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 three body problem.
Patti Smith moves through a year of loss and dreaming — a fever state between the real and the imagined. Grief, art, and the relentless spirit to create.
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 rich life from the ephemera of the past, utilizing marginalia and correspondence to resurrect a woman all but lost to history.
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. Hendrickson finds the wound at the center of the genius.
Teddy Roosevelt once said that he could either run the country or control Alice, but not both. Alice Roosevelt Longworth is the quintessential counterexample of a well-behaved woman. She made history, after all.
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.