Books like One Good Turn by Witold Rybczynski

Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs draws on more than forty interviews with the pioneer and the perspectives of family, friends, competitors, and colleagues, portraying his relentless drive, meticulous perfectionism, and profound influence on personal computing, animation, music, phones, tablets and digital publishing.

Walter Isaacson’s biography reveals Leonardo da Vinci as a restless genius whose notebooks and inventions connect his celebrated paintings to groundbreaking science, illustrating how curiosity, observation, and imagination forge lasting creativity.

Walter Isaacson chronicles the minds that forged the digital age, from Ada Lovelace to Larry Page, showing how vision, collaboration, and engineering transformed abstract ideas into the computers, Internet, and technology we use today.

A biography of Srinivasa Ramanujan that traces his upbringing in India, his extraordinary mathematical achievements, and his collaboration with G. H. Hardy at Cambridge.

An analysis of IQ, genetics, environment, social class, and education in the United States, examining how intelligence test scores reflect both biological and social factors.

The Bully Pulpit traces the complex friendship and bitter rivalry of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, showing how their 1912 presidential battle reshaped the Republican Party and weakened progressivism.

An orchardist's lonely existence torn by love and pain, captured in vivid nature and human relationships.

Simon Winchester chronicles the life of Cambridge biochemist Joseph Needham, whose passion for China led him to uncover the empire's pioneering inventions—from printing to the compass—and to author the monumental *Science and Civilisation in China* series.

David McCullough chronicles the daring brothers who, in 1903, achieved the first human‑powered flight on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, revealing their ingenuity, determination, and the family support that drove their success.

A spy thriller set against the backdrop of World War II Paris, focusing on Jean Casson's tumultuous romance and moral compromises during the occupation.

Michael Gross, chronicler of America's rich and powerful, goes west to uncover the very secret history of Los Angeles, specifically those wealthiest and most private of enclaves--Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Holmby Hills, and Beverly Park--through their most mind-boggling estates, and the fascinating, fabulous folks who created and populate them. Gross begins with the mob-driven history of the newest mega-mansion district in L.A., Beverly Park. Using the century-long evolution from adobe huts to $100 million mansions as the baseline of the story, he reveals how a few powerful and often ruthless oil and railroad magnates imposed their idyllic vision of the good life on the Los Angeles landscape to create the legendary communities known as the Platinum Triangle. But the stories of these homes are just a window onto the lives of their owners and occupants over the course of the twentieth century.--From publisher description.

In Slave in a Box, M. M. Manring investigates why the troubling figure of Aunt Jemima has endured in American culture. The author traces the evolution of the mammy from her roots in Old South slave reality and mythology, through reinterpretations during Reconstruction and in minstrel shows and turn-of-the-century advertisements, to Aunt Jemima's symbolic role in the Civil Rights movement and her present incarnation as a "working grandmother." The reader learns how advertising entrepreneur James Webb Young, aided by celebrated illustrator N. C. Wyeth, skillfully tapped into nostalgic 1920s perceptions of the South as a culture of white leisure and black labor. Aunt Jemima's ready-mixed products offered middle-class housewives the next best thing to a black servant: a "slave in a box" that conjured up romantic images of not only the food but also the social hierarchy of the plantation South.

A thrilling tale of espionage and love in wartime Paris, featuring a foreign correspondent who must navigate the treacherous politics of Europe as he races to protect a clandestine newspaper and its brave editors, journalists, and scientists who risk everything for a free Italy.

Martin Dugard recounts the dramatic 1998 Sydney‑Hobart Yacht Race, a storm‑ridden event that produced multiple yachting accidents and large‑scale search and rescue operations across Australian waters.

A biography of Bayard Rustin, focusing on his work as a civil rights organizer and strategist, including his role in the Montgomery bus boycott and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.