Böcker utgivna av University of Chicago Pr.

A dynamic and sweeping history that exposes how humankind's affinity for pesticides made the modern world possible--while also threatening its essential fabric. For thousands of years, we've found ways to scorch, scour, and sterilize our surroundings to make them safer. Sometimes these methods are wonderfully effective. Often, however, they come with catastrophic consequences--consequences that aren't typically understood for generations. The Chemical Age tells the captivating story of the scientists who waged war on famine and disease with chemistry. With depth and verve, Frank A. von Hippel explores humanity's uneasy coexistence with pests, and how their existence, and the battles to exterminate them, have shaped our modern world. Beginning with the potato blight tragedy of the 1840s, which led scientists on an urgent mission to prevent famine using pesticides, von Hippel traces the history of pesticide use to the 1960s, when Rachel Carson's Silent Spring revealed that those same chemicals were insidiously damaging our health and driving species toward extinction. Telling the story of these pesticides in vivid detail, von Hippel showcases the thrills and complex consequences of scientific discovery. He describes the invention of substances that could protect crops, the emergence of our understanding of the way diseases spread, the creation of chemicals used to kill pests and people, and, finally, how scientists turned those wartime chemicals on the landscape at a massive scale, prompting the vital environmental movement that continues today. The Chemical Age is a dynamic, sweeping history that exposes how humankind's affinity for pesticides made the modern world possible--while also threatening its essential fabric.

"Mozart today is known as one of the foremost composers in Western music; yet, during his lifetime, his compositional mastery seemed to pale in comparison with his achievements on the concert platform. Mozart knew that his fame was due to his piano playing and improvisations; and, as a result, much of the music he wrote was intended to serve a single aim: to set the stage, quite literally, for compelling and captivating performances. In his piano works, symphonies, and operas he sought to amuse, stir, and ravish an awe-struck public. Mozart the Performer brings to life this elusive side of Mozart's musicianship. Over the course of five "variations," Dorian Bandy traces the influence of showmanship on Mozart's style, imbuing his output with a theatricality and evanescence easily lost behind the scrim of familiarity. This insightful and imaginative book reveals the countless ways performance influenced Mozart's compositional habits, ultimately offering a genuinely novel understanding of why, centuries later, Mozart's music still captivates us and inspiring new ways of listening to it"--

"By now, it should be clear: in the face of disinformation and disaster, we cannot hot take, life hack, or meme our way to a better future. But how should we respond instead? In How to Think like a Philosopher, Julian Baggini turns to the study of reason itself for practical solutions to this question, inspired by our most eminent philosophers, past and present. Baggini offers twelve key principles for a more human, balanced, and rational approach to thinking: pay attention; question everything (including your questions); watch your steps; follow the facts; watch your language; be eclectic; be a psychologist; know what matters; lose your ego; think for yourself, not by yourself; make connections, not theories; and don't give up. Each chapter is chockfull of real-world examples showing these principles at work-from the discovery of penicillin to the fight for trans rights-and how they lead to more thoughtful conclusions. More than a book of tips and tricks (or ways to be insufferably clever at parties), How to Think like a Philosopher is an invitation to develop the habits of good reasoning that our world desperately needs"--

"Mars and its secrets have fascinated and mystified humans since ancient times. Its vivid color and visibility to the naked eye, its geologic kinship with Earth, its potential as our best hope for settlement-Mars embodies everything that inspires us about space and space exploration. In this book, National Air and Space Museum Curator Matthew Shindell captures the majesty of the red planet and the work done by people on Earth to explore it. He connects our current period of human exploration of Mars to the work done through the centuries and across cultures by asking how the quest to understand Mars has shaped our knowledge of ourselves, our own planet, our solar system, and beyond. For the Love of Mars reveals why Mars has piqued scientists' interest for centuries. It brings to light how difficult and sometimes flawed martian discoveries could be for earth-bound planetary explorers and, by focusing on the human stories behind the telescopes and behind the robots we have come to know and love, shows how Mars exploration became more sophisticated through the years in ways that helped expand knowledge about other facets of space and the universe. A must read for everyone curious about Curiosity and the Red Planet"--

"Ocean Bestiary tells the history of our relationship with the sea, one animal at a time, from A to Z. From the earliest Polynesian navigators to the pilots of deep-sea submersibles today, humans have been exploring the globe's most dominant and inaccessible ecosystem and bringing home to those ashore breathtaking accounts of what they observed. Jumping off from the stories of whalemen, pirates, explorers, immigrants, naturalists, writers, painters, and cruiser-sailors-some famous, some entirely unknown and unpublished-this little book examines and shares what it was they saw. Ocean Bestiary crosses a range of geographies and oceanic environments, from shallows to depths and including coral reefs, upwelling zones, and more. It covers an equally wide range of organisms as well, from tiny zooplankton to immense whales. In playful prose, Richard J. King unfurls his stories and their relevance today for our understanding of environmental history, the history of marine biology, and our shifting perceptions of the ocean"--

"Skip the iPhone, iPod, and the Macintosh. If we want to understand how Apple Computer became an industry behemoth, we have to look elsewhere: at the 1977 Apple II. Designed by the prodigious engineer Steve Wozniak, and hustled into the marketplace by his Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, the Apple II would become one of the most prominent personal computers of this dawning American industry. The Apple II was a versatile piece of hardware, but its most compelling story isn't found in the feat of its engineering, the personalities of Apple's founders, or the way it set a stage for the company's multi-billion-dollar future. Instead, computer and video game historian Laine Nooney suggests that what made the Apple II iconic was its software. In software, we discover the material reasons people bought computers. Not to hack, but to play. Not to code, but to calculate. Not to program, but to print. The story of personal computing in the United States is not the story of the rise of the hacker. It is the story of the rise of the user. Offering a constellation of software creation stories, Nooney puts forth a new understanding of how the hobbyists' microcomputers of the 1970s became the personal computer we know today. From iconic software products like VisiCalc and The Print Shop to historic games like Mystery House and Snooper Troops, to long forgotten disk-cracking utilities, The Apple II Age offers an unprecedented look at the people, the industry, and the money that built the microcomputing milieu-and why so much of it converged around the unbeatable Apple II"--

"As the co-discoverer of the first known burrowing dinosaur and a popular science author, Anthony J. Martin is an expert at explaining his fossil-finding work to broad audiences. In this engaging book, Martin uses modern and fossil traces to introduce readers to a menagerie of animals and other lifeforms that dig, crunch, bore, and otherwise reshape our planet. We meet elephants that dig ballroom-sized caves alongside volcanoes, parrotfishes that chew coral reefs and poop out sandy beaches, dinosaur-eating crocodiles, and moon snails that drill into clams, or even other moon snails. In a detective story that spans millions of years, ranging from microbes to whales, Martin shows how when life got hard, life got boring, using bodies and behavior to hide, eat, attack, and defend, affecting both our world and our understanding of evolution, climate, and life itself"--