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Men That Changed the 20th Century
The first half of the 20th century was a silver age for inventors, exceeded only by the previous half-century. It introduced some of the most important technologies of the modern world: mass production, aircraft, and telecommunications among them.
From the Early 1900s to the Mid-1900s: Henry Ford to Walt Disney, History’s Most Influential Inventors, edited by Robert Curley, is part of a series of slim volumes with biographies of inventors. The series is divided chronologically.
This volume focuses on inventors who became prominent between roughly 1900 and 1950. It contains thirteen biographies starting with Ford and ending with Disney. Their achievements are spread among a broad spectrum of technology. Chemistry, industrial engineering, aviation, architecture, entertainment, and food preparation are represented.
Melanie Mooney is an EMT in rural Indiana when she comes across an unusual accident scene while going home after a shift. Thinking it a downed experimental military jet, and being who she is, she renders aid to those inside. They prove to be space aliens straight out of a supermarket tabloid.
It is the 1930s and the world seems headed for another war. The Soviet Union would welcome one. How else will the revolution dominate the world? The Soviets are expanding their spy networks in anticipation.
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Anthony was a hitman. They rarely die of old age, but Anthony drowned trying to save a driver whose car went off a bridge into a river.
The America’s Cup yacht race is one of the oldest sports events. It started in 1854 and is still going strong.
James Lee Burke has written two dozen books about Louisiana cop Dave Robicheaux. Present in most is Robicheaux’s former partner and friend Cletus Purcel. A former Marine, onetime New Orleans cop, and ex-Central American mercenary, Purcel returned to Louisiana and set up as a private investigator with offices in New Orleans and Dave’s New Iberia.
Many books have been written about Fort Sumter, the opening battle of the American Civil War. Most do an adequate job of describing what happened. Some are outstanding. Few explain why events unrolled as they did. They present the big issues of why, such as slavery. Almost none get inside the heads of the participants of both sides to explain what motivated their actions.
Knight Watch is back, in a new account of their adventures. They plug leakage from the weird world into the mundane world, keeping monsters of the Unreal firmly where they belong.
We all know great art: the Mona Lisa, Michelangelo’s David, the Venus de Milo. It has been ever so. That was what Rochelle Gurstein believed when she began writing a book to define what made a piece of art a timeless classic fifteen years ago. She soon realized that today’s classics were largely ignored in the past. Other pieces of art were proclaimed exemplars.
By 1985 Andrew Kaplan successfully sold two thrillers. The first, Scorpion, sold well. Kaplan asked the question many writers ask after early success: do I quit the day job and write full time? A wife and two-year-old child made Kaplan reluctant to take that step. Then the day job quit Kaplan and he was unemployed.
Did the work of Alfred Nobel lead to the surveillance state? A new book finds a connection.
One minute Jason Graham is sitting in a Mobile, Alabama, restaurant chatting up a waitress. The next he wakes up on a massive space station above a terraformed planet orbiting a star in the Sagittarius arm of the Milky Way Galaxy.
