The shocking story of the single greatest contributor to the first Oxford English Dictionary in 1857 reveals that the man who contributed some ten thousand definitions to the book was in fact a patient in an asylum for the criminally ...

Considers the global impact of the 1883 eruption of the Krakatoa volcano, documenting its cause of an immense tsunami that killed some 40,000 people, its impact on the weather for several years, and its role in anti-Western Islamic fu...

An informative exploration of earthquakes places a particular focus on the San Francisco disaster of 1906, describing how it affected more than two hundred miles of California, triggered a vast firestorm, and destroyed the gold-rush c...

In sumptuous and illuminating detail Simon Winchester chronicles the extraordinary story of Joseph Needham, the brilliant Cambridge scientist who turned his eccentric genius on the study of China. In 1937 Joseph Needham fell in lov...