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This book is intended to help social scientists make sense of the fact that our relation to the world is one of concern. The concern needn’t take the form of...

Why Things Matter to People - In a nutshell

Glenn E. Robinson

A “just browsing” reader would be well-served by reading the very short, 3-page Preface to get a better sense of what the whole book is about. Indeed, the scope of...

Global Jihad - A close-up

Stephen Schryer

I hope that readers will begin with my introduction, which lays out the basic terms of my argument. However, casual readers might prefer to start with one of the chapters...

Fantasies of the New Class - A close-up

Joanna Merwood-Salisbury

One of the most revered buildings in Chicago’s architectural history is also one of the strangest. Looming over the intersection of Dearborn and Jackson Streets, Burnham’s and Root’s Monadnock building,...

Chicago 1890 - A close-up

Valerie Steele

I first read Interpretation of Dreams when I was about 14 or 15, and I left school when I was 15, and lived in a commune. I never finished high school, but I eventually went to college. And then, in graduate school, I went to Yale to get my PhD in Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History. I had an epiphany when I realized fashion is part of culture, and I can do fashion history...

Dress, Dreams, and Desire - The wide angle

Warren I. Cohen

For those whose eyes are caught by the book’s cover, I would urge them to read the preface (2 pages) and “Last Thoughts” (5 pages). Those few pages will tell...

A Nation Like All Others - A close-up

Bernardo Zacka

As a work of political theory, When the State Meets the Street is unusual in that it combines normative reasoning with ethnographic fieldwork. Political theory is often criticized for operating...

When the State Meets the Street - A close-up

Thomas Dumm

I first approached this study as an intellectual history of individualism. From early on in my life as a political theorist, I have been interested in those large forces that...

Loneliness as a Way of Life - The wide angle

Noah Feldman

Today many people think that, in retrospect, the Arab spring was doomed to fail. Arab popular self-government was a “mirage,” a “false dawn.” There was no truly transformative political self-determination...

The Arab Winter - In a nutshell

Sharon Haar

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 - In a nutshell

David Badre

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

On Task - In a nutshell

Howard Gardner

As has become the practice these days, the book’s preface summarizes the book’s aims and content, as I have just done. No need to repeat those 1000 words here. But...

A Synthesizing Mind - A close-up

Charles Camic

I came to write Veblen out of years of skepticism about the “outsider thesis.” Added to this was my frustration, at once theoretical and methodological, with the tendency of intellectual...

Veblen - The wide angle

Jordan B. Smith

The Invention of Rum is my attempt to answer how people living in the Atlantic world invented rum and subsequently wrestled with the wide-ranging implications of its production and …

The Invention of Rum - In a nutshell

Edward Berenson

I hope browsers will look at the book’s prologue, since I open the story by describing an excursion to the Statue of Liberty, my first trip there since my 6<sup...

The Statue of Liberty - A close-up

R. Daniel Kelemen

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 - The wide angle

Tyler Volk

I recently gave a book talk at a salon held on the first Sunday of every month at the Cornelia Street Café, in New York. (Great jazz there, by the...

Quarks to Culture - A close-up

Brian A. Hatcher

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...

Hinduism Before Reform - A close-up

David L. Weimer

Each chapter offers interesting research findings interpreted from an economic perspective. “Chasing the Tale” reviews what evolutionary biology tells us about the transformation of wolves into dogs. It also considers...

Dog Economics - A close-up

Iftikhar Dadi

I wrote this book keeping in mind a number of audiences. Scholars of modernism who remain narrow in their scope and clearly need to understand it in a genuinely global...

Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia - The wide angle

Warren I. Cohen

I have spent my entire adult life studying and writing about the United States in world affairs. Much of my work, especially the essays, but also many of the books,...

A Nation Like All Others - The wide angle

William J. Cook

A home of TSP studies is the field of applied mathematics known as operations research. The focus of the field is the creation of methods to improve decision making, in...

In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman - The wide angle

Andrea Vesentini

There is no question that suburbs are one of the defining features of the U.S. urban landscape, as well as the place where most Americans have spent their lives since...

Indoor America - In a nutshell

E. Paul Zehr

Chapter 13 is entitled “Injury and Recovery: How Much Banging until the Batback Goes Bonk?” When thinking of Batman, people tend to often think of his gear and technology, often...

Becoming Batman - A close-up

Ken Alder

For Keeler’s placebo strategy to succeed—both for him to sell his services and to make the lie detector effective—he had to drum up publicity. Hence, my book zooms in on...

The Lie Detectors - A close-up

Garrett L. Brandon

“That’s not my fingerprint, your honor,” said the defendant, after FBI experts reported a “100-percent identification.”They were wrong.The judge sided with the FBI and ordered the defendant, Brandon Mayfield detained...

Autopsy of a Crime Lab - In a nutshell

Nancy Leys Stepan

Eradication tells the story of modern efforts to rid the world of diseases completely. I use the term “eradication” in the book in its modern, precise, public health sense. Eradication...

Eradication - In a nutshell

Garett Jones

The Culture Transplant debunks the view that immigrants fully assimilate in a generation or two. This is something my fellow economists know—we have vast empirical literatures showing that, for instance,...

The Culture Transplant - The wide angle

Ian Hodder

I have tried in this book to engage with a range of disparate theoretical perspectives. On the one had there is a clear influence from Bruno Latour and other writers...

Where Are We Heading? The Evolution of Humans and Things - The wide angle

David W. Bates

Although I was trained as a historian I have always been interested in thinking about how contemporary problems animate historical work, and how historical understanding might address our own world.This...

States of War - The wide angle

Krin Gabbard

This book is about the trumpet, but it brings the subject to life with several different approaches. First, it is a cultural history of the instrument, from the oldest surviving...

Hotter Than That - In a nutshell

Tyler Volk

Quarks to Culture involves a new, big picture perspective of the universe. Now, by universe I do not mean the astronomical cosmos that the word usually refers to. I mean...

Quarks to Culture - In a nutshell

Howard Gillette Jr.

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 - A close-up

Alex Rosenberg

It doesn’t matter what part of The Atheist’s Guide I may want people to open up first, it’s a safe bet browsers will go right to chapters 5 and 6:...

The Atheist's Guide to Reality - A close-up

Garrett L. Brandon

Forensic analysis is perhaps best known through its fictional portrayals in crime novels and television courtroom dramas: A crime occurs, law enforcement gathers evidence from the scene, and a team...

Autopsy of a Crime Lab - The wide angle

Andrew Scull

SterilizationWhat occurred then was a crisis for a new profession that had emerged as these new institutions arrived on the scene. It’s something of a chicken and egg phenomenon. The...

Desperate Remedies - A close-up

Alan Taylor

The point of departure for the book is a severe illness I suffered in December 2005. As a result of a biopsy, I went into septic shock and suddenly fell...

The Civil War of 1812 - The wide angle

Stuart Banner

In the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, we heard many critiques of speculation for having contributed to the problem, and many defenses of speculation as necessary for robust markets....

Speculation - The wide angle

Kathy Rudy

Animal exploitation is rampant in American culture today. In factory farms, shelters, zoos, puppy mills, science labs, and many other sites, animals are often treated as senseless commodities. Loving Animals...

Loving Animals - In a nutshell

Glenn E. Robinson

There are two main audiences for this book. First, anyone interested in the history of the global jihad movement, including its intellectual precursors, its development, its ideologies, and its structural...

Global Jihad - The wide angle

Renée L. Beard

I think the prologue does a particularly good job of depicting why people seek evaluation, how they feel during it, and most crucially, what can go wrong in the delivery...

Living with Alzheimer’s - A close-up

Hal Foster

The First Pop Age takes up these matters above all: how Pop art folds painting and photography into one another; how, in doing so, it combines the effect of immediacy...

The First Pop Age - In a nutshell

Frank A. von Hippel

The Chemical Age is the story of intense famines, ceaseless wars, ravaging diseases, and ecological disasters, told through the personal lives of the scientists who strove to either halt calamity...

The Chemical Age - In a nutshell

Gregory D. Koblentz

Biological weapons are the least well understood of the so-called weapons of mass destruction, or WMDs. Despite the growing awareness of the threat posed by biological weapons, the history of...

Living Weapons - The wide angle

Elizabeth A. Fay

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 - In a nutshell

Greg L. Warchol

I set out to provide the reader with a detailed overview of the global illegal trade in African wildlife. The illegal trade involves the poaching, trafficking and consumption of common...

Exploiting the Wilderness - In a nutshell

Matthew Kaiser

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

The World in Play - In a nutshell

Charlie Hailey

Slab City is known as the “last free place.” This remote settlement in the southern California desert occupies a decommissioned World War II military camp. Only its slabs and tank-rutted...

Slab City - In a nutshell

Catherine M. Cole

Once at a dinner party, when I described my book as being about the performative dimensions of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an attorney who was there quipped, “Well, that...

Performing South Africa's Truth Commission - The wide angle

R. Keith Schoppa

In a Sea of Bitterness is a narrative-rich study of spatial and social displacement during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945.I describe an array of Chinese people and institutions that chose...