In this book Bill Bryson explores the most intriguing and consequential questions that science seeks to answer and attempts to understand everything that has transpired from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization. To that end, Bill Bryson apprenticed himself to a host of the world's most profound scientific minds, living and dead. His challenge is to take subjects like geology, chemistry, paleontology, astronomy, and particle physics and see if...

One man's campaign to build schools in the most dangerous, remote, and anti-American reaches of Asia: in 1993 Greg Mortenson was an American mountain-climbing bum wandering emaciated and lost through Pakistan's Karakoram. After he was taken in and nursed back to health by the people of a Pakistani village, he promised to return one day and build them a school. From that rash, earnest promise grew one of the most incredible humanitarian campaigns of...

"Over the course of ten years, poet and critic David Biespiel published a brief, dazzling essay on poetry every month in what became the longest-running newspaper column on poetry in the United States. Collected here for the first time, these enormously popular essays, many of which have been revised and expanded, offer a fresh and refreshing approach to the reading and writing of poetry. With passion, wit, and common sense, they articulate a profound...