"One of the funniest and most unusual books of the year....Gross, educational, and unexpectedly sidesplitting."-Entertainment Weekly
Stiff is an oddly compelling, often hilarious exploration of the strange lives of our bodies postmortem. For two tho... View details
The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back. The brain has shut down. The flesh begins to soften. Nothing much new h...
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
More than one million copies sold! A "brilliant" (Lupita Nyong'o, Time), "poignant" (Entertainment Weekly), "soul-nourishing" (USA Today) memoir about coming of age during the twilight of apartheid
"Noah's childhood sto... View details
Sometimes in big Hollywood movies they’ll have these crazy chase scenes where somebody jumps or gets thrown from a moving car. The person hits the ground and rolls for a bit. Then they come to a stop ...
#1 New York Times Bestseller
From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity's creation and evolution-a #1 international bestseller-that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understa... View details
About 300,000 years after their appearance, matter and energy started to coalesce into complex structures, called atoms, which then combined into molecules. The story of atoms, molecules and their int...
New York Times bestselling author Douglas Adams and zoologist Mark Carwardine take off around the world in search of exotic, endangered creatures.
Join them as they encounter the animal kingdom in its stunning beauty, astonishing variety, and imminen... View details
My own last chance to see Douglas Adams in action as a public speaker was at the Digital Biota conference in Cambridge in September 1998, over ten years ago. Also as it happens, I dreamed last night o...
In A Short History of Nearly Everything, the bestselling author of A Walk in the Woods and The Body, confronts his greatest challenge yet: to understand-and, if possible, answer-the oldest, biggest questions we have posed about the universe and ourse... View details
A proton is an infinitesimal part of an atom, which is itself of course an insubstantial thing. Protons are so small that a little dib of ink like the dot on thisi can hold something in the region of ...
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll
Douglas Hofstadter's book is concerned directly with the nature of "maps" or links between formal systems. However, according to Hofstadter, the... View details
Introduction: A Musico-Logical Offering. The book opens with the story of Bach's Musical Offering. Bach made an impromptu visit to King Frederick, the Great of Prussia, and was requested to improvise ...
When a generous boy shares a cookie with a hungry mouse, it is the beginning of a chain of events that keeps the boy busy all day long, and might keep him busy for days to come. If you give a mouse a cookie, after all, he's bound to ask for a glass o... View details
THINGS FALL APART tells two overlapping, intertwining stories, both of which center around Okonkwo, a "strong man" of an Ibo village in Nigeria. The first of these stories traces Okonkwo's fall from grace with the tribal world in which he lives, and ... View details
Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievements. As a young man of eighteen he had brought honour to his village by throwing Amalinz...
Heart of Darkness is the thrilling tale of Marlow, a seaman and wanderer recounting his physical and psychological journey in search of the infamous ivory trader Kurtz. Traveling upriver into the heart of the African continent, he gradually becomes o... View details
1869 Conrad’s father dies, also of tuberculosis; Conrad is adopted by his maternal uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, who lives in Poland. The completion of the Suez Canal effectively links the Mediterranean a...
Newly revised and up-to-date, this edition of The Social Animal is a brief, compelling introduction to modern social psychology. Through vivid narrative, lively presentations of important research, and intriguing examples, Elliot Aronson probes the p... View details
As far as I know, Aristotle was the first serious thinker to call our species “the social animal.” Of course he was right, but what does that mean? A host of other creatures are “social,” from ants an...