"Finalist for the 2006 Book Award in Science, Independent Publisher Book Awards" David Park is Webster Atwell-Class of 1921 Professor of Physics, Emeritus at Williams College. He is the author of seven previous books, including The Fire within the Eye, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1997, and The How and the Why (both Princeton). The Grand Contraption tells the story of humanity's attempts through 4,000 years of written history to...

In this collection of lectures Feynman originally gave in 1963, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist discusses several mega questions of science. Marked by Feynman's characteristic combination of rationality and humor, these lectures provide an intimate glimpse at the man behind the legend.

"Undrowned is a book-length meditation for the human species, based on the subversive and transformative lessons of marine mammals. Alexis Pauline Gumbs has spent hundreds of hours watching our aquatic cousins. They are queer, fierce, protective of each other, complex, shaped by conflict, and struggling to survive the extractive and militarized conditions humans impose on the ocean. With a brilliant mix of poetic sensibility, naturalist observation,...

During the summer of 1908, twelve-year-old Constantine Boyd is witness to an explosion of home-spun investigation--from experiments with cave-dwelling fish without eyes to scientifically bred crops to motorized bicycles and the flight of an early aeroplane. In 1920, a popular science writer and young widow tries, immediately after the bloodbath of the First World War, to explain the new theory of relativity to an audience (herself included) desperate...

Eighteen essays written from the vantage of clinical medicine at Bellevue Hospital and experimental marine biology at Woods Hole, Massachusetts.