Selection from the forthcoming books

selected by the editors

The Song of the Cell. An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human.

TIP

The Song of the Cell. An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Named a New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by The Economist, Oprah Daily, BookPage, Book Riot, the New York Public Library, and more!

In The Song of the Cell, the extraordinary author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Emperor of All Maladies and the #1 New York Times bestseller The Gene „blends cutting-edge research, impeccable scholarship, intrepid reporting, and gorgeous prose into an encyclopedic study that reads like a literary page-turner“ (Oprah Daily ).

Mukherjee begins this magnificent story in the late 1600s, when a distinguished English polymath, Robert Hooke, and an eccentric Dutch cloth-merchant, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek looked down their handmade microscopes. What they saw introduced a radical concept that swept through biology and medicine, touching virtually every aspect of the two sciences, and altering both forever. It was the fact that complex living organisms are assemblages of tiny, self-contained, self-regulating units. Our organs, our physiology, our selves – hearts, blood, brains – are built from these compartments. Hooke christened them „cells.“

The discovery of cells – and the reframing of the human body as a cellular ekosystém – announced the birth of a new kind of medicine based on the therapeutic manipulations of cells. A hip fracture, a cardiac arrest, Alzheimer’s dementia, AIDS, pneumonia, lung cancer, kidney failure, arthritis, COVID pneumonia – all could be reconceived as the results of cells, or systems of cells, functioning abnormally. And all could be perceived as loci of cellular therapies.

Filled with writing so vivid, lucid, and suspenseful that complex science becomes thrilling, The Song of the Cell tells the story of how scientists discovered cells, began to understand them, and are now using that knowledge to create new humans. Told in six parts, and laced with Mukherjee’s own experience as a researcher, a doctor, and a prolific reader, The Song of the Cell is both panoramic and intimate – a masterpiece on what it means to be human.

„In an account both lyrical and capacious, Mukherjee takes us through an evolution of human from the seventeenth-century discovery that humans are made up of cells to our cutting-edge technologies for manipulating and deploying cells for therapeutic purposes“ (The New Yorker).

To be published in autumn 2025.

Pre-White-Mountain patents of arms for Bohemian, Moravian and Silesian towns, market towns and villages

Pre-White-Mountain patents of arms for Bohemian, Moravian and Silesian towns, market towns and villages

Petr Houzar

The book deals with the study of heraldic charters from the pre-Bohemian period, when the promotion of villages to towns and towns to cities limited the power of the royal towns. The study examines the diplomatic and heraldic aspects of the charters, including the details of the emblems granted, which often differed in the Czech and German descriptions. A unique part of the book is the register, which provides a substantial recapitulation of the charters.

To be published in winter 2024.

You are running an old browser version. We recommend updating your browser to its latest version.