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From Leonardo Da Vinci to John Dee and Comenius, from George Eliot to Oliver Sacks and Susan Sontag, polymaths have moved the frontiers of knowledge in countless ways. But history can be unkind to scholars with such encyclopaedic interests. All too often these individuals are remembered for just one part of their valuable achievements. In this engaging, erudite account, renowned cultural historian Peter Burke argues for a more rounded view.

On the shores of Lake Tanganyika, Gombe is a community where the principal residents are chimpanzees. Through Jane Goodall's eyes we watch young Figan's rise to power and old Mike's crushing defeat. We learn how one mother rears her children to succeed, and another dooms hers to failure. We witness horrifying murders, touching moments of affection, joyous births, and wrenching deaths. As Goodall compellingly tells the story of this intimately intertwined community, we are shown human emotions stripped to their essence. In the mirror of chimpanzee life, we see ourselves reflected.

Gene Kranz was present at the creation of America's manned space program and was a key player in it for three decades. As a flight director in NASA's Mission Control, Kranz witnessed firsthand the making of history. He participated in the space program from the early days of the Mercury program to the last Apollo mission, and beyond. He endured the disastrous first years when rockets blew up and the United States seemed to fall further behind the Soviet Union in the space race.

Nearly a hundred years after its publication, Kurt Gödel's famous proof that every mathematical system must contain propositions that are true - yet never provable - continues to unsettle mathematics, philosophy, and computer science. Yet unlike Einstein, with whom he formed a warm and abiding friendship, Gödel has long escaped all but the most casual scrutiny of his life.

As Carl Sagan did for astronomy and Brian Green did for cosmology, Walter Lewin takes listeners on a marvelous journey in For the Love of Physics, opening our eyes as never before to the amazing beauty and power with which physics can reveal the hidden workings of the world all around us. "I introduce people to their own world," writes Lewin, "the world they live in and are familiar with but don't approach like a physicist - yet."

Simply Electrifying: The Technology That Transformed the World, from Benjamin Franklin to Elon Musk brings to life the 250-year history of electricity through the stories of the men and women who used it to transform our world: Benjamin Franklin, James Watt, Michael Faraday, Samuel F.B. Morse, Thomas Edison, Samuel Insull, Albert Einstein, Rachel Carson, Elon Musk, and more. In the process, it reveals for the first time the complete, thrilling, and often dangerous story of electricity's historic discovery, development, and worldwide application.

The Lobotomist explores one of the darkest chapters of American medicine: the desperate attempt to treat the hundreds of thousands of psychiatric patients in need of help during the middle decades of the 20th century. Into this crisis stepped Walter Freeman, MD, who saw a solution in lobotomy, a brain operation intended to reduce the severity of psychotic symptoms. Drawing on Freeman's documents and interviews with Freeman's family, Jack El-Hai takes a penetrating look at the life and work of this complex scientific genius.

Bob Lazar was a brilliant young physicist that found himself employed at a top-secret facility in the middle of the desert outside Las Vegas. Under the watchful eye of the government elite, he is tasked with understanding an exotic propulsion system being used by an advanced aerospace vehicle he is told came from outer space. The stressful work and long, odd hours start to wear on Bob and he becomes concerned for his safety. He tells his wife and a couple close friends about what he's doing in the desert, and his employers find out and are furious.

The Moog synthesizer "bent the course of music forever" Rolling Stone declared. Bob Moog, the man who did that bending, was a lovable geek with Einstein hair and pocket protectors. He walked into history in 1964 when his homemade contraption unexpectedly became a sensation-suddenly everyone wanted a Moog. The Moog's gamechanging sounds saturated sixties counterculture and burst into the disco party in the seventies to set off the electronic dance music movement. Bob had singlehandedly founded the synth industry and became a star.

In February 1971, as Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell hurtled Earthward through space, he was engulfed by a profound sense of universal connectedness. He intuitively sensed that his presence and that of the planet in the window were all part of a deliberate, universal process, and that the glittering cosmos itself was, in some way, conscious. The experience was so overwhelming, Mitchell knew his life would never be the same.

From award-winning author Merilyn Simonds, a remarkable biography of an extraordinary woman—a Swedish aristocrat who survived the Russian Revolution to become an internationally renowned naturalist, one of the first to track the mid-century decline of songbirds.

This is the dramatic and inspirational first-person story of theoretical physicist Dr. Ronald Mallett, who recently discovered the basic equations for a working time machine that he believes can be used as a transport vehicle to the past. Combining elements of Rocket Boys and Elegant Universe, Time Traveler follows Mallett's discovery of Einstein's work on space-time, his study of Godel's work on a solution of Einstein's equation that might allow for time travel.

One day in 1996, the neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel took a call from his program officer at the National Institute of Mental Health, who informed him that he had been awarded a key grant. Also, the officer said, he and his colleagues thought Kandel would win the Nobel Prize. "I hope not soon," Kandel's wife, Denise, said when she heard this. Sociologists had found that Nobel Prize winners often did not contribute much more to science, she explained.

When Stephen Hawking died, he was widely recognized as the world's best physicist, and even its smartest person. He was neither. In Hawking Hawking, science journalist Charles Seife explores how Stephen Hawking came to be thought of as humanity's greatest genius. Hawking spent his career grappling with deep questions in physics, but his renown didn't rest on his science. He was a master of self-promotion, hosting parties for time travelers, declaring victory over problems he had not solved, and wooing billionaires.

Drawing on 40 years of research and a treasure trove of new information, Tesla: Wizard at War provides a comprehensive view of Tesla's discoveries, which continue to influence today's military technology and diplomatic strategies. One of the world's leading Tesla experts, Marc J. Seifer, offers new insight into the brilliant scientist's particle beam weapon (aka the "Death Ray") and explores his military negotiations with pivotal historical figures - including his links to Joseph Stalin, Vannevar Bush, General Andrew McNaughton, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

A 23-year veteran of emergency medical services, paramedic Matthew Sias took a detour in his career to pursue the death-care business and found a complementarity between two seemingly divergent careers. Silent Siren: Memoirs of a Life Saving Mortician is the record of some of the more memorable calls he has responded to through the years.

Inspired by Albert Einstein's theory of relativity and Bertrand Russell and David Hilbert's pursuit of the fundamental rules of mathematics, some of the most brilliant minds of the generation came together in post-World War I Vienna to present the latest theories in mathematics, science, and philosophy and to build a strong foundation for scientific investigation. Composed of such luminaries as Kurt Gödel and Rudolf Carnap, and stimulated by the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, the Vienna Circle left an indelible mark on science.

While 1858 in London may have been noteworthy for its broiling summer months and the related stench of the sewage-filled Thames River, the year is otherwise little remembered. And yet, historian Rosemary Ashton reveals in this compelling microhistory, 1858 was marked by significant, if unrecognized, turning points. For ordinary people, and also for the rich, famous, and powerful, the months from May to August turned out to be a summer of consequence.

Volcanoes have fascinated - and terrified - people for ages. They have destroyed cities and ended civilizations. In this book, John Dvorak, the acclaimed author of Earthquake Storms, looks into the early years of volcanology and its "father", Thomas Jaggar. Jaggar was the youngest of five scientists to investigate the explosion of Mount Pelee in Martinique, which leveled the entire city of St. Pierre and killed its entire population in two minutes.

In 1938, a young German rocket enthusiast named Wernher von Braun had dreams of building a rocket that could fly him to the moon. In Ray, North Dakota, a young farm girl named Mary Sherman was attending high school. In an age when girls rarely dreamed of a career in science, Mary wanted to be a chemist. A decade later, the dreams of these two disparate individuals would coalesce in ways neither could have imagined.