Gonzo: A Graphic Biography of Hunter S. Thompson

Will Bingley

Fear and loathing in six panels.

Trees of Life: A Visual History of Evolution

Theodore W. Pietsch

Trees of Life – a visual history of evolution in 450 years of tree-like diagrams of the living world.

Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire

Eric Berkowitz

Writer and lawyer Eric Berkowitz explores the millennia-long quest to regulate and mandate one of the strongest drivers of human behavior, and the tragic deformities that result from the dictatorship of external authority over the most intimate of inner realities. Tracing how we went from the male bonding ceremonies commonly performed in medieval Mediterranean churches to the lesbian executions in 18th-century Germany, along the entire spectrum of cultural attitudes towards mistresses, goat-lovers, prostitutes, medieval transvestites, adulterers, and other sexual norm nonconformists, Berkowitz brings an eye-opening lens to one the most mercilessly judged yet universal aspects of being human.

Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone

Eric Klinenberg

“Despite its prevalence, living alone is one of the least discussed and, consequently, most poorly understood issues of our time.”

100 Ideas that Changed Graphic Design

Steven Heller

From visual puns to the grid, or what Edward Tufte has to do with the invention of the fine print.

Frank Lloyd Wright: Graphic Artist

Penny Fowler

An unprecedented look at the iconic architect’s diverse contribution to graphic design — his covers for Liberty (some of which were so radical the magazine rejected them), his mural designs for Midway Gardens, his photographic experiments, his hand-drawn typographical studies, the jacket designs for his own publications, including The House Beautiful and An Autobiography, and a wealth more.

The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

Jonathan Gottschall

“Human minds yield helplessly to the suction of story. No matter how hard we concentrate, no matter how deep we dig in our heels, we just can’t resist the gravity of alternate worlds.”

Educator and science writer Jonathan Gottschall traces the roots, both evolutionary and sociocultural, of the transfixing grip storytelling has on our hearts and minds, individually and collectively. What emerges is a kind of “unified theory of storytelling,” revealing not only our gift for manufacturing truthiness in the narratives we tell ourselves and others, but also the remarkable capacity of stories — the right kinds of them — to change our shared experience for the better.

The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell: 1944-1969

Bertrand Russell

1. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

From Russell’s A Liberal Decalogue — his list of the Ten Commandments that outline the essential responsibilities of a teacher.

Luigi Russolo, Futurist: Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult

Luciano Chessa

Italian Futurist painter and composer Luigi Russolo (1885-1947), best-known for authoring the 1913 manifesto The Art of Noises (public library) and regarded as the first noise artist, is the father of the first systematic poetics of noise. He Russolo played a crucial role in the evolution of 20th-century musical aesthetics and influenced such music icons as Edgar Varese, Pierre Schaeffer, and John Cage. He was also one of the first theorists of electronic music and is even considered by some the inventor of the synthesizer. Yet despite enormous interest in his work, Russolo’s life remained largely unexamined — until now.

Here, composer and San Francisco Conservatory music history professor Luciano Chessa reconstructs Russolo’s life through ambitious archival research, uncovering and digesting esoteric and obscure texts to reverse-engineer how the artist’s eccentric interests influenced his creative output — namely an interest in the supernatural and, more specifically, in the occult.

The Freud Files: An Inquiry into the History of Psychoanalysis

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen

In 1916, Freud took the stage in Vienna in front of an audience that had gathered to hear the eighteenth of his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, and proceeded to canonize himself by staking his place in the history of humanity alongside Copernicus and Darwin, the former having solved geocentrism, the latter anthropocentrism, and Freud himself, allegedly, egocentrism. He likened the criticism psychoanalysis, “his” “science,” was receiving to that Copernicus and Darwin faced when their theories first confronted the status quo. Over the century that followed, Freud’s legacy penetrated society and went on to underpin the making of consumer culture. But understanding the story, the complete story, of how Freud became Freud hinges on understanding the story’s very storiness.

Science and the Indian Tradition: When Einstein Met Tagore (India in the Modern World)

David L. Gosling

In 1930, Indian philosopher Rabindranath Tagore met Albert Einstein. One of history’s most stimulating and intellectually riveting conversations ensued – collision and convergence in Truth and Beauty as the two explored the intersection of science and spirituality.

Free Radicals: The Secret Anarchy of Science

Michael Brooks

The story of scientific rule-breakers, the men and women who experimented on themselves, had fantastic visions and unexplainable hunches, and took once-in-a-lifetime risks, all in the name of pursuing curiosity.

Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art

Peter Barber

This lavish tome collects cartographic curiosities from the golden age of display maps — the period between 1450 and 1800, when maps were as much a practical tool for navigation as they were works of art and affirmations of cultural hegemony or social status — culled from the formidable collection of the British Library.

In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World

Ian Stewart

“The power of equations lies in the philosophically difficult correspondence between mathematics, a collective creation of human minds, and an external physical reality. Equations model deep patterns in the outside world. By learning to value equations, and to read the stories they tell, we can uncover vital features of the world around us… This is the story of the ascent of humanity, told in 17 equations.”

The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present

Eric Kandel

Something unusual defined Vienna between 1890 and 1918, something that shaped more of Western culture than we dare suspect — artists, writers, thinkers and scientists across biology, medicine, and psychoanalysis came into regular contact and, in the process of these interactions, steered the course of modern art and science.