Other books that might interest you

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  Alta California - From San Diego...

  Nick Neely

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  Nick Neely chronicles his 650-mile trek on foot from San Diego to San Francisco, following the route of the first overland Spanish expedition into what was soon called Alta California. Led by Gaspar de Portolá in 1769, the expedition sketched a route that would become, in part, the famous El Camino Real. It laid the foundation for the Golden State we know today, a place that remains as mythical and captivating as any in the world. 
  Neely grew up in California but realized how little he knew about its history. So he set off to learn it bodily, with just a backpack and a tent, trekking through stretches of California both lonely and urban. For 12 weeks, following the journal of expedition missionary Father Juan Crespí, Neely kept pace with the ghosts of the Portolá expedition—nearly 250 years later.  
  Weaving together natural and human history, Alta California relives his adventure, tells a story of Native cultures and the Spanish missions that soon devastated them, and explores the evolution of California and its landscape. The result is a collage of historical and contemporary California, of lyricism and pedestrian serendipity, and of the biggest issues facing California today—water, agriculture, oil and gas, immigration, and development—all of it one step at a time.

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  The Brain Savers - How a Scrappy...

  Colin T. McDonald, Bonnie...

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  A FULL CAST PERFORMANCE, FEATURING HOLLYWOOD ACTORS, SOUND EFFECTS, AND AN ORIGINAL SCORE! 
  From the authors of the New York Times bestseller, The Barefoot Spirit, and the Audie Award finalist, genre-bending audiobook of the same name, comes a story of vision and invention, failure and setbacks, mistakes and lessons. Business Audio Theatre presents a Sherwood Players Production, The Brain Savers, the true story of how a scrappy startup used technology to put the humanity of patients first and ended up changing medicine forever. 
  Amid the internet boom of the mid-2000s, a band of entrepreneurs stood at the intersection of medicine, technology, and business. They saw a solution to the crucial problems of emergency care, which was too often handicapped by underfunding, overscheduled specialists, archaic practices, and onerous equipment. Through pioneering telemedicine and new inventions like the portable CT scanner, the founders of Specialists on Call (S.O.C.) did more than just make emergency care better, faster, and more humane; they brought health care, which is often described as the slowest industry in America to change, into the 21st Century.   
  This is Dr. Colin McDonald’s story of how S.O.C. came to be. After leaving a cushy teaching position at Harvard, it took years of pursuing a single objective, then changing on a dime, to create S.O.C. In the end, what he created was a system that saved lives—and continues to save lives today. 
  Some of these hard-learned lessons are complex, while others are so timeless they almost sound cliché (“trust your vision and your moral compass, change when you must, just keep going”), but they are far from cliché for the founders of S.O.C. Theirs is a story of people with imagination and drive who wanted to make the world better, who trusted their ideas and each other, and who, despite everything, kept on going!

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  Hunting the Essex - A Journal of...

  Midshipman Allen Gardiner

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  In February 1813 the British frigate Phoebe set out on a secret mission that would involve sailing halfway around the world to attack American settlements in the Pacific Northwest. The United States, frustrated at the treatment of its shipping by the combatants in the Napoleonic Wars, had finally opened hostilities against the British in the previous June. From the American perspective the War of 1812 began with disasters in its invasion of Canada, but against all expectations the infant US Navy had scored significant victories at sea. The most strategically significant of these was the campaign by the frigate USS Essex, which had almost annihilated the lucrative British whaling trade in the south Pacific. Therefore, Phoebe was diverted to hunt down and destroy this highly successful commerce-raider. After an epic search, Phoebe tracked her prey to neutral Valparaiso where the American frigate was blockaded and,in a very bloody battle, eventually captured. The American captain, David Porter, published a self-serving account of his actions which ever since has mired the battle in controversy, so this British naval eyewitness account is an important counter-balance. It is one of the lesser-known campaigns of a war which is currently celebrating its bicentenary, but its inherent drama inspired the plot of Patrick O'Brian's novel The Far Side of the World, although in its movie adaptation Master & Commander the American frigate is transformed into a French privateer.

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  The Fatal Strain - On the Trail...

  Alan Sipress

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  When avian flu began spreading across Asia in the early 2000s, it reawakened fears that had lain dormant for nearly a century. During the outbreak's deadliest years, Alan Sipress chased the virus as it infiltrated remote jungle villages and teeming cities and saw its mysteries elude the world's top scientists. In The Fatal Strain, Sipress details how socioeconomic and political realities in Asia make it the perfect petri dish in which the fast-mutating strain can become easily communicable among humans. Once it does, the ease and speed of international travel and worldwide economic interdependence could make it as destructive as the flu pandemic of 1918.In his vivid portrayal of the struggle between man and microbe, Sipress gives a front-line view of the accelerating number of near misses across Asia and the terrifying truth that the prospects for this impending health crisis may well be in the hands of cockfighters, live chicken merchants, and witch doctors rather than virologists or the World Health Organization.Like The Hot Zone and The Great Influenza, The Fatal Strain is a fast-moving account that brings the inevitability of an epidemic into a fascinating cultural, scientific, and political narrative.

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  Texas Takes Wing - A Century of...

  Barbara Ganson

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  A history of aviation in Texas that “brilliantly demonstrates the evolution of flight technology as a harbinger of social change” (Technology and Culture).   In this book, pilot and historian Barbara Ganson brings to life the colorful personalities that shaped the phenomenally successful development of the aviation industry in the Lone Star state. Weaving stories and profiles of aviators, designers, manufacturers, and those in related services, Texas Takes Wing covers the major trends that propelled Texas to the forefront of the field.   Covering institutions from San Antonio’s Randolph Air Force Base (the West Point of this branch of service) to Brownsville’s airport with its Pan American Airlines instrument flight school (which served as an international gateway to Latin America as early as the 1920s) to Houston’s Johnson Space Center, home of Mission Control for the US space program, the book provides an exhilarating timeline and engaging history of dozens of unsung pioneers as well as their more widely celebrated peers.   Drawn from personal interviews as well as major archives and the collections of several commercial airlines, including American, Southwest, Braniff, Pan American Airways, and Continental, this sweeping history captures the story of powered flight in Texas since 1910. With its generally favorable flying weather, flat terrain, and wide-open spaces, Texas has more airports than any other state and is often considered one of America’s most aviation-friendly places. Texas Takes Wing also explores the men and women who made the region pivotal in military training, aircraft manufacturing during wartime, general aviation, and air servicing of the agricultural industry. The result is a soaring history that will delight aviators and passengers alike.  Includes photos

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  Nikola Tesla and the Electrical...

  Iwan Rhys Morus

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  '[This] crisply succinct, beautifully synthesized study brings to life Tesla, his achievements and failures...and the hopeful thrum of an era before world wars.' - Nature
  
  Nikola Tesla is one of the most enigmatic, curious and controversial figures in the history of science. An electrical pioneer as influential in his own way as Thomas Edison, he embodied the aspirations and paradoxes of an age of innovation that seemed to have the future firmly in its grasp.
  
  In an era that saw the spread of power networks and wireless telegraphy, the discovery of X-rays, and the birth of powered flight, Tesla made himself synonymous with the electrical future under construction but opinion was often divided as to whether he was a visionary, a charlatan, or a fool.
  
  Iwan Rhys Morus examines Tesla's life in the context of the extraordinary times in which he lived and worked, colourfully evoking an age in which anything seemed possible, from capturing the full energy of Niagara to communicating with Mars.
  
  Shattering the myth of the 'man out of time', Morus demonstrates that Tesla was in all ways a product of his era, and shows how the popular image of the inventor-as-maverick-outsider was deliberately crafted by Tesla - establishing an archetype that still resonates today.

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