Rarely does anyone use the term “two-way” in regard to a baseball player. Yet the Los Angeles Angels’ Shohei Ohtani, at the young age of twenty-three, has become the epitome of the term, drawing comparisons to Babe Ruth by baseball pundits everywhere.After being drafted by the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters of the Japan Pacific League with the number-one pick in 2012, the eighteen-year-old Ohtani struggled with the bat during his rookie season. However, he had a breakout year in 2014...

In 1946, the Cleveland Rams, having just won the NFL championship, moved to sunny Los Angeles. The LA Rams experienced immediate success, making four NFL Championship Game appearances in six years—one of which they won. From Los Angeles, the team moved to St. Louis in 1995, only to return to Los Angeles again in 2016.Regardless of the city or the stadium that they’ve called home, the Rams have compiled a myriad of memorable moments and at times have drawn record crowds. In Game...

Since their founding in 1959, the San Diego Chargers have tackled their way into the hearts of devoted SoCal football fans. In Game of My Life San Diego Chargers, fans can immerse themselves in all the greatest moments in Chargers history. Die-hard Chargers fan and award-winning sports writer Jay Paris expertly chronicles all of the greatest Charger moments, including the team’s thirteen playoff appearances, their heart-breaking loss in the 1995 Super Bowl, and their glory runs in...

One of literature's greatest gifts is its portrayal of realistically drawn characters--human beings in whom we can recognize motivations and emotions. In Imagined Human Beings, Bernard J. Paris explores the inner conflicts of some of literature's most famous characters, using Karen Horney's psychoanalytic theories to understand the behavior of these characters as we would the behavior of real people.When realistically drawn characters are understood in psychological...

With the enthralling style that made Longitude and Galileo's Daughter international best-sellers, Dava Sobel paints an unforgettable portrait of the Copernican Revolution. Encouraged by his German protege, Polish cleric Nicolaus Copernicus published his heliocentric model of the universe, tantalizing 16th-century mathematicians and scientists-and triggering a groundswell of opposition.

THE PLANETS is Dava Sobel's sweeping look at our heavenly galaxy. In the spirit of Longitude and Galileo's Daughter, Sobel once again brings science and history deftly to life as she explores the origins of the planets and reveals the exotic environments that exist in each of these fascinating alien worlds.After the huge national and international success of Longitude and Galileo's Daughter, Dava Sobel tells the human story of the nine planets of our solar system. THE PLANETS tells...

An exciting scientific adventure from the days of wooden ships and iron men, LONGITUDE is full of heroism and chicanery, brilliance and the absurd. It is also a captivating brief history of astronomy, navigation and clockmaking.During the great ages of exploration, "the longitude problem" was the gravest of all scientific challenges. Lacking the ability to determine their longitude, sailors were literally lost at sea as soon as they lost sight of land. Ships ran aground on rocky sh...

In 1271, a young Italian merchant named Marco Polo embarked on a groundbreaking expedition from Venice, through the Middle East and Central Asia to China. His extraordinary reports of his experiences introduced medieval Europe to an exotic new world of emperors and concubines, amazing cities, huge armies, unusual spices and cuisine, and imperial riches. Marco Polo also revealed the wonders of Xanadu, the summer capital of Mongol emperor Kublai Khan.Almost 750 years later, acclaimed...

Over the past few decades, a handful of scientists have been racing to explain a disturbing aspect of our universe: only four percent of it consists of the matter that makes up you, me, our books, and every star and planet. The rest is completely unknown.Richard Panek tells the dramatic story of the quest to find this “dark” matter and an even more bizarre substance called “dark energy.” This is perhaps the greatest mystery in all of science, and solving it will bring fame, funding...

Will in the World interweaves a searching account of Elizabethan England with a vivid narrative of the playwright's life. We see Shakespeare learning his craft, starting a family, and forging a career for himself in the wildly competitive London theater world, while at the same time grappling with dangerous religious and political forces that took less-agile figures to the scaffold. The basic biographical facts of Shakespeare's life have been known for over a century, but now Stephen Green...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Periodic Tales by Hugh Aldersey-Williams, read by John Sackville.Everything in the universe is made of them, including you.Like you, the elements have personalities, attitudes, talents, shortcomings, stories rich with meaning.Here you'll meet iron that rains from the heavens and noble gases that light the way to vice. You'll learn how lead can tell your future while zinc may one day...

“It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence,” twenty-four-year-old Alan Turing announced in 1936. In Turing’s Cathedral, George Dyson focuses on a small group of men and women, led by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who built one of the first computers to realize Alan Turing’s vision of a Universal Machine. Their work would break the distinction between numbers that mean thi...