Sean Lahman

As a result of a lunchtime conversation with Professor Wendell Garner concerning the productiveness of the sacrifice bunt, Earnshaw Cook took on the three-year task of presenting a formal analysis of baseball. His analysis, explained in terms perfectly clear to anyone with college freshman level mathematics, suggests that no one has ever known the true percentages, and if anyone did know them he could manage almost any team into the top ranks of major league baseball. Among other theories that Cook attacks with irrefutable mathematical findings are the benefits of the sacrifice bunt, the use of relief pitchers, the traditional batting order, the hit and run play, and the standardization of baseball itself. As with almost any serious innovation, the first edition of this book met with bitter controversy and criticism from some baseball fans, team managers, and sportswriters. James Gallagher in Sporting News wrote, "I do not understand how the Baltimore mathematicians reached their controversial conclusions, but in my book any generalizations about baseball have to be wrong." Yet in 1964 this "Baltimore mathematician," using his scoring index, K.2 factors, base-scoring equations, etc., predicted that the hometown Baltimore Orioles would finish in fourth place behind, in order, New York, Chicago, and Minnesota -- with perfect accuracy!

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • This follow-up to The Underground Railroad brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys unjustly sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. • "One of the most gifted novelists in America today." —NPR Nickel Boys, now a major motion picture directed by Academy Award® nominee RaMell Ross. Now Playing in select theaters. When Elwood Curtis, a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, he finds himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors. Elwood’s only salvation is his friendship with fellow “delinquent” Turner, which deepens despite Turner’s conviction that Elwood is hopelessly naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble. As life at the Academy becomes ever more perilous, the tension between Elwood’s ideals and Turner’s skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades. Based on the real story of a reform school that operated for 111 years and warped the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative that showcases a great American novelist writing at the height of his powers and “should further cement Whitehead as one of his generation's best" (Entertainment Weekly). Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto!

Astrophysicist and NPR commentator on what the latest research on the existence and trajectories of alien civilizations may teach us about our own. Light of the Stars tells the story of humanity’s coming of age as we awaken to the possibilities of life on other worlds and their sudden relevance to our fate on Earth. Astrophysicist Adam Frank traces the question of alien life and intelligence from the ancient Greeks to the leading thinkers of our own time, and shows how we as a civilization can only hope to survive climate change if we recognize what science has recently discovered: that we are just one of ten billion trillion planets in the Universe, and it’s highly likely that many of those planets hosted technologically advanced alien civilizations. What’s more, each of those civilizations must have faced the same challenge of civilization-driven climate change. Written with great clarity and conviction, Light of the Stars builds on the inspiring work of pioneering scientists such as Frank Drake and Carl Sagan, whose work at the dawn of the space age began building the new science of astrobiology; Jack James, the Texas-born engineer who drove NASA’s first planetary missions to success; Vladimir Vernadsky, the Russian geochemist who first envisioned the Earth’s biosphere; and James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, who invented Gaia theory. Frank recounts the perilous journey NASA undertook across millions of miles of deep space to get its probes to Venus and Mars, yielding our first view of the cosmic laws of planets and climate that changed our understanding of our place in the universe. Thrilling science at the grandest of scales, Light of the Stars explores what may be the largest question of all: What can the likely presence of life on other worlds tell us about our own fate? 20 illustrations