Award-winning journalist Simran Sethi explores the history and cultural importance of our most beloved tastes, paying homage to the ingredients that give us daily pleasure, while providing a thoughtful wake-up call to the homogenization that is threatening the diversity of our food supply.Food is one of the greatest pleasures of human life. Our response to sweet, salty, bitter, or sour is deeply personal, combining our individual biological characteristics, personal preferences, an...

Award-winning journalist Simran Sethi explores the history and cultural importance of our most beloved tastes, paying homage to the ingredients that give us daily pleasure, while providing a thoughtful wake-up call to the homogenization that is threatening the diversity of our food supply.Food is one of the greatest pleasures of human life. Our response to sweet, salty, bitter, or sour is deeply personal, combining our individual biological characteristics, personal preferences, an...

Award-winning journalist Simran Sethi explores the history and cultural importance of our most beloved tastes, paying homage to the ingredients that give us daily pleasure, while providing a thoughtful wake-up call to the homogenization that is threatening the diversity of our food supply.Food is one of the greatest pleasures of human life. Our response to sweet, salty, bitter, or sour is deeply personal, combining our individual biological characteristics, personal preferences, an...

A sterling roster of natural and social scientists in conversation with top-flight journalist Stefan Klein—shedding new light on their work, their lives, and what they still hope to discoverWhen acclaimed science writer Stefan Klein asks Nobel Prize–winning chemist Roald Hoffmann what sets scientists apart, Hoffmann says, “First and foremost, curiosity.” In this collection of intimate conversations with nineteen of the world’s best-known scientists (including three Nobel Laureates)...

From Silk to Silicon tells the story of who these men and women were, what they did, how they did it, and how their achievements continue to shape our world today. They include:• Genghis Khan, who united east and west by conquest and by opening new trade routes built on groundbreaking transportation and management innovations.• Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who arose from oppression to establish the most powerful bank the world has seen.• Cyrus Field, who becam...

""A breakthrough book. In a world of increasingly specialized knowledge, it takes a particular gift and some stubbornness to cut across the fields of neuroscience, psychiatry, philosophy and psychology and to ask the fundamental question: Why it is that we can allow our best selves to be captured by and torpedoed by thoughts and actions that sink us?. . . . [Kessler's] ultimate answer is profound and one that could be life-changing and life-saving. I know I will be handing this boo...

The Invention of Everything Else is a luminous imagining of an unlikely friendship between the eccentric inventor, Nikola Tesla, and a young hotel chambermaid, Louisa, who is obsessed with radio dramas and the secret lives of the hotel guests. Louisa first catches sight of the hotel’s most famous resident on New Year’s Day, 1943, and is determined to befriend the strange man. As they share their mutual affinity for pigeons, Louisa begins to piece together Tesla’s extraordinary sto...

African-American folklore was Zora Neale Hurston's first love. Collected in the late 1920's Every Tongue Got to Confess, from the celebrated author of Their Eyes Were Watching God, is published here for the first time, beautifully performed by Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis.Hilarious, bittersweet, and often saucy, these folk-tales provide a verdant slice of African-American life in the rural South at the turn of the twentieth century. They capture the heart and soul of the vital, indepen...

Greatly expanding on his blockbuster 1421, distinguished historian Gavin Menzies uncovers the complete untold history of how mankind came to the Americas—offering new revelations and a radical rethinking of the accepted historical record in Who Discovered America?The iconoclastic historian’s magnum opus, Who Discovered America? calls into question our understanding of how the American continents were settled, shedding new light on the well-known “discover...

In their 2007 bestseller Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams taught the world how mass collaboration was changing the way businesses communicate, compete, and succeed in the new global marketplace. But much has changed in three years, and the principles of wikinomics are now more powerful than ever.In this new age of networked intelligence, businesses and communities are bypassing crumbling institutions. We are altering the way our financial institutions and g...

The New York Times bestselling author of The Kennedy Women chronicles the powerful and spellbinding true story of a brutal race-based killing in 1981 and subsequent trials that undid one of the most pernicious organizations in American history—the Ku Klux Klan.On a Friday night in March 1981 Henry Hays and James Knowles scoured the streets of Mobile in their car, hunting for a black man. The young men were members of Klavern 900 of the United Klans of America. The...

The bestselling author of Misquoting Jesus, one of the most renowned and controversial Bible scholars in the world today examines oral tradition and its role in shaping the stories about Jesus we encounter in the New Testament—and ultimately in our understanding of Christianity.Throughout much of human history, our most important stories were passed down orally—including the stories about Jesus before they became written down in the Gospels. In this fascinating and deeply ...