The rise of manufacturing could not have happened without an attention to precision. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in 18th-century England, standards of measurement were established, giving way to the development of machine tools --- machines that make machines. Eventually, the application of precision tools and methods resulted in the creation and mass production of items from guns and glass to mirrors, lenses and cameras --- and eventually gave way to further breakthroughs, including gene splicing, microchips and the Hadron Collider. Simon Winchester takes us back to the origins of the Industrial Age, to England where he introduces the scientific minds that helped usher in modern production.

In a year of historic violence and discord --- the Tet Offensive, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago --- the Apollo 8 mission would be the boldest, riskiest test of America’s greatness under pressure. In ROCKET MEN, Robert Kurson puts the focus on the three astronauts and their families: the commander, Frank Borman, a conflicted man on his final mission; idealistic Jim Lovell, who had dreamed since boyhood of riding a rocket to the Moon; and Bill Anders, a young nuclear engineer and hotshot fighter pilot making his first space flight.

Marilynne Robinson has plumbed the human spirit in her renowned novels, including LILA, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and GILEAD, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this new essay collection, she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America like Emerson and Tocqueville inform our political consciousness, or discussing the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson’s peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display.

The only legitimate child of Lord Byron, the most brilliant, revered and scandalous of the Romantic poets, Ada Byron King was destined for fame long before her birth. Banishing fairy tales and make-believe from the nursery, Ada’s mother provides her daughter with a rigorous education grounded in mathematics and science. Any troubling spark of imagination --- or worse yet, passion or poetry --- is promptly extinguished. Or so her mother believes. When Ada is introduced into London society as a highly eligible young heiress, she at last discovers the intellectual and social circles she has craved all her life. Little does she realize that her delightful new friendship with inventor Charles Babbage will shape her destiny.

With the publication of ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, Charles Darwin --- hailed as the man who "discovered evolution" --- was propelled into the pantheon of great scientific thinkers, alongside Galileo, Copernicus and Newton. A. N. Wilson challenges this long-held assumption. He argues that Darwin was not an original scientific thinker, but a ruthless and determined self-promoter who did not credit the many great sages whose ideas he advanced in his book. Furthermore, Wilson contends that religion and Darwinism have much more in common than it would seem, for the acceptance of Darwin's theory involves a pretty significant leap of faith.

On All Hallow’s Eve in 1517, a young monk named Martin Luther posted a document he hoped would spark an academic debate, but that instead ignited a conflagration that would forever destroy the world he knew. Five hundred years after Luther’s now famous Ninety-five Theses appeared, Eric Metaxas paints a startling portrait of the wild figure whose adamantine faith cracked the edifice of Western Christendom and dragged medieval Europe into the future. MARTIN LUTHER tells the searing tale of a humble man who, by bringing ugly truths to the highest seats of power, caused the explosion whose sound is still ringing in our ears.

The stories in FIVE-CARAT SOUL --- none of them ever published before --- spring from the place where identity, humanity and history converge. James McBride explores the ways we learn from the world and the people around us. An antiques dealer discovers that a legendary toy commissioned by Civil War General Robert E. Lee now sits in the home of a black minister in Queens. Five strangers find themselves thrown together and face unexpected judgment. An American president draws inspiration from a conversation he overhears in a stable. And members of The Five-Carat Soul Bottom Bone Band recount stories from their own messy and hilarious lives.

Take a trip back to Jane Austen's world and the many places she lived as historian Lucy Worsley visits Austen's childhood home, her schools, her holiday accommodations, the houses --- both grand and small --- of the relations upon whom she was dependent, and the home she shared with her mother and sister towards the end of her life. In places like Steventon Parsonage, Godmersham Park, Chawton House and a small rented house in Winchester, Worsley discovers a Jane Austen very different from the one who famously lived a "life without incident." She examines the rooms, spaces and possessions that mattered to her, and the varying ways in which homes are used in her novels as both places of pleasure and as prisons.

Richard Ford’s parents --- Edna, a feisty, pretty Catholic-school girl with a difficult past; and Parker, a sweet-natured, soft-spoken traveling salesman --- were rural Arkansans born at the turn of the 20th century. Married in 1928, they lived “alone together” on the road, traveling throughout the South. Eventually they had one child, born late, in 1944. For Ford, the questions of what his parents dreamed of, how they loved each other and loved him become a striking portrait of American life in the mid-century. BETWEEN THEM is Ford’s vivid image of where his life began and where his parents’ lives found their greatest satisfaction.

Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are lovesick doctors, students, ex-boyfriends, actors, bartenders and even Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, brought together to tell stories that speak to us all. In MEN WITHOUT WOMEN, Murakami has crafted another contemporary classic, marked by the same wry humor and pathos that have defined his entire body of work.