Science & Technology Biographies

An admiring portrait of the pioneering entrepreneur from the former CNBC host and Forbes editor. One of the most influential figures of our time, Elon Musk is the most talked about man in America who isn’t running for president (yet!). In The Leadership Genius of Elon Musk, veteran business journalist Dennis Kneale chronicles Musk’s extraordinary journey, presenting him as a...

In 1942, a team at the University of Chicago achieved what no one had before: a nuclear chain reaction. At the forefront of this breakthrough stood Enrico Fermi. Straddling the ages of classical physics and quantum mechanics, equally at ease with theory and experiment, Fermi truly was the last man who knew everything—at least about physics. But he was also...

In The First Cell, Azra Raza offers a searing account of how both medicine and our society (mis)treats cancer, how we can do better, and why we must. A lyrical journey from hope to despair and back again, The First Cell explores cancer from every angle: medical, scientific, cultural, and personal. Indeed, Raza describes how she bore the terrible burden...

Dava Sobel, acclaimed and bestselling author of Longitude, chronicles the life and work of the most famous woman in the history of science – and the untold story of the young women who trained in her laboratory. ‘A fresh and feminist study of the pioneering Nobel laureate reveals her impact on the women she mentored and set on the path...

NOW IN PAPERBACK: A "captivating, behind-the-scenes account" of NASA's historic OSIRIS-REx mission to return an asteroid sample and unlock the mystery of the formation of life on Earth, braided with the remarkable life story of the mission's leader, Dr. Dante Lauretta (Sara Seager). On September 11, 1999, humanity made a monumental discovery in the vastness of space. Scientists uncovered an...

Rosemary Woodruff Leary has been known only as the wife of Timothy Leary, the Harvard professor-turned-psychedelic high priest, whose jailbreak captivated the counterculture and whose life on the run with Rosemary inflamed the U.S. government. But Rosemary was more than a mere accessory. She was a beatnik, a psychonaut, and a true believer who tested the limits of her mind...

A new, updated edition of the New York Times bestseller. Get inside the head of Steve Jobs: inventor, visionary, business mogul, and one of the most influential entrepreneurs in the world. Drawn from more than three decades of media coverage, this tribute serves up the best, most thought-provoking insights ever spoken by Steve Jobs: more than 200 quotations that are...

The private space industry's consensus leader, SpaceX, headed by controversial billionaire Elon Musk, is worth an estimated $187 billion today in 2023. SpaceX is taking on more roles, flying cargo, supplies, and astronauts to outer space, and even playing a central role as rocket supplier to NASA's Artemis moon mission. SpaceX: Elon Musk and the Final Frontier tells the story...

In 1872, Eadward Muybridge, a British photographer who had landed in California during the Gold Rush, captured images of high-speed movement. These photographs would go on to lay the foundations for motion pictures, changing the west coast of America, and the world, forever. River of Shadows is both a bold and original biography of a true pioneer—his trailblazing work, and...

A major new biography of the brilliant naturalist, traveller, humanitarian, and codiscoverer of natural selection Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) was perhaps the most famed naturalist of the Victorian age. His expeditions to remote Amazonia and Southeast Asia were the stuff of legend. A collector of thousands of species new to science, he shared in the discovery of natural selection and...

It all started with a Hob Nob. As Dr Matt Morgan, an intensive care consultant, examined a patient who had suffered a cardiac arrest after inhaling some biscuit crumbs, he saw a flock of birds fly past the window. They must inhale objects all the time when flying, how do they survive? he thought to himself. This began an investigation...

Neanderthal Man is one of Amazon's top 100 books of 2014. The book tells the story of geneticist Svante Paabo's mission to answer a crucial question: what can we learn from the genomes of our closest evolutionary relatives? Beginning with the study of DNA in Egyptian mummies in the early 1980s and culminating in the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome...

Described by Voltaire as 'perhaps a man of the most universal learning in Europe', Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) is often portrayed as a rationalist and philosopher who was wholly detached from the worldly concerns of his fellow men. Leibniz in His World provides a groundbreaking reassessment of Leibniz, telling the story of his trials and tribulations as an aspiring scientist...

A new edition in the year of James Lovelock's 100th birthday With over fifty patents to his name and innumerable awards and accolades, James Lovelock is a distinguished and original thinker who has been widely recognised by the international scientific community. In this inspiring book, republished in the year of his 100th birthday, Lovelock tells his life story, from his...

Gray Matters is described by Henry Marsh, author of Do No Harm, as ‘A fascinating and wide-ranging account of what neurosurgery is really about – the past, present and future.’ Since its inception in the early twentieth century, brain surgery has maintained an air of mystery. As the saying ‘it’s not exactly brain surgery’ suggests, the specialty has become synonymous...

Gorillas are among the most recognisable of the large charismatic mammals, but climate change and poaching have brought them to the brink of extinction. Greg Cummings was the executive director of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund for seventeen years. He shares his fascinating experiences as a "wildlife Robin Hood"—raising money from the rich and famous and redistributing it to endangered...

A mathematician unlike any other, John Horton Conway (1937-2020) possessed a rock star's charisma, a polymath's promiscuous curiosity, and a sly sense of humour. Conway found fame as a barefoot professor at Cambridge, where he discovered the Conway groups in mathematical symmetry and the aptly named surreal numbers. He also invented the cult classic Game of Life, a cellular automaton...

Partly a memoir and partly a recent history of medicine, the definitive account of Michael Milken’s lifetime work to accelerate medicine's evolution from a dark past to a bright future. What if cleaning early-stage cancers from your body could become as routine as going to the dentist to clean your teeth, or if a single vaccine could protect you against...

From the author of Steve Jobs and other bestselling biographies, this is the astonishingly intimate story of the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era—a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence. Oh, and took over Twitter. Australian Financial Review Top 20 Read for 2023​ When...

Louis Bromfield was a World War I ambulance driver, a Paris expat, and a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist as famous in the 1920s as Hemingway or Fitzgerald. But he cashed in his literary success to finance a wild agrarian dream in his native Ohio. The ideas he planted at his utopian experimental farm, Malabar, would inspire America's first generation of organic...

By early morning of June 30, 1860, a large crowd began to congregate in front of Oxford University's brand-new Museum of Natural History. The occasion was the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and the subject of discussion was Charles Darwin's new treatise: fact or fiction? Darwin, a simultaneously reclusive and intellectually audacious squire from...

Nathaniel Kleitman arrived in the US as a penniless teenager who could not speak a word of English. Within a decade, he was pioneering the first ever experiments about how we sleep, and why. He stayed up for 115 hours. He tried moving from a 24-hour day to a 48-hour one. As he became a national sensation, students hungered to...

"This visual - and artistically beautiful - format differentiates Einstein: The Man And His Mind from all previous books about him" - Amazon reader review "Gary Berger and Michael DiRuggerio's photographic exploration of Einstein is indubitably a coffee table book, but in its highest form. It's huge (34 x 26 cm) and contains a collection of beautiful imagery." "Massive, well-produced...

Einstein's Jury is the dramatic story of how astronomers in Germany, England, and America competed to test Einstein's developing theory of relativity. Weaving a rich narrative based on extensive archival research, Jeffrey Crelinsten shows how these early scientific debates shaped cultural attitudes we hold today. The book examines Einstein's theory of general relativity through the eyes of astronomers, many of...

Albert Einstein visited Oxford in 1931, to receive an honorary degree and to lecture on relativity and the Universe. While lecturing, he naturally chalked equations and diagrams on several blackboards. One of these is today the most popular object in Oxford's History of Science Museum. Yet Einstein tried to prevent its preservation because he was modest about his legendary status....

Physics Today, Notable Books of 2020 A finely drawn portrait of Einstein's sixteen months in Prague In the spring of 1911, Albert Einstein moved with his wife and two sons to Prague, the capital of Bohemia, where he accepted a post as a professor of theoretical physics. Though he intended to make Prague his home, he lived there for just...

How did a shy Polish immigrant kid - Karl Sven Woytek Sas Konkovitch Matthew Kruszelnicki - evolve into the fabulously eccentric Dr Karl? Shortlist ABIA Biography of the Year 2025 The only child of Holocaust survivors who fled to Australia in 1950, Karl has always forged his own destiny in an idiosyncratic way. Before he became one of the world's...

Bev Stohl ran the MIT office of the renowned linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky for nearly two and a half decades. This is her account of those years, working next to a man described by the New York Times as "arguably the most important intellectual alive today." Through these pages, we observe the comings and goings of a constant...

In his lifetime, Isambard Kingdom Brunel towered over his profession. Today, he remains the most famous engineer in history, the epitome of the volcanic creative forces which brought about the Industrial Revolution and brought modern society into being. Brunel's extraordinary talents were drawn out by some remarkable opportunities - above all his appointment as engineer to the new Great Western...

'Marcus Chown rocks!' - Brian May How does it feel to know something about the universe that no one has ever known before? And why is mathematics so good at revealing nature's secrets? This is the story of the scientists who, using mathematics, predicted the existence of unknown planets, black holes, invisible force fields, ripples in the fabric of space-time,...

The inspiring story of a young Mexican immigrant who became a renowned neurosurgeon. Today he is known as Dr. Q, an internationally renowned neurosurgeon and neuroscientist who leads cutting-edge research to cure brain cancer. But not too long ago, he was Freddy, a 19-year-old undocumented migrant worker toiling in the tomato fields of Central California. In this gripping memoir, Alfredo...

'The saying goes that time heals. I guess that's partly true. But time also makes you more aware of what has been lost. We find new points of reflection, like lookouts that offer fresh perspectives on a valley you've walked through or gazed at many times. From one vantage point the valley is a glorious feat of nature. From another,...

In this lucid biography, Andreas Daum offers a succinct and novel interpretation of the life and oeuvre of Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859). A Prussian nobleman born into the age of European Enlightenment, Humboldt was a contemporary of Napoleon, Simón Bolívar, and Charles Darwin. As a naturalist and scholar, he travelled the world, from the Americas to Central Asia, and recorded...

As well as being an important medieval theologian, Albertus Magnus (Albert the Great) also made significant contributions to the study of astronomy, geography, and natural philosophy. His studies of the natural world led Pope Pius XII to declare Albertus the patron saint of the natural sciences. Dante Alighieri acknowledged a substantial debt to Albertus's work, and in The Divine Comedy...

Marie Curie's insatiable passion for science allowed her to achieve the unthinkable, in doing so becoming the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the only person ever to win Nobel Prizes in two disciplines. Curie is most famous for her pioneering work in the field of radioactivity and for discovering two new elements, polonium and radium. However, Curie...

The nineteenth century in the United States witnessed the end of slavery and the expansion of another form of confinement: the asylum. How did enslaved and free Black people encounter psychiatric institutions? How were notions of mental disability used to reinforce slavery and Jim Crow? And how did Black people express alternative ideas about individual and communal mental health? Diana...

The inspiring story of Mary Penfold, the mother of the Australian wine industry - a self-taught vintner and business genius who emigrated to a frontier settlement and built her family's small vineyard into one of the world's most respected winemakers. Bestselling author and biographer Grantlee Kieza turns his focus to the birth of the Australian wine industry and the mother,...

Chris Dombrowski was playing a numbers game: two passions—poetry and fly-fishing; one child, with another on the way; and an income hovering perilously close to zero. Enter a miraculous email: Can't go, it's all paid for, just book a flight to Miami. Thus began a journey that would lead to the Bahamas and to David Pinder, a legendary bonefishing guide....

Don’t Miss the Apple TV+ Docuseries Streaming Now! “This book is as engrossing as anything by Agatha Christie, as unsettling as a novel by Stephen King, and reported with a vigorous empathy that leaves Truman Capote in the dust. Scott Johnson’s courage, his relentless quest for the truth behind a set of brilliantly obscured cruelties, and his examination of the...

Winning the war of the air and airwaves helped the Allies win World War II. This is the thrilling story of the maverick genius Reginald Jones who made that possible. 'Deeply researched and engagingly written' – The Times 'Has the pace and style of a well-crafted thriller' – Mail on Sunday 'Chock full of memorable characters and written with all...

Before the Manhattan Project, before nuclear warfare and the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was the twentieth century's great scientific quest to fathom the secrets of the atom. The unlikely story of an Antipodean friendship that changed the world forever. Centred on the inter-war years - within the ivy-clad walls of Cambridge University's famed Cavendish Laboratory, amid the windswept...

What can we learn about the world and ourselves if we think like scientists? A scientist's journey from observation to discovery is anything but straightforward. It is littered with failure, unexpected diversions, and joyous realisations. Science helps us to understand ourselves in a world where we often feel like strangers—but what we know about the world around us, what has...

In this #3 New York Times bestselling memoir, TikTok star and hospice nurse Hadley Vlahos demystifies death with inspiring patient stories. What can people at the end of their lives teach us about living well today? In this heart-warming memoir of wisdom, redemption, and even joy, Hadley Vlahos shares stories from being a palliative care nurse and how patients informed...

Who was Nikola Tesla? Find out in this comprehensive volume that includes Tesla’s autobiography and scientific writings, as well as other works that examine his life and career in detail. Nikola Tesla came from a humble upbringing in what is now Croatia and reached the heights of science and technology in the United States at the turn of the twentieth...

‘Perhaps the truth is that severe mental illness is just as frightening, just as stigmatising, just as much a taboo as it has always been . . .’ Over the course of her forty-year career, psychiatrist and psychotherapist Penelope Campling has worked with patients from all walks of life, from survivors of abuse to ICU doctors struggling under the strain...

Has an animal saved your life? Studying Arctic birds helped resuscitate those suffering from hypothermia. An ECG on the 150kg heart of a humpback whale has extended the lives of patients with heart failure. Understanding giraffes' long necks has led to improved asthma treatment. Learning how animals survive and thrive has led to life-saving advances for human health. But we...

The incredible story of a woman who took the path less travelled to work for the Royal Flying Doctor Service in outback Australia, and what the experience taught her about life, death, and human connection. It was 1988. I had no time for makeup and wore a crushed heart on my sleeve. My life was up in the air. Being...

The extraordinary story of the famous 'Birdman' John Gould and his talented wife Elizabeth, who revealed the astonishing world of Australian birds and wildlife in one of the most important naturalist expeditions in history - from the bestselling author of Sister Viv, Flinders, Banks, Mrs Kelly and The Remarkable Mrs Reibey. Longlisted for the Indie Book Awards 2025 John and...

One of Esquire's 50 Best Biographies of All Time One of The Economist's Best Books of 2022 A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Nominated for The Next Big Idea Club The Week Magazine Book of the Week From Alec Nevala-Lee, the author of the Hugo and Locus Award finalist Astounding, comes a revelatory biography of the visionary designer...

A poignant and thought-provoking memoir following one psychiatrist and four of her patients as they deal with the unspoken mental and physical costs of caring for others. For Dr Jessi Gold, everything was absolutely fine – until it suddenly wasn’t. As an assistant professor, practising psychiatrist, and dedicated friend and family member, Jessi was used to being busy. After all,...

This Is Going to Hurt meets Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures) — a rollicking, smart and self-aware memoir about the extremes of the human experience, the limits to compassion, and what trying to save the world actually entails. In her early 30s, Katie Treble felt stuck — in her life, in her career as an emergency doctor, and in...

How one woman's extraordinary determination saved millions of lives—the inspiring memoir from the Winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Katalin Karikó began life as a butcher's daughter in communist Hungary. Raised in a one-room home of clay and straw with no running water, she saw potential everywhere—in the promise of a seed, in the alchemy of soap, in...

Raw, honest and compelling, Scrubbed is Dr Nikki Stamp's account of her life as one of Australia's leading cardiothoracic surgeons. A life lived at the very edge of modern medicine, where heart surgeons walk the thinnest of lines between life and death, and yet where the greatest challenge can be the medical system itself. From childhood, Nikki Stamp wanted to...

Featured in The Economist’s Best Books of 2024 USA Today Bestseller How did a shaky startup defy expectations and become the world’s leading spaceflight company? Get the untold story of the team of game-changers, led by a well-known billionaire, who are sending NASA astronauts to space—and just might carry the human race to Mars. One company dominates the modern space...

The “delightfully macabre” (The New York Times) true tale of a brilliant and eccentric surgeon... and his quest to transplant the human soul. In the early days of the Cold War, a spirit of desperate scientific rivalry birthed a different kind of space race: not the race to outer space that we all know, but a race to master the...

Insane Mode is the astounding story of the most revolutionary car company since Ford, revealing how, under Elon Musk's leadership, it is bringing to an end the era of gasoline-powered transportation. Hamish McKenzie, journalist and former writer for Tesla, explores how an unlikely West Coast start-up with an audacious dream to create a new successful US car company, went up...

The Big Hop tells the powerful true story of the first flight across the Atlantic and the ordinary heroes who risked their lives in the pursuit of progress. 'David Rooney is an expert storyteller with a big heart, capturing not only the perils faced by the intrepid airmen who attempted the flight, but also their humanity.’ – JOHN LANCASTER, author...

From the acclaimed biographer of explorers Magellan, Columbus, and Francis Drake comes a unique exploration of the life and influence of Jules Verne, the novelist whose mind spun the greatest adventures ever told. His daring and prescient imagination sparked a lasting transformation of modern society and technology, inspiring everyone from J.R.R. Tolkien to Kurt Vonnegut to Jeff Bezos. "We are...

Tracy Kidder is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the author of the bestsellers The Soul of a New Machine, House, Among Schoolchildren, and Strength in What Remains, amongst others. This compelling and inspiring book shows how one person can work wonders. In Mountains Beyond Mountains, author Tracy Kidder tells the true story of a gifted man who loves...

The New York Times Bestseller Winner of the Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award Omaha Beach legend Ray Lambert's unforgettable firsthand account of D-Day “Lambert landed on [Omaha Beach] as a 23-year-old Army medic. ... As the bullets cut down his comrades, he raced repeatedly back into the sea to drag out wounded soldiers.” —New York Times Seventy-five years ago,...

THE INTERNATIONAL BEST SELLER FEATURING INTERVIEWS WITH DR ANTHONY FAUCI, DAME SALLY DAVIES AND DR JIM DOWN For every doctor, there is that one patient whose story touches them in a way they didn’t expect, changing their entire outlook on life. This inspiring and deeply moving book is the story of those patients. Every weekend, in Holland’s most popular newspaper,...

Indecently entertaining. A Daily Mail Book of the Week An Amazon US Best Book of 2022 'A fascinating tale of poisons and poisonous deeds which both educates and entertains.' — Kathy Reichs As any reader of murder mysteries can tell you, poison is one of the most enduring — and popular — weapons of choice for a scheming murderer. It...

Now a docuseries from Ken Burns on PBS! The #1 New York Times bestseller from Walter Isaacson brings Leonardo da Vinci to life in this exciting new biography that is “a study in creativity: how to define it, how to achieve it…Most important, it is a powerful story of an exhilarating mind and life” (The New Yorker). Based on thousands...

'A must read for anyone who wants to start a mobile app business' Riccardo Zacconi, founder and CEO King Digital (maker of Candy Crush Saga) 'A fascinating deep dive into the world of billion-dollar apps. Essential reading for anyone trying to build the next must-have app' Michael Acton Smith, Founder and CEO, Mind Candy THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO BUILDING AN...

The compelling story of one woman's journey to find out the truth about her paternity—and to come to grips with the rewriting of her own history and sense of identity. 'Now you're over twenty-one and back from overseas, I've decided it's time to tell you something.' When Lauren Burns learns she is donor conceived, she begins a turbulent journey to...

A hugely accessible history of science that reveals the human stories behind the biggest discoveries. Scientists have been participants in the best reality show of all time, with all the highs, lows, bust-ups, and strange personalities of any show on telly today. This hugely accessible history of science reveals the human stories behind the biggest discoveries. For example, we meet...

This is Marina Mahathir's story, from her perspective and no one else's. It is, she hopes, the answer to the question: What is it like to be Dr M's daughter? When an apple falls, does it roll far or stay close to its tree? Is it an exact clone of all the other apples the tree produces, or something entirely...

An explosive expose of one of the biggest and most secretive companies in the world, Samsung, as the Korean juggernaut battles Apple and Sony to dominate the world of technology. Longlisted for the 2020 Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year 'Shines an incisive and entertaining light into the secretive world of the South Korean technology giant shaping...

A powerful, moving account of an intensive care doctor's life on the frontlines of the Covid-19 pandemic. As a doctor on the intensive care unit at one of London's top hospitals, Jim Down has spent his life working as healthcare's last resort, where each day reveals a new challenge. But nothing could prepare Jim and his colleagues for the events...

A powerful memoir that explores how one Indigenous woman from the Pilbara transformed psychology. From humble beginnings in the remote Pilbara, psychologist and Nyamal woman Tracy Westerman has redefined what's possible at every turn. Despite neither of her parents progressing past primary school, and never having met a psychologist before attending university, Tracy went on to become the first Aboriginal...

When Professor Ian Frazer was awarded the patent for the vaccine to cervical cancer, he knew it could help to save the lives of 275,000 women around the world each year. Respected across the globe, few people know the real story of the Scottish-born Australian of the Year who is behind one of the great medical discoveries of the century....

When Professor Ian Frazer was awarded the patent for the vaccine to cervical cancer, he knew it could help to save the lives of 275,000 women around the world each year. Respected across the globe, few people know the real story of the Scottish-born Australian of the Year who is behind one of the great medical discoveries of the century....

The definitive biography of one of Britain's most iconic heroines, reissued for the 200th anniversary. Whether honoured and admired or criticised and ridiculed, Florence Nightingale has invariably been misrepresented and misunderstood. As the Lady with the Lamp, ministering to the wounded and dying of the Crimean War, she offers an enduring image of sentimental appeal and one that is permanently...

A multi-award-winning Italian debut from a bold new voice in contemporary queer literature. Jonathan is 31 years old, living in Milan with his boyfriend of three years and their two Devon Rex cats when, on a day like any other, he gets a fever. But unlike most, this fever doesn't go away; it's constant, low-level, and exhausting. After spending weeks...

An illuminating history of the man and the science behind the Higgs boson, a piece of scientific history (Spectator). In the summer of 1964, a reclusive young professor at the University of Edinburgh wrote two scientific papers which have come to change our understanding of the most fundamental building blocks of matter and the nature of the universe. Peter Higgs...

The story behind the real-life Iron Man - told especially for young readers. Elon Musk Young Readers’ Edition is an inspirational account of a remarkable role model for young entrepreneurs, Elon Musk, who continually breaks boundaries and revolutionises the tech world. Known as the real-life inspiration for the Iron Man series of films, starring Robert Downey Junior, Musk's journey is...

One woman's journey from Mao's China to the White House Ping Fu was born on the eve of China's Cultural Revolution; aged just eight she was taken from the arms of her loving family. She suffered appalling treatment and was denied an education. For ten years she lived in bleak dormitories, while protecting her younger sister from Mao's Red Guards....

Two hundred years of modern science and culture, told through one family history. In his early twenties, poor, depressed, stranded in the Coral Sea on the HMS Rattlesnake, hopelessly in love with the young Englishwoman Henrietta Heathorn, Thomas Henry Huxley was a nobody. And yet together he and Henrietta would return to London and go on to found one of...

A profound and provocative journey through the human body from the award-winning writer, broadcaster and surgeon. Exceptional, beautiful and absolutely absorbing - CHRIS VAN TULLEKEN A book of wonder - SARAH MOSS For Gabriel Weston, there was always something missing from the anatomy she was taught at medical school. Medicine teaches us how a body functions, but it doesn't help...

Active Labour is an inspiring, warm and moving memoir by one of the most pioneering and compassionate doctors in Australia, a key advocate for women's reproductive rights. It is a testament to one man's abiding, passionate belief in the power of medicine and the importance of community health. Percy Rogers was no ordinary doctor. Raised in small Western Australian towns,...