The Best of All Possible Worlds: Mathematics and Destiny
Optimists believe this is the best of all possible worlds. And pessimists fear that might really be the case. But what is the best of all possible worlds? How do we define it? Is it the world that operates the most efficiently? Or the one in which most people are comfortable and content?
Chaotic Harmony: A Dialog About Physics, Complexity and Life
This fascinating book written by Ali Sanayei and Otto E. Rössler is not a classic scientific publication, but a vivid dialogue on science, philosophy and the interdisciplinary intersections of science and technology with biographic elements.
Chemically Imbalanced: Everyday Suffering, Medication, and Our Troubled Quest for Self-Mastery
Chemically Imbalanced is a field report on how ordinary people dealing with common problems explain their suffering, how they're increasingly turning to the thin and mechanistic language of the "body/brain," and what these encounters might tell us.
150,000 innocents died in Changchun at the end of WW2 when Mao's Revolutionary Army laid siege. Japanese girl Homare Endo, then age 7, was traumatized but survived to devote her life to telling the world of the atrocity China now denies. This gripping, firsthand account is tough reading, full of both brutal descriptions and dispassionate commentary on politics and humanity.
Brazil's Minister of Indigenous Peoples Sonia Guajajara speaks during the 'Brazil is Indigenous Land' festival, in Brasilia, Brazil. REUTERS/Ueslei Marcelino
The new edition of this accessible and wide-ranging book demonstrates the distinctive insights that sociology has to bring to the study of globalization. Taking in the cultural, political and economic dimensions of globalization, the book provides a thorough introduction to key debates and critically evaluates the causes and consequences of a globalizing world.
A deeply moving and inspiring collection of notes from the most expressive wall in the world.
In the days and weeks after the 2016 presidential election, Matthew Chavez showed up in the subway with stacks of brightly colored sticky notes. "Express yourself," he told passersby. The response was electric. Chavez turned an underground maze into a communal art space known as Subway Therapy.
Drawing on insightful new findings in the study of seventeenth-century history and in a more nuanced exploration of notions like Puritanism, republicanism, radicalism, and dissent, this book sheds fresh light on the writings, the thought, and the life of poet John Milton, whose career spanned one of the most turbulent periods in English history.
Hollywood Her Story
An Illustrated History of Women and the Movies
With more than 1200 women featured in the book, you will find names that everyone knows and loves—the movie legends. But you will also discover hundreds and hundreds of women whose names are unknown to you: actresses, directors, stuntwomen, screenwriters, composers, animators, editors, producers, cinematographers and on and on.
We Stand Divided
The Rift Between American Jews and Israel
From National Jewish Book Award winner and author of Israel, a bold reevaluation of the tensions between American and Israeli Jews that reinterprets the past and reimagines the future of Jewish life.
A guide to cultivating a shared life of joy and respect with our dogs.
Who's a Good Dog? is an invitation to nurture more thoughtful and balanced relationships with our canine companions. By deepening our curiosity about what our dogs are experiencing, and by working together with them in a spirit of collaboration, we can become more effective and compassionate caregivers.
Twenty-Five Women Who Shaped the Italian Renaissance
Twenty-Five Women Who Shaped the Italian Renaissance takes readers on a journey through early modern Italy that places women at the heart of the artistic and cultural developments of this transformative era.
Tripping Over the Truth
How the Metabolic Theory of Cancer Is Overturning One of Medicine's Most Entrenched Paradigms
A masterful synchronization of history and cutting-edge science shines new light on humanity's darkest diagnosis.
In the wake of the Cancer Genome Atlas project's failure to provide a legible roadmap to a cure for cancer, science writer Travis Christofferson illuminates a promising blend of old and new perspectives on the disease.
Through Astronaut Eyes: Photographing Early Human Spaceflight
Featuring over seventy images from the heroic age of space exploration, Through Astronaut Eyes presents the story of how human daring along with technological ingenuity allowed people to see the Earth and stars as they never had before.
Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States
In this first comprehensive overview of the intersection of immigration law and the First Amendment, a lawyer and historian traces ideological exclusion and deportation in the United States from the Alien Friends Act of 1798 to the evolving policies of the Trump administration.
This Will End in Tears
The Miserabilist Guide to Music
Sad music moves us like nothing else, and despite its gloomy nature it also has the curious power to make us happy. In This Will End in Tears: The Miserabilist Guide to Music, author Adam Brent Houghtaling explains why, while offering up a compendium of history's masters of melancholy and the greatest sad songs of all time.
This One Wild and Precious Life
A Hopeful Path Forward in a Fractured World
We live in truly overwhelming times. The climate crisis, political polarisation, racial injustice and coronavirus have left many of us in a state of PTSD. We have retreated, morally and psychologically; we are experiencing a crisis of disconnection - from one another, from our true values, from joy, and from life as we feel we are meant to be living it.
Tales of fate and fortune on the road. A timely collection of 26 inspiring tales, The Kindness of Strangers explores the unexpected human connections that so often transfigure and transform the experience of travel, and celebrates the gift of kindness around the world.
The Kindness of Strangers
How a Selfish Ape Invented A New Moral Code
A sweeping psychological history of human goodness — from the foundations of evolution to the modern political and social challenges humanity is now facing.
A local resident leaves her apartment building damaged during a Russian missile strike, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine. REUTERS/Gleb Garanich
Ukrainian serviceman launches a kamikaze FPV drone at a front line, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, near the city of Bakhmut in Donetsk region, Ukraine. REUTERS/Inna Varenytsia
A lively and unconventional exploration of our senses, how they work, what is revealed when they don’t, and how they connect us to the world
Over the past decade neuroscience has uncovered a wealth of new information about our senses and how they serve as our gateway to the world.
Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance
“This passionate book delves deep into classical music’s responses to World War II, and the tragic intertwining of German and Jewish cultures. Eichler roves through history and language to express how music keeps cultural memory alive. Along the way, he paints an unforgettable portrait of an unspeakable time.” —Jeremy Denk, author of Every Good Boy Does Fine
An unmatched guide to the religious dimensions of American politics, Jeff Sharlet journeys into corners of our national psyche where others fear to tread. The Undertow is both inquiry and meditation, an attempt to understand how, over the last decade, reaction has morphed into delusion, social division into distrust, distrust into paranoia, and hatred into fantasies—sometimes realities—of violence.
The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality
A poet, a physicist, and a philosopher explored the greatest enigmas in the universe—the nature of free will, the strange fabric of the cosmos, the true limits of the mind—and each in their own way uncovered a revelatory truth about our place in the world.
The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History
Ned Blackhawk interweaves five centuries of Native and non‑Native histories, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Native American self-determination in the late twentieth century.
The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism
The award-winning journalist and staff writer for The Atlantic follows up his New York Times bestseller American Carnage with this timely, rigorously reported, and deeply personal examination of the divisions that threaten to destroy the American evangelical movement.
Paradise: that elusive place where the anxieties, struggles, and burdens of life fall away. Most of us dream of it, but each of us has very different ideas about where it is to be found. For some it can be enjoyed only after death; for others, it’s in our midst—or just across the ocean—
The astonishing story of immigrants lured to the United States from India and trapped in forced labor—told by the visionary labor leader who engineered their escape and set them on a path to citizenship.
The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who broke the story, the inspiring account of the sixteen female scientists who forced MIT to publicly admit it had been discriminating against its female faculty for years—sparking a nationwide reckoning with the pervasive sexism in science.
The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church
In 1838, a group of America’s most prominent Catholic priests sold 272 enslaved people to save their largest mission project, what is now Georgetown University.
The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages?
Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”
In Our Migrant Souls , the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Héctor Tobar delivers a definitive and personal exploration of what it means to be Latino in the United States right now.
Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.―and the first to include recently declassified FBI files.
Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope
The bestselling author of How to Live and At the Existentialist Café explores seven hundred years of writers, thinkers, scientists, and artists, all trying to understand what it means to be truly human.
A stunning account of a colossal wildfire that collided with a city, and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind from the award-winning, best-selling author of The Tiger and The Golden Spruce.
"What if you woke up one morning and found you'd acquired another self—a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you'd devoted your life to fighting against?"
Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State
A wild, humane, and hilarious meditation on post-privacy America—from the acclaimed author of Thrown
"Howley meditates on freedom, privacy, storytelling, and the state, carefully following the threads of the War on Terror to the political upheavals of the present day."
Battle of Ink and Ice: A Sensational Story of News Barons, North Pole Explorers, and the Making of Modern Media
A sixty-year saga of frostbite and fake news that follows the no-holds-barred battle between two legendary explorers to reach the North Pole, and the newspapers which stopped at nothing to get–and sell–the story.
The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul
A rich, wide-ranging portrait of the divisions among Israelis today, at a critical juncture in their country’s history, by a veteran New York Times correspondent who has spent decades working in Israel.
What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World's Most Enigmatic Birds
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Genius of Birds and The Bird Way, a brilliant scientific investigation into owls—the most elusive of birds—and why they exert such a hold on human imagination.
Palestinians collect books from the rubble of a cultural centre following an Israeli strike in Rafah in southern Gaza on November 18, 2023 [Mohammed Abed/AFP]
