Stephen Bowlby

Factories, with their ingenious machinery and miraculous productivity, are celebrated as modern wonders of the world. Yet from William Blake's "dark Satanic mills" they have also fuelled our fears of the future. Telling the story of the factory, Joshua B. Freeman takes readers from the textile mills in England that powered the Industrial Revolution to the steel and car plants of twentieth-century America, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, to today's...

"A vivid narrative that connects the lives of four great astronomers and the scientific discovery that ushered in the modern era. Before the invention of the telescope, people used nothing more than their naked eye to understand what took place in the visible sky. So how did four men in the sixteenth century--of different nationality, age, religion, and class--collaborate to discover that the earth revolved around the sun? With this radical discovery,...

A 1940s Hollywood gumshoe heads to San Francisco to foil a very real phantom of the opera in this “believable and entertaining” mystery (Publishers Weekly).
 
1942 is a dangerous year to stage Madama Butterfly. Although Puccini’s masterpiece is a perennial favorite of the San Francisco opera crowd, its sympathetic depiction of a Japanese girl causes tension a year after Pearl Harbor. Newspaper...

Gen. Douglas MacArthur enlists the help of a discreet private detective in “one of the sprightliest of the [Toby Peters] series” (Time).
 
It’s September 1942, and Gen. Douglas MacArthur believes he’s got what it takes to win the war in the Pacific—but he’s got a personal problem to take care of first. An aide has run off with his war chest, his donor list, and a handful of embarrassing...

Time is running out for surrealist painter Salvador Dalí and a 1940s Hollywood PI: “Fast-paced, well-plotted, consistently funny” (The Philadelphia Inquirer).
 
Talk about surreal! An ax-wielding monk hacks at a door, while on the other side private detective Toby Peters is running as fast as his recently broken leg will allow, alongside Salvador Dalí, dressed in a rabbit suit, repeatedly muttering...

Goodness has nothing to do with it as a hard-luck private eye in 1940s Hollywood takes a case for legendary silver screen sex symbol Mae West.
 
In the early days of talking pictures, the greatest sex symbol in Hollywood was the platinum-blonde bad girl Mae West. Naughty and gorgeous with a razor-sharp wit, West wrote her own material and controlled her own image—until the censors came in and outlawed the racy repartee...

Best-selling author Jeff Alworth takes serious beer aficionados on a behind-the-scenes tour of 26 major European and North American breweries that create some of the world’s most classic beers. Learn how the Irish make stout, the secrets of traditional Czech pilsner, and what makes English cask ale unique by delving deep into the specific techniques, equipment, and geographical factors that shape these distinctive styles. Contemporary brewers...

"The Very Last Interview is a unique work, a lacerating self-examination that came about when David decided to gather every interview he ever did, going back nearly 40 years. If it was radio or TV, he transcribed it. He wasn't sure what he was looking for, but he knew he wasn't interested in any of his own answers. The questions interested him - approximately 2,700, which he collated and cut down to form 22 chapters focused on subjects that include...

"The Mysterious Romance of Murder is about mysteries, murder-mystery movies and books, and about the romance of "noir" as a style, an outlook, a spirit"--

A forgotten heroine of science and how she solved one of the crucial mysteries of the universe. How big is the universe? In the early twentieth century, scientists took sides. One held that the entire universe was contained in the Milky Way galaxy. Their champion was the strong-willed astronomer Harlow Shapley. Another camp believed that the universe was so vast that the Milky Way was just one galaxy among billions―the view that would prevail,...