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Thirtyfour Campgrounds - A close-up

Thirtyfour Campgrounds is a large volume featuring an eye-popping 6,200 individual illustrations, most of them in color. The systematic arrangement of the campsite photographs in grids across the book (6,500...

Martin Hogue

Into the Extreme - A close-up

I hope the reader will thumb through the book and check out the images and illustrations. U.S. human spaceflight is both a civil and a military activity, which means that...

Valerie Olson

Mura Dehn - The wide angle

I started dancing professionally in California. I had been a jazz dancer growing up. My first teacher—and my closest teacher in my youth—was a vaudeville hoofer. So there was not much technical training; there was an incredible amount of passion. She was tap. She was jazz. She wasn’t doing the steps; she wasn’t just teaching “shuffle off to Buffalo.” She inhabited it. She embodied the whole thing...

Kim Chandler Vaccaro

Clouds - In a nutshell

The book is principally about the science of clouds but its unique and distinctive feature - one that differentiates it from any other book ever published on weather and clouds – is our use of classic 18th and 19th century impressionist art to illustrate the clouds...

Edward Graham

A Prehistory of Ordinary People - In a nutshell

Multitasking isn’t something new to the twenty-first century: our species was designed for it! On the cognitive, linguistic, and social level, humans are highly adapted to doing and thinking about...

Monica L. Smith

A Guide to Infinity - A close-up

Mathematics is not a dreary sequence of equations and calculations. Many ideas are brought to life through pictures. I hope that a casual bookstore browser might open this Guide to Infinity

Edward Scheinerman

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

Lost Colony - A close-up

The book begins with an execution. Frederik Coyet, the leader of the Dutch colony that Koxinga captured, has been blamed for the lost colony, even though it wasn’t his fault....

Tonio Andrade

The Invention of Rum - A close-up

I tried to tell a story when writing The Invention of Rum, and like most stories this one is probably best enjoyed from the beginning. If readers start with the introduction, they will …

Jordan B. Smith

Buddhism and Science - The wide angle

I am a scholar of Buddhism—we call ourselves Buddhologists—focusing on late Indian Buddhism (roughly from the fifth to twelfth centuries) and on Tibetan Buddhism. My early work was on Indian...

Donald S. Lopez Jr.

Composing the Citizen - A close-up

The book can be read like parts of a puzzle. Although some themes (education, history, progress, and national identity) permeate the entire book, one can start anywhere depending on one’s...

Jann Pasler

The Will of the People - In a nutshell

Most people who think about it, no doubt, consider the US Supreme Court to be the protector of minority and constitutional rights against majority oppression.But is that right?In The Will...

Barry Friedman

Thomas Mann's War - The wide angle

Although Thomas Mann’s War is primarily a book about the 1930s and 1940s, I embarked on the project because of my interest in contemporary literature. This connection came full circle...

Tobias Boes

Free Speech Beyond Words - In a nutshell

The First Amendment says that “freedom of speech” shall not be abridged. The Supreme Court has said that the First Amendment unquestionably covers Jackson Pollock’s paintings, Arnold Schoenberg’s music, and...

Mark V. Tushnet

The Death and Afterlife of Achilles - The wide angle

The Death and Afterlife of Achilles looks at all types of ancient evidence about Achilles to reconstruct the basic outlines of his death and afterlife. For literary evidence, the Homeric...

Jonathan S. Burgess

Friction - In a nutshell

From the DNA in our bodies to the formation of planets in the universe, friction is present and that’s what makes it such an intriguing force. However, friction is arguably the most underappreciated force in our lives...

Jennifer R. Vail

American Homicide - In a nutshell

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...

Randolph Roth

Cruel Optimism - The wide angle

My big question is: Why do people stay with lives, forms, and fantasies of life that don’t work?How do we learn to associate certain things with our fantasies of the...

Lauren Berlant

The Market as God - The wide angle

The book deals with economic history in conjunction with religious history, and the interaction of the two. I use the capitalized Market to indicate a market system that has exceeded...

Harvey Cox

What Would Nature Do? A Guide for Our Uncertain Times - The wide angle

The motivation for the book comes from the uncertain future that faces humanity. The twentieth century, as I wrote in my previous book, The Big Ratchet, was an extraordinary time...

Ruth DeFries

Sublime Dreams of Living Machines - The wide angle

A major aspect of the West’s fascination with the automaton is that the interest in the object is an ambivalent one. The delight, amusement, and amazement that people experience in...

Minsoo Kang

The Tibetan Book of the Dead - The wide angle

As someone who went to college in the 1970s and was interested in “Eastern Philosophy” as it used to be called, I read The Tibetan Book of the Dead and...

Donald S. Lopez Jr.

Hinduism Before Reform - A close-up

When it first dawned on me that Rammohun and Sahajanand were nearly exact contemporaries my immediate thought was: What a wonderful opportunity to bring into view the character and complexity...

Brian A. Hatcher

Birthright - The wide angle

Although the inspiration for five novels, Annesley’s ordeal has attracted scant attention from historians, in part because the principal primary source associated with his abduction is a volume, first published...

Roger Ekirch

The Madhouse Effect - The wide angle

Denial is something we encounter in many aspects of modern life, and there is an entire psychological literature dealing with the topic. In this book, we are focused on a...

Michael E. Mann

AI Versus IP - The wide angle

From a broad, theoretical perspective, intellectual property is underpinned by the philosophy of utilitarianism. At the risk of wildly oversimplifying moral philosophy, utilitarianism considers the ‘utility,’ that is, the total...

Robin Feldman

Illiberal Politics in Neoliberal Times - The wide angle

My work concerns democracy, culture and political engagement. Scholars usually analyze democracy through the study of liberal political regimes and movements or post-authoritarian transitions. In contrast, I have focused on...

Mabel Berezin

Perfect Communities - The wide angle

A key point of the book is to show that it was once possible to build affordable housing on an enormous scale, and that we can still learn something from...

Edward Berenson

Animus - In a nutshell

This book explores the concept of “animus” in the law of the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. Over the last thirty years, the Supreme Court has decided several important equal protection...

William D. Araiza

The Prometheus Bomb - A close-up

A fairly standard practice – a look at the introduction and the last chapter – should give the reader a sense of the book. The introduction provides an overview of...

Neil J. Sullivan

2134 Micro-Interviews