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I’m an anthropologist but I’ve struggled with the discipline since I began studying it in the 1980s. That was a time when some anthropologists were focusing on the taken-for-granted medium...
My own trajectory has taken a number of twists and turns.In the introduction, I mention only one of the many people who have influenced my own thought—a professor who at...
The book moves fluidly, even unexpectedly, among chronological periods, genres, types of media, and among ways in which the “classic” has been defined since the second century C.E. All of...
My book is a stark but comprehensive look at what really happened following the discovery of two seemingly unrelated cases of murder near Phoenix, Arizona, in 1991.The first case involved...
We relate to the past (partly) through things. People and societies keep and create attachments to the past by keeping, collecting, preserving, recreating and otherwise interpreting a whole range of...
One claim I make in different ways in the book—and very explicitly in chapter 3—is that to be really credible, a victim has to appear to have mastered his or...
No question, the best way to dip into Before Fiction is by skipping the short Preface and getting right to the Introduction. That’s where I lay out and illustrate my...
Beyond the Map is the kind of book you can dip into anywhere. Reviewers often call it ‘quirky’ and the individual chapters are very different from each other; some are...
What’s unique about the Enver Hoxha: Twentieth-Century Tyrant is that we don’t actually have a decent scholarly biography of Enver Hoxha. There is some work—Blendi Fefziu has a book, which is fairly standard, even in its title...
I wrote this book to ask some new questions about our relationship to modern technology. As the world is constantly being changed by new technological inventions, what is the psychic...
Toward the end of the second chapter I discuss William Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age. For me, this section embodies all the concepts I try to engage in the book.I...
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...
The Death and Afterlife of Achilles looks at all types of ancient evidence about Achilles to reconstruct the basic outlines of his death and afterlife. For literary evidence, the Homeric...
On a warm summer evening in Los Angeles, Franco Gonzales, an undocumented immigrant working as a dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant, was waiting alone at a bus stop. An armored...
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...
I believe the reader would find interest in browsing Chapter 1, especially the passage on how the Right, the Church, and the Left disdained women’s personal experiences, as they adopted...
In my new book Transforming Toxic Leaders I speak from behind closed corporate doors to provide a unique view into the dark side of leadership. Based on executive coaching and...
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...
Signs from the Future originates from my earlier works—Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency (2017), and Being at Large: Freedom in the Age of...
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...
While The Quantum Frontier is not a single-topic book, perhaps no question has received as much attention as that of the enigmatic Higgs boson. This undiscovered particle is always mentioned...
The Romantics understood what scientists often forget: that, as Wordsworth put it, we ‘half-create’ the world we see. Any particular observation is the joint product of sense data our minds...
Chicago occupies a particular place in the development of American urbanism. Urban reform movements, the city beautiful movement, modern architecture, and urban renewal and public housing were developed and tested...
I am a historian of science, but rather than focus on the achievements of great thinkers—Darwin’s theory of natural selection, say, or Einstein’s theory of relativity—I am interested in the...
Lost to the Collective is an exploration into both the history of suicide and the elusive promises of Soviet socialism and the modern social sciences.Suicide unsettled the Soviets because it...
Between the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), US folks celebrated US beginnings in all sorts of ways. They formed Forefather Societies. They held Forth of July parades...
The Iraq invasion of 2003 was justified by the Bush administration on the grounds of national security. But all of the principal advisors of the administration of president George W....
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...
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...
AsylumsIn the early nineteenth century, America, like much of Europe in the same period, embraces the idea that the proper response to serious forms of mental disorder is to put...
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