In 1969, Elton John and Bernie Taupin gave the world Empty Sky, a heady mix of rock, folk, rhythm and blues, jazz, psychedelia, and classicism that announced the arrival of one of the most potent creative teams in the history of popular music. In the fifty-five years since that release, Elton's astounding output of thirty-one studio albums, nine soundtrack albums (ten if you count the unreleased Lestat!), and three collaboration albums has enchanted new generations, as grandparents who grew up with "Your Song" and "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" on their turntables have shared their love of Elton with parents who played "Sacrifice" and "The One" on their cd players who in turn are sharing it with their children who know The Lion King soundtrack by heart and dance to "Cold Cold Heart" in their bedrooms through Spotify playlists and YouTube remixes.Elton John: Album by Album takes you on a guided journey through those forty-four albums that have engaged three full generations of music lovers, exploring the history behind the production of each, uncovering the hidden stories and meanings of each track, and delving into the musical nuts and bolts of Elton John's unique gift for conveying the meaning of Bernie Taupin's lyrics through his unrivalled and almost otherworldly sense of tonal architecture.Whether you have been spinning Elton records since the days of "Lady Samantha", or found your way to his work in the post-Rocketman revival of appreciation for his legendary career, Elton John: Album by Album has what you need to navigate your way through the vast richness of his recorded catalogue, allowing you to answer such questions as "How did Ray Cooper make a gong sound like a spaceship?", "Why is "Ego" in Lokrian mode anyway?" and "Just what is the Pilot, and why would anybody want to be taken there?"

In 2024, women swept the Grammy awards, prompting headlines about their arrival in music. However, women have been shaping pivotal musical developments over the past 3,000 years. A History of Women in Music from Antiquity to the Present Day is a magisterial survey of their manifold contributions to musical history around the world, from Sappho to Nicki Minaj, M.S. Subbulakshmi to Madonna, and Hildegard of Bingen to AKB48. Here are the stories of the women who worked their way from the secret palace performers of sixteenth-century Italy to the quasi-divine operatic divas of nineteenth-century France, whose artistry made the Blues a profitable venue for Black vocalists at the dawn of the recording age, who composed chaste love ballads in the Middle Ages, and less chaste Hyperpop lust ballads in the TikTok Age, all while carrying out the decades-long battle of fighting for representation in some of the world's most male-coded musical forms, as singers of boleros and rancheras in Central America, heavy metal warriors and rap queens in the United States, operatic composers in Europe, reggaeton divas in Puerto Rico, and instrumentalists in a jazz landscape that only barely tolerated their presence as vocalists for forty long years.This book tells the long story of a global movement carried out at first country by country and woman by woman, until the weight of their amassed contributions burst open the gates of resistance, and cleared the way for women's musical prominence today. Whether you're trying to escape another Manic Monday, are curious What Love Has To Do With It (answer: quite a lot), or simply want to step Into The Groove for a while, there are stories and songs here aplenty to let you connect with the long and fascinating lineage of women who took the world by the ears, and poured therein the full measure of their rich musical genius.

When you pick up the latest Emily Henry novel, or settle in for an evening with the newest volume of your favorite romantasy, you are taking part in a process stretching back two millennia. The ancient Greeks considered it a highlight of one's life to hear with one's own ears the words of the great romantic poets of their day. The Romans enjoyed sprawling romantic epics that only reunited their lovers after continent-spanning struggles against foreign armies, pirates, and treacherous monarchs. The Middle Ages sung hushed stories of lust far from the ears of the Church, while its great poets probed the darker boundaries of courtly love, and the writers of the seventeenth century delighted in giving young women ten-volume romances, delivered over the course of a decade, to fill their bookshelves and lonely hours. Writing about love, its complexities, and resolutions, has been a part of the literary tradition since its inception, but it is only in the last three centuries that the format has grown into the publishing juggernaut we know today. From the intensely observed novels of Jane Austen, through the great Sensation Novels of the 1860s that fused romance and mystery, and into the great industrial and marketing machine that was Mills & Boon and Harlequin at their height, new developments in publishing have linked up with new ideas about womanhood, sex, and romance, to produce an ever-evolving approach to the romance novel, culminating in our own modern Golden Age, where more people from more backgrounds are writing more types of romance than ever before for a readership than is larger than it has ever been, and is consuming its favourite literary form in convenient new formats. A History of Romance Novels: From Trembling Innocents to Hunky Werewolves explores the long story of our love affair with love stories, during both its eras of creative flourishing, and the long periods of industrially motivated stagnation, to give even the most dedicated romance reader a few new veins to mine, and a few more characters to fall in love with.

Since virtually its first moments as an academic science, women have played a major role in the development of psychology, gaining from the outset research opportunities and academic positions that had been denied them for centuries in other branches of scientific investigation. Look wherever you will, in any branch of psychology or neuroscience in the last century and a half, and what you will find are a plethora of women whose discoveries fundamentally changed how we view the brain and its role in the formation of our perceptions and behaviors.A History of Women in Psychology and Neuroscience tells the story of 267 women whose work opened new doors in humanity's ongoing attempt to learn about its own nature, from Christine Ladd Franklin's late 19th century studies of how the brain perceives color to Virginia Johnson's pioneering studies of the human sexual response, and Augusta Dejerine-Klumpke's early association of neurological conditions with their underlying brain regions to May-Britt Moser's Nobel-winning discovery a century later of the grid cells that allow us to mentally model our surroundings.Here are the stories of when and how we learned how memories are formed, what role an enriched environment plays in mental development, why some individuals are better able to cope with chronic stress than others, how societal stereotypes unconsciously feed into our daily interactions with other people, what role evolution might have played in the formation of our social habits, what light the practices of sign language might shed on our brain's basic capacity for language, how children internalize the violence they experience from others, and hundreds of other tales of the women who dug deep into the structures of the human mind to uncover, layer by layer, the answers to millennia-old questions of what humans are, and why they behave as they do.

For the last four hundred years, women have played a part far in excess of their numerical representation in the history of astronomical research and discovery. It was a woman who gave us our first tool for measuring the distances between stars, and another who told us for the first time what those stars were made of. It was women who first noticed the rhythmic noise of a pulsar, the temperature discrepancy that announced the existence of white dwarf stars, and the irregularities in galactic motion that informed us that the universe we see might be only a small part of the universe that exists.And yet, in spite of the magnitude of their achievements, for centuries women were treated as essentially second class citizens within the astronomical community, contained in back rooms, forbidden from communicating with their male colleagues, provided with repetitive and menial tasks, and paid starvation wages. This book tells the tale of how, in spite of all those impediments, women managed, by sheer determination and genius, to unlock the secrets of the night sky. It is the story of some of science's most hallowed names - Maria Mitchell, Caroline Herschel, Vera Rubin, Nancy Grace Roman, and Jocelyn Bell-Burnell - and also the story of scientists whose accomplishments were great, but whose names have faded through lack of use - Queen Seondeok of Korea, who built an observatory in the 7th century that still stands today, Wang Zhenyi, who brought heliocentrism to China, Margaret Huggins, who perfected the techniques that allowed us to photograph stellar spectra and thereby completely changed the direction of modern astronomy, and Hisako Koyama, whose multi-decade study of the sun's surface is as impressive a feat of steadfast scientific dedication as it is a rigorous and valuable treasure trove of solar data.A History of Women in Astronomy and Space Exploration is not only a book, however, of those who study space, but of those who have ventured into it, from the fabled Mercury 13, whose attempt to join the American space program was ultimately foiled by betrayal from within, to mythical figures like Kathryn Sullivan and Sally Ride, who were not only pioneering space explorers, but scientific researchers and engineers in their own rights, aided in their work by scientists like Mamta Patel Nagaraja, who studied the effects of space upon the human body, and computer programmers like Marianne Dyson, whose simulations prepared astronauts for every possible catastrophe that can occur in space.Told through over 130 stories spanning four thousand years of humanity's attempt to understand its place in the cosmos, A History of Women in Astronomy and Space Exploration brings us at last the full tale of women's evolution from instrument makers and calculators to the theorists, administrators, and explorers who have, while receiving astonishingly little in return, given us, quite literally, the universe.

For the last four hundred years, women have played a part far in excess of their numerical representation in the history of astronomical research and discovery. It was a woman who gave us our first tool for measuring the distances between stars, and another who told us for the first time what those stars were made of. It was women who first noticed the rhythmic noise of a pulsar, the temperature discrepancy that announced the existence of white dwarf stars, and the irregularities in galactic motion that informed us that the universe we see might be only a small part of the universe that exists. And yet, in spite of the magnitude of their achievements, for centuries women were treated as essentially second class citizens within the astronomical community, contained in back rooms, forbidden from communicating with their male colleagues, provided with repetitive and menial tasks, and paid starvation wages. This book tells the tale of how, in spite of all those impediments, women managed, by sheer determination and genius, to unlock the secrets of the night sky. It is the story of some of science''s most hallowed names - Maria Mitchell, Caroline Herschel, Vera Rubin, Nancy Grace Roman, and Jocelyn Bell-Burnell - and also the story of scientists whose accomplishments were great, but whose names have faded through lack of use - Queen Seondeok of Korea, who built an observatory in the 7th century that still stands today, Wang Zhenyi, who brought heliocentrism to China, Margaret Huggins, who perfected the techniques that allowed us to photograph stellar spectra and thereby completely changed the direction of modern astronomy, and Hisako Koyama, whose multi-decade study of the sun''s surface is as impressive a feat of steadfast scientific dedication as it is a rigorous and valuable treasure trove of solar data. A History of Women in Astronomy and Space Exploration is not only a book, however, of those who study space, but of those who have ventured into it, from the fabled Mercury 13, whose attempt to join the American space program was ultimately foiled by betrayal from within, to mythical figures like Kathryn Sullivan and Sally Ride, who were not only pioneering space explorers, but scientific researchers and engineers in their own rights, aided in their work by scientists like Mamta Patel Nagaraja, who studied the effects of space upon the human body, and computer programmers like Marianne Dyson, whose simulations prepared astronauts for every possible catastrophe that can occur in space. Told through over 130 stories spanning four thousand years of humanity''s attempt to understand its place in the cosmos, A History of Women in Astronomy and Space Exploration brings us at last the full tale of women''s evolution from instrument makers and calculators to the theorists, administrators, and explorers who have, while receiving astonishingly little in return, given us, quite literally, the universe.

In the nineteenth century, a small but dedicated group of European and American women rose to agitate for the inclusion of women in the medical profession. It is a historic tale that we have told and retold for decades, but it is far from where the story of women as physicians and healers begins. Stretching back into deepest antiquity, we possess accounts of women who were consulted by emperors and paupers alike for their medical expertise. They were surgeons, apothecaries, midwives, university lecturers, and medical researchers in correspondence with the most learned societies of their time. And then it all came crashing down. A History of Women in Medicine and Medical Research is the story of the women who participated in that early Golden Age, and of a medical establishment closing ranks against them so effectively that, by the early Victorian era, they not only were barred from practicing medicine, but from so much as stepping into a classroom where medical topics were being discussed. It is the story of that intrepid band of reformers and pioneers who built back the women''s medical profession from the ashes and constructed a thriving new community of researchers and practitioners who within a century had retaken not only the ground that had been lost, but boldly advanced to levels of fame and achievement unimaginable to any previous era. Told through in-depth accounts of the lives of the pioneers and practitioners who built and rebuilt the women''s medical movement, this title dives into the lives of not only legendary figures like Florence Nightingale, Gertrude Elion, Rosalyn Yalow, and Elizabeth Blackwell, but visits women the world over whose medical contributions broke down doors and advanced the cause of women''s and world health, like the revolutionary medieval physician Trota of Salerno, the pioneering eighteenth century midwife and businesswoman Madame du Coudray, the microbiological research trailblazer Mary Putnam Jacobi, and the HIV researcher and world epidemic response coordinator Francoise Barre-Sinoussi. With over 140 stories spanning three millennia of global medicine, this book shines a light on the unknown heroes, towering discoveries, tragic missteps, and profound struggles that have accompanied the Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of the women''s medical profession.

In 1969, Elton John and Bernie Taupin gave the world Empty Sky, a heady mix of rock, folk, rhythm and blues, jazz, psychedelia, and classicism that announced the arrival of one of the most potent creative teams in the history of popular music. In the fifty-five years since that release, Elton's astounding output of thirty-one studio albums, nine soundtrack albums (ten if you count the unreleased Lestat!), and three collaboration albums has enchanted new generations, as grandparents who grew up with "Your Song" and "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" on their turntables have shared their love of Elton with parents who played "Sacrifice" and "The One" on their cd players who in turn are sharing it with their children who know The Lion King soundtrack by heart and dance to "Cold Cold Heart" in their bedrooms through Spotify playlists and YouTube remixes.Elton John: Album by Album takes you on a guided journey through those forty-four albums that have engaged three full generations of music lovers, exploring the history behind the production of each, uncovering the hidden stories and meanings of each track, and delving into the musical nuts and bolts of Elton John's unique gift for conveying the meaning of Bernie Taupin's lyrics through his unrivalled and almost otherworldly sense of tonal architecture.Whether you have been spinning Elton records since the days of "Lady Samantha", or found your way to his work in the post-Rocketman revival of appreciation for his legendary career, Elton John: Album by Album has what you need to navigate your way through the vast richness of his recorded catalogue, allowing you to answer such questions as "How did Ray Cooper make a gong sound like a spaceship?", "Why is "Ego" in Lokrian mode anyway?" and "Just what is the Pilot, and why would anybody want to be taken there?"

In 2024, women swept the Grammy awards, prompting headlines about their arrival in music. However, women have been shaping pivotal musical developments over the past 3,000 years. A History of Women in Music from Antiquity to the Present Day is a magisterial survey of their manifold contributions to musical history around the world, from Sappho to Nicki Minaj, M.S. Subbulakshmi to Madonna, and Hildegard of Bingen to AKB48. Here are the stories of the women who worked their way from the secret palace performers of sixteenth-century Italy to the quasi-divine operatic divas of nineteenth-century France, whose artistry made the Blues a profitable venue for Black vocalists at the dawn of the recording age, who composed chaste love ballads in the Middle Ages, and less chaste Hyperpop lust ballads in the TikTok Age, all while carrying out the decades-long battle of fighting for representation in some of the world's most male-coded musical forms, as singers of boleros and rancheras in Central America, heavy metal warriors and rap queens in the United States, operatic composers in Europe, reggaeton divas in Puerto Rico, and instrumentalists in a jazz landscape that only barely tolerated their presence as vocalists for forty long years.This book tells the long story of a global movement carried out at first country by country and woman by woman, until the weight of their amassed contributions burst open the gates of resistance, and cleared the way for women's musical prominence today. Whether you're trying to escape another Manic Monday, are curious What Love Has To Do With It (answer: quite a lot), or simply want to step Into The Groove for a while, there are stories and songs here aplenty to let you connect with the long and fascinating lineage of women who took the world by the ears, and poured therein the full measure of their rich musical genius.

When you pick up the latest Emily Henry novel, or settle in for an evening with the newest volume of your favorite romantasy, you are taking part in a process stretching back two millennia. The ancient Greeks considered it a highlight of one's life to hear with one's own ears the words of the great romantic poets of their day. The Romans enjoyed sprawling romantic epics that only reunited their lovers after continent-spanning struggles against foreign armies, pirates, and treacherous monarchs. The Middle Ages sung hushed stories of lust far from the ears of the Church, while its great poets probed the darker boundaries of courtly love, and the writers of the seventeenth century delighted in giving young women ten-volume romances, delivered over the course of a decade, to fill their bookshelves and lonely hours. Writing about love, its complexities, and resolutions, has been a part of the literary tradition since its inception, but it is only in the last three centuries that the format has grown into the publishing juggernaut we know today. From the intensely observed novels of Jane Austen, through the great Sensation Novels of the 1860s that fused romance and mystery, and into the great industrial and marketing machine that was Mills & Boon and Harlequin at their height, new developments in publishing have linked up with new ideas about womanhood, sex, and romance, to produce an ever-evolving approach to the romance novel, culminating in our own modern Golden Age, where more people from more backgrounds are writing more types of romance than ever before for a readership than is larger than it has ever been, and is consuming its favourite literary form in convenient new formats. A History of Romance Novels: From Trembling Innocents to Hunky Werewolves explores the long story of our love affair with love stories, during both its eras of creative flourishing, and the long periods of industrially motivated stagnation, to give even the most dedicated romance reader a few new veins to mine, and a few more characters to fall in love with.

Since virtually its first moments as an academic science, women have played a major role in the development of psychology, gaining from the outset research opportunities and academic positions that had been denied them for centuries in other branches of scientific investigation. Look wherever you will, in any branch of psychology or neuroscience in the last century and a half, and what you will find are a plethora of women whose discoveries fundamentally changed how we view the brain and its role in the formation of our perceptions and behaviors.A History of Women in Psychology and Neuroscience tells the story of 267 women whose work opened new doors in humanity's ongoing attempt to learn about its own nature, from Christine Ladd Franklin's late 19th century studies of how the brain perceives color to Virginia Johnson's pioneering studies of the human sexual response, and Augusta Dejerine-Klumpke's early association of neurological conditions with their underlying brain regions to May-Britt Moser's Nobel-winning discovery a century later of the grid cells that allow us to mentally model our surroundings.Here are the stories of when and how we learned how memories are formed, what role an enriched environment plays in mental development, why some individuals are better able to cope with chronic stress than others, how societal stereotypes unconsciously feed into our daily interactions with other people, what role evolution might have played in the formation of our social habits, what light the practices of sign language might shed on our brain's basic capacity for language, how children internalize the violence they experience from others, and hundreds of other tales of the women who dug deep into the structures of the human mind to uncover, layer by layer, the answers to millennia-old questions of what humans are, and why they behave as they do.

For the last four hundred years, women have played a part far in excess of their numerical representation in the history of astronomical research and discovery. It was a woman who gave us our first tool for measuring the distances between stars, and another who told us for the first time what those stars were made of. It was women who first noticed the rhythmic noise of a pulsar, the temperature discrepancy that announced the existence of white dwarf stars, and the irregularities in galactic motion that informed us that the universe we see might be only a small part of the universe that exists.And yet, in spite of the magnitude of their achievements, for centuries women were treated as essentially second class citizens within the astronomical community, contained in back rooms, forbidden from communicating with their male colleagues, provided with repetitive and menial tasks, and paid starvation wages. This book tells the tale of how, in spite of all those impediments, women managed, by sheer determination and genius, to unlock the secrets of the night sky. It is the story of some of science's most hallowed names - Maria Mitchell, Caroline Herschel, Vera Rubin, Nancy Grace Roman, and Jocelyn Bell-Burnell - and also the story of scientists whose accomplishments were great, but whose names have faded through lack of use - Queen Seondeok of Korea, who built an observatory in the 7th century that still stands today, Wang Zhenyi, who brought heliocentrism to China, Margaret Huggins, who perfected the techniques that allowed us to photograph stellar spectra and thereby completely changed the direction of modern astronomy, and Hisako Koyama, whose multi-decade study of the sun's surface is as impressive a feat of steadfast scientific dedication as it is a rigorous and valuable treasure trove of solar data.A History of Women in Astronomy and Space Exploration is not only a book, however, of those who study space, but of those who have ventured into it, from the fabled Mercury 13, whose attempt to join the American space program was ultimately foiled by betrayal from within, to mythical figures like Kathryn Sullivan and Sally Ride, who were not only pioneering space explorers, but scientific researchers and engineers in their own rights, aided in their work by scientists like Mamta Patel Nagaraja, who studied the effects of space upon the human body, and computer programmers like Marianne Dyson, whose simulations prepared astronauts for every possible catastrophe that can occur in space.Told through over 130 stories spanning four thousand years of humanity's attempt to understand its place in the cosmos, A History of Women in Astronomy and Space Exploration brings us at last the full tale of women's evolution from instrument makers and calculators to the theorists, administrators, and explorers who have, while receiving astonishingly little in return, given us, quite literally, the universe.

For the last four hundred years, women have played a part far in excess of their numerical representation in the history of astronomical research and discovery. It was a woman who gave us our first tool for measuring the distances between stars, and another who told us for the first time what those stars were made of. It was women who first noticed the rhythmic noise of a pulsar, the temperature discrepancy that announced the existence of white dwarf stars, and the irregularities in galactic motion that informed us that the universe we see might be only a small part of the universe that exists. And yet, in spite of the magnitude of their achievements, for centuries women were treated as essentially second class citizens within the astronomical community, contained in back rooms, forbidden from communicating with their male colleagues, provided with repetitive and menial tasks, and paid starvation wages. This book tells the tale of how, in spite of all those impediments, women managed, by sheer determination and genius, to unlock the secrets of the night sky. It is the story of some of science''s most hallowed names - Maria Mitchell, Caroline Herschel, Vera Rubin, Nancy Grace Roman, and Jocelyn Bell-Burnell - and also the story of scientists whose accomplishments were great, but whose names have faded through lack of use - Queen Seondeok of Korea, who built an observatory in the 7th century that still stands today, Wang Zhenyi, who brought heliocentrism to China, Margaret Huggins, who perfected the techniques that allowed us to photograph stellar spectra and thereby completely changed the direction of modern astronomy, and Hisako Koyama, whose multi-decade study of the sun''s surface is as impressive a feat of steadfast scientific dedication as it is a rigorous and valuable treasure trove of solar data. A History of Women in Astronomy and Space Exploration is not only a book, however, of those who study space, but of those who have ventured into it, from the fabled Mercury 13, whose attempt to join the American space program was ultimately foiled by betrayal from within, to mythical figures like Kathryn Sullivan and Sally Ride, who were not only pioneering space explorers, but scientific researchers and engineers in their own rights, aided in their work by scientists like Mamta Patel Nagaraja, who studied the effects of space upon the human body, and computer programmers like Marianne Dyson, whose simulations prepared astronauts for every possible catastrophe that can occur in space. Told through over 130 stories spanning four thousand years of humanity''s attempt to understand its place in the cosmos, A History of Women in Astronomy and Space Exploration brings us at last the full tale of women''s evolution from instrument makers and calculators to the theorists, administrators, and explorers who have, while receiving astonishingly little in return, given us, quite literally, the universe.

In the nineteenth century, a small but dedicated group of European and American women rose to agitate for the inclusion of women in the medical profession. It is a historic tale that we have told and retold for decades, but it is far from where the story of women as physicians and healers begins. Stretching back into deepest antiquity, we possess accounts of women who were consulted by emperors and paupers alike for their medical expertise. They were surgeons, apothecaries, midwives, university lecturers, and medical researchers in correspondence with the most learned societies of their time. And then it all came crashing down. A History of Women in Medicine and Medical Research is the story of the women who participated in that early Golden Age, and of a medical establishment closing ranks against them so effectively that, by the early Victorian era, they not only were barred from practicing medicine, but from so much as stepping into a classroom where medical topics were being discussed. It is the story of that intrepid band of reformers and pioneers who built back the women''s medical profession from the ashes and constructed a thriving new community of researchers and practitioners who within a century had retaken not only the ground that had been lost, but boldly advanced to levels of fame and achievement unimaginable to any previous era. Told through in-depth accounts of the lives of the pioneers and practitioners who built and rebuilt the women''s medical movement, this title dives into the lives of not only legendary figures like Florence Nightingale, Gertrude Elion, Rosalyn Yalow, and Elizabeth Blackwell, but visits women the world over whose medical contributions broke down doors and advanced the cause of women''s and world health, like the revolutionary medieval physician Trota of Salerno, the pioneering eighteenth century midwife and businesswoman Madame du Coudray, the microbiological research trailblazer Mary Putnam Jacobi, and the HIV researcher and world epidemic response coordinator Francoise Barre-Sinoussi. With over 140 stories spanning three millennia of global medicine, this book shines a light on the unknown heroes, towering discoveries, tragic missteps, and profound struggles that have accompanied the Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of the women''s medical profession.