Cynthia Stokes Brown was an avid reader and researcher. This collection is a digital representation of her personal library with the books categorized as Cynthia had them on the bookshelves in her home.
These are the books she had in her Research collection
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The Life and Death of Planet Earth: How the New Science of Astrobiology Charts the Ultimate Fate of Our World
Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee
“They deftly bring together findings from many disparate areas of science in a book that science buffs will find hard to put down.” —Publishers Weekly Science has worked hard to piece together the story of the evolution of our world up to this point, but only recently have we developed the understanding and the tools to describe the entire life cycle of our planet. Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee, a geologist and an astronomer respectively, are in the vanguard of the new field of astrobiology. Combining their knowledge of how the critical sustaining systems of our planet evolve through time with their understanding of how stars and solar systems grow and change throughout their own life cycles, the authors tell the story of the second half of Earth’s life. In this masterful melding of groundbreaking research and captivating, eloquent science writing, Ward and Brownlee provide a comprehensive portrait of Earth’s life cycle that allows us to understand and appreciate how the planet sustains itself today, and offers us a glimpse of our place in the cosmic order.
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Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
Jack Weatherford
The Mongol army led by Genghis Khan subjugated more lands and people in twenty-five years than the Romans did in four hundred. In nearly every country the Mongols conquered, they brought an unprecedented rise in cultural communication, expanded trade, and a blossoming of civilization. Vastly more progressive than his European or Asian counterparts, Genghis Khan abolished torture, granted universal religious freedom, and smashed feudal systems of aristocratic privilege.
From the story of his rise through the tribal culture to the explosion of civilization that the Mongol Empire unleashed, this brilliant work of revisionist history is nothing less than the epic story of how the modern world was made. -
The Fall of the Ancient Maya: Solving the Mystery of the Maya Collapse
David Webster
An account of the mysterious fall of the ancient Maya civilization evaluates current theories and myths, citing sixteenth-century evidence of a residual population and offering a portrait of its Late Classic society beset by overly ambitious nobles, wars, and an exploding population that could not be sustained by its scanty agriculture.
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The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe
Steven Weinberg
This classic of contemporary science writing by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist explains to general readers what happened when the universe began, and how we know.
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Life Along the Silk Road
Susan Whitfield
In the first 1,000 years after Christ, merchants, missionaries, monks, mendicants, and military men traveled on the vast network of Central Asian tracks that became known as the Silk Road. Linking Europe, India, and the Far East, the route passed through many countries and many settlements, from the splendid city of Samarkand to tiny desert hamlets. Susan Whitfield creates a rich and varied portrait of life along the greatest trade route in history in a vivid, lively, and learned account that spans the eighth through the tenth centuries. Recounting the lives of ten individuals who lived at different times during this period, Whitfield draws on contemporary sources and uses firsthand accounts whenever possible to reconstruct the history of the route through the personal experiences of these characters.
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A Short History of Progress
Ronald Wight
Each time history repeats itself, the cost goes up. We live at a time of runaway growth in human numbers, consumption, and technology. The great question we now face is how, and whether, this can go on. Ronald Wright argues that our modern predicament, though new in scale, is as old as humankind.
A Short History of Progress is nothing less than a concise history of the world since Neanderthal times, elegantly written, brilliantly conceived, and stunningly clear in its warming to us now. Wright shows how human beings have a way of walking into "progress traps," beginning with the worldwide slaughter of big game in the Stone Age. The same pattern of overconsumption then took a new form as many of the world's most creative civilizations--Mesopotamia, the Maya, the Roman Empire--fell victim to their own success. -
Cosmic Dispatches: The New York Times Reports on Astronomy and Cosmology
John Noble Wilford
A collection of articles and essays by the award-winning science reporters of The New York Times discusses recent discoveries in the field of astronomy and the new developments in technology that have allowed scientists to probe deeply into the universe and its phenomena.
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1688: A Global History
John E. Wills Jr.
In his brief, focused chapters, Jack Wills also shows us ordinary life in the world of 1688. We join the great caravans of Muslims on their annual pilgrimage from Damascus and Cairo to Mecca, witness the suicidal exaltation of Russian Old Believers, and walk the pungent streets of Amsterdam. There we enter the Rasp House, where vagrants, beggars, and petty criminals labored to produce powdered brazilwood for the local dyeworks. And we meet hitherto unnoticed but unforgettable characters: Constantine Phaulkon, a Greek adventurer whose efforts to advance French interests as well as his own with the court of Siam ended in betrayal and a grisly death; and Dona Teresa, a beauty at fifteen, whose chaste loves stirred local legend in the wild mining town of Potosi." "Told with verve, color, and insight, Wills's book captures an historical moment in which the world seems both strange and familiar, when the global connections of power, money, and belief were ushering in the modern age.
- Book jacket -
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On Human Nature
Edward O. Wilson
With characteristic pungency and simplicity of style, the author of Sociobiology challenges old prejudices and current misconceptions about the nature-nurture debate. He shows how evolution has left its traces on the most distinctively human activities, how patterns of generosity, self-sacrifice, and worship, as well as sexuality and aggression, reveal their deep roots in the life histories of primate bands that hunted big game in the last Ice Age. His goal is nothing less than the completion of the Darwinian revolution by bringing biological thought into the center of the social sciences and the humanities. Wilson presents a philosophy that cuts across the usual categories of conservative, liberal, or radical thought. In systematically applying the modern theory of natural selection to human society, he arrives at conclusions far removed from the social Darwinist legacy of the last century.
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Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth
Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer
With the publication of the book, we have for the first time in any modern literary form one of the most vital of ancient myths - that of Inanna (known to the Semites as Ishtar), the world's first goddess of recorded history and the beloved deity of the ancient Sumerians.
- From the book jacket -
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Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
Richard Wrangham
Ever since Darwin and The Descent of Man, the evolution and world-wide dispersal of humans has been attributed to our intelligence and adaptability. But in Catching Fire, renowned primatologist Richard Wrangham presents a startling alternative: our evolutionary success is the result of cooking. In a groundbreaking theory of our origins, Wrangham shows that the shift from raw to cooked foods was the key factor in human evolution. Once our hominid ancestors began cooking their food, the human digestive tract shrank and the brain grew. Time once spent chewing tough raw food could be sued instead to hunt and to tend camp. Cooking became the basis for pair bonding and marriage, created the household, and even led to a sexual division of labor. In short, once our ancestors adapted to using fire, humanity began. Tracing the contemporary implications of our ancestors' diets, Catching Fire sheds new light on how we came to be the social, intelligent, and sexual species we are today. A pathbreaking new theory of human evolution, Catching Fire will provoke controversy and fascinate anyone interested in our ancient origins-or in our modern eating habits.
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The Planet in a Pebble: A Journey into Earth's Deep History
Jan Zalasiewicz
This is the story of a single pebble. It is just a normal pebble, as you might pick up on holiday - on a beach in Wales, say. Its history, though, carries us into abyssal depths of time, and across the farthest reaches of space.
This is a narrative of the Earth's long and dramatic history, as gleaned from a single pebble. It begins as the pebble-particles form amid unimaginable violence in distal realms of the Universe, in the Big Bang and in supernova explosions and continues amid the construction of the Solar System. Jan Zalasiewicz shows the almost incredible complexity present in such a small and apparently mundane object. Many events in the Earth's ancient past can be deciphered from a pebble: volcanic eruptions; the lives and deaths of extinct animals and plants; the alien nature of long-vanished oceans; and transformations deep underground, including the creations of fool's gold and of oil.
Zalasiewicz demonstrates how geologists reach deep into the Earth's past by forensic analysis of even the tiniest amounts of mineral matter. Many stories are crammed into each and every pebble around us. It may be small, and ordinary, this pebble - but it is also an eloquent part of our Earth's extraordinary, never-ending story. -
The Goldilocks Planet: The Four Billion Year Story of Earth's Climate
Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams
n this remarkable new work, Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams demonstrate how the Earth's climate has continuously altered over its 4.5 billion-year history. The story can be read from clues preserved in the Earth's strata - the evidence is abundant, though always incomplete, and also often baffling, puzzling, infuriating, tantalizing, seemingly contradictory. Geologists, though, are becoming ever more ingenious at interrogating this evidence, and the story of the Earth's climate is now being reconstructed in ever-greater detail - maybe even providing us with clues to the future of contemporary climate change.
