For fifty years, Pamela Kirrage longed to unlock the secrets of her husband s encrypted war diary. She was on the verge of giving up when she at last found a mathematician who became as obsessed with learning the secrets of the diary as she was. After months of painstaking investigation, he was finally able to crack the code, and in the process uncover the ending to an extraordinary World War II romance.
Pamela fell in love with RAF pilot Donald Hill in the summer of 1939, just a few months before he was sent to fight in Pacific. Although they planned to marry soon, Donald was captured...

In 1790, America was in enormous debt, having depleted what little money and supplies the country had during its victorious fight for independence. Before the nation's greatest asset, the land west of the Ohio River, could be sold it had to be measured out and mapped. And before that could be done, a uniform set of measurements had to be chosen for the new republic out of the morass of roughly 100,000 different units that were in use in daily life.

Measuring America tells the fascinating story of how we ultimately gained the American Customary System--the last traditional system in...

The author describes his experiences living among the Iban, and recounts his attempts to understand their culture.