Groundbreaking Reads: Science & Tech

Using one engaging story after another, coupled with accessible scientific facts, world authority Richard B. Alley explores the fascinating history of energy use by humans over the centuries.

A landmark work of narrative nonfiction that tells the dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the twenty-first century’s great, unequal cities.   I

A fascinating new book that explains climate change--its implications for the future and what we can and cannot do to avoid further change.

On January 12, 2010 a massive earthquake laid waste to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, killing hundreds of thousands of people. Within three days, Dr. Paul Farmer arrived in the Haitian capital, along with a team of volunteers, to lend his services to the injured.

DISAPPEARING SPOON follow carbon, neon, silicon, and gold as they play out their parts in human history, finance, mythology, war, the arts, poison, and the lives of the (frequently) mad scientists who discovered them.

"Mastermind" explores Holmess unique methods of ever-present mindfulness, astute observation, and logical deduction.

In his fifth work of nonfiction, Mark Kurlansky turns his attention to a common household item with a long and intriguing history: salt. The only rock we eat, salt has shaped civilization from the very beginning.

The End of Countryis the compelling story about the epic battle for control of one of the richest natural gas deposits the world has ever known: the Marcellus Shale, worth more than one trillion dollars.

In the summer of 2006, racing through Lebanon to report on the Israeli invasion, Anthony Shadid found himself in his family's ancestral hometown of Marjayoun. he discovered his great-grandfather's once magnificent estate in near ruins. One year later, Shadid returned to Marjayoun, not to chronicle the violence, but to rebuild in its wake.

For fans of "The Lost City of Z"--a real-life Indiana Jones story set in the jungle of Honduras from journalist Stewart.

And yet as late as 2000, the earth’s deepest cave—the supercave—remained undiscovered. This is the story of the men and women who risked everything to find it, earning their place in history beside the likes of Peary, Amundsen, Hillary, and Armstrong.

From the bestselling author of "The Professor and the Madman" and "The Map That Changed the World" comes an examination of the enduring and world-changing effects of the catastrophic eruption off the coast of Java of the world's most dangerous volcano--Krakatoa.

In The Universe Within, with his trademark clarity and exuberance, Shubin takes an even more expansive approach to the question of why we look the way we do. Starting once again with fossils, he turns his gaze skyward, showing us how the entirety of the universes fourteen-billion-year history can be seen in our bodies.