Featured Psychology Author

Madame Curie

Eve Curie

This book enthralled me as a ten-year-old boy. I loved learning about the discovery of all the elements, and Marie Curie's story, of years of intense physical and intellectual effort, boiling down vats of pitchblende to isolate the magical, radioactive element radium, captured my imagination. The copy I had as a child remains in my library seven decades later, and I was thrilled, when I met Eve Curie at the centennial of her mother's discovery of radon in 1998, to have her sign it.
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Inward Bound

Abraham Pais

Pais was a professional physicist as well as a wonderful biographer, so he can provide a front-row seat to the history of twentieth-century physics. I was so taken by this book that I bought three copies: one for home, one for the office, and one for travel.
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The Atmosphere of Heaven

Mike Jay

A beautiful portrait of Beddoes and his Pneumatic Institution, as well as Humphry Davy, the great chemist whose dramatic experiments with gases (including, famously, nitrous oxide) were legendary in his time. But science is always a collaboration, and Mike Jay describes the sense of wonder and exploration that permeated poets and scientists alike the early nineteenth century.
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The Strangest Man

Graham Farmelo

Did Paul Dirac, a supreme theoretical physicist -- the Einstein of quantum mechanics -- have Asperger's syndrome? Certainly he was a very peculiar man, but brilliant and compelling, as Farmelo's wonderful and sensitive portrait brings out.
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The Philosophical Breakfast Club

Laura J. Snyder

In 1812, four young men -- Charles Babbage, John Herschel, Richard Jones, and William Whewell -- set out to put science on a firm professional basis. Herschel, like his father, was a great astronomer. Babbage was the first to conceive of a "calculating engine," an early computer, and Whewell, among other things, invented the word "scientist." Together these four launched the era of modern scientific thought.
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