Q: How do you find all this business of having screaming girls following you all over the place? George: Well, we feel flattered . . . John: . . . and flattened. When the Beatles burst onto the music scene in the early 1960s, they were just four unknown l
Poor Abraham Lincoln! His life was hardly fun at all. A country torn in two by war, citizens who didn’t like him as president, a homely appearance—what could there possibly be to laugh about? And yet he did laugh. Lincoln wasn’t just one of our grea
For thirty years, the whole last half of his life, Leonardo da Vinci was obsessed with unlocking the secrets of nature. His notebooks are the mind-boggling evidence of a fifteenth-century scientist standing at the edge of the modern world, basing his idea
What was Isaac Newton like? Secretive, vindictive, withdrawn, obsessive, and, oh, yes, brilliant. His imagination was so large that, just "by thinking on it," he invented calculus and figured out the scientific explanation of gravity.Yet Newton was so sma
Albert Einstein. His name has become a synonym for genius. His wild case of bedhead and playful sense of humor made him a media superstar?the first, maybe only, scientist-celebrity. He wasn?t much for lab work; in fact he had a tendency to blow up experim
The knock-knock joke: a kid classic. So many funny, punny punchlines. It was just screaming for its own book. To do this classic joke justice, we decided to gather fourteen of the best-known and most talented children?s book artists to illustrate their fa
Max’s brothers have grand collections that everyone makes a big fuss over. Benjamin collects stamps and Karl collects coins, and neither one will share with their little brother. So Max decides to start a collection of his own. He’s going to collect w
"Nothing ever happens here," the shepherd thinks. But the bored boy knows what would be exciting: He cries that a wolf is after his sheep, and the town's people come running. How often can that trick work, though? B.G. Hennessy's retelling of this timele
Clink! Clankety-bang! Thump-whirr! That's the sound of Papa at work. Although he is an inventor, he has never made anything that works perfectly, and that's because he hasn't yet found a truly fantastic idea. But when he takes his family fishing on Lake
