Books to Enlighten and Amuse

Discover a curated list of books to enlighten and amuse, blending wisdom with wit. Find your next favorite read for both inspiration and entertainment.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers Cover
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Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

by Mary Roach

A look inside the world of forensics examines the use of human cadavers in a wide range of endeavors, including research into new surgical procedures, space exploration, and a Tennessee human decay research facility.
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ID: 0393064646
(Type: books)
Spook Cover
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Spook

 

No summary available.
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ID: 0674001893
(Type: books)
Big Bang Cover
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Big Bang

by Simon Singh

A half century ago, a shocking Washington Post headline claimed that the world began in five cataclysmic minutes rather than having existed for all time; a skeptical scientist dubbed the maverick theory the Big Bang. In this amazingly comprehensible history of the universe, Simon Singh decodes the mystery behind the Big Bang theory, lading us through the development of one of the most extraordinary, important, and awe-inspiring theories in science.
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ID: 0393066614
(Type: books)
The Code Book Cover
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The Code Book

by Simon Singh

In his first book since the bestselling Fermat's Enigma, Simon Singh offers the first sweeping history of encryption, tracing its evolution and revealing the dramatic effects codes have had on wars, nations, and individual lives. From Mary, Queen of Scots, trapped by her own code, to the Navajo Code Talkers who helped the Allies win World War II, to the incredible (and incredibly simple) logisitical breakthrough that made Internet commerce secure, The Code Book tells the story of the most powerful intellectual weapon ever known: secrecy. Throughout the text are clear technical and mathematical explanations, and portraits of the remarkable personalities who wrote and broke the world's most difficult codes. Accessible, compelling, and remarkably far-reaching, this book will forever alter your view of history and what drives it. It will also make you wonder how private that e-mail you just sent really is.
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ID: 0060843837
(Type: books)
Mutants Cover
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Mutants

by Armand Marie Leroi

Visit Armand Marie Leroi on the web: http://armandleroi.com/index.html Stepping effortlessly from myth to cutting-edge science, Mutants gives a brilliant narrative account of our genetic code and the captivating people whose bodies have revealed it—a French convent girl who found herself changing sex at puberty; children who, echoing Homer’s Cyclops, are born with a single eye in the middle of their foreheads; a village of long-lived Croatian dwarves; one family, whose bodies were entirely covered with hair, was kept at the Burmese royal court for four generations and gave Darwin one of his keenest insights into heredity. This elegant, humane, and engaging book “captures what we know of the development of what makes us human” (Nature).
A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities Cover
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A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities

by Jan Bondeson

Discusses several strange diseases, remarkable malformations, uncommon and gruesome ways of death, and unlikely feats of fasting or gluttony, which proliferated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries' medical literature, and shows that sometimes these curiosities did occur