The gripping history of electricity and how the fateful collision of Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse left the world utterly transformed.In the final decades of the nineteenth century, three brilliant and visionary titans of America’s Gilded Age—Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse—battled bitterly as each vied to create a vast and powerful electrical empire. In Empires of Light, historian Jill Jonnes portrays this extra...

The story of the world-famous monument and the extraordinary world’s fair that introduced it, by the author of Conquering Gotham and Urban ForestsIn this first general history of the Eiffel Tower in English, Jill Jonnes-acclaimed author of Conquering Gotham-offers an eye- opening look not only at the construction of one of the modern world's most iconic structures, but also the epochal event that surrounded its arrival as a wonder of the ...

**“Far-ranging and deeply researched, Urban Forests reveals the beauty and significance of the trees around us.” *—*Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction“Jonnes extols the many contributions that trees make to city life and celebrates the men and women who stood up for America’s city trees over the past two centuries. . . . An authoritative account.” —Gerard Helferich, The Wall Street Journal“We all know that tre...

Eiffel's Tower for Young People is a vivid, lively pageant of people and cultures meeting—and competing—on the world stage at the dawn of the modern era.The 1889 World's Fair was a worldwide event showcasing the cutting-edge cultural and technological accomplishments of the world's most powerful nations on the verge of a new century. France, with its long history of sophistication and cultivation and a new republican government, presented the Eiffel Tower, the world's tall...

Thirty-five years after this landmark of urban history first captured the rise, fall, and rebirth of a once-thriving New York City borough—ravaged in the 1970s and ’80s by disinvestment and fires, then heroically revived and rebuilt in the 1990s by community activists—Jill Jonnes returns to chronicle the ongoing revival of the South Bronx. Though now globally renowned as the birthplace of hip-hop, the South Bronx remains America’s poorest urban congressional district. In this new edition, ...

“Superb. [A] first-rate narrative” (The Wall Street Journal) about the controversial construction of New York’s beloved original Penn Station and its tunnels, from the author of Eiffel's Tower and Urban ForestsAs bestselling books like Ron Chernow's Titan and David McCullough's The Great Bridge affirm, readers are fascinated with the grand personalities and schemes that populated New York at the close of the nineteenth c...

One of our most provocative military historians, Victor Davis Hanson has given us painstakingly researched and pathbreaking accounts of wars ranging from classical antiquity to the twenty-first century. Now he juxtaposes an ancient conflict with our most urgent modern concerns to create his most engrossing work to date, A War Like No Other.Over the course of a generation, the Hellenic city-states of Athens and Sparta fought a bloody conflict that resulted in the collapse of Athens ...

The bestselling author of E=mc2 weaves tales of romance, divine inspiration, and fraud through an account of the invisible force that permeates our universe—electricity—and introduces us to the virtuoso scientists who plumbed its secrets.For centuries, electricity was seen as little more than a curious property of certain substances that sparked when rubbed. Then, in the 1790s, Alessandro Volta began the scientific investigation that ignited an explosion o...

An illuminating portrayal of Richard Feynman—a giant of twentieth century physics—from his childhood tinkering with radios, to his vital work on the Manhattan Project and beyondRaised in Depression-era Rockaway Beach, physicist Richard Feynman was irreverent, eccentric, and childishly enthusiastic—a new kind of scientist in a field that was in its infancy. His quick mastery of quantum mechanics earned him a place at Los Alamos working on the Manhattan Project under...

In Radical Evolution, bestselling author Joel Garreau, a reporter and editor for the Washington Post, shows us that we are at an inflection point in history. As you read this, we are engineering the next stage of human evolution. Through advances in genetic, robotic, information and nanotechnologies, we are altering our minds, our memories, our metabolisms, our personalities, our progeny–and perhaps our very souls.Taking us behind the scenes with today's foremost ...

Paris, 1900. The height of the Belle-Époque: decadence, wealth, hedonism...and murder.Homicide investigator Guillaume Devré stands for the silenced victims, bound to seek justice as he makes his way from the wide boulevards frequented by the tout-Paris to the narrow byways of Montmartre, to the shadow of the Tour Eiffel and the lush elegance of Maxim's.When the most famous courtesan in Paris becomes the prime suspect in the death of a wealthy young...

PULITZER PRIZE WINNERNATIONAL BESTSELLERWINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARDIn this groundbreaking biography, T.J. Stiles tells the dramatic story of Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt, the combative man and American icon who, through his genius and force of will, did more than perhaps any other individual to create modern capitalism. Meticulously researched and elegantly written, The First Tycoon describes an improbable life, from Vanderbilt’s hu...