"The memoir of a prominent member of the Manhattan Project, and an intimate friend of J. Robert Oppenheimer."--Jacket.

Alan Hodgkin believes that - contrary to popular conviction - chance plays quite as large a role as design in scientific discovery. This engaging autobiography charts the balance of the two in his own life. Beginning starts with an account of his childhood in an extended Quaker family. Not a great success at school, he nevertheless won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, and he writes informatively of the climate of university opinion in the thirties when he was an undergraduate and came to abandon the pacifist ideals of his upbringing. A chance observation on frog nerve led to a Trinity Fellowship and a year at the Rockefeller Institute in New York (where he met his future wife), to the Nobel Prize in 1963, and ultimately to the Presidency of the Royal Society. His experiments on nerve conduction seemed almost at the point of success when everything had to be abandoned on the outbreak of war in 1939, and for six years Hodgkin worked on the concept and design of airborne radar, described in the central section of the book as Flight Trials and Tribulations. The account of his return to civilian life and the resumption of experimentation includes two chapters of solid detail of Starting Again - for this is a book for any reader interested in the origin and development of a dedicated scientist.

Leon Panetta has had two of the most consequential careers of any American public servant in the past fifty years. His first, beginning as an army intelligence officer and including a run as one of Congress's most powerful and respected members, lasted 35 years and culminated in his role as Clinton's budget czar and White House chief of staff. He then 'retired' to establish the Panetta Institute,to serve on the Iraq Study Group; and to protect the California coast. In 2009 he accepted what many said was a thankless task: returning to public office as the director of the CIA.

Excerpt from Reminiscences of Peace and War It will be obvious to the reader that this book affects neither the "dignity of history" nor the authority of political instruction. The causes which precipitated the conflict between the sections and the momentous events which attended the struggle have been recounted by writers competent to the task. But descriptions of battles and civil convulsions do not exhibit the full condition of the South in the crisis. To complete the picture, social characteristics and incidents of private life are indispensable lineaments. It occurs to the author that a plain and unambitious narrative of her recollections of Washington society during the calm which preceded the storm, and of Virginia under the afflictions and sorrows of the fratricidal strife, will not be without interest in the retrospect of that memorable era. The present volume recalls that era in the aspect in which it appeared to a woman rather than as it appeared to a statesman or a philosopher. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

A reader's companion for Tolstoy's epic novel, War and Peace, inspired by the online book club led by Yiyun Li. For the writer Yiyun Li, whenever life has felt uncertain, War and Peace has been the novel she turns to. In March 2020, as the pandemic tightened its grip, Li and A Public Space launched #TolstoyTogether, a War and Peace book club, on Twitter and Instagram, gathering a community (that came to include writers such as Joyce Carol Oates, Garth Greenwell, and Carl Phillips) for 85 days of prompts, conversation, succor, and pleasure. It was an experience shaped not only by the time in which they read but also the slow, consistent rhythm of the reading. And the extraordinary community that gathered for a moment each day to discuss Tolstoy, history, and the role of art in a time like this. Tolstoy Together captures that moment, and offers a guided, communal experience for past and new readers, lovers of Russian literature, and all those looking for what Li identifies as "his level-headedness and clear-sightedness offer[ing] a solidity during a time of duress.