Gordon Gould woke up one night in his Bronx, New York, apartment, opened a laboratory notebook and wrote: "Some rough calculations on the feasibility of a LASER: Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation." That was November 1957, and the 37-year-old graduate student had coined the name for a world-changing invention. Before he stopped, he had written the first description of a working laser and how it could be used. What he didn't know was how to get a patent. So Gould, even ...

A touching and beautifully written story of Nick Taylor's journey with his parents to the end of their lives. Millions of children are taking similar journeys, which is why the Washington Post called A NECESSARY END "one of the key stories of our time."

Ray Scott founded the Bass Angler Sportsman Society (B.A.S.S.) and launched a series of tournaments that created a new brand of sports hero: the professional bass fisherman. Roland Martin and Rick Clunn won big tournaments and grew into legends. They inspired countless anglers who dreamed of fishing their way to fame and fortune. BASS WARS vividly describes the beginnings of B.A.S.S. as it follows Clunn, his top rivals, and two of the young dreamers, Randy Blaukat and Randy Moseley, during...

Led by the zealous Fray Junipero Serra to the fringes of the Spanish Empire in the mid-1700s, Franciscan missionaries Francisco Palou and Juan Crespi are as fervid as their master about the opportunity posed by Alta California: to gloriously swell the kingdom of God through conversion--consensual or forced--of the native people. As Crespi and our sensitive but bitterly envious narrator, Palou, vie for Serra’s fickle favor, a chain of their newly established missions creeps north up the fog...

If you’ve traveled the nation’s highways, flown into New York’s LaGuardia Airport, strolled San Antonio’s River Walk, or seen the Pacific Ocean from the Beach Chalet in San Francisco, you have experienced some part of the legacy of the Works Progress Administration (WPA)—one of the enduring cornerstones of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.When President Roosevelt took the oath of office in March 1933, he was facing a devastated nation. Four years into the Great Depression, a stagge...

The true story of how Sal Polisi—a member of a New York crime family and author of The Sinatra Club—turned his back on the mob and spoke out against organized crime.As a wiseguy for some of New York’s biggest crime families, “Crazy Sal” Polisi couldn’t imagine another way of life—until the day he was busted and faced life behind bars. Then he decided it was time to talk, not so much for himself, but for the sake of his two teenaged sons.Forced to a...

If History is written by the victors then this is His-Story, as corrected by the losers. The Parable of His-Story is a telling of the age where men have been in charge. Inspired by ideas of feminism and spirituality, it suggests that eternal rules are temporary examples of a one sided story, repeatedly told to glorify the masculine and denigrate the feminine. Charting the origin of this story at the dawn of civilization, the book details how his-story spread across the world through succes...

It is April 17, 1861 -- the day that Virginia secedes from the Union and the sixteenth birthday of John Alan Muro. As the Commonwealth erupts in celebration, young Muro sees his dream of attending medical school in Philadelphia shattered by the sudden reality of war.Muro's father, believing that the Disagreement will pass, sends his son instead to Charlottesville. Jefferson's forty-year-old University of Virginia has become a haven of rogues and dilettantes, among ...

This is the story of a developing love story about two people in a tired relationship who rediscover an exciting sex life which completes their lives to contentment - discovery into threesomes, anal, prostate, sex clubs and dogging

When President Roosevelt took the oath of office in March 1933, he was facing a devastated nation. Four years into the Great Depression, a staggering 13 million American workers were jobless and many millions more of their family members were equally in need. Desperation ruled the land.What people wanted were jobs, not handouts—the pride of earning a paycheck. And in 1935, after a variety of temporary relief measures, a permanent nationwide jobs program was created. This was the Wo...

Tabloid journalist Mike Penn just got sprung from Rikers Island after a six-month sentence for hacking a dead girl’s phone—the governor of New York’s mistress no less. Now that Penn is out, the disgraced governor hires him to track down her missing sister, along with some compromising photos a fiendish paparazzo has of the two, to avoid another scandal while he resurrects his political career. The assignment soon has Penn battling the mafia and a diabolical political operative, but he gets...

Taylor Swift is always rewriting the rule book. From taking on streaming platforms to re-recording her early albums to regain control, she has built her reputation on business savvy as well as incredible songwriting talent.In a series of 50 accessible essays, author and journalist Nick Levine explores everything Taylor Swift: her public image, her industry firsts, her relationships, her famously loyal fan base and of course, her music. Each one of these ideas summarises a distinct ...