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I first became interested in how money affected political decision making when my son was in the first grade at PS 75 on the West side of Manhattan. It was...

Killer Instinct - The wide angle

E. Paul Zehr

Inventing Iron Man is a kind of sequel to my earlier book Becoming Batman. That book was about asking how far can our biology take us toward the performance of...

Inventing Iron Man - In a nutshell

Mark V. Tushnet

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...

Free Speech Beyond Words - In a nutshell

Clare Palmer

I’d like a casual reader to start at the beginning, with the Introduction. That’s because in the Introduction, using recent media stories, I set up the key debate I pursue...

Animal Ethics in Context - A close-up

Nicole Howard

At its heart this book is about scientific discovery and the risks inherent in sharing new ideas. It focuses on the scientific revolution in Europe during the 16th and 17th...

Loath to Print - In a nutshell

David Badre

Curious readers who start with the first chapter are introduced to a puzzle that seems trivial yet is such a mystery that science still doesn’t have a full answer to...

On Task - A close-up

Stefan Kölsch

Good Vibrations is written so that readers can open it anywhere and immediately find something that speaks to them. You can simply turn to a chapter that connects with what...

Good Vibrations - The wide angle

Claude S. Fischer

I would like to highlight just two passages.The first is from the start of Chapter 2:In early 1865, Abraham Lincoln was the most powerful man in the Western Hemisphere. He...

Made in America - A close-up

Eric Ames

One aspect of the book will be of particular interest to American readers: the history of Wild West shows in Germany. The story of Buffalo Bill, his Wild West, and...

Carl Hagenbeck’s Empire of Entertainments - A close-up

Joanna Merwood-Salisbury

Although I was trained as a professional architect, I am principally an architectural historian, drawn especially to the social and political context of architecture and urbanism in nineteenth and early...

Chicago 1890 - The wide angle

Ann Blair

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 - The wide angle

Frank A. Guridy

When first readers pick up The Sports Revolution, they might assume that it is yet another book about football in Texas, and with good reason. H.G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights,...

The Sports Revolution - A close-up

Niko Kolodny

As to what pages of the book I would hope a browser encountered first, I will say, unsurprisingly, the introduction and conclusion. The introduction spells out in a bit more...

The Pecking Order - A close-up

William V. Harris

From the Iliad onwards, via Aristophanes and the gospel of Matthew, to Augustine and beyond, Greek and Latin texts in many genres are constellated with dream-descriptions. The best ancient minds,...

Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity - In a nutshell

Mike Hulme

The idea of climate change carries quite different meanings. It is used to support different political, social and technological projects and seems to imply different courses of action.The Intergovernmental Panel...

Why We Disagree About Climate Change - The wide angle

Seo-Young Chu

In the introduction I make what is probably the book’s most counterintuitive claim—that science fiction and lyric poetry are intimately interconnected.From page 11 to page 63 of Do Metaphors Dream,...

Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation - A close-up

Eric Ames

This book tells the story of one of the greatest showmen in the history of zoos and circuses. Carl Hagenbeck (1844-1913) may not be well-known today, but his name was...

Carl Hagenbeck’s Empire of Entertainments - In a nutshell

Lesley A. Sharp

For a reader who is most interested in browsing the book’s contents, there are several points of entry. For those unfamiliar with my work, they’d probably find the Introduction (“Moral...

Animal Ethos - A close-up

Richard Scholar

George W. Bush is said to have claimed that “the problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur.” Whether or not it is true, that...

Émigrés - In a nutshell

Daryn Lehoux

There was a moment in the thirteenth century, when the great polymath Albertus Magnus held in his hand an exquisitely wrought ancient onyx cameo. He went on to describe it...

Creatures Born of Mud and Slime - A close-up

Robert Tubbs

I find that non-mathematicians often perceive mathematics as a self-contained, inaccessible, body of knowledge that was essentially completed sometime in the distant past. Mathematics is seen as being isolated from...

What is a Number? Mathematical Concepts and Their Origins - In a nutshell

Edward B. Barbier

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 - A close-up

Harold S. Luft

The current policy environment is one in which we must come to grips with the unsustainable increases in health care costs, the unconscionable proportion of the population without insurance, and...

Total Cure - In a nutshell

Michael B. Katz

Why Don’t American Cities Burn? is about the collision between urban transformation and rightward moving social politics.A series of economic, demographic, and spatial changes have transformed American cities, producing an...

Why Don't American Cities Burn? - In a nutshell

David C. Kang

My book set out to answer one general and seemingly simple question: How did international relations function in East Asia from the fourteenth century to the nineteenth, before the arrival...

East Asia Before the West - In a nutshell

Steven Nadler

The opening of chapter one introduces the reader to Leibniz as he arrives in Paris, ostensibly on a secret mission to establish world peace – or at least to persuade...

The Best of All Possible Worlds - A close-up

Ann Marie Stock

On Location shares the voices and visions of dozens of Cuban filmmakers. With candor they explain their interest in probing subjects once considered taboo in Cuba—sexuality, domestic violence, drugs, prostitution,...

On Location in Cuba - A close-up

Robert Alter

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 - In a nutshell

Kevin W. Saunders

Given the conceptual similarity between obscene depictions and hate speech, it would seem likely that some guidance could be drawn from the analysis of obscenity that would help us more...

Degradation - A close-up

Sara Lodge

My book relates Lear’s work to the intellectual and cultural life of his age in several different ways. I investigate Lear’s anger as a religious dissenter of an Independent cast,...

Inventing Edward Lear - The wide angle

Jonathan P. Lamb

I hope readers look first at the table of contents, to see the whole range of topics covered in the book: from printing language to book-related insults, and from scientific...

How the World Became a Book in Shakespeare's England - A close-up

Nicholas Fox Weber

I got to Le Corbusier through his letters. It took me a long time to get him. When I began the book it was like facing a vault wall in...

Le Corbusier - A close-up

Benjamin Ginsberg

In more than thirty years of teaching politics, I have observed that students’ natural healthy cynicism is constantly criticized by the press and by their teachers. I want to assure...

The American Lie - The wide angle

Steven Nadler

This book is about three philosophers – Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Antoine Arnauld, and Nicolas Malebranche – who happened to be together in Paris in the 1670s and their great debate...

The Best of All Possible Worlds - In a nutshell

Gary Stuart

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 - A close-up

Antone Martinho-Truswell

My book is called The Parrot in the Mirror: How Evolving to Be Like Birds Makes Us Human. This book initially grew out of a single conversation as I was...

The Parrot in the Mirror - In a nutshell

Ian Merkel

Terms of Exchange is about Brazilian and French intellectuals and the dialogues between them that were foundational to the emergence of the modern social sciences. The book examines the interactions...

Terms of Exchange - In a nutshell

Frank A. von Hippel

If a reader were to flip open the book at a random place, I hope they would encounter one of the eccentric scientists pursuing their research with a singular focus...

The Chemical Age - A close-up

Donald S. Lopez Jr.

Princeton University Press has started a new series entitled “Lives of Great Religious Books,” and my book is one of the three inaugural volumes.The idea behind the series is that...

The Tibetan Book of the Dead - In a nutshell

Lucas Richert

As we reflect on the #MeToo era, Weinstein, Epstein, and other deeply unseemly characters, it’s important to note that women’s issues and mental health were embedded in radical mental medicine...

Break On Through - A close-up

Lynn Keller

The concept of the “self-conscious Anthropocene,” introduced in the book’s title, is one of the book’s innovations and points to its larger significance. The term Anthropocene was introduced in 2000...

Recomposing Ecopoetics - The wide angle

Shirley Anne Warshaw

How I came to write the book was that I was asked about 10 years ago to give a lecture about real women who masqueraded as men and who took...

The Co-Presidency of Bush and Cheney - The wide angle

Sarah Maslen

My book examines the tricks of the trade and forms of collective support for crafting our largely unconscious practices of hearing. As we live our daily lives, our hearing generally...

Learning to Hear - In a nutshell

Jeffrey A. Lockwood

Six-Legged Soldiers is a story, a bizarre and fantastic tale of how humans have conscripted the natural world—insects in particular—to do our bidding in times of war.For thousands of years...

Six-Legged Soldiers - In a nutshell

Michael A. Ryan

This is my first single-authored monograph and, as such, is a direct outgrowth of the dissertation that I defended from the University of Minnesota’s Department of History in 2005. In...

A Kingdom of Stargazers - The wide angle

Dana Polan

This book is about Steven Spielberg's 1977 film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. A lot of people assume this is special effects driven film and about “wow” and “wonder”—which it is—but it's also about alienated lost masculinity. Part of what I argue—and I think this is the new angle to the book—is that in the beginning of the 70s films by Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese, Hal Ashby, Kubrick and others...

Close Encounters of the Third Kind - In a nutshell

Stephen DeStefano

Coyote at the Kitchen Door: Living with Wildlife in Suburbia is about what the relatively recent phenomenon of wide-scale urban and suburban development means to the landscape, to wildlife, to...

Coyote at the Kitchen Door - In a nutshell

Elizabeth Cobbs

What if someone could commit you to an insane asylum for life with a simple signature? Or send your children to live with strangers? Or fire you from your job...

Fearless Women - In a nutshell

George Saliba

This book started almost ten years ago. Initially, I wanted to know what were the conditions under which a civilization could produce science afresh.I was trained in ancient Semitics, and...

Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance - In a nutshell

Jennifer M. Barker

In Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep (2006), Gael GarcÃa Bernal plays a frustrated artist with a penchant for quirky handmade objects and stop-motion animation who falls in love with...