Birth Science

The life story of Gary Gygax, godfather of all fantasy adventure games, has been told only in bits and pieces. Michael Witwer has crafted a dynamic, dramatized biography of Gygax from his childhood in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, to his untimely death in 2008. Gygax’s magnum opus, Dungeons & Dragons, would explode in popularity throughout the 1970s and ’80s and irreversibly alter the world of gaming. Gygax’s involvement in the industry lasted long after his dramatic and involuntary departure, and his footprint can be seen in the role-playing genre he is largely responsible for creating.

Sometimes our understanding of our universe is given a huge boost by one insightful thinker. Such a boost came in the first half of the 20th century, when an obscure Belgian priest put his mind to deciphering the nature of the cosmos. The Day Without Yesterday covers the modern history of an evolving universe, and how Georges Lemaître convinced a generation of thinkers to embrace the notion of cosmic expansion and the theory that this expansion could be traced backward to the cosmic origins, a starting point for space and time that Lemaître called "the day without yesterday".

The perfect introduction to the enchanted world of the Magic Faraway Tree for the youngest children. Discover the magic! A brand-new story where you can meet Silky, Moonface and Saucepan Man and explore the Magic Faraway Tree. On Moonface's birthday he wants to hold a party for all his special friends. He tries to bake a cake, but it ends up burnt. Will he find help in one of the wonderful lands at the top of the Faraway Tree?

From author Paul Gilding comes an unflinching look at the challenges we face as a global climate crisis approaches - and the unique opportunities this crisis presents for moving toward an ethic of sustainability.

Icy, rocky, sometimes dusty, always mysterious – comets and asteroids are among the Solar System's very oldest inhabitants, formed within a swirling cloud of gas and dust in the area of space that eventually hosted the Sun and its planets. Locked within each of these extra-terrestrial objects is the 4.6-billion-year wisdom of Solar System events, and by studying them at close quarters using spacecraft we can coerce them into revealing their closely-guarded secrets. This offers us the chance to answer some fundamental questions about our planet and its inhabitants.

This Frozen collection is a must-have for any Frozen fan! Join Elsa, Anna, Olaf, and friends for adventure, mystery, and fun in four new adventures.

An indispensable guide to the revolutionary advances in pregnancy and childbirth. After decades of research into how babies develop in the womb, Susan J. Fisher, PhD, shares her expert advice to empower expecting parents. Complete with helpful illustrations, practical tips, and the essential questions to ask health-care providers, here is everything you need to take charge of your health and your baby’s.

Should you really read to your baby? Can teaching a baby sign language boost IQ? Should you pipe classical music into the nursery? Dr. Jill Stamm translates the latest neuroscience findings into clear explanations and practical suggestions, demonstrating the importance of the simple ways you interact with your child every day. It isn't the right edutainment that nurtures an infant's brain. It is as simple as attention, bonding, and communication, and it's within every parent's ability to provide.

Rebels in the Making is a narrative-driven history of how and why secession occurred. In this work, senior Civil War historian William L. Barney narrates the explosion of the sectional conflict into secession and civil war. Carefully examining the events in all 15 slave states and distinguishing the political circumstances in each, he argues that this was not a mass democratic movement but one led from above.

Parents and parents-to-be are bombarded with information, from what to expect to what to do (and not to do) when it happens. But what they may not realize is that from the chemistry of pregnancy tests to the vacuum physics of breastfeeding, there is fascinating science at the heart of every aspect of creating and raising a new human.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dale Maharidge has spent his career documenting the downward spiral of the American working class, and his new book explores the limits of the American dream in the 2020s. Poverty is both reality and destiny for increasing numbers of people in the 2020s and, as Maharidge discovers spray-painted inside an abandoned gas station in the California desert, it is a fate often handed down from birth.

Araminta Spookie lives in a wonderful old haunted house, but her crabby Aunt Tabby wants to move. Aunt Tabby is determined to sell their house; Araminta has to stop her! With the help of a haunted suit of armor named Sir Horace, a ghost named Edmund, and a lot of imagination, Araminta hatches a plot for an Awful Ambush that is so ghoulish, it just might work!

How did we get from an age of dignified nightly news broadcasts on three national networks to the age of 24-hour channels and constantly breaking news? The answer - thanks to Ted Turner and an oddball cast of cable TV visionaries, big league rejects, and nonunion newbies - can be found in the basement of an abandoned country club in Atlanta. Because it was there, in 1980, that this motley crew somehow, against all odds, launched CNN. Up All Night is an inside look at the founding of the upstart network that set out to change the way news was delivered and consumed.

As late as the 1930s, virtually no drug intended for sickness did any good; doctors could set bones, deliver babies, and offer palliative care. That all changed in less than a generation with the discovery and development of a new category of medicine known as antibiotics. By 1955 the age-old evolutionary relationship between humans and microbes had been transformed, trivializing once-deadly infections.

The effort to reconnect the world has been successful, and a new home for the Defense Force chosen. All that remains is to tackle the Madness. Sarah Jennifer is still hurting from Ezekiel’s departure. Meanwhile, Ezekiel has his own losses to contend with. A chance encounter in the woods gives him the push he needs to make things right.

On November 20, 1979, worldwide attention was focused on Tehran, where the Iranian hostage crisis was entering its third week. The same morning, the first of a new Muslim century, hundreds of gunmen stunned the world by seizing Islam's holiest shrine, the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Armed with rifles that they had smuggled inside coffins, these men came from more than a dozen countries, launching the first operation of global jihad in modern times.

All winter long, people in the Green Hollows have prepared for a final battle with Gnag the Nameless and the Fangs of Dang. Janner, Kalmar and Leeli are ready and willing to fight alongside the Hollowsfolk. But when the Fangs make the first move and invade Ban Rona, the children are separated.

Salem has emerged as the center of civilization on the East Coast. The barriers between the factions dropped when the UnknownWorld stepped up to protect the unenhanced from the Madness. The Defense Force is ready to tackle Europe, the Madness, and the malfunctioning climate control system Bethany Anne left behind. Sarah Jennifer leads the way as the pack forges new connections around the world. Not everyone takes the news of the impending break-up well.

This is the origin story of the airwaves - the foundational technology of the communications age - as told through the 40-year friendship of an entrepreneurial industrialist and a brilliant inventor. David Sarnoff, the head of RCA and equal parts Steve Jobs, Jack Welch, and William Randolph Hearst, was the greatest supporter of his friend, Edwin Armstrong, developer of the first amplifier, the modern radio transmitter, and FM radio.

In this audacious recasting of the American Revolution, distinguished historian Gary Nash offers a profound new way of thinking about the struggle to create this country, introducing listeners to a coalition of patriots from all classes and races of American society. From millennialist preachers to enslaved Africans and disgruntled women to aggrieved Indians, the people so vividly portrayed in this book laid down ideas that have become part of our inheritance and ideals toward which we still strive today.