For thirty years, Larry Aumiller lived in close company with the world's largest grouping of brown bears, returning by seaplane every spring to the wilderness side of Cook Inlet, two hundred and fifty miles southwest of Anchorage to work as a manager...

George Steiner is one of the preeminent intellectuals of our time. The Washington Post has declared that no one else "writing on literature can match him as polymath and polyglot, and few can equal the verve and eloquence of his writing", while the N...

Anand Prahlad was born on a former plantation in Virginia in 1954. This memoir, vividly internal, powerfully lyric, and brilliantly impressionistic, is his story. For the first four years of his life, Prahlad didn't speak. But his silence didn't stop...

In many ways, Marie Curie represents modern science. Her considerable lifetime achievements – the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize, the only woman to be awarded the Prize in two fields, and the only person to be awarded Nobel Prizes in multipl...

The island nation of Iceland is known for many things – majestic landscapes, volcanic eruptions, distinctive seafood – but racial diversity is not one of them. So the little-known story of Hans Jonathan, a free black man who lived and raised a family...

Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from its establishment in 1930 until his retirement in 1962, Harry J. Anslinger is the United States' little known first drug czar. Anslinger was a profligate propagandist with a flair for demonizing ra...

It's midnight and there are fists pounding on the door. Authoritative voices shouting, "We're coming in! Get on the floor!" A few terrorized minutes later a family member is dragged out by armed men, disappearing into the night. This scenario is the...

Meet Netley Lucas, Prince of Tricksters – royal biographer, best-selling crime writer, and gentleman crook. In the years after the Great War, Lucas becomes infamous for climbing the British social ladder by his expert trickery – his changing names an...

A. Revathi's memoir "The Truth about Me" became a sensation in India when it was published in 2011. The pathbreaking autobiography told the story of Revathi's childhood uneasiness with her male body, her exile to a house of "hijras" (the South Asian...

What did it mean to be a scientist before the profession itself existed? Jan Golinski finds an answer in the remarkable career of Humphry Davy, the foremost chemist of his day and one of the most distinguished British men of science of the nineteenth...