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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe
Arthur Koestler · 624 pages
The Ascent of Man
Jacob Bronowski · 448 pages
Traces the development of science and the discoveries that have made man unique among animal species.
The Natural and the Human
Stephen Gaukroger · 411 pages
Stephen Gaukroger presents an original account of the development of empirical science and the understanding of human behaviour from the mid-eighteenth century. Since the seventeenth century, science in the west has undergone a unique form of cumulative development in which it has been consolidated through integration into and shaping of a culture. But in the eighteenth century, science was cut lo
Questioning the Millennium: A Rationalist's Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown
Stephen Jay Gould · 199 pages
L'ecrivain scientifique tente ici de comprendre comment un simple probleme de calendrier a pu donner lieu a tant d'elucubrations irrationnelles. Il est question "de la perception des nombres ronds, du soleil et de la lune, de l'age de la terre et de la naissance de Jesus-Christ", pour apprecier le retour cyclique des vieilles questions irresolues que provoquera immanquablement l'an 2000.
Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science
David Lindley · 272 pages
The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa.--Werner HeisenbergThat God would choose to play dice with the world is something I cannot believe.--Albert EinsteinNothing exists until it is measured.--Neils BohrThe remarkable story of a startling scientific idea that ignited a battle among the greatest minds of the twentieth
At Home: A Short History of Private Life
Bill Bryson · 560 pages
"As I stood on the roof of my house, taking in this unexpected view, it struck me how glorious it was that this was exactly how this land must have looked to centuries of people, quietly going about their daily business – eating, sleeping, having sex, endeavouring to be amused – and it occurred to me, with the forcefulness of a thought experienced in 360 degrees, that that's really what history mo
How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It
Arthur Herman · 392 pages
"Mention of Scotland and the Scots usually conjures up images of kilts, bagpipes, Scotch whisky, and golf. But as historian and author Arthur Herman demonstrates, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Scotland earned the respect of the rest of the world for its crucial contributions to science, philosophy, literature, education, medicine, commerce, and politics - contributions that have forme
From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present
Jacques Barzun · 896 pages
"Highly regarded here and abroad for some thirty works of cultural history and criticism, master historian Jacques Barzun has now set down in one continuous narrative the sum of his discoveries and conclusions about the whole of Western culture since 1500.". "In this account, Barzun describes what Western Man wrought from the Renaissance and Reformation down to the present in the double light of
Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed
Philip Paul Hallie · 303 pages
Tells of the struggle of a Protestant village in Nazi-controlled France to save Jews from persecution. Despite the obvious risks and the many sacrifices, the people of Le Chambon succeeded in hiding and transporting Jews beyond the reach of the Nazis.
Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present
Cynthia Stokes Brown · 288 pages
Extend the human story backward for the five thousand years of recorded history and it covers no more than a millionth of a lifetime of the Earth. Yet how do we humans take stock of the history of our planet, and our own place within it? A “vast historical mosaic” (Publishers Weekly) rendered engaging and accessible, Big History interweaves different disciplines of knowledge to offer an all-encomp
The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels
Thomas Cahill · 304 pages
Silencing the Past
Michel-Rolph Trouillot · 191 pages
In this provocative analysis of historical narrative, Michel-Rolph Trouillot demonstrates how power operates, often invisibly, at all stages in the making of history to silence certain voices. From the West's failure to acknowledge the Haitian Revolution, the most successful slave revolt in history, to the continued debate over denials of the Holocaust, and the meaning of Columbus's arrival in th
The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450
David C. Lindberg · 455 pages
A Man on the Moon
Andrew Chaikin, Michael Kramer · 688 pages
For the 25th anniversary of the first moon landing, a winning and detailed account of the Apollo astronauts, a dozen of whom were the first human beings to walk on the face of the moon. The strength of the book lies in Chaikin's exhaustive research, including interviews with all 24 Apollo astronauts. Chaikin, an editor of Sky and Telescope, draws on the wealth of material from NASA's files--incl
The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival
John Bagot Glubb · 52 pages
The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World
Steven Johnson · 299 pages
A thrilling historical account of the worst cholera outbreak in Victorian London-and a brilliant exploration of how Dr. John Snow's solution revolutionized the way we think about disease, cities, science, and the modern world.From the dynamic thinker routinely compared to Malcolm Gladwell, E. O. Wilson, and James Gleick, The Ghost Map is a riveting page-turner with a real-life historical hero that
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
Charles C. Mann · 660 pages
A groundbreaking study that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans in 1492. Traditionally, Americans learned in school that the ancestors of the people who inhabited the Western Hemisphere at the time of Columbus's landing had crossed the Bering Strait twelve thousand years ago; existed mainly in small, nomadic bands; and lived so lightly on the land
Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution
Holly Tucker · 304 pages
A sharp-eyed expose of the deadly politics, murderous plots, and cutthroat rivalries behind the first blood transfusions in seventeenth-century Europe.
From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia
Pankaj Mishra · 368 pages
A little more than a century ago, as the Japanese navy annihilated the giant Russian navy at the Battle of Tsushima, original thinkers across Asia, working independently, sought to frame a distinctly Asian intellectual tradition that would inform and inspire the continent's anticipated rise to dominance. Asian dominance did not come to pass, and those thinkers are seen as outriders from the main a
The Discoverers: A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself
Daniel J. Boorstin · 747 pages
Tells the ongoing story of the progressive discovery by man of the nature of the observable world and universe.
The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason
Charles Freeman · 470 pages
How the early Christian Church bent the intellectual climate of the Mediterranean world from one of active and questioning inquiry to an encouragement of the subordination of the mind to authority and acceptance of incomprehensibility as the will of God.
The Old Regime and the French Revolution
Alexis de Tocqueville · 300 pages
Brilliantly and searchingly examines the nature of French society in the years before the Revolution. Why did the Revolution break out? Was it inevitable, and if so, why? How was France really changed by the Revolution? Why did the intellectuals become enemies of the old French state and society? Why was the French nobility so estranged from the French people? Why, in short, were Louis XVI and Mar