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The World in Play - In a nutshell

The most compelling and unsettling moment for me in all of Victorian literature comes when Alice tumbles down the rabbit hole: that epistemological abyss at the heart of nineteenth-century modernity....

Matthew Kaiser

A Taste for the Beautiful - A close-up

The first two chapters set the stage for understanding how beauty comes to be in the brain of the beholder. I begin Chapter 1 by asking a simple question: Why...

Michael J. Ryan

The Controversy of Renaissance Art - In a nutshell

This book puts Italian art of the period 1490-1540, in the context of the religious controversy that dominated the era.This is the period before the Council of Trent, before the...

Alexander Nagel

A Theory of Assembly - In a nutshell

How have new technologies transformed the way we communicate? It’s a question we have to ask in the age of smartphones and the internet and as ever more disruptive expressive...

Kyle Parry

The Death of a Prophet - A close-up

The introduction will give readers the best overview of the issues and questions that the book engages, as well as its broader intellectual context. Nevertheless, I attempted to write the...

Stephen J. Shoemaker

Clash of Extremes - The wide angle

Several principles shape the book. First, the story of the coming of the Civil War and its aftermath is told with a focus on individuals. Readers will encounter lawmaker Thaddeus...

Marc Egnal

Mao’s Great Famine - A close-up

Thanks to extraordinarily rich archives, the reader can get much closer to every aspect of life and death during Mao’s Great Famine than ever before. But nothing illustrates the desperation...

Frank Dikötter

Masters of Craft - The wide angle

There are three broad forces occurring in society today that in concert are leading to these jobs becoming cool. First, how we classify taste is shifting. Consumers are questioning what...

Richard E. Ocejo

The Age of Addiction - The wide angle

I wrote the Age of Addition to explain why addiction has become so widespread, conspicuous, and varied. When I entered the field in the 1970s, as a doctoral student studying...

David T. Courtwright

On Task - In a nutshell

On any given day, we accomplish a wide range of tasks from big long-term goals down to the simplest chores like making a cup of coffee. If we have a...

David Badre

Foretelling the End of Capitalism - In a nutshell

This book seeks to explain the persistence of capitalism despite all the trouble it has created. For several years now, every crisis—even crises not directly caused by capitalism, such as...

Francesco Boldizzoni

The Genius Checklist - The wide angle

Three points need to be made about how this book covers the subject.First, although the overview is restricted to creative genius—and thus ignores genius in politics, war, and religion—the coverage...

Dean Keith Simonton

The Dialectic of Cosmopolitan Time - A close-up

The book looks to modern and contemporary literature and film from Turkey and Iran. The chapters examine the temporalities of the late Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami and the Turkish Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk. They interpret other Middle Eastern modernist writers including the poets Forough Farrokhzad and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, as well as the Ottoman novelist Ahmet Midhat Efendi...

Shaj Mathew

Made in America - A close-up

I would like to highlight just two passages.The first is from the start of Chapter 2:In early 1865, Abraham Lincoln was the most powerful man in the Western Hemisphere. He...

Claude S. Fischer

Higher Learning, Greater Good - In a nutshell

Higher Learning, Greater Good is the first book to systematically identify and develop the evidence necessary to measure comprehensively the benefits of higher education and to estimate their economic value.The...

Walter W. McMahon

Slaves to Fashion - A close-up

In order to illustrate the way that a black dandy can embody complex and even competing notions of blackness, meet “Dandy Jim, from Carolina,” a theatrical figure made famous by...

Monica L. Miller

Radical Thinking - In a nutshell

Radical Thinking is a book about how we make sense of the world, and how we can make more sense of it. But it’s not a typical ‘critical thinking’ book. It’s ‘radical’ (from the Latin radic, meaning ‘root’) because it’s about the roots - the foundations - of what we think. In other words, it’s about the things that shape our thoughts...

Peter Lamont

Global California - The wide angle

Global California discusses what Californians can do to identify and promote their own interests in a rapidly changing world. It takes up such thorny issues as globalization, trade, infrastructure, immigration,...

Abraham F. Lowenthal

On the Side of the Angels - A close-up

I’ll focus on the three elements of my proposed ethic of partisanship, which applies to “civilian” partisans, ordinary citizen voters, as well as to partisan politicians in office.The first is...

Nancy L. Rosenblum

Sustainable Utopias - The wide angle

In some ways, a history of late twentieth-century utopianism fits neatly into histories of the twentieth century. Many scholars have emphasized that efforts to realize sweeping revisions to the structure...

Jennifer L. Allen

Carl Hagenbeck’s Empire of Entertainments - A close-up

One aspect of the book will be of particular interest to American readers: the history of Wild West shows in Germany. The story of Buffalo Bill, his Wild West, and...

Eric Ames

Breaking the Devil’s Pact - A close-up

Because the book presents an historical case study of U.S. v. IBT, it would best be approached chronologically.The Timeline (pages xix—xxi in the book) is a thumbnail overview of the...

James B. Jacobs

Gods and Robots - The wide angle

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...

Adrienne Mayor

The Culture Transplant - A close-up

The preface, for sure, is what I want readers to encounter first. I ask, “What’s the best practical immigration policy for the average middle-income country?” My answer: “Let in just...

Garett Jones

The Invention of Ecocide - In a nutshell

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...

David Zierler

Slaves to Fashion - The wide angle

Slaves to Fashion began with a footnote I encountered in graduate school. While auditing a class on W.E.B Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, I came across a troubling...

Monica L. Miller

Speaking, Stammering, Singing, Shouting - A close-up

The book attempts to give equal billing to scientific debates and educational practice in music and oracy. Different parts of the narrative are therefore likely to appeal to readers interested...

Josephine Hoegaerts

The City As Campus - The wide angle

For someone who felt passionately about cities from a very young age, my formal education actually took place away from them. Early on I was aware of the ways in...

Sharon Haar

Investing in Protection - The wide angle

The idea for the book was born from a conversation with Noboru Hatakeyama, a former top official in Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry—the (in)famous MITI—in the fall of...

Mark S. Manger

Stalking Nabokov - In a nutshell

Stalking Nabokovfocuses always on Vladimir Nabokov and occasionally also on me in persistent pursuit, wielding a variety of nets, in different seasons and terrains, panting with effort while he flutters...

Brian Boyd

2073 Micro Interviews