Knowledge = Power

New York Times Bestseller: This life story of the quirky  physicist is “a thorough and masterful portrait of one of the great  minds of the century” (The New York Review of Books). Raised  in Depression-era Rockaway Beach, physicist Richard Feynman was  irreverent, eccentric, and childishly enthusiastic—a new kind of  scientist in a field that was in its infancy. His quick mastery of  quantum mechanics earned him a place at Los Alamos working on the  Manhattan Project under J. Robert Oppenheimer, where the giddy young man  held his own among the nation’s greatest minds. There, Feynman turned  theory into practice, culminating in the Trinity test, on July 16, 1945,  when the Atomic Age was born. He was only twenty-seven. And he was just  getting started. In this sweeping biography, James Gleick captures the  forceful personality of a great man, integrating Feynman’s work and life  in a way that is accessible to laymen and fascinating for the  scientists who follow in his footsteps.

Called a great book worthy of a  great man, this definitive biography of the Commander in Chief of the  Pacific Fleet in World War II is considered the best book ever written  about Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. Highly respected by both the civilian  and naval communities, Nimitz was sometimes overshadowed by more  colorful warriors in the Pacific such as MacArthur and Halsey. Potter's  lively and authoritative style fleshes out Admiral Nimitz's personality  to help listeners appreciate the contributions he made as the principle  architect of Japan's defeat. Following the Japanese attacks on Pearl  Harbor on December 7, 1941, President Roosevelt named Nimitz the  commander of the Pacific Fleet. An experienced and respected  leader, Nimitz was also an effective military strategist who directed US  forces as they closed in on Japan, beginning in May and June of 1942  with the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway. Nimitz was promoted to the  newly created rank of fleet admiral in 1944 and became the naval  equivalent to the army's General Dwight Eisenhower. The book covers his  full life: from a poverty-stricken childhood to postwar appointments as  chief of naval operations and UN mediator, and candidly reveals Nimitz's  opinions of Halsey, Kimmel, King, Spruance, MacArthur, Forrestal,  Roosevelt, and Truman.

A brilliant and concise account of the lives and ideas of the great philosophers, from Plato to Dewey. Few  write for the non-specialist as well as Will Durant, and this book is a  splendid example of his eminently readable scholarship. Durant’s  insight and wit never cease to dazzle; The Story of Philosophy is a key book for anyone who wishes to survey the history and development of philosophical ideas in the Western world.

2015 Audie Award Finalist for Non-Fiction Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson’s revealing story of the people who created the  computer and the Internet. It is destined to be the standard history of  the digital revolution and an indispensable guide to how innovation  really happens. What were the talents that allowed certain  inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into  disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some  succeed and others fail? In his masterly saga, Isaacson begins  with Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter, who pioneered computer  programming in the 1840s. He explores the fascinating personalities that  created our current digital revolution, such as Vannevar Bush, Alan  Turing, John von Neumann, J.C.R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Robert  Noyce, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Tim Berners-Lee, and Larry  Page. This is the story of how their minds worked and what made  them so inventive. It’s also a narrative of how their ability to  collaborate and master the art of teamwork made them even more  creative. For an era that seeks to foster innovation, creativity, and teamwork, The Innovators shows how they happen.

Julius Caesar wrote his exciting Commentaries during some of the most  grueling campaigns ever undertaken by a Roman army. The Gallic Wars and  The Civil Wars constitute the greatest series of military dispatches  ever written. As literature, they are representative of the finest  expressions of Latin prose in its "golden" age, a benchmark of elegant  style and masculine brevity imitated by young schoolboys for centuries. One  of the most daring and brilliant generals of all time, Julius Caesar  combined the elements of tactical genius with the shrewdness of a master  politician. He was an astute judge of men's character - their strengths  and weaknesses. Whenever possible, he exercised restraint and mercy  even when his worst enemies were in his power. But he also knew when and  how to mete out stern punishment and his swift retaliations became a  hallmark of his career. With his charismatic leadership, his powerful  intellect and his magnetic personal charm, Julius Caesar became the idol  of men and women everywhere. The fanatic loyalty of his troops and the  adulation of the Roman public propelled him to the pinnacle of power.  Historian Will Durant called him "the most complete man that antiquity  produced." Follow along in this recording as Julius Caesar in 50  B.C. undertakes the awesome enterprise of subduing savage Gaul, an area  roughly the size of Texas. That task was barely completed before his  enemies in Rome struck, igniting the bloody Civil War that engulfed most  of the Roman Empire and afterward left Caesar in supreme power.

Wilson is a sophisticated and marvelously humane writer. His vision is a  liberating one, and a reader of this splendid book comes away with a  sense of the kinship that exists among the people, animals, and insects  that share the planet. (New Yorker 20041219) Compellingly  interesting and enormously important...The most stimulating, the most  provocative, and the most illuminating work of nonfiction I have read in  some time. --William McPherson (Washington Post Book World 20050301) A  work of high intellectual daring...Here is an accomplished biologist  explaining, in notably clear and unprevaricating language, what he  thinks his subject now has to offer to the understanding of man and  society...The implications of Wilson's thesis are rather considerable,  for if true, no system of political, social, religious or ethical  thought can afford to ignore it. --Nicholas Wade (New Republic 20071124) Twenty-five years after its first publication, Harvard University Press has re-released Edward O. Wilson's classic work, On Human Nature.  A double Pulitzer Prize winner, Wilson is a writer of effortless grace  and stylish succinctness and this is one of his finest, most important  books...[A] highly influential, elegantly written book. --Robin McKie (The Observer ) A seminal, groundbreaking, informative, thought-provoking, enduringly valuable, and highly recommended read. (Bookwatch )

"It's hard to overestimate the impact that Robert Conquest's  extraordinary study had on the West's perceptions of Soviet history.  Using rare Soviet materials, some published during the Khrushchev thaw,  others in self-published samizdat format, the British historian put  together an authoritative chronicle of Stalin's murderous reign. Western  communists and fellow travelers dismissed the book as propaganda. But  when Soviet archives were partially opened in 1991, Conquest's estimates  of 700,000 "legal" executions during 1937-38 -- and of the total number  of other deaths thanks to the Soviet terror campaigns ("hardly lower  than some fifteen million") -- were proven chillingly accurate." -- Owen  Matthews, N/A, Wall Street Journal "Anthony Powell  once wrote of Robert Conquest that he had a 'capacity for taking  enormous pains in relation to any enterprise in hand.' It is beyond  dispute that, forty years after the publication of The Great Terror, this judgment requires no reassessment."--Michael Weiss, The New Criterion "The volume that tore the mask away from Stalinism before most people had even heard of Solzhenitsyn."--Christopher Hitchens, Wall Street Journal

South: The Story of Shackleton's 1914-1917 Expedition  Kindle Edition by                 Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton

Featuring extensive revisions to  the text as well as a new introduction and epilogue - bringing the book  completely up to date on the tumultuous politics of the previous decade  and the long-term implications of the Soviet collapse - this compact,  original, and engaging book offers the definitive account of one of the  great historical events of the last 50 years. Combining  historical and geopolitical analysis with an absorbing narrative, Kotkin  draws upon extensive research, including memoirs by dozens of insiders  and senior figures, to illuminate the factors that led to the demise of  Communism and the USSR. The new edition puts the collapse in the context  of the global economic and political changes from the 1970s to the  present day. Kotkin creates a compelling profile of post-Soviet Russia,  and he reminds us, with chilling immediacy, of what could not have been  predicted - that the world's largest police state, with several million  troops, a doomsday arsenal, and an appalling record of violence, would  liquidate itself with barely a whimper. Throughout the book,  Kotkin also paints vivid portraits of key personalities. Using recently  released archive materials, for example, he offers a fascinating picture  of Gorbachev, describing this virtuoso tactician and resolutely  committed reformer as "flabbergasted by the fact that his socialist  renewal was leading to the system's liquidation" - and more or less  going along with it. At once authoritative and provocative, Armageddon Averted illuminates the collapse of the Soviet Union, revealing how "principled  restraint and scheming self-interest brought a deadly system to meek  dissolution".

How American race law provided a blueprint for Nazi Germany Nazism  triumphed in Germany during the high era of Jim Crow laws in the United  States. Did the American regime of racial oppression in any way inspire  the Nazis? The unsettling answer is yes. In Hitler’s American Model,  James Whitman presents a detailed investigation of the American impact  on the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation  of the Nazi regime. Both American citizenship and antimiscegenation  laws proved directly relevant to the two principal Nuremberg Laws―the  Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. Contrary to those who have insisted  otherwise, Whitman demonstrates that the Nazis took a real, sustained,  significant, and revealing interest in American race policies. He looks  at the ultimate, ugly irony that when Nazis rejected American practices,  it was sometimes not because they found them too enlightened but too  harsh. Indelibly linking American race laws to the shaping of Nazi  policies in Germany, Hitler’s American Model upends the understanding of America’s influence on racist practices in the wider world.