Michael Lenz

This beloved operetta, which takes place during Carnival celebrations in 18th-century in Venice, shows Strauss’s descriptive writing at its best, helped by his love of Italy. Eine Nacht in Venedig inspired Strauss to compose some of his most successful operetta-music. The Italian atmosphere, the sun, the sea and the Venetian way of life appealed to his creative imagination.

This pathbreaking book explores how life can begin, taking us from cosmic clouds of stardust, to volcanoes on Earth, to the modern chemistry laboratory. Seeking to understand life's connection to the stars, David Deamer introduces astrobiology, a new scientific discipline that studies the origin and evolution of life on Earth and relates it to the birth and death of stars, planet formation, interfaces between minerals, water, and atmosphere, and the physics and chemistry of carbon compounds.