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I would recommend that readers potentially interested in the book start by looking at the Preface. Why? Because besides giving a straightforward idea about the book’s main argument, it also...

Designs for the Pluriverse - A close-up

Timothy Snyder

Between 1933 and 1945, when both Hitler and Stalin were in power, their two regimes murdered some fourteen million people in the lands between Berlin and Moscow, which I call...

Bloodlands - In a nutshell

Robert E. Hegel

My book presents a sample of crime reports from eighteenth-century China in English translation. All are capital crimes. Since all capital crimes might carry the death penalty, detailed reports of...

True Crimes in Eighteenth-Century China - In a nutshell

Benjamin C. Hett

I am a historian of 20th century Germany, not a journalist or an expert on current American affairs. Yet there is no denying that the experience of the last eight...

Crossing Hitler - The wide angle

Jeffrey G. Ogbar

There are many inspirations for this book. I am a huge fan of hip-hop. Like most guys around my age, I tried my hand at breakdancing as a teen. I...

Hip-Hop Revolution - The wide angle

Alex Krieger

The book’s primary intent is to portray the American inclination to experiment with forms of settlement, evident in both utopian and pragmatic efforts at reconceiving how and in what shape...

City on a Hill - In a nutshell

David M. Henkin

This is a book about how we experience and imagine time. Although treatments of that subject often focus on the clock, modern time consciousness is organized around calendars as well....

The Week - In a nutshell

Robert Tubbs

The most contentious of the standards and conventions of “real” journalism, as I’ve found in my dual career as historian and journalist, has long been the ideal of objectivity. Having...

What is a Number? Mathematical Concepts and Their Origins - The wide angle

Jerry Z. Muller

The book’s introduction is titled “Thinking about Jews and Capitalism.”Capitalism has been the most important force in shaping the fate of the Jews in the modern world. Of course, one...

Capitalism and the Jews - A close-up

David S. Powers

Professional path I began the study of Arabic during my senior year at Yale. After receiving my B.A., I spent two years (1973-75) at the Hebrew University in the Department...

Muhammad is Not the Father of any of Your Men - The wide angle

Mabel Berezin

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...

Illiberal Politics in Neoliberal Times - The wide angle

Paul Wapner

I discovered many interesting issues in my research into the illegal wildlife trade and will just mention three here. The German and British colonial governments in east Africa established the...

Living through the End of Nature - 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

Stephen F. Cohen

I hope that your “browsing reader” glances at the Prologue, the pages one through six. One informed reader said this must be the best short overview of Stalin’s terror ever...

The Victims Return - A close-up

Jacob Darwin Hamblin

I have a hard time deciding what is the best entry point for this book. Some people will be fascinated by the story about the CIA collaborating with a Japanese...

The Wretched Atom - A close-up

Jan Kenneth Birksted

There are 170 illustrations in Le Corbusier and the Occult. And they are not just pretty pictures. Some of them tell stories in their right.One reviewer said that he could...

Le Corbusier and the Occult - A close-up

Naofumi Nakamura

I hope that they would take a moment to compare the photograph on page 186 with the locomotive photograph on page 187. Although the two locomotives appear very similar, there...

Trading Locomotives - A close-up

Andrew Scull

I have worked on the history of psychiatry for four decades now. I originally wrote on the rise of the asylum in Victorian Britain, and the emergence of the modern...

Madness in Civilization - The wide angle

Lydia H. Liu

As someone who trained in comparative literature, I have been taught to focus on literary text and ignore science and technology. I was among the first generation of graduate students...

The Freudian Robot - The wide angle

Lynn Stout

This book deals with a basic question: What’s the best way to get people to behave themselves?Modern legal, policy, and management experts often assume human beings are selfish creatures who...

Cultivating Conscience - In a nutshell

Andrew Scull

In Desperate Remedies, I look at American psychiatry, with a few glances at European developments. I examine how the profession of psychiatry came into being in the early nineteenth century,...

Desperate Remedies - In a nutshell

Barry McCrea

In the Company of Strangers is about how different ideas of the family affect the deep narrative structure of novels.The principles of marriage and reproduction seem to be fundamental to...

In the Company of Strangers - In a nutshell

Jerome Kagan

The most important pages begin on the bottom of page 265.Snow did not dwell on the useful social functions of the trio of intellectual communities. Each culture, like the branches...

The Three Cultures - A close-up

David M. Carter

Money Games chronicles how sports and entertainment have continued to converge throughout history. The pace at which this convergence has been happening is covered in the book’s nine chapters. My...

Money Games - In a nutshell

Andrew G. Walder

Venice in the 1610s and 1620s was the first European state to undertake systematic surveillance of private individuals, and to entrust the supervision of such surveillance to a permanent committee,...

Fractured Rebellion - The wide angle

Michael Schudson

This book examines the history of a set of transparency-related reforms that came to fruition in the 1960s and 1970s. The term “transparency” was not in general use in politics...

The Rise of the Right to Know - In a nutshell

Katherine Verdery

I tried to finesse this question by putting the most important things at the beginning: a surveillance photo of myself in my underwear, a preface beginning with the sentence I...

My Life as a Spy - A close-up

Andrew Feenberg

Technosystem should be read as a attempt to link up several different traditions of social thought in an innovative theory of modernity. The big question to which Technosystem is addressed...

Technosystem - The wide angle

Harold James

One of the most dramatic bubbles of the 2000s occurred in the art market, above all in contemporary art. For fine art overall, the most widely quoted index, the Mei...

The Creation and Destruction of Value - A close-up

Jini Kim Watson

The final three chapters of The New Asian City each examine in detail one national site and one aesthetic form: Singaporean city poetry, Taiwanese New Cinema, and Korean minjung (people’s...

The New Asian City - A close-up

Hobson Woodward

A Brave Vessel is a story of two Williams: William Strachey, a poet and would-be chronicler of the New World in 1609 London; and William Shakespeare, a playwright of uncommon...

A Brave Vessel - In a nutshell

E. Paul Zehr

Becoming Batman is an examination of a superhero. I was trying to answer a simple question: Is it actually possible for any human to attain the skills and abilities of...

Becoming Batman - In a nutshell

Albena Azmanova

This book defends the duty of judgment and the freedom to err. Against the modernist ambition to discover truth by the power of reason, and post-modernist flagellation of both truth...

The Scandal of Reason - In a nutshell

Aditi Sahasrabuddhe

For anyone who stumbled upon Bankers’ Trust in a bookstore, I’d hope they’d open to the first pages, where the story begins not with numbers or charts, but with people....

Bankers' Trust - A close-up

Marnia Lazreg

In the past I wrote books that were historical in nature in so far as they relied on archival research or on existing historical research; I focused on structural rather...

Questioning the Veil - The wide angle

Barbara Penner

The fourth chapter, “Consuming: The Palace Bridal Chamber” perhaps best illustrates the larger arguments and tensions at this book’s heart.This chapter initially grew out of my interest in honeymoon suites—I...

Newlyweds on Tour - A close-up

Michael Kimmage

The Conservative Turn is an intellectual history of American anti-communism told through the biographies of two intellectuals, Lionel Trilling and Whittaker Chambers, who met as Columbia undergraduates in the 1920s.Both...

The Conservative Turn - In a nutshell

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

Christopher L. Eisgruber

Justice Stevens permitted me to include in the book an anecdote that illustrates how differently judges and legislators behave when dealing with politically controversial issues. While I was clerking for...

The Next Justice - 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 matters to you right now: perhaps the sections about emotional wellbeing, stress reduction, and resilience; or those about ...

Good Vibrations - A close-up

Tony Whyton

I came to this subject through an earlier project concerning business complicity under National Socialism.Companies such as Siemens (electronics), Krupp (steel), and the automotive firms BMW, Volkswagen, and Daimler Benz,...

Jazz Icons - 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

Francesco Duina

America’s poorest citizens are among its most patriotic. Their love of country – and indeed, their sense that the United States is superior to other countries in the world –...

Broke and Patriotic - In a nutshell

Inderpal Grewal

Readers encountering my book might first turn to the chapter on Hurricane Katrina, which captures the context of the book, both with regard to the problems of a retreating welfare...

Saving the Security State - A close-up

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

Monika Zagar

Knut Hamsun: The Dark Side of Literary Brilliance explains how and why the extraordinary Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun supported, enthusiastically and to the bitter end, the German occupation of Norway...

Knut Hamsun - In a nutshell

William J. Cook

In the hands of your browsing reader, I'd like the book to fall open to a pair of pages displaying two paintings by Julian Lethbridge, Traveling Salesman and Traveling Salesman...

In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman - A close-up

Herbert S. Terrace

I recommend a new reader turn to the chapter on the first year of infancy. Most people who spend time with infants (including their parents) think they are just playing...

Why Chimpanzees Can't Learn Language and Only Humans Can - A close-up

Santiago Zabala

I hope that readers who are simply browsing the book will immediately recognize the difference between “philosophical warnings” and “trigger warnings.” While the latter aims to alert students and viewers...

Signs from the Future - A close-up

Nicholas Fox Weber

The close-upIf a reader finds The Art of Tennis in a bookstore, I hope, first of all, that they look at the cover, and they realize that this should be...