The real-life story behind Marie Benedict’s The Other Einstein—a fascinating profile of mathematician Mileva Einstein-Marić and her contributions to her husband’s scientific discoveries.Albert Einstein’s first wife, Mileva Einstein-Marić, was forgotten for decades. When a trove of correspondence between them beginning in their student days was discovered in 1986, her story began to be told. Some of the tellers of the “Mileva Story” made startling claims: t...

Albert Einstein's first wife, Mileva Einstein-Maric, was forgotten for decades. When a trove of correspondence between them beginning in their student days was discovered in 1986, her story began to be told. Some of the tellers of the "Mileva Story" made startling claims: that she was a brilliant mathematician who surpassed her husband, and that she made uncredited contributions to his most celebrated papers in 1905, including his paper on special relativity.Mileva was one of the f...

Bloomsbury presents Greed in the Gilded Age by William Elliott Hazelgrove, read by Cindy Piller.Greed in the Gilded Age is a Gatsby-esque tale of mystery, money, sex, and scandal.‘Millionaire’ had just entered the American lexicon and Cassie Chadwick was front page news, becoming a media sensation before mass media, even eclipsing President Roosevelt’s inauguration. Using these newspaper articles, Hazelgrove tells the story of one of the greatest cons in Am...

It's a story almost too tawdry to be true—a con woman prostitute who met the descendant of a Founding Father in a brothel, duped him into marriage using an infant purchased from a baby farm, then went to prison for stabbing the couple's baby nurse—all while in a common-law marriage with another man. The scandal surrounding Evangeline and Robert Ray Hamilton, though little known today, was one of the sensations of the Gilded Age.When the salacious Hamilton story emerged during Eva's...

From a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a devastating exploration of the racial disparities in violent death and injury in America and a blueprint for ending this fundamental social injusticeAbout 170,000 black Americans have died in homicides just since the year 2000. Violence takes more years of life from black men than cancer, stroke, and diabetes combined; a young black man in the United States has a fifteen times greater chance of dying from violence than his white co...

An eye-opening celebration of the marvels of space, time, the cosmos, and moreHow to Love the Universe is a new kind of science writing by an author truly enamored of the world around him. In ten short chapters of lyrical prose—each one an ode to a breathtaking realm of discovery—Stefan Klein uses everyday objects and events as a springboard to meditate on the beauty of the underlying science.Klein sees in a single rose the sublime interdependence ...

Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years by Carl Sandburg is a two-volume biography that explores Lincoln's life from his childhood through his early political career, ending just before he became president. Published in 1926, Sandburg’s work combines detailed historical research with a lyrical, almost poetic style, reflecting his background as both a poet and a historian. The narrative captures the spirit of the American frontier, vividly portraying the world that shaped Lincoln’s char...

Sand and stone are Earth's fragmented memory. Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life-defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent's past from the relics of deep time; but the paths of ancestors toward her—paths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land—lie largely eroded and lost.In this p...

In the tradition of Nathaniel Philbrick and David McCullough comes the first full-scale narrative history of Hawaii, an epic tale of empire, industry, war, and culture.The most recent state to join the union, Hawaii is the only one to have once been a royal kingdom. After its discovery by Captain Cook in the late eighteenth century, Hawaii was fought over by European powers determined to take advantage of its position as the crossroads of the Pacific. The arrival of the first missi...

The newest anthology from Mystery Writers of America explores the theme of home and the crimes that endanger it, with stories by Ellen Hart, Naomi Hirahara, Walter Mosley, Sara Paretsky and more.Everyone comes from someplace. Everyone has somewhere they feel safe. Some people have found their home and are content where they are. Others feel trapped and yearn to go somewhere else. Many are somewhere else and yearn to go back. But evenin these safes...

How Hansel and Gretel, Sherlock Holmes, the movie Groundhog Day, Harry Potter, and other familiar stories illustrate the concepts of computing.Picture a computer scientist, staring at a screen and clicking away frantically on a keyboard, hacking into a system, or perhaps developing an app. Now delete that picture. In Once Upon an Algorithm, Martin Erwig explains computation as something that takes place beyond electronic computers, and computer science as the stud...

What altered states of consciousness―the dissolution of feelings of time and self―can tell us about the mystery of consciousness.During extraordinary moments of consciousness―shock, meditative states and sudden mystical revelations, out-of-body experiences, or drug intoxication―our senses of time and self are altered; we may even feel time and self dissolving. These experiences have long been ignored by mainstream science, or considered crazy fantasies. Recent rese...