This is the latest offering from Richard Schickel, a renowned film critic who probably knows more -- and writes with greater incision -- about the history of film than any contemporary reviewer.

John McCabe's insightful biography of Charlie Chaplin is a scholarly work, which will easily engage both young and old. McCabe (1920-2005) is best known for his biographies.

His autobiography, filled with rank name-dropping, is almost unreadable. The 1992 biopic, despite a fine performance by Robert Downey, Jr., is an embarrassment. And not everyone wants to plow through a 750-page biography just to find out what made the Little Tramp tick. 

This book offers a timely examination of the lives of two men who transformed their world -- and ours -- in ways that are difficult to adequately summarizein a few hundred pages.

Many of the ideas brilliantly and compellingly explored in Why Darwin Matters made a showing in certain chapters of three of Michael Shermer’s earlier books: Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (1997).

Newton, Einstein and Gravitation - In the late 1970s, Steve Allen hosted a show on PBS called “A Meeting of Minds.” Its format was a talk show bringing together renowned historical personalities, portrayed by actors.

Einstein and Our World is in many ways like an engaging, introductory school course – so effectively conveyed that it might inspire a lifelong passion for the subject. The “instructor” in this case is David C. Cassidy, a professor of natural sciences at Hofstra University, and the former associate editor of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein

While a patent clerk in 1905, Einstein published a handful of seminal physics papers which received wide critical acclaim. These papers, notes Ohanian, contained several mistakes.

Einstein 1905: The Standard of Greatness, is a detailed look into the five papers written by Einstein in 1905 - known as his Annus Mirabilis, the extraordinary year - that truly separated him from other physicists of his time and beyond.

Einstein and Oppenheimer examines the lives of two of the 20th century's most consequential physicists.

During the winter of 1943-44, as much of the supposedly civilized world tore itself limb from limb, four of the most brilliant thinkers of the century gathered in a small colonial-style house in Princeton, New Jersey.

Physicist Brian Greene, a well-known string theorist, does his best to explain complex and abstract theoretical physics to the average layperson, which, no doubt, is a monumental feat.

The late, great Stephen J. Gould posited that science and religion can be described as properly having "non-overlapping magisteria" - in other words, that religion doesn't describe the processes of the natural world and science has nothing to say about morality.

Kristine Larsen begins her biography of Stephen Hawking with a central question: how has a theoretical physicist known for "esoteric mathematics" and "the secret language of general relativity" become a cultural icon and the most recognizable scientist in the world?

In "The Cosmic Connection," Jeff Kanipe tackles the Earth's place in the universe, and how other denizens and aspects of the cosmos have contributed to the development of life here. Yet, they may also have led to mass extinctions in the past and may yet again in the future. The cosmos giveth and the cosmos taketh away, it seems.

This is a book about a mathematical formula that nearly everyone -- even those who are science-phobic -- can recite, but almost no one can actually explain with the slightest degree of coherence.

Written by Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, and marine biologist Sheril Kirshenbaum, Unscientific America addresses the disconnect between the country's brightest minds and the political process that has so much power over funding and applications for new research.

It's About Time: Understanding Einstein's Relativity began as a series of notes and lectures Mermin, a physicist at Cornell University, wrote for his nonscientist students during the 1990s. The notes were continually organized and revised as students raised new questions.

When Jack Kerouac drove into "the great American night," then poured its manic pace into On the Road, he created a living literary genre -- the road narrative. Since Kerouac, authors from John Steinbeck to William Least Heat-Moon have taken to the road in vans or, hitchhiking, bringing their memories and dogs for the ride. 

Perhaps once in a generation, an artist comes along to permanently alter the landscape of his medium. In Fellini: A Life, Hollis Alpert guides the reader through the tumultuous life of this fascinating Italian master.

Everything you ever wanted to know about Federico Fellini’s film history is in Peter Bondanella’s exhaustive and scholarly treatment of the director’s early influences.

Twice in Federico Fellini: Interviews, the journalist assigned to the renowned auteur is invited to ride in his infamous black Jaguar, with which Fellini would terrorize the streets of Rome. The mixture of subject and setting seems appropriately paired: 

The enduring power of religious belief in the 21st century would come as something of a surprise to Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, and the other long-departed social theorists whose influence lurks in the background of Tamas Pataki’s provocative essays Against Religion.

Having exposed the power of the unconscious, Sigmund Freud was hardly modest in assessing his own achievement. Like Copernicus and Darwin, he argued, his theories had delivered the “third and most wounding blow” to the “naïve self-love” that characterized human culture.

Despite the recent biography of Martha Freud by Katja Behling, and the numerous books about her husband, Sigmund Freud, little has been written about how Mrs. Freud (1861-1951) may have felt about her life with the founder of psychoanalysis.

Joining the chorus of voices in the health care debate, an issue which has continued to dominate the American conversation, is Timothy A. Kelly with Healing the Broken Mind.

In 1909 Austrian neurologist and father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud made his first and only trip to the United States. He had been invited by the president of Clark University to give a series of lectures on psychoanalysis.

Janine Burke's examination of Sigmund Freud is part biography, part art history, and part analysis of Freud, the man. She has opened up new territory by choosing to study Freud's life and ideas through a focus on his collection of art and antiquities.

Without a doubt, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing were two of the most compelling figures in the history of mathematics, logic and philosophy. Gödel's revolutionary “incompleteness theorems” and Turing's work with artificial intelligence have changed the world.

Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel by Rebecca Goldstein tells the story of Kurt Gödel, one of the greatest mathematicians and logicians of modern times.

When the great Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos died in 1996 at the age of 83, he left behind a staggering body of work. With nearly 1500 academic articles to his credit -- by far the most extensive publishing record of any mathematician in history -- Erdos collaborated with 485 co-authors during his long career.

Mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. was so confident of his own genius that in 1948, at the age of 20, he challenged Albert Einstein in his Princeton office about amending the physicist’s quantum theory.

This new edition of Papa Hemingway from Da Capo Press brings A.E. Hotchner's famous memoir back into print for the first time in nearly a decade.

In Fitzgerald and Hemingway: Works and Days, Scott Donaldson draws on his own remarkable writings, crafted over the last four decades, to form a collection of essays -- part biographical, part critical -- about two of the most celebrated authors of the 20th century.

Fifty years have passed since the death of Ernest Hemingway, history’s ultimate man, and young males today—obsessed with Facebook, Twitter, and Nintendo—know nothing about his legendary brand of rugged, alcoholic masculinity. They cannot skin a fish, dominate a battlefield, or transform majestic creatures of the Southern Hemisphere into piano keyboards. 

Flora Samuel, an architect and lecturer at the Welsh School of Architecture, has written widely on the subject of Le Corbusier. In Le Corbusier: Architect and Feminist, she unearths certain aspects of his work that other researchers have ignored or discounted.

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris -- better known as Le Corbusier, the name he adopted in 1920 -- was among the most significant architects and urban planners of the 20th century, and his career was marked by an astonishing productivity and self-promoted celebrity.

Several years ago, German publisher, Taschen, released a book of monumental proportions in celebration of boxing's "Greatest of All Time" - Muhammad Ali. It tipped the scales at 75 lbs and gave new meaning to over-sized coffee table books measuring 20" x 20" and offering over 3,000 images of Ali over the course of his remarkable and irrepressible career. COMING SOON...

What do a rogue elephant, a wild boar, and a shaven porcupine have in common? They all reflect facets of Karl Marx’s personality as described by British journalist Francis Wheen in “Karl Marx: A Life,” an entertaining biography of a man whose life story does not immediately appear to have had the potential for a lot of laughs.

Here is a quote to consider: "[Karl Marx's] real mission in life was to contribute in one way or another to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the forms of government which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the present-day proletariat, which he was the first to make conscious of its own position and its needs, of the conditions under which it could win its freedom."

This brief biography, published as part of Taschen’s short and affordable series on notable artists, provides a nice introduction to the life and work of Pablo Picasso.

This memoir -- the first from a Picasso progeny -- recounts the cumulative familial wreckage produced by Pablo Picasso, as told by his granddaughter, Marina.

For much of the latter part of our previous century, the philosopher who exerted the greatest influence over his field, at least in the Anglo-American tradition, was Harvard professor W.V. Orman Quine (1908-2000). COMING SOON...

Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000), was one of the greatest analytic philosophers and logicians of the 20th century whose body of work fits into a long history of philosophical treatments of metaphysics, epistemology and language, especially within the empiricist tradition, which remains profoundly influential to this day.

Stephen Greenblatt's book Will in the World is an enlightening biographical study of not only William Shakespeare, but also of England in the late 1500s.

Bill Bryson’s concise biography of William Shakespeare is brilliantly written, humorously insightful, and entirely delightful. The prose is a well-crafted and playful presentation of the dozen odd facts known about Shakespeare and many of the suppositions, inferences, and wild speculations about the man and his work.

Although he died nearly 400 years ago, William Shakespeare's legacy continues to resonate today. His works, which include 37 plays, five poems and 154 sonnets, strike a chord with modern audiences not only because...

How to Read a Shakespeare Play is part of a small series of "How To" books released by Blackwell Publishing and designed to aid college-level students with their literature studies. Despite the somewhat officious title, this small volume by David Bevington strays....

Unlike most biographies, this one begins not with the birth, but with the death of its subject. Not much is known about William Shakespeare's life, but much has come to be known about the playwright since his death in 1616. This growth in the reputation of the Bard (as he became known ) is a fascinating story in its own right.