Dynasty Foundation Popular Science Library

In 2006, the Foundation undertook its own publishing project. The Dynasty Foundation Popular Science Library publishes the best contemporary mass-market books on the natural sciences and the humanities.

The Dynasty Foundation Library has three basic goals:

• to make the natural sciences and the humanities more accessible to the general public and to popularize science by bringing it to readers in a contemporary form;
• to develop the popular science segment of the publishing business, making it a competitive sector;
• to foster a community where people interested in the sciences—writers, experts, publishers, booksellers, and readers—can interact.

Dynasty Foundation Library Books

In 2006, Geleos Publishers released two editions of the Russian-language version of Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. In 2004, this extraordinary encyclopedia won the prestigious Aventis Prize for best general science book.

A Short History of Nearly Everything headed the 2007 bestseller list amongst popular science books.

In 2007, our imprint released James Trefil's The Nature of Science: An A-Z Guide to the Laws and Principles Governing Our Universe, which was first published in Russian on the website Elements.

James Trefil is a professor of physics at George Mason University (USA) and one of the most well-known authors of general science books.

November 2007 saw the release of Matt Ridley's Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters.

Originally published in English in 1999, the book continues to be a worldwide best seller.

Matt Ridley is a British zoologist and the author of several highly regarded popular science books.

In November 2007, we released Stephen Hawking's The Universe in a Nutshell, the second popular science book by the great theoretical physicist.

His first general science book, A Brief History of Time, has been translated into forty languages and sold almost ten million copies.

Stephen Hawking is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge.

February 2008 saw the release of The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers, by the famous American economist and historian Robert Heilbroner.

The book tells the story of the lives and ideas of the great economic thinkers. The book's tremendous sales worldwide overturned the notion that economics is boring.

In cooperation with the Liberal Mission Foundation, we have published Ella Paneiakh's Rules of the Game for Russian Entrepreneurs (Moscow: Kolibri, 2008).

This book by Petersburg sociologist Ella Paneiakh explores the relationship between business people and the machinery of the state, as well as the surprises and traps that lay in store for the novice who has decided to open his own firm and do business honestly, “by the rules.” The book also looks at the paradoxes of Russian life: after all, soon or later all of us have the idea to our own undertakings, great or small.

In August 2008, another title was added to the Dynasty Foundation Library—Philip Ball, Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another (Moscow: Geleos, 2008).

Written by a well-known British science journalist, the book explores so-called social physics and the use of natural scientific models—mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology—in describing social phenomena.

In 2005, Critical Mass won the Aventis Prize, which is awarded by the Royal Society (UK) to the best popular science book of the year.

Published in October 2008, Albert Einstein, Works on the Theory of Relativity (Moscow: Amfora, 2008) contains a number of his famous works on relativity theory as well as The Evolution of Physics, a book intended for the general reading public that Einstein wrote with Polish physicist Leopold Infeld.

Albert Einstein was one of the world's greatest scientists, a man who fundamentally changed our notions about the structure of the Universe and the nature of space and time.

The renowned English physicist Stephen Hawking wrote the introduction to this anthology.

October 2008 also saw the release of Carl Sagan, Cosmos (Moscow: Amfora, 2008). Sagan was an American astrophysicist and the most famous popularizer of science in the twentieth century.

The book examines the evolution of the Universe, the formation of the galaxies, and the emergence of life and intelligence. Sagan traces the paths that man's discovery of the Universe has taken—from the insights of the ancients and the breakthroughs of Kepler, Newton, and Einstein to today's space missions.

This book and the eponymous TV series brought Sagan international fame.

The God Delusion (Moscow: KoLibri, 2008), by the preeminent British ethologist and popular science writer Richard Dawkins, was published by the Dynasty Foundation Library in November 2008.

After the release of this book, which has now been translated into several dozen languages, Dawkins was named author of the year (2006) by Reader's Digest.

When The God Delusion was released, the American popular science magazine Discovery christened Dawkins “Darwin's Rottweiler,” thus equating him with the famous evolutionary biologist Thomas Huxley, who was dubbed “Darwin's bulldog” in the late nineteenth century. The English magazine Prospect opined that Dawkins is one of the three most visible public intellectuals in the world, along with Noam Chomsky and Umberto Eco.

In Physics of the Impossible (Moscow: Alpina Non-Fiction, 2009), Michio Kaku, a Japanese-American physicist and one of the originators of string theory, ranks fantastic phenomena according to the likelihood of whether they will become realities sometime in the future.

Using the language and images of science fiction—from teleportation to telekinesis—Kaku undertakes a brilliant, engaging examination of the methods and limits of contemporary physics. He predicts how likely each “impossibility” is and when it might become a reality—in the coming century, in the next millennium or (perhaps) never.

According to Dr. Kaku, even the wildest dreams of science fiction might become a reality.

Michio Kaku is the author of more than 170 scientific articles in the world's preeminent physics journals. He is also known for his popular science best sellers Beyond Einstein, Visions, Hyperspace, and Parallel Worlds.

Dr. Kaku has worked on such PBS documentaries as Einstein Revealed and Stephen Hawking's Universe as well as series on the BBC and the Discovery Channel.

The main—almost the only—work of the outstanding Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), has been published in Russian translation by the Dynasty Foundation (Moscow: Amfora, 2009).

This work, which first came out in 1543, became one of the greatest breakthroughs in history.

The astrophysicist and academician V. A. Ambartsumian characterized the significance of the great scientist's work thus:
«The heliocentric system, created by Copernicus, was the beginning of the profoundest revolution in exact science. Having first appeared in astronomy, this revolution spread to mechanics and all of physics. In fact, the achievements of this scientific revolution serve as the foundation for the whole edifice of modern science.»

The book by the American ornithologist, physiologist, and geographer Jared Diamond—Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Moscow: AST, 2010)—became an international bestseller and brought its creator the prestigious Pulitzer Prize (1997), which at once turned the academic into an A-list celebrity.

Many people ponder the question why different regions of our planet have been developing so nonuniformly. Why were the Australian aborigines not able to come out of the Stone age while Europeans learned to produce complex tools, build space ships, and pass the accumulated knowledge to succeeding generations?

Relying on the data of geography, botany, zoology, microbiology, linguistics, and other sciences, Diamond convincingly proved that the asymmetry in the development of different parts of the world is not accidental and is based on many natural factors such as living environment, climate, availability of animals and plants suitable for domestication, and even the shapes and sizes of the continents.

Diamond's solid and convincing theory allows a reader to comprehend the hidden mechanisms of the development of human civilization in a new way.

The book by Armand Marie Leroi Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body [Russian translation: Mutants: On Genetic Variability and the Human Body (Moscow: Corpus, 2010)] opens the new series Elementy—a collection of the best examples of world popular science literature of the last decade. They were selected for translation into Russian by Dynasty Foundation experts.

In his exciting and sometimes shocking book, which made a big splash in the world of popular science literature at the beginning of the 21^st century, the British biologist brings us closer to answering questions about which everybody wonders:

• How is a human body created?
• How do we become who we are?

The author finds the most direct route to the solution—through mutations and mutants, through the histories of famous monsters.

Monsters or mutants are only a part of the spectrum of human forms for us today and studying them helps clarify the organism’s laws of development. There are mutations that make a person red-haired or fat, a dwarf or a giant... Changing the meaning of genes, mutations help us understand what these genes in fact are for the organism in the first place.

In the book Origin of Life: Science and Faith (Moscow: Corpus, 2010; translation of Science, Evolution, and Creationism), experts assembled under the aegis of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine describe the basic methods of scientific cognition and present massive evidence in support of biological evolution. They consider and critique the views of supporters of different creationist theories, including «intelligent design.»

The creators of the book tell a reader about many fascinating researches that allow using the evolution theory in treating human diseases, making new foods, and implementing various technological innovations.

One of the main goals of the book is to show that science and religion can be regarded not as two antagonistic points of view but as two mutually complementary world perceptions and that recognizing the validity of evolution theory does not exclude a deep and sincere religious feeling.

Origin of Life: Science and Faith will become a valuable source of information and arguments for all people interested in spreading and confirming sensible views of the world around us in society, based on factual scientific information.