History

John Green, the #1 bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and a passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’s deadliest infectious disease.

Based on the newly released personal letters of Albert Einstein, Walter Isaacson explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos....

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells - taken without her knowledge - became one of the most important tools in medicine....

Drawing on his decades of field research and up-to-the-minute understanding of the latest science, renowned geologist Andrew H. Knoll delivers a rigorous yet accessible biography of Earth, charting our home planet's epic 4.6 billion-year story....

An exhilarating history of humankind, chronicling thousands of years of trial and error - but mostly error - in the rise of civilization....

“An elegant, wide-ranging history” (The New York Review of Books) of the centuries-long quest to discover the critical role of germs in disease that reveals as much about human reasoning—and the pitfalls of ego—as it does about microbes.

From the masters of storytelling-meets-science, Patient Zero tells the long and fascinating history of disease outbreaks—how they start, how they spread, the science that lets us understand them, and how we race to destroy them before they destroy us....

Here for the first time, in rich human, political, and scientific detail, is the complete story of how the bomb was developed....

An oddly compelling, often hilarious exploration of the strange lives of our bodies postmortem....

One of the great insights of science is that the universe has an underlying order. The supreme goal of physicists is to understand this order through laws that describe the behavior of the most basic particles and the forces between them....

In Air-Borne, award-winning New York Times columnist and author Carl Zimmer leads us on an odyssey through the living atmosphere and through the history of its discovery.

Over the last 220 years, society has evolved a universal belief that electricity is "safe" for humanity and the planet. Scientist and journalist Arthur Firstenberg disrupts this conviction by telling the story of electricity in a way it has never been told before....

James Gleick has long been fascinated by the making of science....

More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed radically different suites of plants and animals....

An exciting scientific adventure from the days of wooden ships and iron men, Longitude is full of heroism and chicanery, brilliance and the absurd....

In the winter of 1918, at the height of World War I, history's most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide....

The dramatic inside story of the first four historic flights that launched SpaceX - and Elon Musk - from a shaky startup into the world's leading-edge rocket company....

The acclaimed Pulitzer Prize finalist and #1 New York Times bestselling author of Galileo’s Daughter crafts a luminous chronicle of the life and work of the most famous woman in the history of science.

Modern Physics and Ancient Faith argues that the great discoveries of modern physics are more compatible with the central teachings of Christianity and Judaism....

Here, for the first time, in a brilliant, panoramic portrait by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, is the definitive, often shocking story of the politics and the science behind the development of the hydrogen bomb and the birth of the Cold War.

From the acclaimed author of Death in the Air comes the riveting story of the birth of criminal investigation in the 20th century....

The Clockwork Universe is the story of a band of men who lived in a world of dirt and disease but pictured a universe that ran like a perfect machine....

Science is a force for good in the world—at least usually. But sometimes, when obsession gets the better of scientists, they twist a noble pursuit into something sinister. Under this spell, knowledge isn’t everything, it’s the only thing—no matter the cost....

The Story of Western Science shows us the joy and importance of reading groundbreaking science writing for ourselves....

In a rarified world of scientific research, a revolution has been brewing. Its activists are not anarchists, but rather Nobel Laureates in physics and economics and pony-tailed graduates, mathematicians, and computer scientists from all over the world. They have formed an iconoclastic think-tank....

“An elegant, wide-ranging history” (The New York Review of Books) of the centuries-long quest to discover the critical role of germs in disease that reveals as much about human reasoning—and the pitfalls of ego—as it does about microbes.

Bill Bryson’s The Body meets Mary Roach’s Gulp (with a dash of What’s Your Poo Telling You?) in this delightfully weird, richly informative, and unexpectedly lyrical tour of our bodily emissions—revealing that the very parts of us that we seek to hide in embarrassment are actually an essential part of human health, with fascinating social history.

In this gripping sequel to Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, 19th-century iconoclast Ignatius Donnelly sets his sights on Earth’s forgotten disasters. Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel argues that a comet struck the Earth thousands of years ago, unleashing firestorms, floods, and a dark age that buried civilizations in myth and rubble.

Quantum theory is at the heart of modern physics, but how does it actually work? NASA scientist and communicator Sten Odenwald demystifies the subject and makes this crucial topic accessible to everyone. Featuring topics such as Schrodinger's cat, the wave-particle duality and the newly emerging theories of quantum gravity, as well as the personalities behind the science, such as Max Planck, Neils Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Richard Feynman and many more, Knowledge in a Nutshell: Quantum Physics provides an essential introduction to cutting edge science.

What has quantum physics taught us about consciousness and the nature of reality? Are we living in a simulation? In order for matter to exist, does it need to be observed? Join Dr. Trevor Lohman as he grapples with these questions and others, plunging listeners into a sea of quantum strangeness while simultaneously helping them navigate these incredibly choppy waters.