Vitruvian Man is the world's most famous drawing, by one of the world's most famous artists. The image - named after a Roman architect and engineer, Vitruvius - has become visual shorthand for artistic genius and scientific inquiry, and yet nobody knows anything about it. In Da Vinci's Ghost, critically acclaimed historian Toby Lester examines the forces that converged in 1490 to turn an idea that had been around for centuries into this iconic image, bringing the ghost of an unknown Leonar...

Everybody knows the picture: a man, meticulously rendered by Leonardo daVinci, standing with arms and legs outstretched in a circle and asquare. Deployed today to celebrate subjects as various as the grandeurof art, the beauty of the human form, and the universality of the humanspirit, the drawing turns up just about everywhere: in books, on coffeecups, on corporate logos, even on spacecraft. It has, in short, becomethe world's most famous cultural...

"Old maps lead you to strange and unexpected places, and none does so more ineluctably than the subject of this book: the giant, beguiling WaldseemUller world map of 1507." So begins this remarkable story of the map that gave America its name. For millennia Europeans believed that the world consisted of three parts: Europe, Africa, and Asia. They drew the three continents in countless shapes and sizes on their maps, but occasionally they hinted at the existence of a "fourth part of the wor...

In the Beginning, James. Orphaned, bullied, lonely, and unloved as a boy, in time the young King of Scots overcame his troubled beginnings to ascend the English throne at the height of EnglandÆs Golden Age. In an effort to pacify rising tensions in the Anglican Church, and to reflect the majesty of his new reign, he spearheaded the most important literary undertaking in Western historyùthe translation of the Bible into a beautiful, lyrical, and accessible English.David TeemsÆs narrative cr...

An eye-opening narrative of how geometric principles fundamentally shaped our worldOne night in 1661, Nicholas Fouquet, a superintendent under Louis XIV, was arrested. His crime was peculiar: he had dared to construct a grand geometrical garden. In doing so, he violated an irrefutable hierarchy: that geometry, in its perfection, was a testament to divine right. The elegant, symmetrical designs were more than just ornament; they were proofs of incontestable certaint...

Joining the bestsellers Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter, a lively and intriguing tale of two artists whose competitive spirit brought to life one of the world’s most magnificent structures and ignited the RenaissanceThe dome of the Santa Maria del Fiore, the great cathedral of Florence, is among the most enduring symbols of the Renaissance, an equal to the works of Leonardo and Michelangelo. Its designer was Filippo Brunelleschi, a temperamental architect and inventor who rediscov...

Etched in the wedge-shaped letters known as cuneiform on clay tablets, the Epic of Gilgamesh stands as the earliest classic of world literature. Its earliest surviving fragments date back to the eighteenth century BC, more than 3,700 years ago. In The Buried Book, David Damrosch tells the story of George Smith, a self-taught linguist, who one momentous afternoon in 1872 was working at the British Museum, going through a pile of Layard’s clay tablets, when he suddenly real...

What do Bach's compositions, Rubik's Cube, the way we choose our mates, and the physics of subatomic particles have in common? All are governed by the laws of symmetry, which elegantly unify scientific and artistic principles. Yet the mathematical language of symmetry—known as group theory—did not emerge from the study of symmetry at all, but from an equation that couldn't be solved.For thousands of years mathematicians solved progressively more difficult algebraic equations, until...

How did the preaching of a peasant carpenter from Galilee spark a movement that would grow to include over two billion followers? Who listened to this "good news," and who ignored it? Where did Christianity spread, and how? Based on quantitative data and the latest scholarship, preeminent scholar and journalist Rodney Stark presents new and startling information about the rise of the early church, overturning many prevailing views of how Christianity grew through time to become th...

Fourteen centuries ago, Irish saints brought the Word of God to the Hebrides and Scotland's Atlantic shore. These "white martyrs" sought solitude, remoteness, even harshness, in places apart from the world where they could fast, pray, and move closer to an understanding of God: places where they could see angels. Columba, who founded the famous monastery at Iona, was the most well-known of these courageous men who rowed their curraghs towards danger and uncertainty in a pagan land, but the...

The story of how we got our numbers—told through one mathematician's journey to find zeroThe invention of numerals is perhaps the greatest abstraction the human mind has ever created. Virtually everything in our lives is digital, numerical, or quantified. The story of how and where we got these numerals, which we so depend on, has for thousands of years been shrouded in mystery. Finding Zero is an adventure-filled saga of Amir Aczel's lifelong obsession: to find the origin...

For many Americans, Brazil is a land of contradictions: vast natural resources and entrenched corruption; extraordinary wealth and grinding poverty; beautiful beaches and violence-torn favelas. Brazil occupies a vivid place in the American imagination, and yet it remains largely unknown.In an extraordinary journey that spans five hundred years, from European colonization to the 2016 Summer Olympics, Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling's Brazil offers a rich, dramatic...