700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
Discussions about migration in the media and elsewhere are limited by a lack of perspective of international migration’s historical role, contemporary impacts, and future prospects. Exceptional People addresses these gaps....
For fans of psychobiography, Nixon is the gift that keeps on giving.Even after he reached the White House in 1969, Nixon still had to live with his ulcers and his...
The story of survivors of the Jewish Holocaust is widely known. The story of surviving victims of Stalin’s 25-year terror is virtually unknown in the West—and even in Russia itself....
This book is intentionally hybrid: it mixes literary criticism, commentary on teaching, reflections on the role of the Humanities, and personal memoir. This was a risky choice, on my end,...
Few people today except dentists will have heard of gutta-percha, but one hundred years ago it was a household word. A close cousin of rubber extracted from wild trees in...
On page 149 I start to describe the Disco Demolition rally in Chicago that occurred just a few days before Jimmy Carter gave his speech. The rally is a wonderful...
I started writing this book in a period when the political position of Asian Americans seemed to be oscillating between appearing either as threats to middle America or tokens of...
Crack tells the story of the young men who bet their lives on the rewards of selling “rock” cocaine, the people who gave themselves over to the crack pipe, and...
This book tells my personal story, that is, the story of a young scientist, driven by a curiosity about the natural world, who found himself wandering, essentially by accident, into...
Three shifts in thinking influenced the frequency of war and its motives.The first concerns the nature of wealth. Until Adam Smith and modern economics, the world’s wealth was thought to...
A book that takes this long to write is bound to have multiple origin stories. One came from my attempts as an undergraduate to think about Caribbean taverns as one place where many different …
My own involvement with chimpanzees came about fortuitously. In the late 1980s, I was conducting my doctoral research in Bangladesh on a previously little-known monkey called the capped langur. I...
Rebels at the Gates is about the United States Civil War in the 1860s. Of course, entire forests have been filled with pages of books on the American Civil War, and rightfully so. It was clearly one of the defining events in American history. However, my angle is new and unexplored...
I was a graduate student at Rice University in Houston Texas when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated overhead as it was returning to Earth. I watched communities in and around...
I like a book that tells you what it’s about on the very first page. Mine does—in fact on a page numbered with a roman numeral. Open it up to...
The Invention of Ecocide traces the rise and fall of herbicidal warfare in Vietnam from the origins of plant physiology, in Charles Darwin’s laboratory, to the apex of the global...
I think that the reader interested in the pressing contemporary problem of emergency power and its excesses would find the introductory chapter most interesting. There I identify the longer history...
This book is about Steven Spielberg's 1977 film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. A lot of people assume this is special effects driven film and about “wow” and “wonder”—which it is—but it's also about alienated lost masculinity. Part of what I argue—and I think this is the new angle to the book—is that in the beginning of the 70s films by Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese, Hal Ashby, Kubrick and others...
There is no more controversial aspect of Calvin’s life than the execution of Michael Servetus in Geneva in the fall of 1553, an event I treat on pages 217-228, in...
I actually did not intend to write a book on preventive war. A lot of people assumed I became interested in the subject because of the 1991 Gulf War, or...
Page 6, which shows the difference between the number of states that are included in the data that underpin our book, compared to the number of states identified in existing...
At Berkeley where I did my graduate work in comparative literature in the 1970s, there were no courses on women, or race, or ethnicity. No one read women writers much...
They both indicate that the current economic recovery from the global recession is inherently unsustainable.In 2008, the world was confronted with multiple crises—fuel, food and financial—and by December the result...
The introduction is a fruitful place to meander and to get a sense of the book. It covers a lot of ground. It also provides a short, traditional overview of...
The world faces two major challenges in the 21st century. First, how do we advance the institutions and practices capable of enacting a desirable quality of life for a burgeoning...
As a folklorist and historian of ancient science, I investigate the crossroads of classical antiquity, literature and art, archaeology, and history. My goal is uncovering historical and scientific realities embedded...
Others in Mind is a book about self-consciousness: how it originates and how it shapes our lives. Self-consciousness is arguably the most important and revealing of all psychological issues. Why...
How do physicists decide that some data might constitute a discovery?The way to find out is to watch. For 18 months I watched physicists arguing about a burst of data...
One of my favorite passages in the book comes in the third chapter, which looks at Agfa’s German factories (particularly the Wolfen factory) during the weeks and months after World...
For Keeler’s placebo strategy to succeed—both for him to sell his services and to make the lie detector effective—he had to drum up publicity. Hence, my book zooms in on...
We don't have paywalls. We don't sell your data. Please help to keep this running!
.png)
.png)
.png)
.jpeg)
