Genius Biographies

A comprehensive guide to all of Robin Williams' movies, with facts about plots, performances, and cast, as well as notable trivia and behind-the-scenes details about each film.

Gerard Lee Bevan was the black sheep of one of London's most respectable banking families. A high-living womanizer and upper-class shyster of almost pantomime proportions, he exploited a glittering range of social connections. After a long run of success in City dealings he perpetrated a massive fraud which ruined both the City Equitable Fire Insurance Company and his stockbroking firm, Ellis & Co. He fled the country and was eventually arrested, tried, and jailed.

In 2008, Elon Musk's SpaceX became the first private company to build a low-cost rocket that could reach orbit. Suddenly Silicon Valley, not NASA, was the epicentre of the new Space Age. Start-ups and investors began to realise that the heavens - ungoverned and unregulated - were open for business. When the Heavens Went on Sale tells the remarkable, unfolding story of this frenzied race to control access to outer space. Ashlee Vance follows four pioneering companies - Astra, Firefly, Planet Labs and Rocket Lab - as they attempt to launch thousands of low-cost rockets and satellites into orbit.

Ernest Rutherford, who grew up in colonial New Zealand and came to Cambridge on a scholarship, made numerous revolutionary discoveries, among them the orbital structure of the atom and the concept of the “half-life” of radioactive materials, which led to a massive re-evaluation of the age of the Earth―previously judged just 100 million years old. Above all, perhaps, Rutherford and the young men working under him were the first to split the atom, unlocking tremendous forces―forces, as Rutherford himself predicted, that would bring us the atomic bomb.

لا يُقدّم العقّاد كتابه "عبقريّة محمد"، مجرّد سردٍ للسّيرة النّبويّة، وإنّما أراد في كتابه تقديرًا لعبقريّة محمّد عليه الصّلاة والسّلام، فهو يرى أنّ إعطاء العظمة حقّها لازمٌ في كلّ أوان وبين كلّ قبيل، فالعبقريّة قيمة في النّفس قبل أن تبرزها الأعمال، وإنّ محمد وقد رجح به ميزان العبقريّة، وميزان العمل، وميزان العقيدة، نبيٌّ عظيم، وبطلٌ عظيم، وإنسان عظيم.

The captivating biography of the French aristocrat who balanced the demands of her society with passionate affairs of the heart and a brilliant life of the mind. Although today she is best known for her fifteen-year liaison with Voltaire, Gabrielle Emilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise Du Châtelet (1706-1749) was more than a great man's mistress. After marrying a marquis at the age of eighteen, she proceeded to fulfill the prescribed-and delightfully frivolous-role of a French noblewoman of her time.

In September 1769, 3,000 people descended on Stratford-upon-Avon to celebrate the artistic legacy of the town's most famous son, William Shakespeare. Attendees included the rich and powerful, the fashionable and the curious, eligible ladies and fortune hunters, and a horde of journalists and profiteers. For three days, they paraded through garlanded streets, listened to songs and oratorios, and enjoyed masked balls. It was a unique cultural moment - a coronation elevating Shakespeare to the throne of genius. Except it was a disaster....

To understand how the macabre death of Francis Mawson Rattenbury could have happened, you have to study his life. He was a murdered genius. A victim of love. He was an architectural virtuoso who designed some of Canada's most memorable structures. Rattenbury dreamed on the grandest of scales and created edifices that remain incredible sonnets in wood and stone a century after his blueprints were penned. His buildings remain landmarks, but he was truly a forgotten Canadian hero.

One phone call. That's all it took to change Stephanie Wittels Wachs's life forever.... Her younger brother Harris, a star in the comedy world known for his work on shows like Parks and Recreation, had died of a heroin overdose. How do you make sense of such a tragic end to a life of so much hilarious brilliance? In beautiful, unsentimental, and surprisingly funny prose, Stephanie Wittels Wachs alternates between her brother's struggle with addiction, which she learned about three days before her wedding, and the first year after his death, in all its emotional devastation.

Much like her hit TV show, I Love Lucy, Americans in the 1950s fell in love with Lucy. Born in New York in 1911, Lucille Ball was always a natural performer. She danced in the chorus of Broadway shows and acted in small parts in Hollywood movies. But Ball's true gift was comedy. She found a way to showcase her gifts in 1951 when CBS gave her the chance to star in a sitcom.

Vince Ciacci wanted to be a "Made Guy". From the time he left the brutality of upstate New York's Coxsackie Reformatory, he worked for "Wiseguys", committing armed robberies, collecting for the Mob, and dreaming of the day that he would "get his button". He never made it into the Mafia's inner sanctum. Why? He was too crazy and too violent. Hooked on drugs and alcohol, Vince was a loose cannon, so dangerous that his own crew considered taking him out.

In 2007, agents of the New York State Petroleum, Alcohol, and Tobacco Bureau (PATB) seized over half a million dollars in untaxed alcohol, drugs, and guns. This takedown, the largest in New York history, led to 87 arrests, the recovery of an unprecedented quantity of cocaine, crack, and marijuana, and captured the attention of law enforcement agencies all around the world. Under Too Long is the story of the PATB undercover team that led this investigation, as seen through the eyes of “Billy the Liquor Guy”.

Based on the newly released personal letters of Albert Einstein, Walter Isaacson explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk, a struggling father in a difficult marriage who couldn't get a teaching job or a doctorate, became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe. His success came from questioning conventional wisdom and marveling at mysteries that struck others as mundane.

In 2006 an oddball group of bankers, traders and brokers from some of the largest financial institutions made a startling realization: Libor - the London interbank offered rate, which determines the interest rates on trillions in loans worldwide - was set daily by a group of easily manipulated administrators, and they could reap huge profits by nudging it fractions of a percent to suit their trading portfolios. This group generated incredible riches - until it all unraveled in spectacularly vicious, backstabbing fashion.

True Genius is the definitive family-backed account of his remarkable career published to coincide with what would have been his 75th birthday. The games, the goals, the glory. This is the untold story. Written by celebrated Manchester United author Wayne Barton, this biography goes into unparalleled depth to tell the complete story for the first time of how the lad from Cregagh, Northern Ireland, became the game's first superstar. Barton has trawled the archives and spoken to a host of former team-mates, managers, friends and close family to tell his story.

Gift your kid the inspirational tale of Martin Luther King Jr. Inspire courage, honor, and unlimited possibilities.

In 1895, two young men destined to make their mark on American life, Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, discovered they shared a common interest in the remarkable way ordinary Americans demonstrated the real character of the young nation. They were convinced that the brilliance of American liberty could best be found in the lives of everyday people, rather than in accounts of the famous and powerful.

In this stunning volume, noted art historians Jean-Pierre Isbouts and Christopher Heath Brown discuss the historical, social, and political conditions that shaped Dali's work, identify the impact of Modern as well as Old Master art, and present an unflinching view of the master's personal relationships and motivations.

What really distinguishes the people who literally change the world - those creative geniuses who give us one breakthrough after another? What differentiates Marie Curie or Elon Musk from the merely creative, the many one-hit wonders among us? Melissa Schilling, one of the world's leading experts on innovation, invites us into the lives of eight people - Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Elon Musk, Dean Kamen, Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, Thomas Edison, and Steve Jobs - to identify the traits and experiences that drove them to make spectacular breakthroughs, over and over again.

"An engrossing microcosm of the internet’s Wild West years" (Kirkus Reviews), award-winning journalist David Kushner tells the incredible battle between the founder of Match.com and the con man who swindled him out of the website Sex.com, resulting in an all-out war for control for what still powers the internet today: love and sex.