A Silicon Valley strategist challenges beliefs about the value of harder work, combining scientific research with the examples of minds ranging from Darwin to Stephen King to explain that qualitative, deliberate rest is an essential component of productivity.

"Leonard Mlodinow takes us on a passionate and inspiring tour through the exciting history of human progress and the key events in the development of science. In the process, he presents a fascinating new look at the unique characteristics of our species and our society that helped propel us from stone tools to written language and through the birth of chemistry, biology, and modern physics to today's technological world. Along the way he explores...

Alan Alda meets the unique wildlife that inspired Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and talks to scientists who try to protect it from alien invaders and ecotourists.

This compelling text examines evolution, its definition, the scientific evidence that evolution has taken place, natural selection, Darwin's Origin of Species, genetics and evolution, population genetics, patterns in evolution and species concepts, the story of life and geological time, and human evolution.

A provocative biography of the Roosevelt family draws on family secrets and complex rivalries to argue that the Roosevelts' rise to power was driven by a series of inside competitions that were witnessed firsthand by an increasingly begrudging Eleanor Roosevelt.

"She Has Her Mother's Laugh presents a profoundly original perspective on what we pass along from generation to generation. Charles Darwin played a crucial part in turning heredity into a scientific question, and yet he failed spectacularly to answer it. The birth of genetics in the early 1900s seemed to do precisely that. Gradually, people translated their old notions about heredity into a language of genes. As the technology for studying genes became...

"In his new book human paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall argues that a long tradition of "human exceptionalism" in paleoanthropology has distorted the picture of human evolution. Drawing partly on his own career-- from young scientist in awe of his elders to crotchety elder statesman-- Tattersall offers an idiosyncratic look at the competitive world of paleoanthropology, beginning with Charles Darwin 150 years ago, and continuing through the Leakey...

"In short chapters filled with intriguing historical anecdotes, personal asides, and rigorous exposition, readers learn the difference between how the world works at the quantum level, the cosmic level, and the human level--and then how each connects to the other. Carroll's presentation of the principles that have guided the scientific revolution from Darwin and Einstein to the origins of life, consciousness, and the universe is dazzlingly unique....