Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Publishing" in Biographies

Throughout history, people have experimented, invented, and created new ways of doing things. Kid Innovators tells the stories of a diverse group of brilliant thinkers in fields like technology, education, business, science, art, and entertainment, reminding us that every innovator started out as a kid. Florence Nightingale rescued baby mice, Alan Turing was a daydreamer with terrible handwriting, and Alvin Ailey felt like a failure at sports. 

Dubai wunderkind Michelle Rasul was only a toddler when she first got behind the turntables. By the time she entered the 2021 DMC Global DJing Championship, she was on her way to becoming an international celebrity. Her inspiring autobiography is a testament to passion, talent, family, love, and perseverance—and above all, a celebration of Girl Power with some scratching and a beat.

Inspiring, relatable, and totally true biographies tell the childhood stories of a diverse group of trailblazers including Kamala Harris, Greta Thunberg, Ai Weiwei, Benazir Bhutto, Elliot Page, and John Lewis, along with ten other powerful figures. Kid Trailblazers highlights contemporary figures who have led the way in government, social activism, environmental justice, and the arts. 

What was Isaac Newton like? Secretive, vindictive, withdrawn, obsessive, and oh, yes, brilliant. His imagination was so large that, just “by thinking on it”, he invented calculus and figured out the scientific explanation of gravity. Yet Newton was so small-minded that he set out to destroy other scientists who dared question his findings. This compelling portrait of Newton, contradictions and all, places him against the backdrop of 17th-century England, a time of plague, the Great Fire of London, and two revolutions.

In 1910, Captain Robert Scott prepared his crew for a trip that no one had ever completed: a journey to the South Pole. He vowed to get there any way he could, even if it meant looking death in the eye. Then, not long before he set out, another intrepid explorer, Roald Amundsen, set his sights on the same goal. Suddenly two teams were vying to be the first to make history - what was to be an expedition had become a perilous race. In 2018, Captain Louis Rudd readied himself for a similarly grueling task: the first solo crossing of treacherous Antarctica.  

Listeners have come to expect chatty, direct narratives that develop distinct characters and place those individuals squarely in the context of both their times and their disciplines, and this account of the noted physicist’s life delivers the goods. From her childhood in an oppressed Poland, the daughter of two highly educated individuals, Curie emerges as a driven woman, determined to excel for both her parents’ and her country’s sake - this drive informing everything that followed.

Albert Einstein: His name has become a synonym for genius. His wild case of bedhead and playful sense of humor made him a media superstar - the first, maybe only, scientist-celebrity. He wasn’t much for lab work - in fact, he had a tendency to blow up experiments. What he liked to do was think - not in words, but in "thought experiments". What was the result of all his thinking? Nothing less than the overturning of Newtonian physics. Once again, Kathleen Krull delivers a witty and astute look at one of the true giants of science and the turbulent times in which he lived.

In April 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope team unveiled the first ever image of a super massive black hole. This inspiring scientific breakthrough took years of hard work, innovative thinking, and a level of global cooperation never seen before. A multinational team of scientists, lead by Dr. Shep Doeleman and Dr. Heino Falkem, used eight of the largest telescopes from around the world to collect more than four million billion bytes of data, which was flown to teams of computer scientists and mathematicians.

Discover how animals influenced 20 of the world's most beloved authors, from Charles Dickens to J. K. Rowling. Did you know that a dog saved Pablo Neruda's life? Or that Mark Twain had a cat named Bambino? Or that Edgar Allan Poe wrote with a cat on his shoulders? Writers and Their Pets tells these stories and many more that will delight not only children but also literary experts, history lovers, and animal enthusiasts. Writers and Their Pets features a diverse list of both male and female international authors, from the 19th to the 21st century.

Sure, almost all kids know Benjamin Franklin as one of America's Founding Fathers, a man with a hand in both the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. And they may even have some vague idea that he once flew a kite during a lightning storm. What Kathleen Krull sets out to do in this very different biography is show Ben Franklin as the natural philosopher (the term for scientists back in the 1700s), whose experiments led to important discoveries about the nature of electricity - including his famous demonstration that electricity and lightning were one and the same.

All his life, Charles Darwin hated controversy. Yet he takes his place among the Giants of Science for what remains an immensely controversial subject: the theory of evolution. Darwin began piecing together his explanation for how all living things change or adapt during his five-year voyage on the HMS Beagle. But it took him 20 years to go public, for fear of the backlash his theory would cause.

This book explores the world of Sigmund Freud, who, making it into the author's highly popular series due to his creation of a brand-new branch of medicine called psychoanalysis, introduced the world to such controversial theories as Oedipal complexes, the id, and the ego.

Cesar Chavez is known as one of America’s greatest civil rights leaders. When he led a 340-mile peaceful protest march through California, he ignited a cause and improved the lives of thousands of migrant farmworkers. But Cesar wasn’t always a leader. As a boy, he was shy and teased at school. His family slaved in the fields for barely enough money to survive.

Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks are mind-boggling evidence of a 15th-century scientific genius standing at the edge of the modern world, basing his ideas on observation and experimentation. This book will change children’s ideas of who Leonardo was and what it means to be a scientist.