A Curious Man

Author : Neal Thompson
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 1448184371
Total Pages : 411 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Curious Man written by Neal Thompson and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-06-06 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most successful entertainment figures of his time, Robert Ripley’s life is the stuff of a classic American fairy tale. Bucktoothed and hampered by shyness, Ripley turned his sense of being an outsider into an appreciation of the weird and wonderful. He sold his first cartoon to LIFE magazine at eighteen, but it was his wildly popular ‘Believe It or Not!’ radio shows that won him international fame, and spurred him on to search the globe’s farthest corners for bizarre facts, human curiosities and shocking phenomena. Ripley delighted in making preposterous declarations that somehow turned out to be true – such as that Charles Lindburgh was only the sixty-seventh man to fly across the Atlantic or that ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ was not the USA’s national anthem. And he demanded respect for those who were labelled ‘eccentrics’ or ‘freaks’ – whether it be E. L. Blystone, who wrote 2,871 alphabet letters on a grain of rice, or the man who could swallow his own nose. By the 1930s, Ripley possessed a wide fortune, a private yacht and a huge mansion stocked with such oddities as shrunken heads and medieval torture devices. His pioneering firsts in print, radio and television tapped into something deep in the American consciousness – a taste for the titillating and exotic, and a fascination with the fastest, biggest, wackiest and weirdest – and ensured a worldwide legacy that continues today. This compelling biography portrays a man who was dedicated to exalting the strange and unusual – but who may have been the most amazing oddity of all.

Author : Nieper
Publisher : AuthorHouse
ISBN 13 : 1449067557
Total Pages : 230 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Curious Man written by Nieper and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2010-02 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Mark Kurlansky
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 0767930304
Total Pages : 290 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Birdseye written by Mark Kurlansky and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2013-02-12 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While working as a fur trapper in Labrador, Canada, Clarence Birdseye encountered an age-old problem: bad food and an unappealing, unhealthy diet. However, he observed that fresh vegetables wetted and left outside in the Arctic winds froze in a way that maintained their integrity after thawing. As a result, he developed his patented Birdseye freezing process and started the company that still bears his name. Birdseye forever changed the way we preserve, store, and distribute food, and the way we eat. Mark Kurlansky’s vibrant and affectionate narrative reveals Clarence Birdseye as a quintessential “can-do” American inventor—his other patents include an electric sunlamp, a harpoon gun to tag finback whales, and an improved incandescent lightbulb—and shows how the greatest of changes can come from the simplest of ideas and the unlikeliest of places.

Author : Francis Trevelyan Buckland
Publisher : McSweeney's
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 124 pages
Book Rating : 4.34/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Curious Men written by Francis Trevelyan Buckland and published by McSweeney's. This book was released on 2008 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection brings back to life eighteen tales from one of the most curious men of all.

Author : Mark Hodder
Publisher : Pyr
ISBN 13 : 1616143606
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man written by Mark Hodder and published by Pyr. This book was released on 2011-03-22 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark Hodder's second Burton & Swinburne steampunk adventure, following the acclaimed The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack, is filled with eccentric steam-driven technology, grotesque characters, and a deepening mystery. When a clockwork-powered man of brass is found abandoned in Trafalgar Square, Burton and his assistant, the wayward poet Algernon Swinburne, find themselves on the trail of the stolen Garnier Collection--black diamonds rumored to be fragments of the Lemurian Eye of Naga, a meteorite that fell to Earth in prehistoric times. From a haunted mansion to the Bedlam madhouse, from South America to Australia, from séances to a secret labyrinth, Burton struggles with shadowy opponents and his own inner demons. Can the king's agent expose a plot that threatens to rip the British Empire apart, leading to an international conflict the like of which the world has never seen? And what part does the clockwork man have to play? From the Trade Paperback edition.

Author : Brian Grazer
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 147673075X
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Curious Mind written by Brian Grazer and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-04-07 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Academy Award–winning producer Brian Grazer and an acclaimed business journalist examine the weekly “curiosity conversations” that have inspired Grazer to create some of America's favorite and iconic movies and television shows—from 24 to A Beautiful Mind.

Author : Renee Angers
Publisher : Mushroom Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1843190893
Total Pages : 199 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Ice and a Curious Man written by Renee Angers and published by Mushroom Publishing. This book was released on 2002-09-01 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just North of Dillingham, Alaska lives a reclusive poet named Shane Helnsley. Nobody knows what he is about or even what he looks like. The rumors about him are rampant and really quite revolting, but his works are considered masterpieces and are sought after by the public. Marren Lang is the writer hired by Helnsley to interview him -- an unpleasant task. What Lang encounters in Alaska is the last thing she could have ever expected. The warnings about the old toothless pervert who lives like a savage are the least of her worries. Within hours of her arrival on the new landscape she learns she has much more to contend with. Helnsley teaches Lang to rudely stare down her own demons and face truths that are rarely respected when numbed by civilized society. Ice and a Curious Man melts selfishness down to an unthreatening puddle and bravely shouts that no book can ever be judged by its cover.

Author : Mario Livio
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1476792127
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Why? written by Mario Livio and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-07-11 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Astrophysicist and author Mario Livio investigates perhaps the most human of all our characteristics—curiosity—in this “lively, expert, and definitely not dumbed-down account” (Kirkus Reviews) as he explores our innate desire to know why. Experiments demonstrate that people are more distracted when they overhear a phone conversation—where they can know only one side of the dialogue—than when they overhear two people talking and know both sides. Why does half a conversation make us more curious than a whole conversation? “Have you ever wondered why we wonder why? Mario Livio has, and he takes you on a fascinating quest to understand the origin and mechanisms of our curiosity. I thoroughly recommend it.” (Adam Riess, Nobel Prize Winner in Physics, 2011). Curiosity is not only at the heart of mystery and suspense novels, it is also essential to other creative endeavors, from painting to sculpture to music. It is the principal driver of basic scientific research. Even so, there is still no definitive scientific consensus about why we humans are so curious, or about the mechanisms in our brain that are responsible for curiosity. In the ever-fascinating Why? Livio interviewed scientists in several fields to explore the nature of curiosity. He examined the lives of two of history’s most curious geniuses, Leonardo da Vinci and Richard Feynman. He also talked to people with boundless curiosity: a superstar rock guitarist who is also an astrophysicist; an astronaut with degrees in computer science, biology, literature, and medicine. What drives these people to be curious about so many subjects? An astrophysicist who has written about mathematics, biology, and now psychology and neuroscience, Livio has firsthand knowledge of his subject which he explores in a lucid, entertaining way that will captivate anyone who is curious about curiosity.

Author : Richard P. Feynman
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393079813
Total Pages : 345 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book "What Do You Care What Other People Think?": Further Adventures of a Curious Character written by Richard P. Feynman and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2011-02-14 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times best-selling sequel to "Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!" One of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century, Richard Feynman possessed an unquenchable thirst for adventure and an unparalleled ability to tell the stories of his life. "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" is Feynman’s last literary legacy, prepared with his friend and fellow drummer, Ralph Leighton. Among its many tales—some funny, others intensely moving—we meet Feynman’s first wife, Arlene, who taught him of love’s irreducible mystery as she lay dying in a hospital bed while he worked nearby on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. We are also given a fascinating narrative of the investigation of the space shuttle Challenger’s explosion in 1986, and we relive the moment when Feynman revealed the disaster’s cause by an elegant experiment: dropping a ring of rubber into a glass of cold water and pulling it out, misshapen.

Author : Stewart Cowley
Publisher : Aurum Press
ISBN 13 : 9781781316917
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Man vs Money written by Stewart Cowley and published by Aurum Press. This book was released on 2017-08-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economics expert Stewart Cowley distils the complexities of modern-day money and our relationship with it, explaining how you can use economics to your advantage and that understanding economics can improve your life. Along the way you will discover how the statistics that govern our world are based on guesswork, why stock markets are like a wandering drunken man, what you need to live like a millionaire, and why cooking has made man the dominant species on the planet. Where is all the money? How does a country go bust? Should I get paid in Bitcoin? Wherever you go, whatever you do, however you live your life, money plays a role. Getting it, keeping it, and making more out of it has been one of man’s major preoccupations for the past five thousand years. From buying a sandwich to earning a wage, going on holiday to playing the lottery, how money and economics governs our world is fascinating. And it’s just about to get more curious; the arrival of modern banking, crowd funding, investments at the touch of a smartphone, and virtual currencies means, for many of us, it is even more complex.