Galileo Galilei's telescopes allowed him to discover a new reality in the heavens. But for publicly declaring his astounding argument--that the earth... revolves around the sun--he was accused of heresy and put under house arrest by the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Living a far different life, Galileo's daughter Virginia, a cloistered nun, proved to be her father's greatest source of strength through the difficult years of his trial and persecution.Drawing upon the remarkable surviving letters that Virginia wrote to her father, Dava Sobel has written a fascinating history of Medici--era Italy, a mesmerizing account of Galileo's scientific discoveries and his trial by Church authorities, and a touching portrayal of a father--daughter relationship. Galileo's Daughter is a profoundly moving portrait of the man who forever changed the way we see the universe.• Winner of the Christopher Award and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award • Named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, and the American Library Association

Inspired by a long fascination with Galileo, and by the remarkable surviving letters of his daughter Maria Celeste, a cloistered nun, Dava Sobel has... crafted a biography that dramatically recolors the personality and accomplishments of a mythic figure whose early-seventeenth-century clash with Catholic doctrine continues to define the schism between science and religion-the man Albert Einstein called "the father of modern physics-indeed of modern science altogether." It is also a stunning portrait of Galileo's daughter, a person hitherto lost to history, described by her father as "a woman of exquisite mind, singular goodness, and most tenderly attached to me."Moving between Galileo's grand public life and Maria Celeste's sequestered world, Sobel illuminates the Florence of the Medicis and the papal court in Rome during the pivotal era when humanity's perception of its place in the cosmos was about to be overturned. During that same time, while the bubonic plague wreaked its terrible devastation and the Thirty Years' War tipped fortunes across Europe, Galileo sought to reconcile the Heaven he revered as a good Catholic with the heavens he revealed through his telescope. Filled with human drama and scientific adventure, Galileo's Daughter is an unforgettable story.Praise for Galileo's Daughter : "[Sobel] shows herself a virtuoso at encapsulating the history and the politics of science. Her descriptions of Galileo's ideas…are pithy, vivid, and intelligible."-Wall Street Journal

Why Galileo's finger? Galileo, one of whose fingers is preserved in a vessel displayed in Florence, provided much of the impetus for modern science,... pointing the way out of medieval ignorance. In this brilliant account of the central ideas of contemporary science, Peter Atkins celebrates the effectiveness of Galileo's symbolic finger for revealing the nature of our universe, our world, and ourselves. Galileo's Finger takes the reader on an extraordinary journey that embraces the ten central ideas of current science. "By a great idea," writes Peter Atkins, "I mean a simple concept of great reach, an acorn of an idea that ramifies into a great oak tree of application, a spider of an idea that can spin a great web and draw in a feast of explanation and elucidation." With wit, charm, and patience, Atkins leads the reader to an understanding of the essence of the whole of science, from evolution and the emergence of complexity, to entropy, the spring of all change in the universe; from energy, the universalization of accountancy, to symmetry, the quantification of beauty; and from cosmology, the globalization of reality, to spacetime, the arena of all action. "My intention is for us to travel to the high ridges of science," Atkins tells us. "As the journey progresses and I lead you carefully to the summit of understanding, you will experience the deep joy of illumination that science alone provides." Galileo's Finger breaks new ground in communicating science to the general reader. Here are the essential ideas of today's science, explained in magical prose.

A caballo entre el reportaje y la ficcion, Galindez narra un suceso historico: la desaparicion y ulterior asesinato del abogado y combatiente vasco en... la Guerra Civil espanola, Jesus de Galindez. Nueva York, 1956: Jesus de Galindez, representante del PNV en Estados Unidos, trabaja en una tesis doctoral sobre las dictaduras latinoamericanas centrada en la figura de Trujillo y su sanguinario regimen. Poco despues de presentar su tesis, Galindez es secuestrado y conducido a la Republica Dominicana, donde se le pierde el rastro para siempre. A partir de este hecho, Manuel Vazquez Montalban crea un relato imaginario: la investigacion que, treinta y dos anos mas tarde, lleva a cabo una universitaria americana, Muriel Colbert, a la que pondran en peligro las mismas fuerzas oscuras que acabaron con Galindez. Sobre el misterio, las verdades a medias y las especulaciones se construye esta novela apasionante que en 1991 fue galardonada con el Premio Nacional de Narrativa.

The time was the late Imperial period, an era when Rome wore her vast empire like a huge ancient toga, worn thin from overuse, badly tattered and frayed... around the edges, and studded too sparsely with precious jewels. Galla Placidia was one of those few
precious jewels . . . a brilliant diamond sparkling in the last rays of a setting sun.
This historical novel is based on the true story of a remarkable
woman who lived at a major crossroads of history, when the ancient
pagan past was overtaken by the strong young religion of Christianity.
Daughter, sister, wife, and mother of emperors, Galla Placidia was
instrumental in leading Rome through the tumultuous transition from a
pagan to a Christian state.

One of the most famous battles in history, the WWI Gallipoli campaign began as a bold move by the British to capture Constantinople, but this definitive... new history explains that from the initial landings--which ended with so much blood in the sea it could be seen from airplanes overhead--to the desperate attacks of early summer and the battle of attrition that followed, it was a tragic folly destined to fail from the start. Gallipoli forced the young Winston Churchill from office, established Turkey's iconic founder Mustafa Kemal (better known as "Ataturk"), and marked Australia's emergence as a nation in its own right. Drawing on unpublished eyewitness accounts by individuals from all ranks--not only from Britain, Australia and New Zealand, but from Turkey and France as well--Peter Hart weaves first-hand stories into a vivid narrative of the battle and its aftermath. Hart, a historian with the Imperial War Museum and a battlefield tour guide at Gallipoli, provides a vivid, boots-on-the-ground account that brilliantly evokes the confusion of war, the horrors of combat, and the grim courage of the soldiers. He provides an astute, unflinching assessment of the leaders as well. He shows that the British invasion was doomed from the start, but he places particular blame on General Sir Ian Hamilton, whose misplaced optimism, over-complicated plans, and unwillingness to recognize the gravity of the situation essentially turned likely failure into complete disaster. Capturing the sheer drama and bravery of the ferocious fighting, the chivalry demonstrated by individuals on both sides amid merciless wholesale slaughter, and the futility of the cause for which ordinary men fought with extraordinary courage and endurance--Gallipoli is a riveting account of a battle that continues to fascinate us close to a hundred years after the event.

When Turkey unexpectedly sided with Germany in World War I, Winston Churchill, as Sea Lord for the British, conceived a plan: smash through the... Dardanelles, reopen the Straits to Russia, and immobilize the Turks. On the night of March 18, 1915, this plan nearly succeeded -- the Turks were virtually beaten. But poor communication left the Allies in the dark, allowing the Turks to prevail and the Allies to suffer a crushing quarter-million casualties. A vivid chronicle of adventure, suspense, agony, and heroism, Gallipoli brings fully to life the tragic waste in human life, the physical horror, and the sheer heartbreaking folly of fighting for impossible objectives with inadequate means on unknown, unmapped terrain.

Olympic athlete Jeff Galloway shows how amateur runners can use the same training principles followed by world-class runners. He tells beginners how to... get started, explains his ideas on stress and rest, and reveals secrets for running better. In this completely revised and updated new edition of the classic text on running, Galloway includes training schedules for 5k, 10k, and the increasingly popular half-marathon races, as well as recent insights into motivation, nutrition, and fat burning. Runners at all levels will benefit from this seasoned athlete’s wisdom.

Galois' Theory of Algebraic Equations gives a detailed account of the development of the theory of algebraic equations, from its origins in ancient... times to its completion by Galois in the nineteenth century. The main emphasis is placed on equations of at least the third degree, i.e. on the developments during the period from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The appropriate parts of works by Cardano, Lagrange, Vandermonde, Gauss, Abel and Galois are reviewed and placed in their historical perspective, with the aim of conveying to the reader a sense of the way in which the theory of algebraic equations has evolved and has led to such basic mathematical notions as "group" and "field". A brief discussion on the fundamental theorems of modern Galois theory is included. Complete proofs of the quoted results are provided, but the material has been organized in such a way that the most technical details can be skipped by readers who are interested primarily in a broad survey of the theory. This book will appeal to both undergraduate and graduate students in mathematics and the history of science, and also to teachers and mathematicians who wish to obtain a historical perspective of the field. The text has been designed to be self-contained, but some familiarity with basic mathematical structures and with some elementary notions of linear algebra is desirable for a good understanding of the technical discussions in the later chapters.

Galois theory is a mature mathematical subject of particular beauty. Any Galois theory book written nowadays bears a great debt to Emil Artin’s... classic text "Galois Theory," and this book is no exception. While Artin’s book pioneered an approach to Galois theory that relies heavily on linear algebra, this book’s author takes the linear algebra emphasis even further. This special approach to the subject together with the clarity of its presentation, as well as the choice of topics covered, has made the first edition of this book a more than worthwhile addition to the literature on Galois Theory. The second edition, with a new chapter on transcendental extensions, will only further serve to make the book appreciated by and approachable to undergraduate and beginning graduate math majors.

Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book, Caribbean & Canada and the Canadian Authors Association Literary Award; Finalist for the... Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Book Award, and the Winterset AwardWhen a whale beaches itself on the shore of the remote coastal town of Paradise Deep, the last thing any of the townspeople expect to find inside it is a man, silent and reeking of fish, but remarkably alive. The discovery of this mysterious person, soon christened Judah, sets the town scrambling for answers as its most prominent citizens weigh in on whether he is man or beast, blessing or curse, miracle or demon. Though Judah is a shocking addition, the town of Paradise Deep is already full of unusual characters. King-me Sellers, self-appointed patriarch, has it in for an inscrutable woman known only as Devine’s Widow, with whom he has a decades-old feud. Her granddaughter, Mary Tryphena, is just a child when Judah washes ashore, but finds herself tied to him all her life in ways she never expects. Galore is the story of the saga that develops between these families, full of bitterness and love, spanning two centuries.   With Paradise Deep, award-winning novelist Michael Crummey imagines a realm where the line between the everyday and the otherworldly is impossible to discern. Sprawling and intimate, stark and fantastical, Galore is a novel about the power of stories to shape and sustain us.

Recalling the moody violence of the early novels of Cormac McCarthy and Denis Johnson, a dark and visceral debut set along the seedy wastelands of... Galveston by a young writer with a hard edge to his potent literary styleOn the same day that Roy Cady is diagnosed with a terminal illness, he senses that his boss, a dangerous loan-sharking bar-owner, wants him dead. Known “without affection” to members of the boss’s crew as “Big Country” on account of his long hair, beard, and cowboy boots, Roy is alert to the possibility that a routine assignment could be a deathtrap. Which it is. Yet what the would-be killers do to Roy Cady is not the same as what he does to them, which is to say that after a smoking spasm of violence, they are mostly dead and he is mostly alive.Before Roy makes his getaway, he realizes there are two women in the apartment, one of them still breathing, and he sees something in her frightened, defiant eyes that causes a fateful decision. He takes her with him as he goes on the run from New Orleans to Galveston, Texas—an action as ill-advised as it is inescapable. The girl’s name is Rocky, and she is too young, too tough, too sexy—and far too much trouble. Roy, Rocky, and her sister hide in the battered seascape of Galveston’s country-western bars and fleabag hotels, a world of treacherous drifters, pickup trucks, and ashed-out hopes. Any chance that they will find safety there is soon lost. Rocky is a girl with quite a story to tell, one that will pursue and damage Roy for a very long time to come in this powerful and atmospheric thriller, impossible to put down. Constructed with maximum tension and haunting aftereffect, written in darkly beautiful prose, Galveston announces the arrival of a major new literary talent.

Here at last is one Irish family's epic journey, capturing the tragedy and triumph of the Irish-American experience. In a rousing tale that echoes the... myths and legends of Ireland herself, young Honora Keeley and Michael Kelly wed and start a family, inhabiting a hidden Ireland where fishermen and tenant farmers find solace in their ancient faith, songs, stories, and communal celebrations. Selling both their catch--and their crops--to survive, these people subsist on the potato crop--their only staple food. But when blight destroys the potatoes three times in four years, a callous government and uncaring landlords turn a natural disaster into The Great Starvation that will kill one million. Honora and Michael vow their children will live. The family joins two million other Irish refugees in one of the greatest rescues in human history: the Irish Emigration to America. Danger and hardship await them there. Honora and her unconventional sister Maire watch their seven sons as they transform Chicago from a frontier town to the "City of the Century", fight the Civil War, and enlist in the cause of Ireland's freedom. The Kelly clan is victorious. This heroic story sheds brilliant light on the ancestors of today's 44 million Irish Americans. In the author's colorful and eclectic life, she has written and directed award-winning documentaries on Irish subjects, as well as the dramatic feature Proud. She's been an associate producer on Good Morning America and Saturday Night Live, written books on Martin Scorsese, World War II, and Bosnia, and a novel based on her experiences as a former nun - Special Intentions. She is a frequent contributor to Irish America Magazine and has a PhD in English and Irish literature.

At the beginning of the last century, no city on the continent was growing faster or was more aggressive than Winnipeg. No year in the city’s history... epitomized this energy more that 1912, when Winnipeg was on the crest of a period of unprecedented prosperity. In just forty years, it had grown from a village on the banks of the Red River to become the third largest city in Canada. In the previous decade alone, its population had tripled to nearly 170,000 and it now dominated the economy and society of western Canada. As Canada’s most cosmopolitan and ethnically diverse centre, with most of its population under the age of forty, it was also the country’s liveliest city, full of bustle and optimism.     In Winnipeg 1912 Jim Blanchard guides readers on a tour through this golden year when, as the Chicago Tribune proclaimed, “all roads lead to Winnipeg.” Beginning early New Year’s Day, as the city’s high society rang in 1912 at the Royal Alexandra Hotel, he visits the public and private side of the “Chicago of the North.” He looks into the opulent mansions of the city’s new elite and into its political backrooms, as well as into the crowded homes of Winnipeg’s immigrant North End. From the excited crowds at the summer Exhibition to the turbulent floor of the Grain Exchange, Blanchard gives us a vivid picture of daily life in this fast-paced city of new millionaires and newly arrived immigrants. Richly illustrated with more than seventy period photographs, Winnipeg 1912 captures a time and place that left a lasting impression on Canadian history and culture.