Tavia Gilbert

Isaac Newton was not only briiliant, but secretive, vindictive and obsessive. Here is a portrait of the man, contradictions and all, than places him against the backdrop of seventeenth-century England, a time of plague, the Great Fire of London, and two revolutions.

This biography profiles the life and times of German-born theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, whose contributions to the field earned him a Nobel Prize.

For more than thirty years-half his life-he was obsessively devoted to investigating Everything in the natural world. Nothing escaped his interest-how our eyes see, why the sky is blue, what forces build mountains, how light travels, where water comes from, and-most fascinating of all to Leonardo-the inner workings of the human body. Nothing stopped him. It was illegal to dissect human corpses, so he did autopsies in secret, even devising a clever...

Before Freud, nobody discussed "unconscious" motives, Oedipal complexes, the id and the ego, or Freudian slips. Freud was a complicated, often irascible man, who in 19th-century Vienna developed his still-controversial ideas and the new discipline of psychoanalysis.