Carolrhoda's best-selling Creative Minds Biographies series appeals to a wide range of readers. Written in story format, these biographies also include inviting black-and-white illustrations.

You can think of Freedom from Fear as the academic's version of The Greatest Generation: like Tom Brokaw, Stanford history professor David M. Kennedy focuses on the years of the Great Depression and the Second World War and how the American people coped with those events. But there the similarities end--and, in terms of the differences, one might begin by noting that the historian's account is over twice the size of the journalist's.
Whereas Brokaw made use of extensive interviews, Kennedy relies on published accounts and primary sources, all meticulously footnoted. This academic rigor, however, does not render the book dull--far from it. Certainly the subject matter is interesting enough in its own right, but Kennedy offers attention-grabbing turns of phrase on nearly every page. He also unleashes some convention-shattering theses, such as his revelation that "the most responsible students of the events of 1929 have been unable to demonstrate an appreciable cause-and-effect linkage between the Crash and the Depression" and his subsequent argument that, although it made order out of chaos, the New Deal did not reverse the Depression--that, he says, was the war's doing. All in all, Freedom from Fear compares favorably to its companions in the multivolume Oxford History of the United States in both its comprehensive heft and its vivid readability.

This volume tells about considerably more than half George Washington's life, the forty-three years that elapsed from his birth to his acceptance, at the outbreak of the American Revolution, of the command of the Continental Army.

作者毕业于北京大学，求学美国，经过数年奋斗，成为华尔街交易员。本以为面前的是一条金光大道，却不料一场突如其来的金融海啸，将世界经济推到了悬崖边缘，也将所有的目光聚焦到风暴眼——华尔街上。
身为华尔街一线交易员，作者从市场交易冷暖的角度，看出华尔街乃至全球经济的风云变化， 带领读者体会“风起于青萍之末”的细微、“火烧连营船”的惨烈、“无可奈何花落去”的崩盘。以冷静又还些诙谐的笔触，将海啸原由一一细数。鲜花基金凋谢、夏季风暴、次贷危机、华尔街投行大佬依次蒙难，直到打开潘多拉的盒子，引出保尔森救援计划。
峰回路转，作者更描画出后海啸时代华尔街的新秩序、新市场、新思维，让读者对现在的华尔街有更深层次认识和了解，其目的在于，不是为了简单的再回首，而是警示当下，在美联储量化货宽松币政策之下，新一轮隐患又埋下伏笔。

In "Love and Math," Berkeley professor Edward Frenkel shows that mathematics, far from occupying a specialist niche, goes to the heart of all matter and unites us across cultures, continents, and centuries. In this heartfelt and passionate book, Frenkel reveals a side of mathematics we've never seen, suffused with all the beauty and wonder of a work of art, appealing not only to the cerebral, but to the human and the spiritual.
"Love and Math" tells two intertwined stories: of amazing mathematics and of the journey of one young man learning and living it. Growing up in Russia, Frenkel was denied entrance to university to study mathematics because of discriminatory policies. Yet with the help of his mentors he circumvented the system to become one of the twenty-first century's leading mathematicians. He now works on one of the biggest ideas to come out of mathematics in the last 50 years: the Langlands Program, considered by many to be a Grand Unified Theory of Mathematics.
While most people are not blocked from studying mathematics, many see it as being impenetrable, or worse, irrelevant to their lives. At its core, "Love and Math" is a story about gaining entry to the previously inaccessible, which can enrich our lives and empower us to understand better the world and our place in it. It is an invitation to discover the wonders of the hidden universe of mathematics.

A fascinating memoir from the man who revitalized visual geometry, and whose ideas about fractals have changed how we look at both the natural world and the financial world.
Benoit Mandelbrot, the creator of fractal geometry, has significantly improved our understanding of, among other things, financial variability and erratic physical phenomena. In The Fractalist, Mandelbrot recounts the high points of his life with exuberance and an eloquent fluency, deepening our understanding of the evolution of his extraordinary mind. We begin with his early years: born in Warsaw in 1924 to a Lithuanian Jewish family, Mandelbrot moved with his family to Paris in the 1930s, where he was mentored by an eminent mathematician uncle. During World War II, as he stayed barely one step ahead of the Nazis until France was liberated, he studied geometry on his own and dreamed of using it to solve fresh, real-world problems. We observe his unusually broad education in Europe, and later at Caltech, Princeton, and MIT. We learn about his thirty-five-year affiliation with IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center and his association with Harvard and Yale. An outsider to mainstream scientific research, he managed to do what others had thought impossible: develop a new geometry that combines revelatory beauty with a radical way of unfolding formerly hidden laws governing utter roughness, turbulence, and chaos.
Here is a remarkable story of both the man’s life and his unparalleled contributions to science, mathematics, and the arts.