A thousand years of legal protections against tyranny are being stolen right before our eyes. Under the guise of good intentions, personal liberties as old as the Magna Carta have become casualties in the wars being waged on pollution, drugs, white-collar crime, and all of the other real and imagined social ills. The result: innocent people caught up in a bureaucratic web that destroys lives and livelihoods; businesses shuttered because of victimless infractions; a justice system that valu...

Whistleblowers pay with their lives to save ours. When insiders like former NSA analyst Edward Snowden or ex-FBI agent Coleen Rowley or Big Tobacco truth-teller Jeffrey Wigand blow the whistle on high-level lying, lawbreaking or other wrongdoing-whether it's government spying, corporate murder or scientific scandal-the public benefits enormously. Wars are ended, deadly products are taken off the market, white-collar criminals are sent to jail. The whistleblowers themselves, however, genera...

In Radical Evolution, bestselling author Joel Garreau, a reporter and editor for the Washington Post, shows us that we are at an inflection point in history. As you read this, we are engineering the next stage of human evolution. Through advances in genetic, robotic, information and nanotechnologies, we are altering our minds, our memories, our metabolisms, our personalities, our progeny–and perhaps our very souls.Taking us behind the scenes with today's foremost ...

How do we know a cat is a cat . . . and why do we call it a cat? An "intriguing and often fascinating" look at words, perceptions, and the relationship between them ( Newark Star-Ledger).In Kant and the Platypus, the renowned semiotician, philosopher, and bestselling author of The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum explores the question of how much of our perception of things is based on cognitive ability, and how much on l...

Discover how human beings react to danger—and what makes the difference between life and death“Fascinating and useful . . . [shows that] the most important variable in an emergency is your own behavior.”—The New York TimesToday, nine out of ten Americans live in places at significant risk of earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, terrorism, or other disasters. Tomorrow, some of us will have to make split-second choices to save ourselv...

Today we are faced with the alarming possibility that as many as 50 percent of species alive will become extinct within this century. This statistic is so staggering that scientists have begun to refer to the twenty-first century as the sixth extinction.” But while this is alarming, all hope is not lost; conservation experts across the globe are working tirelessly to preserve our planet for future generations.In Wild Lives, twenty of these pioneers share their stories via...

The founder of LiveWellWithLess.com “promotes minimalism as a way to fend off ‘stuffocation’ and be happier and more productive” (Publishers Weekly).We simply have too much stuff in our lives. Burdened by our heavy consumerist culture to continually own and consume without purpose, we lose ourselves to debt, dissatisfaction, and despair. If having more, doing more, and being more does not allow us to live abundantly, what can?Minimalism can make al...

**Three meticulously researched works—including Pulitzer Prize winner Bearing the Cross—spanning the life of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.This collection from professor and historian David J. Garrow provides a multidimensional and fascinating portrait of Martin Luther King Jr., and his mission to upend deeply entrenched prejudices in society, and enact legal change that would achieve equality for African Americans one hundred years after their emancipati...

After years of prosecuting hard-core criminals, rising legal star Alan Bell took a private sector job in South Florida’s newest skyscraper. Suddenly, he suffered such bizarre medical symptoms, doctors suspected he’d been poisoned by the Mafia. Bell’s rapidly declining health forced him to flee his glamorous Miami life to a sterile “bubble” in the remote Arizona desert.As his career and marriage dissolved, Bell pursued medical treatments in a race against time, hoping to stay alive ...

In the New York Times bestseller Everything All at Once, Bill Nye shows you how thinking like a nerd is the key to changing yourself and the world around you.Everyone has an inner nerd just waiting to be awakened by the right passion. In Everything All at Once, Bill Nye will help you find yours. With his call to arms, he wants you to examine every detail of the most difficult problems that look unsolvable—that is, until you find ...

Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.” William Saroyan, Pulitzer Prizewinning authorFamous authors, like everybody else, know that one day they will die. Final Chapters tells the fascinating stories of more than one hundred writers’ encounters with death-and their attitudes toward the Grim Reaper: fear, uncertainty, or acceptance.Francis Bacon wrote, It is as natural to die as to be born,” w...

For word nerds and grammar geeks, a witty guide to the most commonly mispronounced words, along with their correct pronunciations and pithy forays into their fascinating etymologies and histories of use and misuse.With wit and good humor, this handy little book not only saves us from sticky linguistic situations but also provides fascinating cocktail-party-ready anecdotes. Entries reveal how to pronounce boatswain like an old salt on the deck of a ship, trompe ...