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The apartment plot is a genre, not a setting.

The book addresses a few different fields of inquiry. These include film genre, and writing on genre by people like Rick Altman. They also include ideas about urbanism. I focus...

The Apartment Plot

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The apartment plot is a genre, not a setting, and it dominated American film from 1945 to 1975.

The Apartment Plot argues for the dominance and centrality of the apartment plot from 1945 to 1975. What I am calling “the apartment plot” are narratives in which the apartment figures...

The Apartment Plot

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Stalin's mass killings of the 1930s were genocide, and the definition should cover social and political groups.

Some of the newest and most interesting material in the book illuminates the issue of Stalin’s use of the “special settlements” to punish his alleged opponents and to eliminate groups...

Stalin’s Genocides

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Stalin's mass killings of the 1930s were genocide, and the definition should cover social and political groups.

This study grew out of a long-term preoccupation with the history of genocide and the way Stalin and his crimes should be viewed in the context of that history. More often...

Stalin’s Genocides

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Stalin's mass killings of the 1930s were genocide.

The book—really an extended essay—argues that Stalin’s mass killings in the 1930s should be classified as “genocide.” The book suggests that the definition of genocide, as taken from the work of...

Stalin’s Genocides

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America never took a right turn, since Republicans after 1966 won on wedge issues but could not govern as reactionaries.

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...

No Right Turn

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America never took a right turn after 1966.

When American historical writing entered its Humpty Dumpty phase, sometime around 1970, political and social history flew off in separate directions. In No Right Turn I bring them back together....

No Right Turn

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America never took a right turn, since Republicans after 1966 won on wedge issues but could not govern as reactionaries.

When did America take a right turn? Most people think it began with the chaos of the 1960s, the unraveling of the New Deal coalition, the rise of the New...

No Right Turn

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Modern economics took its narrow, mathematical, market-friendly form because Cold War funding and politics selected it.

Modern economics emerged after the Second World War. Many crucial developments came earlier, for the 1930s was an incredibly fertile period for economic thinking. But the Second World War mobilized...

The Puzzle of Modern Economics

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Modern economics took its narrow, mathematical, market-friendly form because Cold War funding and politics selected it.

The Puzzle of Modern Economics starts by looking at the financial crisis of 2008, when the Queen of England opened a new building at the London School of Economics and...

The Puzzle of Modern Economics

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The narrowness of modern economics is a historical artifact, not a discovery.

Is economics the key to everything or do we need to look for completely new ways of explaining what is going on in the world? By “economics” I mean the discipline...

The Puzzle of Modern Economics

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International human rights became a mass moral cause only in the 1970s, because earlier idealisms had failed.

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...

The Last Utopia

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International human rights became a mass moral cause only in the 1970s, born of disappointment.

I originally got started on this topic as a young idealist then as a neophyte teacher. While in law school, I interned in the United States government, out of the...

The Last Utopia

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International human rights became a mass moral cause only in the 1970s, because earlier idealisms had failed.

The Last Utopia assesses how deeply rooted in history the notion of “international human rights” is. I have long been fascinated by this question since human rights—together with the advocacy and...

The Last Utopia

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The Great Leap famine was mass murder, not miscalculation, and at least 45 million died.

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...

Mao’s Great Famine

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The Great Leap famine was mass murder, not miscalculation, and at least 45 million died.

Mao’s Great Famine recasts the era of Mao Zedong and the history of the People’s Republic of China. Here are my key arguments:1. The famine did not last three years,...

Mao’s Great Famine

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The Great Leap famine was mass murder, not miscalculation.

My goal was to write a detailed chronicle of an era in Chinese history that is much speculated about, but has never before been fully documented. Between 1958 and 1962, Mao...

Mao’s Great Famine

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Fascism was a transatlantic ideology, and Argentina's sacred Catholic version runs directly into Peronism and the 1976 dictatorship.

Transatlantic Fascism investigates how Mussolini’s propaganda endeavors included the fascist rethinking of Argentine history, fascist transatlantic flights and the extensive use of radio, cinema, cartoons and bribes. However, if the Italians...

Transatlantic Fascism

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Fascism was a transatlantic ideology, not a set of national cases.

Fascism was a cross-regional civic religion in its most extreme form. In certain Catholic countries fascism reoccupied places previously held by institutional religion but also let itself be invested by...

Transatlantic Fascism

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Fascism was a transatlantic ideology, and Argentina's sacred Catholic version runs directly into Peronism and the 1976 dictatorship.

This book provides a contextual and theoretical introduction to transnational fascist ideology and practice, particularly the central role of political violence, empire and war across the “fascist Atlantic.” I stress the...

Transatlantic Fascism

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Reischauer got Japan right, and deep language and area knowledge inside government prevents wars.

I found Reischauer’s life to be profoundly interesting, and perhaps even tragic, as a human interest story.His younger sister, Felicia, was born deaf and mute, and Ed had to help...

Edwin O. Reischauer and the American Discovery of Japan

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Reischauer got Japan right, and deep language and area knowledge inside government prevents wars.

The book highlights the hubris and conceit of American foreign policy. We seem to believe that we can dictate to other nations, and spread our democratic “way of life” at the...

Edwin O. Reischauer and the American Discovery of Japan

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Deep language and area knowledge inside government prevents wars.

This is a book about one American’s lifelong mission to explain the real Japan to the rest of the world. Edwin O. Reischauer, born in Japan in 1910 to Presbyterian...

Edwin O. Reischauer and the American Discovery of Japan

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Tuition is a bubble, and no college can fix American higher education's structural crisis on its own.

While radical reform is necessary at every level of higher education, it needs to start with a thorough restructuring of graduate education and, by extension, a redesign of the curriculum...

Crisis on Campus

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American higher education's problems are structural, not cyclical.

The book’s chapter 5 is titled “Education Bubble.” When considering the financial problems of higher education, it is important to look at the issue from the side of both students and...

Crisis on Campus

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Tuition is a bubble, and no college can fix American higher education's structural crisis on its own.

Our current system of higher education is financially, curricularly and institutionally unsustainable. And there is no easy answer to a problem this complex. But I wrote Crisis on Campus because no significant...

Crisis on Campus

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The autonomous, person-like embryo was manufactured by Carnegie's specimen collectors, who made the pregnant women invisible.

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...

Icons of Life

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The person-like embryo is a historical product, not a discovery.

It was a beautiful day in June on the campus of Mount Holyoke College. I had planned to go strawberry picking, but I found myself instead in the basement of...

Icons of Life

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The autonomous, person-like embryo was manufactured by Carnegie's specimen collectors, who made the pregnant women invisible.

Icons of Life explains how we came to think of embryos as tiny, unborn versions of our selves. Today embryos and fetuses are veritable little persons; they star in their own...

Icons of Life

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The desire for standing, not security, is the main cause of war.

The Iraq invasion of 2003 was justified by the Bush administration on the grounds of national security. But all of the principal advisors of the administration of president George W....

Why Nations Fight

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Standing, not security, is the principal cause of war, implicated in 62 of 94 interstate wars since 1648.

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...

Why Nations Fight

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Standing, not security, is the principal cause of war, implicated in 62 of 94 interstate wars since 1648.

There is a burgeoning literature on war and its causes. Almost all major studies approach the problem from a realist perspective. They assume security is the principal motive of states...

Why Nations Fight

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Qutb would have condemned al-Qaeda, since for him jihad against iniquitous Muslim regimes was always paramount.

In 1954, Egypt’s new revolutionary regime arrested Sayyid Qutb and hundreds of other Egyptian Islamist following a Muslim Brother’s assassination attempt on President Nasser. Qutb had joined the Muslim Brotherhood,...

Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism

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Sayyid Qutb is not the father of al-Qaeda's global jihad.

All too often scholars understand Islamism as a channel for material discontent, or else in terms of rational choice theory, which holds that most, if not all, forms of human...

Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism

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Qutb would have condemned al-Qaeda, since for him jihad against iniquitous Muslim regimes was always paramount.

My book is a biography of Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), the influential Egyptian ideologue of Islamic revolution. No other Islamist thinker, with the possible exception of the South Asian Abu l-A‘la Mawdudi...

Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism

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Innocent people confess to crimes as grave as mass murder because interrogators induce them to.

If I could gently nudge a browser in a bookstore to open Innocent Until Interrogated, I’d probably point her to the text on page 221.It’s only a few lines about...

Innocent Until Interrogated

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Innocent people confess to crimes as grave as mass murder because interrogators induce them to.

With regard to the larger picture, my book chronicles moral and legal conflicts, political intrigue, retribution, and drastic consequences—all of which were unintended. There is a dark evil here, smoldering under...

Innocent Until Interrogated

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Innocent people confess to crimes as grave as mass murder because interrogators lead them to.

My book is a stark but comprehensive look at what really happened following the discovery of two seemingly unrelated cases of murder near Phoenix, Arizona, in 1991. The first case involved...

Innocent Until Interrogated

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Romantic Britain invented the identity-play we call modern, with Byron and Brummell as working analogues of Warhol and Madonna.

Toward the end of the second chapter I discuss William Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age. For me, this section embodies all the concepts I try to engage in the book.I...

Fashioning Faces

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Romantic Britain invented the identity-play we call modern, with Byron and Brummell as working analogues of Warhol and Madonna.

Fashioning Faces begins with the assumption that cultural history as an approach and a methodology can capture a cultural phenomenon such as the Romantic fascination with biography and portraiture more...

Fashioning Faces

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The identity-play we think of as modern was invented in Romantic Britain.

Fashioning Faces, a cross-disciplinary study, looks at how literary and visual portraiture in the British Romantic era embodied a newly commercial culture. I consider the Romantic era as a transitional period...

Fashioning Faces

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There is no tradeoff between reviving the world economy and greening it.

Many observers of economic policy enacted during the 2008-9 recession will have noted that some governments included many investments in energy efficiency, clean energy, waste management and other environmental improvements...

A Global Green New Deal

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There is no tradeoff between reviving the world economy and greening it.

This book is a substantial revision and expansion of my influential February 2009 report for the UN Environment Programme. In October 2008, the global economy was reeling from a spate of...

A Global Green New Deal

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There is no tradeoff between reviving the world economy and greening it.

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...

A Global Green New Deal

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Homicide rates track whether people trust government, officials and each other, not poverty, drugs or unemployment.

Historically, only a small minority of murders of unrelated adults have had their origins in long-term, hostile relationships. People who killed non-relatives who lived with them—boarders, landlords, slaves, servants, masters,...

American Homicide

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Homicide rates track whether people trust government, officials and each other, not poverty, drugs or unemployment.

The theory of homicide I develop in the book first emerged because my initial hypothesis “died a horrible death” in the face of the evidence from Vermont and New Hampshire,...

American Homicide

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Homicide rates depend on whether people trust their government and each other, not on poverty or drugs.

No matter where Americans live, their risk of being murdered is higher than it is in any other first-world democracy. From 1965 to 1992, the homicide rate in the United States...

American Homicide

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The diversity of a person's network, not its size, predicts health, recovery, longevity and success.

In chapter 2, “The View From Above,” I write that social networks are like traffic jams. You can easily see the cars that surround you—your intimates. However, it takes a helicopter...

Consequential Strangers

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Our peripheral relationships, not just our intimates, supply information, opportunity and new horizons.

Throughout my career, I wrote books and articles about intimate relationships. When I made a move from New York City to Northampton, Massachusetts in 1990, I left all my everyday...

Consequential Strangers

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The diversity of a person's network, not its size, predicts health, recovery, longevity and success.

We are living at a time when digital technologies allow us to more easily extend the boundaries of our social circles than we could in the past. This book recognizes...

Consequential Strangers

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Galicia was an invented place that became real to the people who lived there.

A fascinating cast of characters populate the pages of the book—individuals who contributed to shaping the idea of Galicia over the course of two centuries.I write about Habsburg emperors like...

The Idea of Galicia

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Galicia was invented in 1772 and abolished in 1918, yet the artificial space became real and its identity primary.

The theories and approaches of The Idea of Galicia are closely related to earlier work that I have done on Eastern Europe more generally. In 1994 I published a book called...

The Idea of Galicia

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Galicia was invented in 1772 and abolished in 1918, yet the artificial space became real and its identity primary.

This is a book about a geopolitical space—Galicia—that existed for a very precisely limited historical epoch. Galicia was created—I would say “invented”—in 1772 at the time of the partitions of Poland,...

The Idea of Galicia

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Jazz history, told as a succession of God-like male heroes, enforces masculine and heterosexual norms.

In my view, the most thought provoking (and potentially provocative) section of the book links to the way in which jazz history promotes masculine and heterosexual norms.In my opening chapter,...

Jazz Icons

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Jazz history, told as a succession of male heroes, enforces masculine and heterosexual norms.

After teaching jazz history for years, several independent observations led me to the concept of a book on jazz icons. I began to see how the behaviour of musicians was tied to broader...

Jazz Icons

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Jazz history, told as a succession of God-like male heroes, enforces masculine and heterosexual norms.

In Jazz Icons, I argue that jazz history is now dominated by iconic figures who have taken on an almost God-like status. When musicians and fans discuss the life and music...

Jazz Icons

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Architecture is destroyed in order to make it stand for something in the first place.

Much of Violence Taking Place appears to be dedicated to violence “over there,” apparently far away—politically if not geographically—from most readers in the Global North. But in one section of the...

Violence Taking Place

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Architecture is destroyed in order to make it stand for something in the first place.

Trained as an architect and an architectural historian, I was led to re-think destruction when I began to survey its remains in Kosovo for the International Criminal Tribunal for the...

Violence Taking Place

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Architecture is destroyed not to erase what it stands for, but to make it stand for something.

What if the destruction of architecture was understood to be just as complicated, just as culturally resonant, and just as open to interpretation as architecture itself—or, indeed, as any other...

Violence Taking Place

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In the 1950s newly independent states were human rights universality's most ardent champions, while European empires invoked cultural difference.

Two sections of the book exemplify its arguments and their significance—and it would be wonderful if, in the hands of a reader, the volume serendipitously fell open at them, preferably...

Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights

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The colonized were not marginal to the making of human rights, but decisive in it.

This book originated in the search for the origins of contemporary skepticism on the universality of human rights—a skepticism exemplified by the 1990s controversy on “Asian Values,” and more recent...

Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights

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In the 1950s newly independent states were human rights universality's most ardent champions, while European empires invoked cultural difference.

My book charts the shifting impact of decolonization on the human rights project. I challenge the presumption that the colonized were marginal players in the construction of the human rights...

Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights

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Most modern human woe comes from supernormal stimuli we build ourselves, like candy and pornography.

Most people don’t try to parse cuteness. Like pornography, we know it when we see it. With a bit of examination, however, cuteness has easily quantifiable aesthetics. Take a moment...

Supernormal Stimuli

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Tinbergen's supernormal stimulus explains most of modern human woe, and unlike animals we build our own.

Niko Tinbergen clearly thought ethological principles applied to man. But while waxing eloquently for pages about bee-wasps and sticklebacks, he devoted the occasional sentence or two to man. The major push...

Supernormal Stimuli

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Tinbergen's supernormal stimulus explains most of modern human woe, and unlike animals we build our own.

Supernormal Stimuli explains how our once-helpful instincts get hijacked in our garish modern world. Instincts for food, sex, or territorial protection evolved for life on the savannahs 10,000 years ago—not...

Supernormal Stimuli

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A century of American planning tried to manufacture civic community out of physical design, and the designs proved insufficient.

I am particularly intrigued with the story of public housing, where one would least expect to encounter “communities of citizens.” The early history of the movement to provide decent shelter at...

Civitas by Design

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A century of American planning tried to manufacture civic community out of physical design, and the designs proved insufficient.

This book represents the evolution of my thinking as a writer over the past 40 years, extending back to my graduate education at Yale. While the university offered no formal training...

Civitas by Design

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A century of American planners have tried and failed to build civic community through physical design.

For more than a century city planners have aspired not only to improve the physical living conditions of urban residents but to strengthen civic ties through better design of built...

Civitas by Design

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A French Jewish literature existed half a century before Dreyfus, and it shows emancipated Jews refused assimilation.

Chapter two of the book focuses on the writer Ben-Lévi (the pseudonym of Godchaux Weil, 1806-1878) who published a dozen short stories, as well as many non-fiction pieces, in the...

Inventing the Israelite

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Emancipated French Jews largely refused assimilation, using fiction to assert a Jewish identity.

Nineteenth-century French Jews have often received bad press. Denounced by antisemites at the time as the new feudal lords of capitalism, they were also seen as nefarious agents of communist...

Inventing the Israelite

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A French Jewish literature existed half a century before Dreyfus, and it shows emancipated Jews refused assimilation.

In 1790-91, France became the first European country to make the Jews full and equal citizens. Considered a backward population in need of “regeneration” by Enlightenment reformers, the French Jews...

Inventing the Israelite

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Once Descartes made consciousness uniquely human, literature dropped sentient beasts and built the novel to display human subjectivity.

One bit of Animal Characters should interest anyone who has ever wondered about the history of cats and their relationship with human beings. In it I unearth a centuries-long tradition...

Animal Characters

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Literature turned to human interiority once Descartes made consciousness uniquely human.

The treatment of beasts in Renaissance literature tells us something about their evolving place in European culture more generally. It also tells us how early modern society understood the difference...

Animal Characters

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Once Descartes made consciousness uniquely human, literature dropped sentient beasts and built the novel to display human subjectivity.

Animal Characters studies the place of nonhuman animals in Renaissance writing. Between 1400 and 1700, written and visual records tell us, Europeans began to experience the animal world in new ways....

Animal Characters

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Plato, Hobbes and Marx endure because they make readers share their anger and hope, not their unconvincing arguments.

I would hope that potential readers who come across the book in their local or campus bookstore will either, having glanced at the opening pages, be sufficiently intrigued to glance...

Great Books, Bad Arguments

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Plato, Hobbes and Marx endure because they make readers share their anger and hope, not their unconvincing arguments.

That the concerns which Republic, Leviathan, and the Communist Manifesto address are of perennial importance is not in doubt. I first encountered the three books as a student more than...

Great Books, Bad Arguments

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Plato, Hobbes and Marx endure because they make readers share their anger and hope, not their arguments.

Great Books, Bad Arguments looks at three of the most famous texts in Western political thought and asks whether the proposals advanced by Plato, Hobbes, and Marx for the avoidance...

Great Books, Bad Arguments

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Jewish success at capitalism is a fact with causes, not an antisemitic fantasy.

The book’s introduction is titled “Thinking about Jews and Capitalism.”Capitalism has been the most important force in shaping the fate of the Jews in the modern world. Of course, one...

Capitalism and the Jews

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Wherever Jews have been granted legal equality they have done disproportionately well at capitalism, and that has causes.

My previous book, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought, examined how modern European intellectuals thought about commerce. Writing it, I recognized that the way modern European...

Capitalism and the Jews

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Wherever Jews have been granted legal equality they have done disproportionately well at capitalism, and that has causes.

The modern history of the Jews is deeply intertwined with the history of capitalism. My book tries, in a brief compass, to show the many facets of this relationship. The way...

Capitalism and the Jews

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Wounded Knee happened because control of the U.S. Senate hung on one contested South Dakota seat.

While the final paragraph of the introduction is perhaps the best synopsis of the book’s argument (page 18), my favorite paragraph in the book is on page 277.This paragraph tells...

Wounded Knee

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Wounded Knee happened because control of the U.S. Senate hung on one South Dakota seat.

Since the 1970s, there has been a tendency in America to see inequalities in society solely through the lens of race. Our understanding of the Wounded Knee massacre has reflected...

Wounded Knee

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Wounded Knee happened because control of the U.S. Senate hung on one contested South Dakota seat.

Wounded Knee is the story of the 1890 massacre in South Dakota that left more than 250 Sioux and 25 soldiers dead. The book explains the history of the relationship between...

Wounded Knee

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The King James Bible's mark on American fiction lies in syntax, diction and rhythm, not in motif and theme.

If I could look over the shoulder of a reader browsing through my book in a bookstore and whisper advice about how best to spend fifteen minutes of sampling the...

Pen of Iron

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The King James Bible's mark on American fiction lies in syntax, diction and rhythm, not in motif and theme.

I suppose the professional path that led me to this book goes back to when I was twenty-two years old and read for the first time Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis. Subtitled...

Pen of Iron

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The King James Bible shaped American fiction through its style, not its themes.

Pen of Iron traces the varying ways in which the language of the King James Version became an enriching element in the prose style of a line of American novelists...

Pen of Iron

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Speed is modernity's one genuinely new pleasure, and modernist art responds to its thrill, not to alienation.

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...

The Speed Handbook

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Speed is modernity's one genuinely new pleasure.

In a 1931 essay, Aldous Huxley asked a brilliant question: “Has modernity, with all its stress on progress, on inventiveness and on the new, actually give humankind any truly new...

The Speed Handbook

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Speed is modernity's one genuinely new pleasure, and modernist art responds to its thrill, not to alienation.

The Speed Handbook is first and foremost devoted to exploring the thrill you feel when you experience intense new speeds. Of what, exactly does the thrill of speed consist? Can speed’s...

The Speed Handbook

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Children's literature is whatever children read, which makes Homer, Shakespeare and Twain children's writers.

I’d like the browsing reader to come, first, to the general introduction to my book – here I outline the principles and scope, the personal experiences that led me to...

Children’s Literature

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Children's literature is whatever children read, which makes Homer, Shakespeare and Twain children's writers.

I first became interested in the history of children’s literature when I was working on the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer was viewed as the “father of English Literature,” and...

Children’s Literature

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Children's literature is not books written for children but books read by them.

My book is about the making of the literate imagination in the history of children’s literature. More than just a survey of books and authors, Children’s Literature is a critical...

Children’s Literature

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Copyright, patents and the idea of intellectual property itself came out of fights over piracy.

On page 343 one meets Frederick Willetts, the self-proclaimed Pirate King of Edwardian London. In the early years of the twentieth century, Willetts ran a “People’s Music Publishing Company” in...

Piracy

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Intellectual property is not a principle piracy violates but a settlement piracy produced.

Piracy today is often presented as the definitive transgression of the information age. There are pirate movies and pirate music, obviously, but there are also pirate pharmaceuticals and seeds, pirate...

Piracy

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Copyright, patents and the idea of intellectual property itself came out of fights over piracy.

Piracy is about how today’s world of intellectual property came into being through half a millennium of conflict. Beginning in early modern Europe, the book traces the emergence of the laws...

Piracy

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Modern lobbying was invented at Sam Ward's dinner table, trading information and access rather than railroad stock.

By the early 1870s, Sam Ward was becoming known as the "King of the Lobby.” While there was a dash of hyperbole in the title, Sam loved it. To his...

King of the Lobby

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The modern lobby was invented at a dinner table, not in bribery scandals.

Lamentations that special interests, spending obscene amounts of money, strangle the voice of “the people”? More lobbyists than Corinthian columns in the halls of Congress? These sound familiar today in...

King of the Lobby

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Modern lobbying was invented at Sam Ward's dinner table, trading information and access rather than railroad stock.

King of the Lobby is about power, politics, money, and lobbying in Washington in the Gilded Age. It is about delicious food, fine wines, and good conversation and how one...

King of the Lobby

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The readymades do not abandon painting, they show that art cannot be defined at all.

The idea that the meaning of art may not be exhausted by its visual manifestations and the desire to look is examined as a response to the pressures of commodification...

Drawing on Art

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The readymades do not abandon painting, they show that art cannot be defined at all.

Drawing on Art: Duchamp and Company builds on the implications of my earlier work in Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit (1995). The focus is no longer on Duchamp alone but...

Drawing on Art

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