Jean Briggs journeyed to the Canadian Northwest Territories in the summer of 1963 to begin a seventeen-month anthropological field study of the small group of Eskimos who live at the mouth of the Back River, northwest of Hudson Bay. Living with an E…
An Economist Best Book of the YearA Financial Times Best Economics Book of the YearA Fast Company "7 Books Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Says You Need To Lead Smarter" SelectionThe nature of globalization has changed but our thinking about globalizati…
Profiles the surprising number of otherwise "normal" people who practice magic and witchcraft in England today, detailing how they became involved in witchcraft, the history and tradition of magic, and other fascinating details
From the awesome grandeur of the Great Pyramids to the delicacy of a face etched on an amulet, the spellbinding power of ancient Egyptian art persists to this day. Spanning three thousand years, this beautifully illustrated history offers a thorough…
The definitive new translation of Max Weber's classic work of social theory-arguably the most important book by the foremost social theorist of the twentieth century.Max Weber's Economy and Society is the foundational text for the social sciences of…
American democratic capitalism is in danger. How can we save it?For its first two hundred years, the American economy exhibited truly impressive performance. The combination of democratically elected governments and a capitalist system worked, with…
The Earth has entered a new age-the Anthropocene-in which humans are the most powerful influence on global ecology. The accelerating pace of energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and population growth has thrust the planet into a massive uncontrolle…
With the rise of science, we moderns believe, the world changed irrevocably, separating us forever from our primitive, premodern ancestors. But if we were to let go of this fond conviction, Bruno Latour asks, what would the world look like? His book…
In our high-speed culture, terms like "stressed-out," "Type-A personality," "biofeedback," and "relaxation response" have become commonplaces. More than ever before, we are aware of the relationship between our mental and emotional states and our ph…
W. E. B. Du Bois never felt so at home as when he was a student at the University of Berlin. But Du Bois was also American to his core, scarred but not crippled by the racial humiliations of his homeland. In Lines of Descent, Kwame Anthony Appiah tr…
A disturbing in-depth expose of the antidemocratic practices of despotic governments now sweeping the world. One day they'll be like us. That was once the West's complacent and self-regarding assumption about countries emerging from poverty, imperia…
From the author of Stylish Academic Writing comes an essential new guide for writers aspiring to become more productive and take greater pleasure in their craft. Helen Sword interviewed one hundred academics worldwide about their writing background…
The age of human rights has been kindest to the rich. Even as state violations of political rights garnered unprecedented attention due to human rights campaigns, a commitment to material equality disappeared. In its place, economic liberalization h…
"Samuel Moyn breaks new ground in examining the relationship between human rights and economic fairness. If we don't address the growing global phenomenon of economic inequality, the human rights movement as we know it cannot survive or flourish." -…
One of the world's most provocative philosophers attacks the obsession with comprehensive intellectual systems-the perceived need for a world view. We live in a unitary cosmos created and cared for in all its details by a benevolent god. That, for c…
In this small book David Herlihy makes subtle and subversive inquiries that challenge historical thinking about the Black Death. Looking beyond the view of the plague as unmitigated catastrophe, Herlihy finds evidence for its role in the advent of n…
Already famous throughout Europe, this international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the actual, practical accomplishments of Communism around the world: terror, torture, famine, mass deportations, and…
No judgment of taste is innocent. In a word, we are all snobs. Pierre Bourdieu brilliantly illuminates this situation of the middle class in the modern world. France's leading sociologist focuses here on the French bourgeoisie, its tastes and prefer…
One of the very few accounts in English of German idealism, this ambitious work advances and revises our understanding of both the history and the thought of the classical period of German philosophy. As he traces the structure and evolution of idea…
Recognition, though it figures profoundly in our understanding of objects and persons, identity and ideas, has never before been the subject of a single, sustained philosophical inquiry. This work, by one of contemporary philosophy's most distinguis…
Separated by millennia, Aristotle and Sigmund Freud gave us disparate but compelling pictures of the human condition. But if, with Jonathan Lear, we scrutinize these thinkers' attempts to explain human behavior in terms of a higher principle-whether…
Jihad, with its many terrifying associations, is a term widely used today, though its meaning is poorly grasped. Few people understand the circumstances requiring a jihad, or "holy" war, or how Islamic militants justify their violent actions within…
A noted expert on Russian energy argues that despite Europe's geopolitical rivalries, natural gas and deals based on it unite Europe's nations in mutual self-interest.Three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet empi…
Advocates of computers make sweeping claims for their inherently transformative power: new and different from previous technologies, they are sure to resolve many of our existing social problems, and perhaps even to cause a positive political revolu…
In the first half of the twentieth century, the United States moved from the periphery to the center of global cultural production. At the same time, technologies of dissemination evolved rapidly, and versions of modernism emerged as dominant art fo…
What does it mean to be a hero? The ancient Greeks who gave us Achilles and Odysseus had a very different understanding of the term than we do today. Based on the legendary Harvard course that Gregory Nagy has taught for well over thirty years, The…
Today the Byzantine mystic, writer, and monastic leader Symeon the New Theologian (ca. 949 to 1022 ce) is considered a saint by the Orthodox Church and revered as one of its most influential spiritual thinkers. But in his own time a cloud of controv…
The Renaissance was not just a rebirth of the mind. It was also a new dawn for the machine.When we celebrate the achievements of the Renaissance, we instinctively refer, above all, to its artistic and literary masterpieces. During the fifteenth and…
A daily glass of wine prolongs life-yet alcohol can cause life-threatening cancer. Some say raising the minimum wage will decrease inequality while others say it increases unemployment. Scientists once confidently claimed that hormone replacement th…
In the daily news and the scientific literature, we are faced with conflicting claims about the effects caused by some treatments, behaviors, and policies. A daily glass of wine prolongs life, or so we are told. Yet we are also told that alcohol can…
Herman Kahn was the only nuclear strategist in America who might have made a living as a standup comedian. Indeed, galumphing around stages across the country, joking his way through one grotesque thermonuclear scenario after another, he came fright…
A provocative account of capitalism's rise to global dominance and, as different models of capitalism vie for world leadership, a look into what the future may hold.We are all capitalists now. For the first time in human history, the globe is domina…
In The Fateful Triangle-drawn from lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1994-one of the founding figures of cultural studies reflects on the divisive, often deadly consequences of our contemporary politics of identification. As he untangles t…
"Hall's main argument rests on the notion that the greatest problem of the 21st century is living with and understanding differences." -Times Higher Education "In this long-awaited work, Stuart Hall...bracingly confronts the persistence of race-and…
A sweeping history of southeastern Europe from antiquity to the present that reveals it to be a vibrant crossroads of trade, ideas, and religions.We often think of the Balkans as a region beset by turmoil and backwardness, but from late antiquity to…
Every year hundreds of defendants are convicted on little more than the say-so of a fellow citizen. Although psychologists have suspected for decades that an eyewitness can be highly unreliable, new evidence leaves no doubt that juries vastly overes…
Science and technology have immense authority and influence in our society, yet their working remains little understood. The conventional perception of science in Western societies has been modified in recent years by the work of philosophers, socio…
The invention of modern freedom-the equating of liberty with restraints on state power-was not the natural outcome of such secular Western trends as the growth of religious tolerance or the creation of market societies. Rather, it was propelled by a…
Lost in the raging debate over the validity of social construction is the question of what, precisely, is being constructed. Facts, gender, quarks, reality? Is it a person? An object? An idea? A theory? Each entails a different notion of social cons…
The violence wrought by climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, and the environmental aftermath of war takes place gradually and often invisibly. Using the innovative concept of "slow violence" to describe these threats, Rob Nixon fo…
In this overview of the Baltic region from the Vikings to the European Union, Michael North presents the sea and the lands that surround it as a Nordic Mediterranean, a maritime zone of shared influence, with its own distinct patterns of trade, cult…
The zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture. They dominate the look of its art and commodities as well as our discourse about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this radiant study, Sianne Ngai offers a th…
Why do good people so often do nothing when a seemingly small action could make a big difference? A pioneering social psychologist explains why moral courage is so rare-and reveals how it can be triggered or trained.We are bombarded every day by rep…
Often considered a lost decade, a pause between the liberal Sixties and Reagan's Eighties, the 1970s were indeed a watershed era when the forces of a conservative counter-revolution cohered. These years marked a significant moral and cultural turnin…
Between 1650 and 1750, four Catholic churches were the best solar observatories in the world. Built to fix an unquestionable date for Easter, they also housed instruments that threw light on the disputed geometry of the solar system, and so, within…
No one likes to be bored. Two leading psychologists explain what causes boredom and how to listen to what it is telling you, so you can live a more engaged life. We avoid boredom at all costs. It makes us feel restless and agitated. Desperate for so…
The great Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky has long been recognized as a pioneer in developmental psychology. But somewhat ironically, his theory of development has never been well understood in the West. Mind in Society should correct much of th…
From a New York Times bestselling author, a gripping account of the slave rebellion that led to the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. For five horrific weeks after Christmas in 1831, Jamaica was convulsed by an uprising of its enslaved peo…
Readers intersted in history, and in development of the modern sensibility, should relish this large-scale yet intimately detailed examination of the blossoming of the ordinary and extraordinary people of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. This…
The second volume of "A History of Private Life" contains much rich and colourful detail culled from a considerable variety of sources. This "secret epic" aims to construct a vivid picture of peasant and patrician life in different places in the 11t…
Why and how systems of political financing and representation in Europe and North America give outsized influence to the wealthy and undermine democracy, and what we can do about it. One person, one vote. In theory, everyone in a democracy has equal…
At the distant beginning of Western civilization, according to European tradition, Greece stands as an insular, isolated, near-miracle of burgeoning culture. This book traverses the ancient world's three great centers of cultural exchange--Babylonia…
We have fallen in thrall to the theology of supply and demand. According to its acolytes, the Market is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. It can raise nations and ruin households, and comes complete with its own doctrines, prophets, and evang…
The Market has deified itself, according to Harvey Cox's brilliant exegesis. And all of the world's problems--widening inequality, a rapidly warming planet, the injustices of global poverty--are consequently harder to solve. Only by tracing how the…
