Science and Technics

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

National Book Critics Circle for General Non-fiction 2009

by Richard Holmes

The Age of Wonder is a colorful and utterly absorbing history of the men and women whose discoveries and inventions at the end of the eighteenth century gave birth to the Romantic Age of Science. 

When young...

The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics

Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology 2008

by Leonard Susskind

What happens when something is sucked into a black hole? Does it disappear? Three decades ago, a young physicist named Stephen Hawking claimed it did-and in doing so put at risk everything we know about physics...

The Whale and the Supercomputer

Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology 2004

by Charles Wohlforth

Scientists and natives wrestle with our changing climate in the land where it has hit first--and hardest

A traditional Eskimo whale-hunting party races to shore near Barrow, Alaska--their comrades trapped on...

Charles Darwin: The Power of Place

National Book Critics Circle for Biography/Autobiography 2002

by Janet Browne

In 1858 Charles Darwin was forty-nine years old, a gentleman scientist living quietly at Down House in the Kent countryside, respected by fellow biologists and well liked among his wide and distinguished circle...

The Invention of Clouds

Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology 2001

by Richard Hamblyn

An extraordinary yet little-known scientific advance occurred in the opening years of the nineteenth century when a young amateur meteorologist, Luke Howard, gave the clouds the names by which they are known...

Annals of the Former World

Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction 1999

by John McPhee

The Pulitzer Prize-winning view of the continent, across the fortieth parallel and down through 4.6 billion years

Twenty years ago, when John McPhee began his journeys back and forth across the United States,...

Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce

Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology 1998

by Douglas Starr

Essence and emblem of life--feared, revered, mythologized, and used in magic and medicine from earliest times--human blood is now the center of a huge, secretive, and often dangerous worldwide commerce. It is...

A Beautiful Mind

National Book Critics Circle for Biography/Autobiography 1998

by Sylvia Nasar

In this powerful and dramatic biography Sylvia Nasar vividly re-creates the life of a mathematical genius whose career was cut short by schizophrenia and who, after three decades of devastating mental illness,...

The Soul of A New Machine

Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction 1982, National Book Award for Non-Fiction 1982

by Tracy Kidder

Computers have changed since 1981, when Tracy Kidder memorably recorded the drama, comedy, and excitement of one companys efforts to bring a new microcomputer to market. What has not changed is the feverish...