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A key component of the book’s argument is that both efforts to reimagine the parameters of what “utopia” could mean and efforts to pursue those possibilities in practice could be...

Sustainable Utopias - A close-up

Patricia Sullivan

The interaction of modern religion and its surrogates interests me. It’s often misleadingly called “belief versus unbelief.” In fact, all of us believe a lot. For centuries intelligent people, both...

Justice Rising - The wide angle

Valerie Steele

Dress, Dreams, and Desire is a book on the cultural history of fashion and psychoanalysis. It traces how psychoanalytic ideas have influenced fashion and how we interpret fashion. On the one hand, you have Freud's writings, where he barely mentions clothing or fashion at all. Just tiny little intriguing slivers, like the libido for looking, or the attraction of concealment. And yet, when you look at his ...

Dress, Dreams, and Desire - In a nutshell

Lynn Meskell

While it is true that UNESCO status bestows a level of international prestige upon ancient sites, for archaeology as a discipline the organization means very little. World Heritage might offer...

A Future in Ruins - The wide angle

Juliann Sivulka

In the 1870s, Mathilde Weil volunteered to secure advertising for a German society paper owned by the brother of her friend. Although the advertising manager could not offer any advertising...

Ad Women - A close-up

Kirk Savage

Washington, D.C. may be the most studied national capital in the world. There are dozens of guidebooks to Washington’s monuments and countless specialized studies of individual projects, landscape plans, and...

Monument Wars - The wide angle

Ho-fung Hung

The world suddenly paid a lot of attention to Hong Kong during the uprising in 2019 and the subsequent crackdown in 2020 and after. My book offers a long historical...

City on the Edge - In a nutshell

Sarah E. Igo

A reader who picked up The Known Citizen and opened it at random might come across social outrage over candid photographs in the late nineteenth century, prompting a spate of...

The Known Citizen - A close-up

Tyler Volk

The Chemical Age connects the sources of human misery throughout history—famine, plague, and war—and follows historical currents to their unpredictable destinations, including world wars and environmental destruction. A force behind...

CO2 Rising - The wide angle

Thomas M. Nichols

I wrote Eve of Destruction hoping to get people to understand that the previous era of warfare—one in which there were at least some rules about when and why states...

Eve of Destruction - In a nutshell

Joshua Clover

I think in some sense any portion of the book will give a sense of it at the level of the writing, the way it wants to talk about its...

1989 - A close-up

R. Daniel Kelemen

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 - A close-up

David L. Hu

From cave paintings to the anatomical sketches of Leonardo da Vinci, the movement of animals has long fascinated people. Now there is an explosion of new interest and understanding in...

How to Walk on Water and Climb up Walls - In a nutshell

Inderpal Grewal

Empires wax and wane, and what we are seeing today is the slow and gradual waning of U.S. empire in the new century. I call this phase of U.S. empire...

Saving the Security State - In a nutshell

John Protevi

In Political Affect I address human nature as bio-cultural. Each one of us is a “body politic” that connects the social and the somatic. I avoid the extremes of social...

Political Affect - In a nutshell

Sarah Maza

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 - A close-up

Meirav Jones

We tend to think of modernity as a time when religion could be set aside without this having a major effect on public discourse. But this understanding of modernity is...

England’s Israel and the Foundations of Modern Political Thought‍ - The wide angle

Mark Osteen

A browsing reader would note that the book is a feast for the eyes. It includes twenty-seven images of paintings, movie stills, and art installations ranging from the Early Modern...

Fake It - A close-up

Edward Berenson

Heroes of Empire tells the story of five colonial figures, two British and three French, who made imperial conquest exciting, even exhilarating, for millions of ordinary citizens.Most British and French...

Heroes of Empire - In a nutshell

Ann Campbell Keller

The book offers a systematic explanation of the changes in role-expectations that scientists who participate in environmental policymaking will face. It is rocky terrain that, for some scientists, is difficult...

Science in Environmental Policymaking - A close-up

Renée L. Beard

I’ve always had an affinity for older people. My first job as a teenager was working in a nursing home where I met a woman who had what was then...

Living with Alzheimer’s - The wide angle

Daniel Martin Varisco

It is sometimes said that you cannot judge a book by its cover. But this should not prevent the reader of Orientalism from reading into its cover illustration. This is...

Reading Orientalism - A close-up

Dan Reiter

How Wars End starts with Carl von Clausewitz’s famous insight that war is politics by other means. War is not just an exercise in martial engineering, two waves of soldiers...

How Wars End - In a nutshell

David M. Henkin

Historians traffic in timekeeping, and time is the fundamental building block of historical scholarship, whether we are telling stories about change, persistence, sequence, or simultaneity. So in a way, books...

The Week - The wide angle

Françoise Baylis

If someone were fanning through the pages of this book at a local bookstore or library, I would encourage them to peruse the first chapter “Targeting a Single Gene: Huntington’s...

Altered Inheritance - A close-up

Peter W. Wilson

If the casual reader or bookshop-browser were to follow my grandfather’s advice, they would start at the end to see whether my book was worth reading. In this case, they...

Heart of Europe - A close-up

Dean Keith Simonton

The Genius Checklist addresses the most essential questions about identifying, developing, and manifesting creative genius. Some of these questions have been examined by thinkers for centuries. These recurrent issues include:...

The Genius Checklist - In a nutshell

Brad Gregory

The view that the findings of science are incompatible with claims of revealed religion per se is widespread—but mistaken.In the first chapter of The Unintended Reformation I explain why many intellectuals today think that science...

Science and religion are not incompatible

Martin Hogue

Thirtyfour Campgrounds examines the standardization and modernization of the contemporary campground as a familiar setting in the American landscape.Campgrounds celebrate a unique form of American ingenuity in which intersecting narratives...

Thirtyfour Campgrounds - In a nutshell

David T. Courtwright

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 - In a nutshell

Mona L. Siegel

Peace on Our Terms recounts the dramatic story of female activism around the world during a single, remarkable year in history, 1919, when the bloodshed of World War I finally...

Peace on Our Terms - In a nutshell

Craig Jeffrey

My book, Timepass, examines the lives of middle class young men in India who have spent long periods in education but cannot find secure salaried work.Joblessness growth is a major...

Timepass - In a nutshell

Moshik Temkin

The end of chapter 2, pages 95-100, just before the book’s gallery of photos, deals with one of the biggest questions I faced when doing the research: why, in fact,...

The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair - A close-up

Larry Wolff

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 Singing Turk - The wide angle

David A. Weintraub

Readers who are shopping for a great book to read, who are trying to decide whether to read past page one in Life on Mars, likely will turn first to...

Life on Mars - A close-up

Dag Nikolaus Hasse

One chapter of the book, for which I have a particular liking, bears the title “Humanists on Laxatives.” It tells the story of the reception of Arabic pharmacology in the...

Success and Suppression - A close-up

Jonathan Petropoulos

For a closer look, I would direct the reader to the section on the relationship between Theodore (“Ted”) Rousseau and Bruno Lohse. Rousseau, the former OSS officer who interrogated Lohse...

Göring's Man in Paris - A close-up

James Simpson

I hope browsing readers will feel the palpable connections between the revolutionary period of the Reformation and our own times. The Introduction and Conclusion would be the places to get...

Permanent Revolution - A close-up

Valeria Sobol

Contrary to what some readers may assume, this book arose not from a personal experience of lovesickness but rather from an intellectual and academic engagement with the dialogue between literature...

Febris Erotica - The wide angle

Ben A. Minteer

For a long time, the field of environmental ethics has been dominated by non-anthropocentrism, i.e., the belief that nature has intrinsic value and that we have powerful duties to promote...

The Fall of the Wild - The wide angle

Steven Nadler

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 - In a nutshell

Jini Kim Watson

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...

The New Asian City - The wide angle

Andrew Sayer

Why are we so worried about our dignity? References to human dignity are enshrined in human rights declarations as the ultimate value or criterion for assessing what people are allowed...

Why Things Matter to People - A close-up

Louise Shelley

Pages 112-138 are on the business of human trafficking.Organized crime, like all businesses is focused on making a profit, ensuring supply, and meeting demand. What sets an organized crime business...

Human Trafficking - A close-up

Jerry Z. Muller

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 - The wide angle

Margaret K. Nelson

Each of the chapters begins with a case study, the first-person story of an individual who held, or discovered, a family secret. A close friend of mine browsed through the...

Keeping Family Secrets - A close-up

Walter Scheidel

It is always a good idea to start at the end. The epilogue of my book takes its cue from the famous question in the Monty Python movie The Life...

Escape from Rome - A close-up

Mark Paterson

What I have written so far might potentially seem incongruous or over-ambitious. How can a book like this do justice to the scientific material, yet also say something about the...

How We Became Sensorimotor - A close-up

Deirdre Barrett

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 - A close-up

Tonio Andrade

In 1997, Jared Diamond published his wonderful book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, which asked why it was that some societies become rich and powerful and others don’t.His explanation was geographical—it...