Do you always struggle to see the best in a situation? Does it seem like it s raining both outside and in? If you re blind to the lighter side of life then you re clearly a grump, but don t despair you re in good company. Are You a Miserable Old Bastard? is an amusing celebration of the grouchiness in life, featuring wittily downbeat sayings from famous grumps including P. J. O Rourke, Dorothy Parker, Michael Moore, H. L. Mencken, Fran Lebowitz, Winston Churchill, Groucho Marx, and W. C. Fields; pessimistic tales of doom and gloom; advice on ways to spot a naturally grumpy person; fascinating...

It was the astronomers and mathematicians of the Islamic world who provided the theories and concepts that paved the way from the geocentric theories of Claudius Ptolemy in the second century AD to the heliocentric breakthroughs of Nicholas Copernicus and Johannes Kepler in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Algebra, the Arabic numeral system, and trigonometry: all these and more originated in the Muslim East and undergirded an increasingly accurate and sophisticated understanding of the movements of the Sun, Moon, and planets. This nontechnical overview of the Islamic advances in the...