For readers of Bill Bryson, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Siddhartha Mukherjee, a wondrous, wildly ambitious, and vastly entertaining work of popular science that tells the awe-inspiring story of the elements that make up the human body, and how these building blocks of life travelled billions of miles and across billions of years to make us who we are.Every one of us contains a billion times more atoms than all the grains of sand in the earth’s deserts. If you weigh 150 pounds, you’ve g...

For readers of Bill Bryson, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Siddhartha Mukherjee, a wondrous, wildly ambitious, and vastly entertaining work of popular science that tells the awe-inspiring story of the elements that make up the human body, and how these building blocks of life travelled billions of miles and across billions of years to make us who we are.Every one of us contains a billion times more atoms than all the grains of sand in the earth’s deserts. If you weigh 150...

An unsparing, incisive, yet ultimately hopeful look at how we can shed the American obsession with self-reliance that has made us less healthy, less secure, and less fulfilledThe promise that you can “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” is central to the story of the American Dream. It’s the belief that if you work hard and rely on your own resources, you will eventually succeed. However, time and again we have seen how this foundational myth, with its emphasis on...

The James Webb Space Telescope is transforming the universe right before our eyes—and here, for the first time, is the inside account of how the mission originated, how it performs its miracles of science, and what its revolutionary images are revealing.Pillars of Creation tells the story of one of the greatest scientific achievements in the history of civilization, a $10 billion instrument with a staggeringly ambitious goal: unlocking the secrets of the c...

In this audiobook Maria Popova, creator of The Marginalian, presents a celebration of the human search for truth and beauty through the lenses of science and poetry.Poetry and science, as Popova writes in her introduction, "are instruments for knowing the world more intimately and loving it more deeply." In 15 short essays on subjects ranging from the mystery of dark matter and the infinity of pi to the resilience of trees and the intelligence of octopuses...

**One of Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction From 2024The first volume in a two-book series about each of the atomic bomb drops that ended the Pacific War based on years of irreplicable personal interviews with survivors to tell a story of devastation and resilience**In this vividly rendered historical narrative, M. G. Sheftall layers the stories of hibakusha—the Japanese word for atomic bomb survivors—in harrowing detail, to give a minute-by-...

'A surprising page-turner, full of humour and startling details' THE TIMES**'If I read a better history this year, I will be lucky' TOM HOLLAND'An astonishing tour de force’ SPECTATORShortlisted for the HWA Nonfiction Crown AwardLonglisted for the Highland Book PrizeFrom Peter Marshall, winner of the 2018 Wolfson Prize, Storm’s Edge is a n...

A provocative exploration of how humans are wired to seek short-term success at the expense of long-term survival—an evolutionary “glitch” that explains everything from toxic workplaces to climate change“Essential reading . . . a lively, ultimately hopeful examination of how incentivizing the wrong values and actions has led to some of our most intractable problems.”—Eric Ries, New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup...

A 2025 Audie Award® FinalistThe white-knuckled saga of a maverick captain, nine courageous sailors, and a US Navy task force who achieved the impossible on June 4, 1944—capturing Nazi submarine U-505, its crew, technology, encryption codes, and an Enigma cipher machine.Two days before D-Day—the course of World War II was forever changed. The hunters of the Atlantic Ocean had become the hunted, and US antisubmarine Task Group 22.3 seized a N...

Bill Bryson’s The Body meets Mary Roach’s Gulp (with a dash of What’s Your Poo Telling You?)in this delightfully weird, richly informative, and unexpectedly lyrical tour of our bodily emissions—revealing that the very parts of us that we seek to hide in embarrassment are actually an essential part of human health, with fascinating social history.In biology class, we learn that the body is a fundamentally cohesive organism, a collection of...

“An elegant, wide-ranging history” (The New York Review of Books) of the centuries-long quest to discover the critical role of germs in disease thatreveals as much about human reasoning—and the pitfalls of ego—as it does about microbes.“Levenson takes readers through an entertaining . . . journey of missed opportunities in microbiology and the eventual advances that arose in this field.”—ScienceScientists and enthusiastic ...

With “characteristic wisdom and grace” (Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author) Robert W. Merry explores a critical lesson about our nation that is as timely today as ever demonstrating how the country came apart during the enveloping slavery crisis of the 1850s.The Mexican War brought vast new territories to the United States, which precipitated a growing crisis over slavery. The new territories seemed unsuitable for the type of agriculture that depended on sl...