Travel Genius

In The Geography of Genius, acclaimed travel writer Weiner sets out to examine the connection between our surroundings and our most innovative ideas. He explores the history of places, like Vienna of 1900, Renaissance Florence, ancient Athens, Song Dynasty Hangzhou, and Silicon Valley, to show how certain urban settings are conducive to ingenuity.

Everyone loves a road trip! One of the best ways to pass time on your adventure and keep the whole family entertained is to spark a little competition. Divide into teams or take these questions on one at a time, keep score, and turn your next road trip into an epic trivia match-up. You can play one chapter at a time and see who wins the most chapters, or you can go for the big win and see who wins the most questions total. It’s up to you! Have fun! Before you know it, you will be pulling into your destination, and this may turn out to be one of your favorite memories from the trip.

Jack and Annie know they have to search for one of the four secrets of happiness to help Merlin the magician find joy in his life again. And so they head off in the magic tree house for Florence, Italy, in the early 1500s to spend the day with one of the greatest artists and inventors of all time: Leonardo da Vinci!

With the writers of the Golden Age as her guides - Pushkin and Tolstoy, among others - Sara Wheeler searches for a Russia not in the news, traveling from rinsed northwestern beet fields and the Far Eastern Arctic tundra to the cauldron of nationalities, religions, and languages in the Caucasus. Wheeler follows local guides; boards with families in modest homestays; eats roe, pelmeni, and cabbage soup; invokes recipes from Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking; learns the language; and observes the pattern of outcry and silence that characterizes life under Vladimir Putin.

An Adventure So Big, It Needs 500 Years To Fit Rocky Automan is just your average kid genius. When he’s not in school wrecking the grade curve for his classmates, he’s in his laboratory in his parent’s garage, making tapdancing cockroaches and laser guns. Rocky can make anything… …except a friend. So when Rocky hears about Leonardo Da Vinci, a genius inventor that captured the hearts and minds of the world for centuries, Rocky does the only sensible thing: he builds a time machine so he can meet his new role model: and hopefully, meet a new friend, too. But as smart as Rocky is, ...

I left school to find myself. Instead, I found him. A research trip to Southeast Asia seemed like the perfect opportunity to get out of my academic rut. But then there was Oliver. Of all my roommates at the boarding house, of course he's the one I keep running into. Brilliant. Sexy. And charming enough to turn coal into diamonds with a quirk of his lips. He might specialize in precious stones, but I'm not going to fall for his act. I'm sure he thinks I'm an easy target - shy, nerdy and with plus-size curves to boot, who never gets attention from guys. But no matter how he makes me melt and ...

Carlos San Sebastián is the heir to the patriarchy of a family of time-travellers who values strength over empathy, cunning over caring, and pleasure over personal boundaries. Carlos wants nothing to do with that life or the macho idiots he would be responsible for, family or not. But unlike his sister, he can’t just disappear and abandon them. He does have some sense of responsibility after all. When Carlos is summoned to the family residence in the middle of a deal that could release him from the patriarchy forever, he can see his opportunity to thwart fate slipping away. What Carlos ...

Packed with a wealth of information, this publication charts the evolution of garden design through a selection of some of our best-loved country house estates and historic gardens, including Hampton Court Palace, Chatsworth, Sissinghurst, and Kew. In addition, it also provides fascinating profiles on the geniuses who created some of our most inspirational gardens, including William Kent, Lancelot "Capability" Brown, Humphry Repton, Gertrude Jekyll, and Sir Joseph Paxton.