Like Charles Seife’s Zero and Dava Sobel’s Longitude, this passionate intellectual history is the story of the intersection of science and the human, in this case the rivals who discovered oxygen in the late 1700s. That breakthrough changed the world as radically as those of Newton and Darwin but was at first eclipsed by revolution and reaction. In chronicling the triumph and ruin of the English freethinker Joseph Priestley and the French nobleman Antoine Lavoisier—the former exiled, the latter executed on the guillotine—A World on Fire illustrates the perilous place of science in an age of unreason.

A World on Fire: A Heretic, an Aristocrat, and the Race to Discover Oxygen

Biographies & Memoirs

Jackson, Joe

Historical

Penguin??Books

The amazing tale of one of history's most daring acts of biopiracy-and how it changed history In this thrilling real-life account of bravery, greed, obsession, and ultimate betrayal, award- winning writer Joe Jackson brings to life the story of fortune hunter Henry Wickham and his collaboration with the empire that fueled, then abandoned him. In 1876, Wickham smuggled 70,000 rubber tree seeds out of the rainforests of Brazil and delivered them to Victorian England's most prestigious scientists at Kew Gardens. The story of how Wickham got his hands on those seeds-and the history-making consequences-is the stuff of legend. The Thief at the End of the World is an exciting true story of reckless courage and ambition that perfectly captures the essential nature of Great Britain's colonial adventure in South America.

The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire

Business & Money

Economics

When an accident with an open oil lantern set the American clipper Hornet alight in 1866, the 31 passengers and crew were forced to abandon ship. Cast adrift in three small lifeboats, they had less than 10 days rations to share between them. They were over 1000 miles from the nearest island. Over the next six weeks they were to encounter every danger the Pacific could throw at them. They were attacked by sharks and swordfish. They endured storms, and even tornadoes. Their hunger became so intense that they resorted to eating their clothes, and later, half-mad from the effects of drinking sea-water, were driven to the edge of cannibalism. A FURNACE AFLOAT tells the story of their 4000-mile voyage through the eyes of three men, who kept journals throughout their ordeal. It is one of the rare, great historical survival stories, and yet it also transcends its genre: the boatful of castaways becomes a microcosm of 1866 America - a diverse mix of immigrants struggling to overcome class divisions, and to recover from the recent Civil War.

A Furnace Afloat : The Wreck of the 'Hornet' and the 4,300-Mile Voyage of Its Survivors

Orion Pub Co

"Part memoir, part discourse on the art of music. . . . This is an intelligent, thoughtful look into the mind of an artist."--New York Times Book Review Since the release of his first best-selling album Look Sharp in 1979, Joe Jackson has forged a singular career in music through his originality as a composer and his notoriously independent stance toward music-business fashion. He has also been a famously private person, whose lack of interest in his own celebrity has been interpreted by some as aloofness. That reputation is shattered by A Cure for Gravity, Jackson's enormously funny and revealing memoir of growing up musical, from a culturally impoverished childhood in a rough English port town to the Royal Academy of Music, through London's Punk and New Wave scenes, up to the brink of pop stardom. Jackson describes his life as a teenage Beethoven fanatic; his early piano gigs for audiences of glass-throwing skinheads; and his days on the road with long-forgotten club bands. Far from a standard-issue celebrity autobiography, A Cure for Gravity is a smart, passionate book about music, the creative process, and coming of age as an artist. Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award Finalist

A Cure For Gravity: A Musical Pilgrimage

Arts & Literature

Da Capo Press

For five weeks--from April 14 to May 21, 1927--the world held its breath while fourteen aviators took to the air to capture the $25,000 prize that Raymond Orteig offered to the first man to cross the Atlantic Ocean without stopping.
Joe Jackson's Atlantic Fever is about this race, a milestone in American history whose story has never been fully told. Delving into the lives of the big-name competitors--the polar explorer Richard Byrd, the French war hero René Fonck, the millionaire Charles Levine, and the race's eventual winner, the enigmatic Charles Lindbergh--as well as those whose names have been forgotten by history (such as Bernt Balchen, Stanton Wooster, and Clarence Chamberlin), Jackson brings a completely fresh and original perspective to the race to conquer the Atlantic.
 Atlantic Fever opens for us one of those magical windows onto a moment when the nexus of technology, innovation, character, and spirit led so many contenders from different parts of the world to be on the cusp of the exact same achievement at the exact same time.

Atlantic Fever: Lindbergh, His Competitors, and the Race to Cross the Atlantic

History

World

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Winner of the Society of American Historians' Francis Parkman Prize Winner of the PEN / Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Best Biography of 2016, True West magazine Winner of the Western Writers of America 2017 Spur Award, Best Western Biography Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography Long-listed for the Cundill History Prize One of the Best Books of 2016, The Boston Globe
The epic life story of the Native American holy man who has inspired millions around the world
Black Elk, the Native American holy man, is known to millions of readers around the world from his 1932 testimonial Black Elk Speaks. Adapted by the poet John G. Neihardt from a series of interviews with Black Elk and other elders at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, Black Elk Speaks is one of the most widely read and admired works of American Indian literature. Cryptic and deeply personal, it has been read as a spiritual guide, a philosophical manifesto, and a text to be deconstructed―while the historical Black Elk has faded from view.
In this sweeping book, Joe Jackson provides the definitive biographical account of a figure whose dramatic life converged with some of the most momentous events in the history of the American West. Born in an era of rising violence between the Sioux, white settlers, and U.S. government troops, Black Elk killed his first man at the Little Bighorn, witnessed the death of his second cousin Crazy Horse, and traveled to Europe with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. Upon his return, he was swept up in the traditionalist Ghost Dance movement and shaken by the Massacre at Wounded Knee. But Black Elk was not a warrior, instead accepting the path of a healer and holy man, motivated by a powerful prophetic vision that he struggled to understand. Although Black Elk embraced Catholicism in his later years, he continued to practice the old ways clandestinely and never refrained from seeking meaning in the visions that both haunted and inspired him.
In Black Elk, Jackson has crafted a true American epic, restoring to its subject the richness of his times and gorgeously portraying a life of heroism and tragedy, adaptation and endurance, in an era of permanent crisis on the Great Plains.

Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary

Community & Culture

Traces the dramatic efforts of Henry Wickham to obtain and smuggle an invaluable cache of rubber tree seeds out of the Brazilian rainforest and into Victorian England, where they gave way to the early twentieth century's rubber boom. 20,000 first printing.

Viking Adult

Traces the breakthrough discovery of oxygen at the end of the 1700s by a pair of rival scientists, describing how English dissenter Joseph Priestley and French aristocrat Antoine Lavoisier waged a fierce competition to solve the "riddle of air" in spite of such historical challenges as the American Revolution and the storming of the Bastille. 25,000 first printing.

The amazing tale of one of history’s most daring acts of biopiracy—and how it changed history In this thrilling real-life account of bravery, greed, obsession, and ultimate betrayal, award- winning writer Joe Jackson brings to life the story of fortune hunter Henry Wickham and his collaboration with the empire that fueled, then abandoned him. In 1876, Wickham smuggled 70,000 rubber tree seeds out of the rainforests of Brazil and delivered them to Victorian England’s most prestigious scientists at Kew Gardens. The story of how Wickham got his hands on those seeds—and the history-making consequences—is the stuff of legend. The Thief at the End of the World is an exciting true story of reckless courage and ambition that perfectly captures the essential nature of Great Britain’s colonial adventure in South America.

Thief at the End of the World

Industries

Gerald Duckworth Co Ltd

Traces the story of an 1866 American clipper ship that accidentally caught on fire and sank, stranding its crews on three small life boats for more than six weeks—with limited resources and under the burning sun—before they resorted to cannibalism and eventually reached Hawaii. 25,000 first printing.

A Furnace Afloat: The Wreck of the Hornet and the Harrowing 4,300-mile Voyage of Its Survivors

Americas

Free Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jackson, Joe. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Jackson, Joe

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jackson, Joe. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

A World on Fire: A Heretic, an Aristocrat, and the Race to Discover Oxygen

The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire

A Furnace Afloat : The Wreck of the 'Hornet' and the 4,300-Mile Voyage of Its Survivors

A Cure For Gravity: A Musical Pilgrimage

Atlantic Fever: Lindbergh, His Competitors, and the Race to Cross the Atlantic

Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary

The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire

A World on Fire: A Heretic, an Aristocrat, and the Race to Discover Oxygen

Thief at the End of the World

A Furnace Afloat: The Wreck of the Hornet and the Harrowing 4,300-mile Voyage of Its Survivors