A civilization transmits its location into the cosmos. On Earth, the signal is received. A reckoning with survival, first contact, and the merciless logic of the dark forest.
Patti Smith moves through a year of loss and dreaming — a fever state between the real and the imagined. Grief, art, and the relentless refusal to stop making things.
Ayn Rand remade herself in America's image — or made America in hers. Burns traces the woman behind the myth and the ferocious hunger that made objectivism possible.
Jane Franklin was as sharp as her brother Benjamin, and history swallowed her whole. Lepore reconstructs a life from scraps — letters, margins, and deliberate silence.
Hollywood called her the most beautiful woman alive. The patent office held the invention that became WiFi and GPS. Hedy Lamarr contained multitudes her era refused to see.
Frank Lloyd Wright built temples to American ego and burned the rest down — literally. Hendrickson finds the wound at the center of the genius and refuses to look away.
Teddy Roosevelt said he could run the country or control Alice — not both. She made sure of it. Alice Roosevelt Longworth lived to 96 and never once behaved.
A Wall Street tycoon builds a secret palace of science, gathering Einstein and Fermi to develop radar that helped win WWII and pushed FDR toward the atomic bomb.