'Forget geek stereotypes. Parsons' life seems straight out of a Hollywood thriller ... Pendle's book leaves us with a taste of genius's energy and fragility' Los Angeles Magazine'You couldn't make it up' Physics World'As a history of space travel, STRANGE ANGEL is a cornerstone ... Highly recommended' Ray BradburyBRILLIANT ROCKET SCIENTIST KILLED IN EXPLOSION screamed the front-page headline of the...

The shocking new memoir from Death--this long-awaited autobiography finally reveals the inner story of one of the most troubling, and troubled, figures in historyAt last, the mysterious, feared, and misunderstood being known only as “Death” talks frankly and unforgettably about his infinitely awful existence, chronicling his abusive childhood, his near-fatal addiction to Life, his excruciating time in rehab, and the ultimate triumph of his true nature. For the firs...

Millard Fillmore has been mocked, maligned, or, most cruelly of all, ignored by generations of historians--but no more! This unbelievable new biography finally rescues the unlucky thirteenth U.S. president from the dustbin of history and shows why a man known as a blundering, arrogant, shallow, miserable failure was really our greatest leader.In the first fully researched portrait of Fillmore ever written, the reader can finally come face-to-face with a misunderstood genius. By met...

Now a CBS All Access series: “A riveting tale of rocketry, the occult, and boom-and-bust 1920s and 1930s Los Angeles” (Booklist).The Los Angeles Times headline screamed: ROCKET SCIENTIST KILLED IN PASADENA EXPLOSION. The man known as Jack Parsons, a maverick rocketeer who helped transform a derided sci-fi plotline into actuality, was at first mourned as a scientific prodigy. But reporters soon uncovered a more shocking story: Parsons had been a de...

In The N Word, a renowned cultural critic untangles the twisted history and future of racism through its most volatile word.In 2003, the book Nigger started an intense conversation about the use and implications of that epithet. The N Word moves beyond that short, provocative book by revealing how the word has both reflected and spread the scourge of bigotry in America.Asim claims that, even when uttered by hipsters and hip-hop icons, the slur hel...

The first full biography of Joy Davidman brings her out from C. S. Lewis’ shadow, where she has long been hidden, to reveal a powerful writer and thinker.Joy Davidman is known, if she is known at all, as the wife of C. S. Lewis. Their marriage was immortalized in the film Shadowlands and Lewis’ memoir A Grief Observed. Now, through extraordinary new documents as well as years of research and interviews, Abigail Santamaria brings Joy Davidman Gresham Lewis to the p...

"The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place." A book to be read for pleasure as well as a practical identification guide, The Edge of the Sea introduces a world of teeming life where the sea meets the land. A new generation of readers is discovering why Rachel Carson's books have become cornerstones of the environmental and conservation movements. New introduction by Sue Hubbell

Slave narratives are extremely rare. Of the one hundred or so of these testimonies that survive, a mere handful are first-person accounts by slaves who ran away and freed themselves. Now two newly uncovered narratives, and the biographies of the men who wrote them, join that exclusive group.Wallace Turnage was a teenage field hand on an Alabama plantation, John Washington an urban slave in Virginia. They never met. But both men saw opportunity in the chaos of the Civil War, both es...

A seminal work on how public opinion is created and shaped, Edward Bernays's 1923 classic Crystallizing Public Opinion set down the principles that corporations and government have used to influence public attitudes over the past century.A primer on the then new profession of "public relations counsel," Crystallizing elucidates the "instruments and techniques" that PR professionals use to mold public opinion on behalf of their client's interests. By adapting the ideas that...

Shortly before Christmas 1933 in Depression-scarred Canton, Ohio, a small newspaper ad offered cash gifts to seventy-five families in distress. Readers were asked to send letters describing their hardships to a benefactor calling himself Mr. B. Virdot. The author’s grandfather, Sam Stone, was inspired to place this ad and help his fellow Cantonians as they prepared for the cruelest Christmas most of them would ever endure.Moved by the stories of suffering and hope in the letters, w...

The astonishing story of America’s airwaves, the two friends—one a media mogul, the other a famous inventor—who made them available to us, and the government which figured out how to put a price on air.This is the origin story of the airwaves—the foundational technology of the communications age—as told through the forty-year friendship of an entrepreneurial industrialist and a brilliant inventor.David Sarnoff, the head of RCA and equal parts Steve Jobs, Jack Welch, and Wil...

San Francisco, until the mid-1940s, was a city that lived by its own rules, fast and loose. Formed by the gold rush and destroyed by the 1906 earthquake, it served as a pleasure palace for the legions of men who sought their fortunes in the California foothills. For the women who followed, their only choice was to support, serve, or submit.Inez Burns was different. She put everyone to shame with her dazzling, calculated, stone-cold ambition.Born in the slums of San Francisc...