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9/11 was one of the most photographed events in history, and in the years that followed numerous films investigated, profiled and sought to understand what happened on that day and...

Firestorm - In a nutshell

Robin Feldman

The United States Constitution laid the groundwork for the intellectual property regime—giving Congress the power: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to...

AI Versus IP - In a nutshell

Ayelet Shachar

The Birthright Lottery proposes a new way of thinking about the intergenerational transfer of citizenship as a special kind of property inheritance. It emphasizes the significance of citizenship – perhaps...

The Birthright Lottery - In a nutshell

James Binney

Entropy is a concept that's almost as important as energy, but far less widely understood. The book explains how until the 1850s the two concepts were confused, and that a clear understanding of what entropy really is was reached only in 1947...

Entropy - In a nutshell

Gary L. Francione

For most of us, the central issue of animal ethics is our treatment of animals. We believe that animals have some moral value but that we are morally justified in...

Animals as Persons - In a nutshell

Steven Stoll

The Great Delusion is about the unrealistic expectations we all have about what this tired and picked-over planet can provide us. It is about economic growth, the belief that a...

The Great Delusion - In a nutshell

Mark Vernon

The greatest challenge in writing a cultural history is that its primary object of study is incredibly hard to pin down. The focus should not only be on the materiality...

Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination - The wide angle

David Farber

I never smoked crack. I did live in New York City in the 1980s and 1990s at the height of the crack era. Until my wife and I discovered it,...

Crack - The wide angle

Stephen Bates

In 1943, Time Inc. editor-in-chief Henry R. Luce sponsored the greatest collaboration of public intellectuals in the twentieth century. He and University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins summoned the...

An Aristocracy of Critics - In a nutshell

Lydia G. Fash

I risk undercutting my argument that short fiction needs more attention by saying this, but for most readers, the easiest chapter to dive into will be the final chapter about...

The Sketch, the Tale, and the Beginnings of American Literature - A close-up

Keith E. Whittington

For a reader “just browsing” the book, there is a natural inclination to skip ahead to chapter three and some of the specific sections there. In that chapter, I take...

Speak Freely - A close-up

Kenneth M. Pinnow

I first became interested in the problem of Soviet suicide after reading a footnote about a dramatic spike in suicides among Bolsheviks (or Communists) during the 1920s. Such an outburst...

Lost to the Collective - The wide angle

Eli Berman

My book offers a fresh way of understanding insurgency and terrorism. I outline a constructive approach to confronting localized insurgencies like those in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the international terrorism...

Radical, Religious, and Violent - The wide angle

Arnold Weinstein

The Lives of Literature tackles the central, all-too-unasked, question that undergirds my teaching and writing career: why read literature? It’s the question all students ponder—why read these books?—and it seems...

The Lives of Literature - In a nutshell

Larry Bennett

Reclaiming Modernity explores a pervasive but largely unexamined mental attitude, Americans’ fond recollection of the not-so-distant past, and elements of material culture associated with that near past. I call this...

Reclaiming Modernity - In a nutshell

André Millard

For the average movie goer who thinks of James Bond as the secret agent with the gadgets, I would suggest Chapter 11 “Gadgets” This chapter works through Bond’s equipment film...

Equipping James Bond - A close-up

Daryn Lehoux

Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see...

Creatures Born of Mud and Slime - The wide angle

Lilia Topouzova

Unsilencing is the first comprehensive study of the Bulgarian gulag— a network of forced-labor camps and prisons that operated throughout the communist era from 1945 to 1989. Referred to as “Little Siberia,” these camps interned thousands without trial, subjected them to inhumane conditions, and silenced them for decades. Drawing on two decades of archival research, oral history interviews...

Unsilencing - In a nutshell

Timothy Snyder

Probably the last page in the book is the most important to me.One of my main purposes was to show how many people were killed—starved, gassed, shot—in the Bloodlands between...

Bloodlands - A close-up

W. Fitzhugh Brundage

My interest in these historical events is a product of our times. Prior to 2004 it is unlikely that I would have written a book about torture in the United...

Civilizing Torture - The wide angle

Susan S. Fainstein

The concluding chapter of the book briefly traces the broad historical forces that formed the context for present urban policies. It explains the effects of national policies on metropolitan areas...

The Just City - A close-up

Michelle Baddeley

Copycats and Contrarians explores our instincts to follow others from a uniquely multidisciplinary perspective. It draws on insights and evidence from economics, finance, psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and behavioral ecology....

Copycats and Contrarians - The wide angle

Susan Schulten

From the voyages of discovery to the digital age, maps have been essential to five hundred years of American history. Whether made as weapons of war or instruments of reform,...

A History of America in 100 Maps - In a nutshell

Ayanna Thompson

So that we might learn what it means to remember one facet of our cultural legacy, we include in the book some two dozen concise essays addressing everything from Frederick...

Weyward Macbeth - A close-up

Robert L. Bettinger

Orderly Anarchy places the Indians of California in modern evolutionary perspective. It disputes the traditional, stage by stage, cultural evolutionary interpretation in which hunter-gatherers represent a primitive, unevolved stage of...

Orderly Anarchy - In a nutshell

Amanda Goodall

Why do experts make better leaders?I interviewed twenty-six presidents and deans in universities in the US and UK, including Amy Gutmann at U Penn, Lawrence Summers and Derek Bok, former...

Socrates in the Boardroom - A close-up

E. Paul Zehr

The main concept under the surface of Becoming Batman is that of stress and adaptation. All responses of the body to exercise, training, and skill learning involve the principle that...

Inventing Iron Man - The wide angle

Jonathan Walker

Pistols! Treason! Murder! describes the short, disturbing and unprecedented career of a Venetian spy, Gerolamo Vano, who was executed for perjury in 1622.In the years immediately preceding his death, Vano...

Pistols! Treason! Murder! The Rise and Fall of a Master Spy - In a nutshell

Michael S. Neiberg

I wrote this book to help me work my way out of a teaching problem.I simply could not explain the outbreak of the war to my students in one or...

Dance of the Furies - The wide angle

Paul Fleming

My book explores various conflicts surrounding the terms “mediocre,” “common,” “ordinary,” and “non-exceptional” in literary and aesthetic discourse since the eighteenth century, when the average man, the market place, and...

Exemplarity and Mediocrity - In a nutshell

James Simpson

I hope the reader would pleasurably remark first on the book’s brevity. It aims to pack a large punch in a small format. It can be read quickly.Readability aside, I...

Under the Hammer - A close-up

Ian Almond

I suppose if I wanted any single moment of the book to be read by the random reader, it would be a particular battle, the battle of Cortenuova in the...

Two Faiths, One Banner - A close-up

Dagmar Herzog

The twentieth century is often called “the century of sex” and seen as an era of increasing liberalization. Indeed, taking the century as a whole, we have seen the erosion...

Sexuality in Europe - In a nutshell

Francesco Boldizzoni

This book seeks to explain the persistence of capitalism despite all the trouble it has created. For several years now, every crisis—even crises not directly caused by capitalism, such as...

Foretelling the End of Capitalism - In a nutshell

Simon Ball

Death to Order is an analytical history of assassination between 1914 and 2024, one-hundred-and-ten years.Death to Order sets out to convince the reader, with a mass of archival evidence drawn...

Death to Order - In a nutshell

Stephen Sheehi

When we talk about the history of photography, we largely mean the history of European and American photography. Then, we attach the “other” photographies: Indian, South American, African, Arab, etc....

The Arab Imago - The wide angle

Santiago Zabala

This book explores the importance of warnings, our tendency to ignore them, and strategies to address this critical issue. I believe the 21st century is characterized by a widespread failure...

Signs from the Future - In a nutshell

Robert Bartlett

A “just browsing” feminist could turn to the chapter on female sovereigns to find out about how some countries, at some times, were ruled by women. I counted 27 examples....

Blood Royal - A close-up

Andrea Komlosy

For a first encounter with the book that would hopefully encourage further reading I recommend the chapter on work discourses (chapter 2). In this chapter, I contrast voices that seek...

Work - A close-up

Christopher L. Eisgruber

Like many law professors, I began my career by doing two judicial clerkships—basically, serving as a staff lawyer for a federal judge. I spent one year in the chambers of...

The Next Justice - The wide angle

Jeffrey G. Ogbar

Hip-Hop Revolution explores the current cultural and political landscape of hip-hop by providing a broad based historical context for the art. Beginning with the emergence of popular culture in the...

Hip-Hop Revolution - In a nutshell

Richard Pomfret

This book is about adopting a longer-term perspective to understand the world we live in.In the 1800s a handful of countries, initially in western Europe and lands settled by Europeans,...

The Age of Equality - In a nutshell

Ellen Wayland-Smith

I backed into this topic, largely by accident. I began my legal career litigating corporate and securities cases at a New York law firm. I recall commiserating with a friend...

The Angel in the Marketplace - The wide angle

Josephine Hoegaerts

Speaking, Stammering, Singing, Shouting is about what people sounded like in the nineteenth century. It doesn’t spotlight the brilliant voices of the stage or the famous voices of public figures....

Speaking, Stammering, Singing, Shouting - In a nutshell

Samuel Jay Keyser

If an idle browser were to thumb through my book, say in a bookshop somewhere, I would hope that Chapter 3 catches her eye. It contains a number of surprises,...

The Mental Life of Modernism - A close-up

Adrienne Mayor

Who first imagined robots?Most historians believe that automatons were first developed in the Middle Ages. Some philosophers of science claim that it was impossible for anyone in ancient times to...

Gods and Robots - In a nutshell

Mark Fenster

I came to political consciousness in the 1970s. The first president I remember was Richard Nixon, and the first political controversies I remember were Watergate and the latter days of...

Conspiracy Theories - The wide angle

Pablo Piccato

Mexico emerged as a modern nation in the 1860s, after half a century of civil war, foreign invasion and political instability. In a new nation divided by ethnicity, class, religion...

The Tyranny of Opinion - In a nutshell