** GUARDIAN SCIENCE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017 ** 'Popular science at its best' Mail on Sunday 'Eminently accessible and enjoyable' Observer With every breath, you literally inhale the history of the world. On the ides of March, 44 BC, Julius Caesar died of stab wounds in the Roman Senate, but the story of his last breath is still unfolding. In fact, you're probably inhaling some of it now. Of the sextillions of molecules entering or leaving your lungs at this moment, some might also bear traces of Cleopatra's perfumes, German mustard gas, particles exhaled by dinosaurs or emitted by atomic bombs, even remnants of stardust from the universe's creation. In Caesar's Last Breath, New York Times bestselling author Sam Kean takes us on a journey through the periodic table, around the globe and across time to tell the epic story of the air we breathe.
The details of the mission rival the finest spy thriller, but what makes this story sing is the incredible cast of characters -- both heroes and rogues alike -- including: Moe Bergm, the major league catcher who abandoned the game for a ...
These fascinating tales follow every element on the table as they play out their parts in human history, and in the lives of the (frequently) mad scientists who discovered them.
In The Disappearing Spoon, bestselling author Sam Kean unlocked the mysteries of the periodic table. In The Violinist's Thumb, he explores the wonders of the magical building block of life: DNA.
The book reveals the origins of much of modern science in the transatlantic slave trade of the 1700s, as well as Thomas Edison’s mercenary support of the electric chair and the warped logic of the spies who infiltrated the Manhattan ...
The last assassin left alive was one of the lesser-known: Cassius Parmensis was a poet and sailor who chose every side in the dying Republic's civil wars except the winning one, a playwright whose work was said to have been stolen and ...
How the Murder of Germanicus Led to the Fall of Rome Stephen Dando-Collins ... execution of Sejanus the order had come to the Palatium from the isle of Capri for the second son of Germanicus to be starved to death in his basement cell.
What is life worth? What would any of us do, what would we really do, if our days were numbered? Ebook contains an excerpt from the anticipated second book in the trilogy, Countdown City.
In 2010, he was nominated for the Science Fiction Poetry Association's Grandmaster Award. ... Fedogan and Bremer), The Drums of Chaos (2008, Mythos Books), and Savage Menace and Other Poems of Horror (2010, reprint 2021, P'rea Press).
A "dazzling" tale of empire and betrayal set among the stars (#1 New York Times bestselling author Casey McQuiston), this queer, spectacular space opera draws inspiration from Roman and Egyptian empires—and the lives and loves of ...
Turn Right at Machu Picchu is Adams’ fascinating and funny account of his journey through some of the world’s most majestic, historic, and remote landscapes guided only by a hard-as-nails Australian survivalist and one nagging question: ...