New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice; Real Simple Best of the Month; Library Journal Editors' PickIn the spirit of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Bringing up Bébé, and The Smartest Kids in the World, a hard-hitting exploration of China's widely acclaimed yet insular education system that raises important questions for the future of American parenting and educationWhen students in Shanghai...

In the spirit of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Bringing up Bébé, and The Smartest Kids in the World, a hard-hitting exploration of China’s widely acclaimed yet insular education system—held up as a model of academic and behavioral excellence—that raises important questions for the future of American parenting and education.When students in Shanghai rose to the top of international rankings in 2009, Americans feared that they were being ""out-educated"" by the r...

Our ability to remake our world is unique among all living things. But where does our creativity come from, how does it work, and how can we harness it to improve our lives, schools, businesses, and institutions? The Runaway Species is a deep-dive into the creative mind, a celebration of the human spirit, and a vision of how we can improve our future by understanding and embracing our ability to innovate. Composer Anthony Brandt and neurologist David Eagleman seek to discover what lies at ...

Libraries are much more than mere collections of volumes. The best are magical, fabled places whose fame has become part of the cultural wealth they are designed to preserve.To research this book, Stuart Kells traveled around the world with his young family like modern-day "library tourists." Kells discovered that stories about libraries are stories about people, containing every possible human drama.The Library is a celebration of books as objects, a celebration o...

Award-winning Boston University educator and researcher Muhammad H. Zaman provides a chilling look at the rise of antibiotic-resistant superbugs, explaining how we got here and what we must do to address this growing global health crisis.In September 2016, a woman in Nevada became the first known case in the U.S. of a person who died of an infection resistant to every antibiotic available. Her death is the worst nightmare of infectious disease doctors and public he...

Organized crime—the Italian American kind—has long been a source of popular entertainment and legend. Now Thomas Reppetto provides a balanced history of the Mafia's rise—from the 1880s to the post–World War II era—that is as exciting as it is authoritative.Structuring his narrative around a series of case histories featuring such infamous characters as Lucky Luciano and Al Capone, Reppetto draws on a lifetime of field experience and access to unseen documents to show us a locally g...

Do You Have An Aging Parent Who —Blames you for everything that goes wrong?Cannot tolerate being alone, wants you all the time?Is obsessed with health problems, real, or imagined?Make unreasonable and/or irrational demands of you?Is hostile, negative and critical?Coping with these traits in parents is an endless, high-stress battle for their children. Though there's no medical definition for "difficult" parents, you know ...

Legend has it that as the American colonies hurtled toward independence, representatives of the Continental Congress, including George Washington, walked into Betsy Ross’s Philadelphia upholstery shop and commissioned the first flag of the Revolutionary nation. Although this story has long made Betsy Ross one of America’s most celebrated patriots, little had been known until now about the woman behind the flag.Drawing on new sources and bringing a fresh, keen eye to the fabled crea...

Named one ofNewsweek**’s ""25 Must-Read Fall Fiction and Nonfiction Books to Escape the Chaos of 2020""**The critically acclaimed journalist and bestselling author of The Rage of a Privileged Class explores one of the most essential rights in America—free speech—and reveals how it is crumbling under the combined weight of polarization, technology, money and systematized lying in this concise yet powerful and timely book.

Explore the laws and theories of physics in this accessible introduction to the forces that shape our Universe, our planet, and our everyday lives.Using a bold, graphic-led approach The Physics Book sets out more than 80 key concepts and discoveries that have defined the subject and influenced our technology since the beginning of time. With the focus firmly on unpicking the thought behind each theory - as well as exploring when and how each idea and breakthrough came about - seven...

The untold story of an eccentric Wall Street tycoon and the circle of scientific geniuses he assembled before World War II to develop the science for radar and the atomic bomb. Together they changed the course of history.Legendary financier, philanthropist, and society figure Alfred Lee Loomis gathered the most visionary scientific minds of the twentieth century—Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, and others—at his state-of-the-art laboratory in Tuxedo Par...

From one of the finest naturalists and writers of our time, a fascinating investigation of Nature’s inspiring death-to-life cycle.How does the animal world deal with death? And what ecological and spiritual lessons can we learn from examining this? Bernd Heinrich has long been fascinated by these questions, and when a good friend with a terminal illness asked if he might have his “green burial” at Heinrich’s hunting camp in Maine, it inspired the acclaimed biologis...