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This book is about image-architecture and the surprising apperceptive shifts that take place when today’s culture of ephemeral images and the stolid material traditions of architecture choose to embrace.Could you...

Kissing Architecture - In a nutshell

Inderpal Grewal

Security is often thought of as a topic for international relations or law and limited to topics such as policing, militarism or terrorism. Over the last decade, there has been...

Saving the Security State - The wide angle

Clare Palmer

Animals inhabit diverse environments: our homes, our settlements, agricultural land, the wild. Some animals never directly encounter human beings. Others are deliberately created by us. Do these different contexts and...

Animal Ethics in Context - In a nutshell

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

Micheline R. Ishay

First, the book title, The Levant Express, is a metaphor representing the demands for human rights that raced across the Arab world like a high-speed train during the Arab uprisings...

The Levant Express - In a nutshell

John Stauffer

GIANTS: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln is a dual biography of the two preeminent self-made men in American history. Lincoln was born dirt poor, had less...

GIANTS - In a nutshell

Ho-fung Hung

I hope any browsing reader will spend time with the many figures showing Hong Kong’s financial centrality in the Chinese economy that can be found in the chapter about Hong...

City on the Edge - A close-up

W. G. (Garry) Runciman

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 - A close-up

Sara Lodge

Edward Lear, the author of ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’ and ‘The Quangle Wangle’s Hat,’ is rightly beloved as a nonsense poet. But few people know that he was also...

Inventing Edward Lear - In a nutshell

Samuel Moyn

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 - The wide angle

Richard Toye

The book is about Winston Churchill’s relationship with the media and the news. Churchill was active in politics from the age of Queen Victoria to that of Elizabeth II, a...

Winston Churchill - In a nutshell

Jeff Schlegelmilch

We see more and more disasters in the news every day. It is getting to the point where, with the exception of the current COVID-19 pandemic, major record-setting disasters barely...

Rethinking Readiness - In a nutshell

Roger Crowley

The content of my book is very much what the title proclaims: ‘Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that shaped the Modern World’. The sixteenth century was a break point in the...

Spice - In a nutshell

Caleb Everett

Numbers, words, and other symbols for precise quantities, are a human invention that had a broad impact on our cognitive and behavioral lives. This claim is based on extensive findings...

Numbers and the Making of Us - In a nutshell

William J. Cook

You wake up in the morning and find that you need to visit a number of cities or towns before returning in the evening. What is the shortest possible route...

In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman - In a nutshell

Jennifer L. Allen

This is a book about hope. It’s about the resilient and adaptable human capacity to imagine a superlative future, even when official discourses insisted on its impossibility. It’s about who...

Sustainable Utopias - In a nutshell

Sarah Cole

Inventing Tomorrow sets out to tell a story of 20th century literary culture that follows an entirely different path from the one that has dominated academia for the last fifty...

Inventing Tomorrow - In a nutshell

Nicholas Dagen Bloom

The fields of design and urban history are dominated by public housing enmity. Public housing projects are key proofs, for instance, in the theory that design determines social behavior. When...

Public Housing That Worked - The wide angle

April D. DeConick

The book focuses on religion and culture in America today, which has taken a gnostic turn beginning in the 1800s. It asks: “If Catholicism defeated gnostic religions in antiquity, how...

The Gnostic New Age - The wide angle

Cliff Edwards

Mystery of the Night Café not only seeks to solve the mystery of Van Gogh’s deepest sense of life, a sense that has attracted many around the globe, but it...

Mystery of the Night Café - The wide angle

Frank L. Cioffi

This book is a grammar handbook. It covers parts of speech, diction, and punctuation. Most grammar handbooks function as reference books, and lay out “Standard Written English” as if it...

One Day in the Life of the English Language - In a nutshell

Heather Hendershot

Martin Scorsese comes up in the book, along with Peter Bogdanovich, Sidney Lumet, and other important directors of the 70s. I contrast Altman to a number of them, including Scorsese, because those other directors have genre commitments that Altman doesn't have.

How does Altman’s distinctive style compare with that of other directors of the same time, such as Scorsese?

John Protevi

The recent earthquake in Haiti echoed—on a much larger scale—the events of Hurricane Katrina, provoking a depressingly familiar reaction from the authorities responsible for militarizing or “securitizing” relief efforts.In Chapter...

Political Affect - A close-up

Jesse LeCavalier

The book includes a 16-page color section that is a kind of visual overture of the project. This section uses a series of drawings and diagrams to address the main...

The Rule of Logistics - A close-up

Scott Peeples

At an American Literature conference about eight years ago, I presented a paper with the title “No Place Like Home”, which proposed that what the field of Poe biography had...

The Man of the Crowd - The wide angle

George Cotkin

A book reveals itself in its fullness, in its sweat and swagger. But if you must rivet attention on one thing in this volume then I would hope that it...

Morality's Muddy Waters - A close-up

Marni Reva Kessler

Although I didn’t know it at the time, this book took root during a visit years ago to the National Gallery of Art when I happened upon Antoine Vollon’s Mound...

Discomfort Food - The wide angle

Brian Boyd

We love the arts but can consider them an indulgence. We need not do so. Art not only reshapes individual minds. Because art facilitates shared attention and emotional contagion, it...

On the Origin of Stories - The wide angle

Russell W. Rumberger

This book addresses one of the greatest challenges facing the US educational system: high school dropouts. The problem has been labeled by some, including President Obama, as a national crisis.The...

Dropping Out - In a nutshell

Greg Robinson

My book offers a new look at a familiar subject, Executive Order 9066 and the removal and confinement of West Coast Japanese Americans during World War II (commonly called the...

A Tragedy of Democracy - In a nutshell

Gary Stuart

The book looks at how people form the different political worlds in which they live. Perhaps we agree, in a broad sense, on what it means to be an “American.”...

Innocent Until Interrogated - The wide angle

Edward Ashford Lee

We are all used to the idea that humanity shapes technology. After all, we humans are the designers, right? Wait. Maybe we are being a bit arrogant here. The French...

The Coevolution - In a nutshell

Simon Ball

When he rides from one place to another, it is in an armored car, preceded and followed by armored cars filled with soldiers. He travels at a high rate of...

Death to Order - A close-up

André Millard

The Bond franchise is the longest, and most profitable, film franchise in the history of motion pictures. Audiences accept the financial success of Bond’s films in much the same way...

Equipping James Bond - The wide angle

Wafaa Bilal

I live in two worlds. I fled my native Iraq in 1991 during the Gulf War, and after almost two years in horrific refugee camps in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait,...

Shoot an Iraqi - In a nutshell

John R. Ehrenfeld

The germ of this book sprouted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where I had returned in my mid-50s to start an academic career, after spending some 35 years working...

Sustainability by Design - The wide angle

Barry Seldes

I wrote the Introduction as a mise en scène that would set the stage for what comes next—a tale of presidential betrayal of an American artist (by Truman and Eisenhower)....

Leonard Bernstein - A close-up

Robert C. Smith

In this book I systematically demonstrate the inescapable racism inherent in American conservatism. The argument unfolds in layers.First, I show that ideological conservatism is everywhere and always the conscious and...

Conservatism and Racism and Why in America They Are the Same - In a nutshell

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

Jason Pine

If a potential reader were to simply browse the book, I hope they would quickly find a page from one of the meth cooks’ stories. They are sensitive, wounded people...

The Alchemy of Meth - A close-up

Charles Camic

I would be happy if readers opened Chapter 3, “Beginnings.” Here I tell a family story and a national story as a prelude to the story of Thorstein Veblen as...

Veblen - A close-up

E. Fuller Torrey

For readers just browsing, I would hope that they would open to chapter six in the book and specifically to the section on skull cults. This is the time in...

Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods - A close-up

Andrew Ross

Ostensibly, Stone Men is about the lives and labors of Palestinian stonemasons. These are men who work in the West Bank stone industry—in quarries, workshops, and factories—and have a rich...

Stone Men - In a nutshell

Lawrence Rothfield

The Rape of Mesopotamia is about the series of missteps, missed opportunities, and miscommunications that led to the massive looting of Iraq’s cultural heritage after the U.S. invasion in 2003....

The Rape of Mesopotamia - In a nutshell

Enda Duffy

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 - The wide angle

Brian C. Kalt

I think that the six scenarios in my book are all compelling and dramatic. I hope that they draw the reader in, and inspire him or her to delve into...

Constitutional Cliffhangers - A close-up

Charles A. Kupchan

I would encourage readers to start with the Preface. There they will find a concise summary of the intellectual journey that prompted me to write Isolationism and of the book’s...

Isolationism - A close-up

Richard E. Ocejo

There are three broad forces occurring in society today that in concert are leading to these jobs becoming cool. First, how we classify taste is shifting. Consumers are questioning what...

Masters of Craft - The wide angle

George C. Galster

Urban theorists have tried for generations to define exactly what a neighborhood is. But behind that daunting existential question lies a much murkier problem: how do you make neighborhoods productive...

Making Our Neighborhoods, Making Our Selves - The wide angle