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Radical art has no necessary tie to progressive politics, and Gertrude Stein was a reactionary modernist who supported Pétain.

The intense, warm, almost passionate friendship of Gertrude Stein and Bernard Faÿ can be seen in a couple of exchanges during the 1930s. This is a letter Stein wrote to...

Unlikely Collaboration

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Radical art has no necessary tie to progressive politics, and Gertrude Stein was a reactionary modernist who supported Pétain.

This book emerged out of a sense of uncertainty as to how to understand the years that Gertrude Stein spent in Vichy, France, from 1940 through 1944. My previous book on...

Unlikely Collaboration

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Radical art has no necessary tie to progressive politics.

Unlikely Collaboration is a study of the unlikely attraction of modernist intellectuals and artists to fascist and authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century. Its focus is on the particular experience...

Unlikely Collaboration

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Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise, not his Ethics, is the book that inaugurated the Enlightenment.

The way I have conceived this book, I would hope the browsing reader will open up to page one and immediately be taken by the story.The opening pages put the...

A Book Forged in Hell

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Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise, not his Ethics, is the book that inaugurated the Enlightenment.

Spinoza’s Treatise is very much a product of its time—especially the immediate context of the Dutch Golden Age, with its heady mix of economic wealth, political liberalism, religious dissent, scientific...

A Book Forged in Hell

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Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise, not his Ethics, is the book that launched the Enlightenment.

A Book Forged in Hell is about one of the most important and controversial books in Western history, one that continues to be vitally relevant today. Writing in May, 1670, the...

A Book Forged in Hell

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Ordinary Soviet citizens made the Great Terror, writing denunciations and naming names out of belief and fear at once.

The front cover of the book reproduces a very powerful painting and is worth looking at carefully. Dmitri Zhilinskii, the artist, painted it from memory. It depicts his own father’s...

Inventing the Enemy

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Ordinary Soviet citizens made the Great Terror, writing denunciations and naming names out of belief and fear at once.

Inventing the Enemy grew out of my previous book, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin, which described the impact of the terror on the unions, workers, and industry....

Inventing the Enemy

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Ordinary Soviet citizens did not merely suffer the Great Terror but helped make it.

Inventing the Enemy is about the period known as the “Great Terror” in the Soviet Union. At the height of the terror in 1937–38, the Soviet secret police under the...

Inventing the Enemy

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International politics is becoming like domestic politics, and the groups that win are those that coordinate across borders.

Your “just browsing” reader should actually start with the blurbs on the back cover. I was blown away by the positive response I got from senior colleagues who are among...

Rethinking World Politics

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International politics is becoming like domestic politics, and the groups that win are those that coordinate across borders.

My own trajectory has taken a number of twists and turns. In the introduction, I mention only one of the many people who have influenced my own thought—a professor who at...

Rethinking World Politics

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International politics is becoming more like domestic politics.

Our understanding of world politics in the “modern” world (i.e. the past couple of centuries) has been dominated by the “inside/outside distinction.” On the one hand, “domestic” politics, the inside, involves...

Rethinking World Politics

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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...

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Attacking all religious belief only fuels fundamentalism.

Will religious moderation be practiced more or less in the future? In many ways the survival of societies committed to the values of tolerance, progress, and the peaceful exchange of...

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Calexico and Mexicali are one bilingual community that manages the border better than Washington and Mexico City do.

I cannot pick out a single page where I would want your browsing reader to go first. One of the joys for me of this project is that the book is...

Calexico

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Calexico and Mexicali are one bilingual community that manages the border better than Washington and Mexico City do.

After September 11, 2001, Washington decided that one of the answers to threats of terrorism was to detain travelers driving north at the Mexican border and relentlessly question them. What the...

Calexico

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Calexico and Mexicali are one bilingual community that manages the border better than policymakers do.

Calexico takes the reader to a border unlike the stereotypes. The lawlessness of some border flashpoints dominates border news. The bulk of Americans, those of us living far from the 2,000...

Calexico

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In Dickens the family almost always wins, in Joyce and Proust the stranger wins.

The first paragraph in the Introduction is about a family memory which prompted the book in the first place. On page 11 I discuss fairytales looking at the problem of maturation...

In the Company of Strangers

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In Dickens the family almost always wins, in Joyce and Proust the stranger wins.

This book is broadly in the field of narratology—that is the examination of how stories are structured and built. It deals with the questions of how time and change are...

In the Company of Strangers

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The modern novel finds kinship among strangers rather than within the family.

In the Company of Strangers is about how different ideas of the family affect the deep narrative structure of novels. The principles of marriage and reproduction seem to be fundamental to...

In the Company of Strangers

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Racial inequality in the United States is a learned cultural practice, not mainly intentional bias.

If a person were randomly opening the book I think I’d want them to flip to page 177, the beginning of Chapter Six, “Exceptionally Yours: Racial Escape Hatches in the...

More Beautiful and More Terrible

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Racial inequality in the United States is a learned cultural practice, so intent is a bad measure of discrimination.

The book is about race, but more broadly it is about the idea of Democracy. In it, I’m grappling with how we move closer to a society in which the...

More Beautiful and More Terrible

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Racial inequality in the United States is a learned cultural practice, so intent is a bad measure of discrimination.

This book is about a conflict between American ideals and our social reality. Although we embrace the ideal of racial equality, in myriad studies in numerous fields there is abundant...

More Beautiful and More Terrible

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The urban campus is a distinct spatial type, not a compromised version of the ideal one.

Chicago occupies a particular place in the development of American urbanism. Urban reform movements, the city beautiful movement, modern architecture, and urban renewal and public housing were developed and tested...

The City As Campus

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The urban campus is a distinct spatial type, not a compromised version of the ideal one.

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...

The City As Campus

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The urban campus is a distinct spatial type, not a compromised version of the ideal one.

The City as Campus is concerned with how higher education is situated within urban environments. I explore how urban universities’ missions of service, teaching, and research have transformed over time—as they...

The City As Campus

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Economists see only auctions and art historians treat the market as taboo, so neither can see how art trades.

The book’s cover image tells a powerful story. Martin Parr, the photographer, is one of my favorite artists. Over the years, he’s built an incredible body of work documenting the...

Art of the Deal

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Economists see only auctions and art historians treat the market as taboo, so neither can see how art trades.

A few basic tropes characterize writing on the art market. Economists focus almost exclusively on the auction trade, and paintings in particular. The reason is straightforward enough: auction sales are public...

Art of the Deal

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Neither economists nor art historians can see how the art market actually works.

The business of contemporary art has changed immeasurably over the last half century. What was essentially a small, insider trade clustered in a few key avant-garde capitals has expanded into...

Art of the Deal

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The Endangered Species Act works, and 262 species would have disappeared between 1973 and 2003 without it.

In Listed, I examined a few high-profile species where there appeared to be a clear conflict between conservation and economics: the red-cockaded woodpecker that knocked down a city, a pair...

Listed

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The Endangered Species Act works, saving far more species than its critics count.

I started Listed when I was working in Washington, DC, as a policy fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. At the time the Endangered Species Act...

Listed

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The Endangered Species Act works, and 262 species would have disappeared between 1973 and 2003 without it.

The first listed species to make headlines after the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973 was the snail darter, a three-inch fish that stood in the way of a...

Listed

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Feminist leaders turned the campaign against sexual violence in media toward pornography to buy press coverage and public support.

Some readers will be familiar with the better-known aspects of the feminist anti-pornography movement, particularly efforts led by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon in the mid-1980s to pass new legislation....

Battling Pornography

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Feminist leaders turned the campaign against sexual violence in media toward pornography to buy press coverage and public support.

In Battling Pornography, I locate the roots of anti-pornography sentiment in a series of interrelated social and political conditions that shaped women’s lives during the late 1960s and early 1970s....

Battling Pornography

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The feminist anti-pornography movement began as a campaign against sexual violence in media, not against pornography.

Battling Pornography chronicles the formation and development of an American feminist anti-pornography movement from 1976 to 1986. The book emphasizes the internal movement dynamics and external structural factors that supported...

Battling Pornography

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Ancient Mediterranean peoples built their identities more by claiming kinship with foreigners than by disparaging them.

If a reader were to browse at random in the book, where would s/he find a representative section that brought its central thesis most clearly to the fore? No single...

Rethinking the Other in Antiquity

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Ancient Mediterranean peoples built their identities more by claiming kinship with foreigners than by disparaging them.

All societies engage in myth-making about their pasts. The tales speak to the image that they wish to project not only to an external world but to themselves. How far...

Rethinking the Other in Antiquity

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Ancient peoples built their identities more by claiming kinship with foreigners than by disparaging them.

How do nations, peoples, and ethnic groups fashion their own collective identities? For antiquity as well as for the modern era, one general answer has prevailed: societies shape their self-consciousness...

Rethinking the Other in Antiquity

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European integration is turning Europe's informal, insider style of regulation into a European version of American adversarial legalism.

I begin the book with the story of passenger rights in the EU—a story which illustrates many of the dynamics described in the book. Many readers will be familiar with the...

Eurolegalism

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European integration is turning Europe's cooperative style of regulation into its own version of American adversarial legalism.

In a sense, Eurolegalism is a book about how the EU attempts to govern and what impact it has on its member countries. Critics like to rail against the EU’s supposedly...

Eurolegalism

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European integration is turning Europe's informal, insider style of regulation into a European version of American adversarial legalism.

Europe’s legal and regulatory landscape is changing. Historically, regulation through litigation was unheard of in European democracies. The United States was the land of “adversarial legalism,” famous—or perhaps infamous—for its activist...

Eurolegalism

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Border walls built since 1989 are theatrical props performing a sovereignty that is draining away.

The first few pages of Chapter One take the reader on a visual and textual tour of some of the new walls: Of the new walls striating the globe… best known...

Walled States, Waning Sovereignty

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Border walls built since 1989 are theatrical props performing a sovereignty that is draining away.

Walled States, Waning Sovereignty emerges from several decades of politically engaged scholarship. I am a political theorist by vocation, which means that my thinking about the world is refracted through my...

Walled States, Waning Sovereignty

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Border walls are not working barriers but performances of a sovereignty that is draining away.

The 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall was an internationally celebrated event, and was also the occasion for numerous proclamations, across the political spectrum, of a dawning unbordered world. Yet,...

Walled States, Waning Sovereignty

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Cairo is on course to become a theme-park replica of its own imagined past unless its citizens keep shaping it.

The last chapter of Cairo, the grand finale, if you will, speaks to the necessity of knowing the history of the city in order to understand the present. In a globalizing...

Cairo

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Cairo is on course to become a theme-park replica of its own imagined past.

Cairo has fascinated me since I was first exposed to the city’s Islamic heritage in 1973, and it has continued to keep me under its spell. This love affair began...

Cairo

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Cairo is on course to become a theme-park replica of its own imagined past unless its citizens keep shaping it.

Cairo is composed of twelve vignettes, arranged by place rather than time. Each vignette carries stories told through the place’s built environment. Each edifice has been dictated by the environment...

Cairo

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The evidence that zoot suiters wore the style as a gesture of refusal is slight and ambiguous.

I hope a browsing reader would start with the epigraphs that open the book, and then turn the page to the introduction.The epigraphs include quotations from such figures as Eudora...

Zoot Suit

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The evidence that zoot suiters wore the style as a gesture of refusal is slight and ambiguous.

Zoot Suit takes issue with historians and other scholars who interpret everyday life and culture largely as expressions of power and politics. In this view, subcultural styles are a form of...

Zoot Suit

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The zoot suit, like any style, was neither pure politics nor free of it.

Zoot Suit is a history of one of the most famous “street styles” of the 20th century. With its broad shoulders, tapered long jacket, pegged pants, and swinging key...

Zoot Suit

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Asian American designers reached the top of New York fashion because Asian immigrants were already in garment production.

The fun thing about writing a book about an emerging phenomenon is that there is always something surprising to learn.If I could direct readers to any part of the book,...

The Beautiful Generation

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Asian American designers reached the top of New York fashion because Asian immigrants were already in garment production.

I started working on this project quite accidentally. When I was a graduate student at NYU during the mid-90s, I spent a lot of time hanging out downtown. I would...

The Beautiful Generation

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Asian American fashion designers and Asian immigrant garment workers are one system, not two.

There was a time when the boutiques that are now so familiar in New York’s landscape were just small tenement buildings, with boarded up windows and bricked up facades. When I...

The Beautiful Generation

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The peoples of Europe accepted war in 1914 only because they believed their nation's war defensive and just.

I tried as much as possible to let the people of 1914 speak for themselves. I also tried to juxtapose words written by people from opposing sides on roughly the...

Dance of the Furies

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Europeans neither sought nor welcomed war in 1914, but accepted it as defensive and just.

I wrote this book to help me work my way out of a teaching problem. I simply could not explain the outbreak of the war to my students in one or...

Dance of the Furies

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The peoples of Europe accepted war in 1914 only because they believed their nation's war defensive and just.

Dance of the Furies is an attempt to understand 1914 by taking a wider view of European society. Instead of focusing on the perhaps dozen or so men whose decisions...

Dance of the Furies

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Business in a form recognizable today was born in the Greek city-states after 600 BC.

I would suggest that your browser first reads the book jacket’s summary. That should give an idea of what the book is all about.After that, it’s a toss up between...

The Origins of Business, Money, and Markets

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Business as we know it was born in the Greek city-states after 600 BC.

Each chapter deals with similar questions. What were the main forces that shaped business and its role in the economy? What new businesses emerged? How did they operate? What was...

The Origins of Business, Money, and Markets

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Business in a form recognizable today was born in the Greek city-states after 600 BC.

This is the first book to trace the genesis of modern business in Western antiquity. The time span stretches from prehistoric times to the late 7th century AD.The Origins of...

The Origins of Business, Money, and Markets

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Audiences following 1920s Hollywood star scandals helped found the human sciences that later claimed personality as their own.

For me, the key chapter of Twilight is the short chapter on Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. Many people today have only the vaguest notion of the these two young men...

Twilight of the Idols

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Audiences following 1920s Hollywood star scandals helped found the human sciences that later claimed personality as their own.

The book’s larger project is to describe the importance of the Hollywood cinema in founding those disciplinary practices that helped institutionalize contemporary scientific approaches to the study of the individual...

Twilight of the Idols

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Hollywood's 1920s scandals were not a distraction from social knowledge but a place where it was made.

Twilight of the Idols is ultimately a book about the central importance of deviance to the formation of American mass culture during the 1920s. Given our current media obsessions with unusual...

Twilight of the Idols

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We are blind to architecture, and the cure is the kiss, image and building superimposed.

I’d like readers to fall into the lush and alluring image of Pipilotti Rist’s Pour Your Body Out, like Alice fell into Wonderland. A short read later, I’d like them...

Kissing Architecture

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We are blind to architecture, and the cure is the kiss, image and building superimposed.

One of the most compelling themes in contemporary art theory is the controversy surrounding the question of “medium specificity.” That is, whether or not anything but habit and convention determine...

Kissing Architecture

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We are effectively blind to architecture.

This book is about image-architecture and the surprising apperceptive shifts that take place when today’s culture of ephemeral images and the stolid material traditions of architecture choose to embrace. Could you...

Kissing Architecture

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Financial crises have rarely been the forces for reshaping finance we want them to be.

How far have bankers been held responsible for the outbreak of financial crises? Charles Baring, the first Lord Revelstoke, the firm’s senior partner, took the brunt of the Baring Crisis...

Crises and Opportunities

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Financial crises have rarely been the forces for reshaping finance we want them to be.

The financial crisis of 2007-2008 triggered a huge demand for history, an unprecedented urge to place the event in a historical perspective. Two questions came up time and time again. How...

Crises and Opportunities

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Financial crises have rarely been the forces for reshaping finance we want them to be.

As the world’s political and economic leaders struggle with the aftermath of the financial debacle of 2008, this book asks: Have financial crises presented opportunities to rebuild the financial systems? Given...

Crises and Opportunities

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Posing is a form of communication, and the model is the central figure of twenty-first-century art.

Since The Real Real Thing covers a lot of ground, readers casually dipping into it might form very different ideas about what sort of book it is. If they happened...

The Real Real Thing

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Twenty-first-century art works to reconnect audiences to the world outside the work.

The Real Real Thing shows early 21st-century culture wrestling with new media, technology, and science. The book is the third in a loose trilogy that began with The Scandal of...

The Real Real Thing

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Posing is a form of communication, and the model is the central figure of twenty-first-century art.

Traditionally, the arts have been valued for providing a sphere of imaginary, virtual experience, in contrast to the reality of everyday life. But today, as our profiles and avatars stand...

The Real Real Thing

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Modern environmentalism got its global scope from the campaign against herbicidal warfare in Vietnam, not from Rachel Carson.

A reader approaching my book from a “close-up” perspective would be best served by reading the introduction and conclusion. In the opening pages I lay out the broad themes of the...

The Invention of Ecocide

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Modern environmentalism got its global scope from the campaign against herbicidal warfare in Vietnam, not from Rachel Carson.

I arrived at this project because I was interested in tracing the development of an idea. We are frequently told that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring “launched” the environmental movement after its...

The Invention of Ecocide

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Environmentalism's global scope came from the campaign against herbicidal warfare in Vietnam, not from Rachel Carson.

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...

The Invention of Ecocide

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A large dealer bank fails through a run by its short-term lenders, whatever caused the crisis.

The book’s story line carries, I hope, some dramatic interest. And it demands relatively little background knowledge. A reader whose curiosity is piqued will hopefully go further and cover the...

How Big Banks Fail and What to Do about It

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A large dealer bank fails by one mechanical sequence, a run by its overnight lenders, whatever caused the crisis.

As a financial economist at Stanford University, I was naturally led to this project. Among other topics, I study capital markets, risk management, derivatives, credit risk, bond markets, and over...

How Big Banks Fail and What to Do about It

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A large dealer bank fails by one mechanical sequence, a run by its overnight lenders, whatever caused the crisis.

This book addresses precisely the questions raised by its title. We all know that banks fail when they can’t pay their debts on time. This book spells out the specific steps...

How Big Banks Fail and What to Do about It

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Drug approvals are falling because we are running out of proteins a small molecule can bind to.

In 1957, during a cleanup of his lab at the pharmaceutical company Roche, Leo Sternbach discovered an old flask containing a chemical he had synthesized previously, but discarded for lack...

The Quest for the Cure

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Drug approvals are falling because we are running out of proteins a small molecule can bind to.

Given the declining number of new drugs, and the crisis in the pharmaceutical industry, many are asking what can be done. The Obama administration has proposed a new initiative to help...

The Quest for the Cure

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Drug approvals are falling because we are running out of proteins a small molecule can bind to.

Over the last 15 years, the annual number of approved new drugs has been declining dramatically. Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical industry, as well as academic and government researchers, have dramatically increased...

The Quest for the Cure

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When people talk about animals they disclose their assumptions about each other.

The essays collected in Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras share a focus on animals but within that general topic, they vary greatly. So a reader most interested in contemporary issues...

Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras

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When people talk about animals they disclose their assumptions about each other.

When I began work on my first book, animals were not universally acknowledged as respectable subjects of historical research. The book was published by Harvard University Press in 1987, and...

Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras

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When people talk about animals they disclose their assumptions about each other.

Disciplines like zoology and veterinary medicine have always taken animals seriously as the subject of research. In the humanities and social sciences, the field sometimes known as “animal studies” began...

Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras

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The Nozière case gripped France because the parents were recognizably people like us.

A chapter that I hope readers will find as exciting to read as I did to write is entitled “Letters to the Judge.” In the French criminal justice system, the initial...

Violette Nozière

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The Nozière case gripped France because the parents were recognizably people like us.

There is only one previous book about this case, an account of the bare facts of the matter published in French in 1975. I happened to read it a few...

Violette Nozière

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The Nozière case gripped France because the parents were recognizably people like us.

Violette Nozière tells the story of a high-profile criminal case that took place in Paris in 1933-34. An eighteen-year-old girl, the only child of a striving lower-middle-class couple, carefully devised and...

Violette Nozière

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Classicism and the pictorial innovations of Italian art, 1490 to 1540, were instruments of reforming religious art.

There is a short section devoted to the painting reproduced on the book’s cover, which is Rosso Fiorentino’s Dead Christ (1527), a very strange painting and nothing less than a...

The Controversy of Renaissance Art

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Italian Renaissance art reformed religious art rather than breaking away from it into secular art.

The Italian Renaissance has always been understood as the foundation of European art. The entire artistic tradition through Picasso stems from the extraordinary achievements of early 16th century artists. Traditionally, this...

The Controversy of Renaissance Art

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Classicism and the pictorial innovations of Italian art, 1490 to 1540, were instruments of reforming religious art.

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...

The Controversy of Renaissance Art

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Fundamentalism is a way of believing, so the New Atheists and the biblical literalists hold the same position.

I would hope your casual reader would first happen upon some of the pages in which I discuss how moderates and fundamentalists believe in very different ways. Religious moderation is a...

In Defense of Religious Moderation

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Fundamentalism is a way of believing, so the New Atheists and the biblical literalists hold the same position.

I come to the question of religious belief as a scholar of literature and philosophy. And the Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges is a great influence for this work. As I...

In Defense of Religious Moderation

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Fundamentalism is not a religious creed but a way of believing.

The current debate around religion in America has been dominated by fundamentalists and atheists. The fundamentalists have managed to set a tone for political discourse in America in which no one...

In Defense of Religious Moderation

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Information overload is ancient, and selecting, summarizing, sorting and storing are still how we cope.

My favorite chapter is the one on note-taking (chapter two). It is about how students and adults in the Renaissance were taught and encouraged to take notes. Humanist pedagogues argued that...

Too Much to Know

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Information overload is ancient, and selecting, summarizing, sorting and storing are still how we cope.

This book illustrates the long history of the basic moves of information management on which we still rely today, even with digital tools. I call them the 4S's: selecting, summarizing,...

Too Much to Know

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Information overload is not a modern condition.

This book is about how the feeling of being overloaded with information, especially things to read, isn't a recent phenomenon. Similarly the tools for coping with overload, notably by managing...

Too Much to Know

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Cuban art of the 1990s asked how a people lives with disenchantment after building the sky.

Juan Francisco Elso’s “Por América” is one of the many remarkable works that I write about. An effigy of José Martí, it is an exquisitely painful portrait, depicting the Cuban...

To and from Utopia in the New Cuban Art

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The chastened Cuban art of the 1990s asked how a people lives with disenchantment after building the sky.

My own engagement with Cuban art began in 1985, the result of a happy accident. I was immediately fascinated by the work that my peers in Havana were making: it...

To and from Utopia in the New Cuban Art

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The chastened Cuban art of the 1990s asked how a people lives with disenchantment after building the sky.

What happened in Cuba was basically the collapse of a dream. That’s obvious, but nonetheless painful. Specifically in the arts, the 1980s was a time of incredibly energetic and critical creativity,...

To and from Utopia in the New Cuban Art

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Adolescent boys have openly intimate male friendships and lose them in late adolescence to culture, not to maturation.

Research consistently reveals that friendships are key to all aspects of wellbeing. So we should be alarmed by the findings of loss of friendships and increased feelings of distrust among...

Boys' Friendships and the Crisis of Connection

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Boys lose their intimate friendships in late adolescence to culture, not to growing up.

Why have we, as a culture, ignored the intimacy in boys’ friendships for so long, despite the fact that research has revealed such intimacy among boys over the past century? And...

Boys' Friendships and the Crisis of Connection

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