Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, was the daughter of Lord Byron and a close friend to many of the leading figures of the Victorian era; based on her report on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine she is also generally known as the inventor of the science of computer programming. In this engrossing biography, Dorothy Stein strips away the many layers of myth to reveal a story far more dramatic and fascinating than previous accounts have indicated. Dorothy Stein is a psychologist with a special interest in thought and language and a background in physics and computer programming. She has taught courses in nineteenth-century women's history and in the biology and psychology of sex differences, and is particularly concerned with the use of myth in science.

Tireless, controversial, and hugely inspirational to those who knew her or encountered her work, Lynn Margulis was a scientist whose intellectual energy and interests knew no bounds. Best known for her work on the origins of eukaryotic cells, the Gaia hypothesis, and symbiogenesis as a driving force in evolution, her work has forever changed the way we understand life on Earth. When Margulis passed away in 2011, she left behind a groundbreaking scientific legacy that spanned decades. In this collection, Dorion Sagan, Margulis's son and longtime collaborator, gathers together the voices of friends and colleagues to remark on her life and legacy, in essays that cover her early collaboration with James Lovelock, her fearless face-off with Richard Dawkins during the so-called "Battle of Balliol" at Oxford, the intrepid application of her scientific mind to the insistence that 9/11 was a false-flag operation, her affinity for Emily Dickinson, and more. Margulis was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983, received the prestigious National Medal of Science in 1999, and her papers are permanently archived at the Library of Congress. Less than a month before her untimely death, Margulis was named one of the twenty most influential scientists alive - one of only two women on this list, which include such scientists as Stephen Hawking, James Watson, and Jane Goodall.

A spiritual and scientific surf quest. After spending two years in bed with Lyme disease, Steven Kotler had lost everything: his health, his job, his girl, and, he was beginning to suspect, his mind. Kotler, not a religious man, suddenly found himself drawn to the sport of surfing as if it were the cornerstone of a new faith. Why, he wondered, when there was nothing left to believe in, could he begin to believe in something as unlikely as surfing. What was belief anyway? How did it work in the body, the brain, our culture, and human history? Into this mix came a strange story. In 2003, on a surf trip through Mexico, Kotler heard of "the conductor," a mythical surfer who could control the weather. He'd heard this same tale eight years earlier, in Indonesia, but this time something clicked. With the help of everyone from rebel surfers to rocket scientists, Kotler undertakes a three year globetrotting quest for the origins of this legend. The results are a startling mix of big waves and bigger ideas: a surfer's journey into the biological underpinnings of belief itself.

Renaissance military memoirs studied for what they reveal of contemporary attiudes towards war, selfhood and identity.

Looks at the life and career of Sally Ride, who in 1983 became the first American woman to travel in space.

This book speculates about the important inventions, scientific discoveries, and political and social developments, which may occur during the coming millennium. It does this by presenting -- through the eyes of a fictitious author living in the year 3000 -- a list of the 100 men and women who have had the greatest impact on world history and on the everyday lives of individuals. The hundred persons are ranked in order of their influence. The main section of the book consists of short biographies of those 100 persons, describing what each person accomplished, and why that person is so important. Forty-five of the entries are actual historical personages. These include such well known figures as Jesus Christ, Confucius, Charles Darwin, Christopher Columbus, Albert Einstein, and George Washington. Among the fifty-five entries from the third millennium are: Sue Ellen Green (who develops a cancer vaccine); Miguel Carranza (chief founder of the United World Federation); Stella Ricardo Garcia (architect and formscaper); Mika Kivikoski (who develops the technology to control the weather); and Shu Gungwu (who finds the solution to the baffling "mind-body problem"). Other topics treated include: space travel and space colonies; medical advances (such as artificial organs, and reversible sex-change operations); arts and entertainment (including music, literature, the visual arts, and sports and games); solar power; philosophy (including political theory, epistemology, semantics, and ethics); mathematics, pollution control, robots, brainwashing; nuclear warfare; robots; and artificial intelligence. The book includes a historical chart (listing the main events of both the actual past and the projected future), a list of honorable mentions (and their accomplishments); a glossary, and an extensive index.

Presents brief biographical portraits of the 106 recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize during its 100-year history.

Profound and often raucously funny, Kamenetz's quirky tale carries him from a conversation with the Dalai Lama (in which he valiantly "contravened forty-six years of my own noisy cultural conditioning" to keep from stepping on the silence) to breaking matzah with him a year later at a Passover seder for Tibetan freedom. Along the way he learns kabbalah poolside at the Beverly Hilton, meditates in a T-shirt shop with Baton Rouge's three resident Tibetan Buddhists, observes the Sabbath in a plastic tent with Jewish addicts and cons in an inter-city slum, and "calls out" to God with new-Hasidic abandon while racing down the San Bernadino freeway. Stalking Elijah teaches at every step of the path how to celebrate the Jewish tradition in the context of feminism, contemporary science, and interfaith dialogue.

A recently retired Israeli Air Force general and its second-highest-scoring fighter ace, Iftach Spector is one of Israel’s living legends. He was the leader of the flight that attacked the USS Liberty in 1967. After the 1967 and 1973 wars, in which he commanded a squadron of fighter-bombers, he rose to head the IAF’s Training and War Lessons Section and later became its the Chief of Operations. He was one of the eight Israeli pilots who attacked Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor at Osirik in 1981. In 2003, his career took an even more dramatic turn: he was the senior signatory of the famous “Pilots’ Letter,” in which Spector and 27 other Israeli pilots stated their refusal to bomb targets in Palestine where collateral damage would likely be severe. His maverick conscience is well on display in this artfully written memoir, which is currently a 10-week-and-counting bestseller in Israel and has been licensed in Brazil as well. The son of a family that immigrated to Palestine at the turn of the 20th century, whose father and mother served in the Palmach, Israel’s early clandestine commando force, Spector has written a rich and reflective meditation on loyalty, on what is right and wrong in war, and on his dedication to the idea and reality of the state of Israel. The Pilots’ Letter ended Spector’s military career, but also made him one of the most compelling and celebrated defenders of the conscience of the Jewish state. In that battle, as in his previous battles against Nasser’s MiGs, his mother’s constant lesson to him sustained him: “All from within.” General Spector’s first book, A DREAM IN BLACK AND AZURE (1992; never translated into English), won the Sade Literary Award, given to him personally by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. He has a B.A. in history and Middle East Studies from Tel Aviv University and a masters in political science from UCLA, both with honors.

Father of the birth control pill, developer of antihistamines, founder of biomedical companies, teacher of world-class chemists, best-selling novelist.... As The Scientist notes, "Few can match Carl Djerassi's juggling act for success and longevity". Here is Djerassi's remarkable autobiography. Blending vivid descriptions of the lucrative world of drug development with controversial chapters on the politics of contraception and poignant disclosures about his personal life, this book tells the story of one of the most productive and socially conscious chemists working today. The Pill, Pygmy Chimps, and Degas' Horse tells how Djerassi, while still in his twenties and leading a small team in an obscure laboratory in Mexico City, used a locally grown yam first to synthesize cortisone and then, within twelve months, to create the first steroid effective as a birth control pill. Dubbed for this latter work "the father of the pill", a title he often shares with Gregory Pincus and John Rock, who performed the biological and clinical studies to confirm the pill's efficacy in humans, Djerassi has spent a lifetime thinking and rethinking, discussing and debating, the social, economic, and biological consequences of the changed attitudes toward contraception engendered by the pill. In two riveting chapters entitled "The Pill at Twenty" and "The Pill at Forty: What Now?" Djerassi recounts the fascinating history of the pill's journey from its first days in the laboratory to widespread public use--from being hailed as an agent of the sexual revolution to condemnation as an agent of the new promiscuity, to being accused of being an expression of the scientific community's sexism (Why was there no malebirth control pill?). And then, in a powerful consideration of where the politics of contraception have taken us, he discusses why so few innovations in contraception are being investigated today, and why even fewer are making their way to the public. The Pill, Pygmy Chimps, and Degas' Horse chronicles Djerassi's many successful careers in science, business, the academy, and the arts (he is a published poet and novelist, as well as the founder of an artists' colony). His growing appreciation for the soft side of science--its human and humane aspects--have long been reflected in the courses he teaches at Stanford, in the plot of his novel, Cantor's Dilemma, and in his decision to found one of the first environmentally aware pesticide companies. In this intellectually challenging book, the reader is let into the fertile mind and psyche of one of the few Renaissance men of twentieth-century science.

One of the most imaginative figures to emerge from the science fiction field. Olaf Stapledon left an indelible mark on many other writers, from Arthur C. Clarke to Saul Bellows, but never won a mass following himself. This study by a renowned American literary critic provides a long-needed introduction to the life and work of the man Brian Aldiss called "the great classical example, the cold pitch of perfection as he turns scientific concepts into ontological epic prose poems, the ultimate science fiction writer." Probing the recurrent themes and images of Stapledon's novels -- which include Last and First Men, Odd John, Star Maker, and Sirius -- Leslie A. Fiedler brilliantly illuminates the complexity and richness that underlie Stapledon's fiction. As Fiedler demonstrates, Stapledon was very much a product of the 1930s, embracing a set of leftist attitudes that were common to many other "Oxbridge-educated sons of the English upper classes." But, as Fiedler further shows, there is much more to Stapleton's books than their superficial ideological content: his works are unique in their awe-inspiring vision of the breadth of the physical universe and the depths of the human psyche. "Certainly since encountering him," Fielder writes, "I have never been able to stare up at thee night sky with the same secure faith that either God exists or he does not; anymore than I have been able between sleeping and waking to be sure that the nighttime "I" preparing to dream is identical with or totally different from the conscious "I" about to surrender its dominion."

A thoroughly engrossing memoir that recounts Beckwith's halting steps toward scientific triumphs--among them, the discovery of the genetic element that turns on genes--as well as his emergence as a world-class political activist, "Making Genes, Making Waves" is a compelling history of the major controversies in genetics during the last 30 years.

"The House of Twenty Thousand Books is journalist Sasha Abramsky's elegy to the vanished intellectual world of his grandparents, Chimen and Miriam, and their vast library of socialist literature and Jewish history. A rare book dealer and self-educated polymath who would go on to teach at Oxford and consult for Sotheby's, Chimen Abramsky drew great writers and thinkers like Isaiah Berlin and Eric Hobsbawm to his north London home; his library grew from his abiding passion for books and his search for an enduring ideology. The books, documents, and manuscripts that covered every shelf at 5 Hillway were testaments to Chimen's quest -- from the Jewish orthodoxy of his boyhood, to the Communism of his youth, to the liberalism of his mature years. The House of Twenty Thousand Books is at once the story of a fascinating family and chronicle of the embattled twentieth century. The House of Twenty Thousand Books includes 43 photos. "--

"A major influence on the BBC and independent television in Britain in the 1960s, as well as on CBC and the National Film Board in Canada, Sydney Newman acted as head of drama at a key period in the history of television. For the first time, his comprehensive memoirs--written in the years before his death in 1997--are being made public. Born to a poor Jewish family in the tenements of Queen Street in Toronto, Newman's artistic talent got him a job at the NFB under John Grierson. He then became one of the first producers at CBC TV before heading overseas to the U.K. where he revitalized drama programming. Harold Pinter and Alun Owen were playwrights whom Newman nurtured, and their contemporary, socially conscious plays were successful, both artistically and commercially. At the BBC, overseeing a staff of 400, he developed a science fiction show that flourishes to this day: Doctor Who. Providing further context to Newman's memoir is an in-depth biographical essay by Graeme Burk, which positions Newman's legacy in the history of television, and an afterword by one of Sydney's daughters, Deirdre Newman."--

In this book, Rudolf A. Raff reaches out to the scientifically queasy, using his life story and his growth as a scientist to illustrate why science matters, especially at a time when many Americans are both suspicious of science and hostile to scientific ways of thinking. Noting that science has too often been the object of controversy in school curriculums and debates on public policy issues ranging from energy and conservation to stem-cell research and climate change, Raff argues that when the public is confused or ill-informed, these issues tend to be decided on religious, economic, and political grounds that disregard the realities of the natural world. Speaking up for science and scientific literacy, Raff tells how and why he became an evolutionary biologist and describes some of the vibrant and living science of evolution. Once We All Had Gills is also the story of evolution writ large: its history, how it is studied, what it means, and why it has become a useful target in a cultural war against rational thought and the idea of a secular, religiously tolerant nation.

The tenure of Earl Warren as chief justice of the United States Supreme Court (1953-69) was marked by a series of decisions unique in the history of the Court for the progressive agenda they bespoke. What made the Warren Court special? How can students of history and political science understand the Warren Court as part of constitutional history and politics? To answer such questions, nine well-known legal scholars and historians explore how each justice contributed to the distinctiveness of the Warren Court in Supreme Court history.

Psychoanalytic Pioneers is a comprehensive history of psychoanalysis as seen through the lives and the works of its most eminent teachers, thinkers, and clinicians. It is also a definitive portrait of the atmosphere in which psychoanalytic creativity has emerged and flourished. Going beyond mere biographical description, the contributors elucidate the contributions of various psychoanalysts to the evolution of psychoanalytic thought, and evaluate their roles in the development of psychoanalysis as a science, as a method of investigation, as a treatment technique, and as an organization. The editors have assembled profiles of Karl Abraham, Sandor Ferenczi, Otto Rank, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Ernest Jones, Paul Federn, Oskar Pfister, Harms Sachs, A.A. Brill, Sandor Rado, Theodor Reik, Melanie Klein, Otto Fenichel, Karen Horney, Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, and twenty-four other pioneers, whose influence on psychoanalysis reverberates to this day. In a new introduction, Eisenstein maintains that while man and his unconscious have not changed much since Freud's time, today psychoanalysis is full of many different clinical and theoretical viewpoints. Among the ideas being debated are object theory, drive theory, the oedipal concept, intersubjectivity, and self-psychology. Eisenstein also discusses the contributions of psychohistory, a recent and significant development in psychoanalysis in which psychological study is applied to historical periods and personalities. Psychoanalytic Pioneers will be an important addition to the libraries of psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, historians, and anyone interested in the influence of psychoanalysis in our lives.

In the tradition of Carl Wilson's Let's Talk About Love , an unforgettable account of fame, fandom, and the problem of making art in the twenty-first century In his multi-hyphenate ambitions, the musician who calls himself Juiceboxxx couldn't be more modern--you might call him a punk rock-rapper-DJ-record executive-energy drink-magnate. Journalist Leon Neyfakh has been something more than a fan of Juiceboxxx's since he was a teenager, when he booked a show for the artist in a church basement in his hometown of Oak Park, Illinois. Juiceboxxx went on to the tireless, lonely, possibly hopeless pursuit of success on his own terms--no club was too dank, no futon too grubby, if it helped him get to the next, next level. And, for years, Neyfakh remained haunted from afar: was art really worth all the sacrifices? If it was, how did you know you'd made it? And what was the difference, anyway, between a person like Juiceboxxx--who devoted his life to being an artist--and a person like Neyfakh, who elected instead to pursue a stable career and a comfortable, middle-class existence? Much more than a brilliant portrait of a charismatic musician always on the verge of something big, The Next Next Level is a wholly contemporary story of art, obsession, fame, ambition, and friendship--as well as viral videos, rap-rock, and the particulars of life on the margins of culture.

Gerald Holton uses the life and work of our century's greatest scientist to warn against today's gathering Romantic rebellion, one in which science is blamed for all our social ills, and in which reason is being replaced by New Age 'ways of knowing.' Through his rich exploration of Einstein's thought, the author shows how the best science depends on great intuitive leaps of imagination, and how science is indeed the creative expression of the traditions of Western civilization. Wide-ranging and forceful, this book is a must reading for anyone interested in the place of science in our world.