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Five hundred-odd years ago, in the time of Leonardo da Vinci, a scientist—a term then unknown—was a person of many parts, someone who might work in fields ranging from chemistry to botany, astronomy to metallurgy, to divine the hidden order of the universe.

Even as recently as the early Victorian idea, writes British science historian Peter Watson in his new book Convergence: The Idea at the Heart of Science, the idea that intellectual life was unitary and had a single ...

Bill Hayes was 48 when he moved from San Francisco to New York. His longtime partner had died suddenly, and after a lifetime on the West Coast, Hayes was looking for a place to reinvent himself. In New York, he found exactly that. Shortly after moving, Hayes begins a relationship with famed neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks. What unfolds from there could be called a love story, but not in the way one might expect.

In that vein, the subtitle ...

Less is indeed more, says Scott Sonenshein, the Henry Gardiner Symonds Professor of Management at Rice University, in his book Stretch. Utlizing numerous case studies, Sonenshein argues that “stretching” by using existing resources more efficiently—whether in business or in our personal lives—leads to better outcomes far more often than just blindly throwing more money at a problem.

What is stretching and how does it help?

Stretching is essentially learning to act resourcefully and use what you have in front of ...

Before my son was born, nearly 20 months ago, one of the first child care–related books I read had nothing to do with a birth plan or what to expect in the first year—though both of those subjects would get plenty of attention in the months to come. No, the most intriguing book on the shelf was Last Child in the Woods (2008), by Richard Louv, recommended to me by my wife and a few friends.

Louv makes a graceful ...

On May 21, 1796, a young African-American woman slipped out the door of her owner’s mansion in Philadelphia and made her way to a ship that would carry her to then-distant New Hampshire—not to freedom, exactly, since slavery was still legal there, but far enough away that she might eventually be forgotten by the master.

Ona Judge had lived all of her 22 years in slavery, a condition that millions of African-descended Americans suffered. But the household from which she ...

Meredith Wadman found the story that would become her first book The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease in a reader letter in a 2012 edition of Science magazine. In response to a policy forum about whether tissue donors should be compensated for their contribution to medical research, prompted by Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a reader named Leonard Hayflick wrote that the article’s authors had overlooked the history of a ...

Late last year, we lost a highly valued member of the Kirkus community. On Dec. 14, 2016, Robert Knight suffered a heart attack and died in his home in Freeport, Maine.

Not only was he one of my longest-tenured reviewers, Bob was also one of my most reliable and versatile, certainly among my top 5 most-trusted contributors (not that there are actual rankings). For more than 10 years, Bob crafted readable, insightful, authoritative reviews on subjects including, but by no ...

In a series of successful biographies, Patricia Bosworth trained the spotlight on four major American artists: Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, Diane Arbus, and Jane Fonda. Now, in The Men in My Life: A Memoir of Love and Art in 1950s Manhattan, Bosworth takes center stage.

The memoir follows her life and career from the 50s through the early 60s as she acted on Broadway, suffered the suicides of her brother and father and, through a series of relationships with men ...