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The Speed Handbook - A close-up

Adrenaline was isolated by Jokicki Takamine in 1901. And it was at once described in terms of human energy, of movement, as “fight or flight,” as the source of increased...

Enda Duffy

The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair - The wide angle

As a graduate student at Harvard University, I worked with B. F. Skinner, the preeminent behaviorist of the 20th century. Although my dissertation was about discrimination learning by pigeons, Skinner's...

Moshik Temkin

Living on Campus - In a nutshell

Did you live in a dormitory? Do you have fond memories of it, or were you plotting your escape from the moment you moved in? Many people live in residence...

Carla Yanni

Democracy's Muse - The wide angle

The discipline of history demands of professional historians that we do our best to re-encounter and faithfully restore to the modern mind the physical, moral, intellectual, social, political, emotional boundaries––the...

Andrew Burstein

Dog Economics - In a nutshell

People and dogs share thousands of years of co-evolution. The nature of their relationship has also evolved, moving largely from dogs as workmates to dogs as pets. Especially in contemporary...

Aidan R. Vining

On the future of religious moderation

Moderation is not, as some secularist firebrands would have us believe, just a watered down version of more committed beliefs. Rather, it is a way of believing that is different...

William Egginton

The Mental Life of Modernism - In a nutshell

I don’t believe in coincidences, at least not big ones. That’s why the sea change the sister arts of poetry, painting, and music underwent at the turn of the 20th...

Samuel Jay Keyser

Cinema in an Age of Terror - A close-up

I’d draw the attention of your “browser” to the book’s first chapter.The first chapter of Cinema in an Age of Terror discusses The Battle of Algiers, a film by the...

Michael F. O’Riley

The Last Utopia - A close-up

I would probably draw my reader’s attention to a chart on p. 231 that I initially made when I got the intuition that “human rights” were far more important in...

Samuel Moyn

Treason on the Airwaves - The wide angle

As a child after the Second World War, I had often heard the grown ups talking about “Tokyo Rose,” the husky-voiced Japanese siren who supposedly taunted our soldiers in the...

Judith Keene

The Anatomy Murders - The wide angle

The Burke and Hare anatomy murders were a sensation in their own day, the first serial killings to be reported in the popular press. The story traveled wherever newspapers were...

Lisa Rosner

The Disordered Police State - In a nutshell

The narcissistic present forever seeks itself in the past. Though the living try to winnow meaning from the chaos of history, they often discover only themselves among the dead generations....

Andre Wakefield

Weyward Macbeth - The wide angle

Unsilencing belongs to the global conversation about how societies remember—or refuse to remember—state violence. It speaks to the legacy of the gulag but also to the aftermath of authoritarianism everywhere,...

Ayanna Thompson

Pure Adulteration - A close-up

Most of the chapters begin with a story about a con man or a point of confusion and mistrust in the world of nineteenth century foods. The first chapter introduces...

Benjamin R. Cohen

Thinking in Place - A close-up

I would hope that readers “browsing” would first look at the book’s cover. It is a dreamy image of water taken on the Hudson River by artist Ellen Kozak. I...

Carol Becker

Making Our Neighborhoods, Making Our Selves - The wide angle

Urban theorists have tried for generations to define exactly what a neighborhood is. But behind that daunting existential question lies a much murkier problem: how do you make neighborhoods productive...

George C. Galster

Perfect Communities - A close-up

There are wonderful pictures sprinkled throughout the book, and I’d love for bookstore browsers to take a look. They’ll see pictures of people camped out overnight in the frigid cold,...

Edward Berenson

Nashville - The wide angle

I write about the politics of media –right-wing and conservative media, mainstream network television news, and journalism history. My era is the 60s and 70s, and the Nashville book is...

Heather Hendershot

To Serve God and Wal-Mart - The wide angle

Histories of the long, prosperous liberal consensus in the middle of the twentieth century looked back to the specific experience of the industrial North. The people and institutions of the...

Bethany Moreton

Adcreep - In a nutshell

By some counts, the average American is exposed to over three thousand advertisements each day. It is not just the number, but the nature of these ads that are different...

Mark Bartholomew

True Crimes in Eighteenth-Century China - A close-up

There are many cases in my book that should be of particular interest to an inquisitive reader wanting to find out what happened, why, and what the punishment might have...

Robert E. Hegel

Before Fiction - In a nutshell

On the face of it, my title is silly: there is no “before fiction” for humans, for we are, from the start of recorded history and from the start of...

Nicholas D. Paige

What Would Nature Do? A Guide for Our Uncertain Times - A close-up

The book has separate chapters for each of the four strategies. My favorite chapter is the one about the fourth strategy, titled “One Size Fits No One.” It’s about how...

Ruth DeFries

The Art of Tennis - A close-up

The close-upIf a reader finds The Art of Tennis in a bookstore, I hope, first of all, that they look at the cover, and they realize that this should be...

Nicholas Fox Weber

Recomposing Ecopoetics - The wide angle

The concept of the “self-conscious Anthropocene,” introduced in the book’s title, is one of the book’s innovations and points to its larger significance. The term Anthropocene was introduced in 2000...

Lynn Keller

Through Amateur Eyes - A close-up

I would hope that the browser who picked up Through Amateur Eyes in a bookstore would turn to the image section in the middle of the book.The archival images that...

Frances Guerin

The Arab Winter - A close-up

To me the heart of the book is my argument (in chapter two) about the two major Egyptian movements that centered on Tahrir Square: The January 25 movement or revolution,...

Noah Feldman

Inventing Tomorrow - In a nutshell

Inventing Tomorrow sets out to tell a story of 20th century literary culture that follows an entirely different path from the one that has dominated academia for the last fifty...

Sarah Cole

The Justice Cascade - In a nutshell

The Justice Cascadeprovides an overview and an evaluation of one of the most important changes in global politics: the rise of individual criminal accountability for human rights violations. In it,...

Kathryn Sikkink

Icons of Life - A close-up

The first time I visited Carnegie embryo collection, I had just finished reading Bobbie Ann Mason’s 1993 novel, Feather Crowns. Mason tells the story of a hardworking farm wife named...

Lynn M. Morgan

2073 Micro Interviews