In Lord High Executioner, Howard Engel produces a wonderfully wise and witty social history of the men and women who represent our agents of death, and who have done our dirty work over the centuries.
With a foreword by Oliver SacksShortly after John Hull went blind, after years of struggling with failing vision, he had a dream in which he was trapped on a sinking ship, submerging into another, unimaginable world. The power of this calmly eloquent, int
Jonathan Lethem is perhaps our most active literary voice mining the genre margins of our culture. In this unique collection he creates an anthology that no one else could. He draws on the work of such unforgettables as Julio Cortazar, who presents
"Nature is so wondrously complex and varied that almost anything possible does happen....I rejoice in [its] multifariousness and leave the chimera of certainty to politicians and preachers."—from Ever Since DarwinUpon his death in 2002, Stephen Jay Goul
Russian psychologist A. R. Luria presents a compelling portrait of a man's heroic struggle to regain his mental faculties. A soldier named Zasetsky, wounded in the head at the battle of Smolensk in 1943, suddenly found himself in a frightening world: he c
Exiting Nirvana" is a strong and affecting profile of an artist with autism, beautifully written by her mother. . . . Skillfully weaving in theories of autism with the experience of raising an autistic child, Park goes beyond individual history to address
At the close of the 20th century, what do we know about why we are here, on this planet, in this universe? To address this and other big questions, journalist Wim Kayzer invited a diverse cast of six of today's great scientific thinkers to discuss, debate
In his introduction to The Best American Science Writing 2003, Dr. Oliver Sacks, "the poet laureate of medicine" New York Times writes that "the best science writing . . . cannot be completely 'objective' -- how can it be when science itself is so human a