In an overwhelming world, how can our lives be shaped to their greatest potential? David F. Ford examines the whirl of life today – the endless information that inundates us and pervades our lives. He serves up practical wisdom for coping creatively, offering a vision of genuine Christian life that can face the best and worst of today’s world.

In A Shape in the Dark, wilderness guide and lifelong Alaskan Bjorn Dihle weaves personal experience with historical and contemporary accounts to explore the world of brown bears--from encounters with the Lewis and Clark Expedition, frightening attacks including the famed death of Timothy Treadwell, the controversies related to bear hunting, the animal’s place in native cultures, and the impacts on the species from habitat degradation and climate change. Much more than a report on human-bear interactions, this compelling story intimately explores our relationship with one of the world’s most powerful predators. An authentic and thoughtful work, it blends outdoor adventure, history, and elements of memoir to present a mesmerizing portrait of Alaska’s brown bears and grizzlies, informed by the species’ larger history and their fragile future.

A Fields medalist recounts his lifelong effort to uncover the geometric shape—the Calabi-Yau manifold—that may store the hidden dimensions of our universe. Harvard geometer Shing-Tung Yau has provided a mathematical foundation for string theory, offered new insights into black holes, and mathematically demonstrated the stability of our universe. In this autobiography, Yau reflects on his improbable journey to becoming one of the world’s most distinguished mathematicians. Beginning with an impoverished childhood in China and Hong Kong, Yau takes readers through his doctoral studies at Berkeley during the height of the Vietnam War protests, his Fields Medal–winning proof of the Calabi conjecture, his return to China, and his pioneering work in geometric analysis. This new branch of geometry, which Yau built up with his friends and colleagues, has paved the way for solutions to several important and previously intransigent problems. With complicated ideas explained for a broad audience, this book offers not only insights into the life of an eminent mathematician, but also an accessible way to understand advanced and highly abstract concepts in mathematics and theoretical physics. “The remarkable story of one of the world’s most accomplished mathematicians . . . Yau’s personal journey—from escaping China as a youngster, leading a gang outside Hong Kong, becoming captivated by mathematics, to making breakthroughs that thrust him on the world stage—inspires us all with humankind’s irrepressible spirit of discovery.” —Brian Greene, New York Times–bestselling author of The Elegant Universe “An unexpectedly intimate look into a highly accomplished man, his colleagues and friends, the development of a new field of geometric analysis, and a glimpse into a truly uncommon mind.” —The Boston Globe “Engaging, eminently readable. . . . For those with a taste for elegant and largely jargon-free explanations of mathematics, The Shape of a Life promises hours of rewarding reading.” —American Scientist

Cambridge theologian David Ford has written a masterful book on tapping into the deep resources of God to provide directions for everyday life, life that in our times is marked by information overload, insecurity, and overwhelming responsibility.

A biophysicist reveals the hidden unity behind nature’s breathtaking complexity The form and function of a sprinting cheetah are quite unlike those of a rooted tree. A human being is very different from a bacterium or a zebra. The living world is a realm of dazzling variety, yet a shared set of physical principles shapes the forms and behaviors of every creature in it. So Simple a Beginning shows how the emerging new science of biophysics is transforming our understanding of life on Earth and enabling potentially lifesaving but controversial technologies such as gene editing, artificial organ growth, and ecosystem engineering. Raghuveer Parthasarathy explains how four basic principles—self-assembly, regulatory circuits, predictable randomness, and scaling—shape the machinery of life on scales ranging from microscopic molecules to gigantic elephants. He describes how biophysics is helping to unlock the secrets of a host of natural phenomena, such as how your limbs know to form at the proper places, and why humans need lungs but ants do not. Parthasarathy explores how the cutting-edge biotechnologies of tomorrow could enable us to alter living things in ways both subtle and profound. Featuring dozens of original watercolors and drawings by the author, this sweeping tour of biophysics offers astonishing new perspectives on how the wonders of life can arise from so simple a beginning.

Describes how to unleash the individuality and uniqueness that God has bestowed, revealing how to tap into the mysteries of our makeup and potential, which will lead to a path of purpose, freedom, confidence, and fulfillment.

Since he followed it all of his life, Richard Neutra (1892-1970) must have relished the maxim of the Greek philosopher Socrates: "The unexamined life is not worth living." In his books, articles, lectures, correspondence, and even casual conversations, Neutra constantly examined, not only his own life, but the lives of others - present and past - and the human and natural world they inhabited. Nowhere was this truer than in his autobiography "Life and Shape", first published in 1962, which now, after years of being out of print, has again happily come back to life. As opposed to "Survival Through Design" (1954), his superb collection of densely philosophical essays, Neutra took a different tack in "Life and Shape", following a lighter and more deliberately relaxed approach. It was as if the usually serious and intense Neutra was giving himself permission to reveal his richly ironic sense of humor and to probe areas in his personal experience which he had not examined as closely before. These included hitherto unrecorded memories of his parents, siblings, and his childhood and education in imperial Vienna, his numbing experiences as an Austrian artillery officer in World War I, and the beginnings of his architectural consciousness in his response to the work of Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos, Erich Mendelsohn, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright. As in the autobiographies of Sullivan and Wright, "Life and Shape" concentrates on Neutra's earlier years, both in Europe and America. While he naturally recounts his memories of such well-known commissions as the Lovell Health House (1929), his own Van der Leeuv Research House (1933) and the von Sternberg House (1935), he also muses on such less famous buildings as the small, and now virtually forgotten, Mosk House (1933). "Life and Shape" also confirms Neutra's obsession with the passage of time and his firm resolution never to waste it. Like Sullivan and Wright, Neutra eschewed writing a factual chronicle, and - at the age of 70 - composed instead a meditation on the aspects of his life and work that seemed, in retrospect, to be the most interesting and significant. He felt no need to try to "include everything" but rather to present an honest recounting of his memory of his life. In writing my own "Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture" [Oxford University Press, 1982; Rizzoli Press, 2006], I relied on "Life and Shape" when I wanted an account of Neutra's experiences told in his own authentic voice. For future generations of architects, historian, and readers, it is good to have it back. - Thomas S. Hines, UCLA Professor Emeritus of History and Architecture