The Periodic Table is one of man's crowning scientific achievements. But it's also a treasure trove of stories of passion, adventure, betrayal and obsession. The infectious tales and astounding details in THE DISAPPEARING SPOON follow carbon, neon, silicon and gold as they play out their parts in human history, finance, mythology, war, the arts, poison and the lives of the (frequently) mad scientists who discovered them. We learn that Marie Curie used to provoke jealousy in colleagues' wives when she'd invite them into closets to see her glow-in-the-dark experiments. And that Lewis and Clark swallowed mercury capsules across the country…
In his first book since the bestselling Fermat's Enigma, Simon Singh offers the first sweeping history of encryption, tracing its evolution and revealing the dramatic effects codes have had on wars, nations, and individual lives. From Mary, Queen of Scots, trapped by her own code, to the Navajo Code Talkers who helped the Allies win World War II, to the incredible (and incredibly simple) logisitical breakthrough that made Internet commerce secure, The Code Book tells the story of the most powerful intellectual weapon ever known: secrecy.
Throughout the text are clear technical and mathematical explanations, and portraits of the remarkable…
Lewis is one of my favorite authors, yet I had never read his Pulitzer Prize winner. Glad I did. I love being transported to an era which has always fascinated me.
Martin Arrowsmith, brilliant but licentious, makes his way from his small Midwest town to New York City. Getting his start at medical school, Martin sets out on a series of affairs, bouncing from woman to woman and job to job, hungry to satisfy his desires as both a man and a man of science. Just as it appears he'll be able to settle down, he finds himself back among the scientific elite and faced with a discovery that can change his life.
Written in conjunction with science writer Paul de Kruif, Arrowsmith is one of the first books to address…
It is one of America's great enduring mysteries; what happened to three inmates who, in 1962, escaped from Alcatraz in a raft they constructed inside the prison? INSEPARABLE is a novel based on the escape was published by DX Varos in June, 2022, on the sixtieth anniversary of the escape.
In this novel, two of the escapees, the Anglin brothers, are helped to freedom by a thirteen year-old boy. He finds them, barely alive, on a tiny beach just south of Sausalito, where he lived with his mother, a Korean War widow. In the novel, the boy helps the Anglins evade the cops, the FBI, the Coast Guard, an obsessed member of the media – as well as the boy's mother.
