This volume offers a major selection of Bertolt Brecht's groundbreaking critical writing. Here, arranged in chronological order, are essays from 1918 to 1956, in which Brecht explores his definition of the Epic Theatre and his theory of alienation-e…
In 1956 two Bell Labs scientists discovered the scientific formula for getting rich. One was mathematician Claude Shannon, neurotic father of our digital age, whose genius is ranked with Einstein's. The other was John L. Kelly Jr., a Texas-born, gun…
The narrative of a boy who lived through Auschwitz and Buchenwald provides a short and terrible indictment of modern humanity.
These essays, as selected and translated by Stephen Heath, are among the finest writings Barthes ever published on film and photography, and on the phenomena of sound and image. The classic pieces Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative…
Why do even well-educated people understand so little about mathematics? And what are the costs of our innumeracy? John Allen Paulos, in his celebrated bestseller first published in 1988, argues that our inability to deal rationally with very large…
At the end of the Reconstruction, the spread of science and technology, industrialism, urbanization, immigration, and economic depressions eroded Americans' conventional beliefs in individualism and a divinely ordained social system. In The Search f…
Trotsky was a hero to some, a ruthless demon to others. To Stalin, he was such a threat that he warranted murder by pickax. This polarizing figure set up a world conflict that lasted through the twentieth century, and in Trotsky: A Graphic Biography…
Alva No is one of a new breed--part philosopher, part cognitive scientist, part neuroscientist--who are radically altering the study of consciousness by asking difficult questions and pointing out obvious flaws in the current science. In Out of Our…
The new translation of the bestselling memoir Night in one volume with its companion novels, Dawn and Day Night is one of the masterpieces of Holocaust literature. First published in 1958, it is the autobiographical account of an adolescent boy a…
No denunciation without its proper instrument of close analysis, Roland Barthes wrote in his preface to Mythologies. There is no more proper instrument of analysis of our contemporary myths than this book--one of the most significant works in French…
"In the sentence She's no longer suffering, ' to what, to whom does she' refer? What does that present tense mean?" Roland Barthes, from his diaryThe day after his mother's death in October 1977, Roland Barthes began a diary of mourning. For nearly…
A graceful, contemplative volume, "Camera Lucida "was first published in 1979. Commenting on artists such as Avedon, Clifford, Mapplethorpe, and Nadar, Roland Barthes presents photography as being outside the codes of language or culture, acting on…
With a New Afterword by the Author "An astonishing work concerning personal honor and dishonor, shame and shamelessness. A book of stunning insights and suspense." --Studs Terkel Half a century later, the investigation of Hollywood radicals by the H…
Offers a collection of stories written between 1919 and 1963 that follow Hughes' literary development and the growth of his personal and political concerns
In The Beats: A Graphic History, those who were mad to live have come back to life through artwork as vibrant as the Beat movement itself. Told by the comic legend Harvey Pekar, his frequent artistic collaborator Ed Piskor, and a range of artists an…
I have noticed that sometimes I frighten people; what they really fear is themselves. They think it is I who scare them, but it is the dwarf within them, the ape-faced manlike being who sticks up his head from the depths of their souls. P r Lagerkvi…
In Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me, one of the final graphic memoirs from the man who defined the genre, Pekar explores what it means to be Jewish and what Israel means to the Jews. Over the course of a single day in his hometown of Cleveland,…
How language evolved has been called 'the hardest problem in science'. In "ADAM'S TONGUE", Derek Bickerton - long a leading authority in this field - shows how and why previous attempts to solve that problem have fallen short. Taking cues from topic…
Succeeds as both a graphic primer and a philosophical meditation. --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)Trinity, the debut graphic book by Jonathan Fetter-Vorm, depicts the dramatic history of the race to build and the decision to drop the first atomic b…
Recreates one of the most overlooked chapters in American history--the smallpox epidemic that coincided with the Revolutionary War--tracing its influence on colonial life and the course of the war.
Do not forget that 'skill and integrity' are the keys to success. This was the last piece of advice on a list Will Thurmond gave his son Strom in 1923. The younger Thurmond would keep the words in mind throughout his long and colorful career as one…
"Bastard Tongues "is an exciting, firsthand story of scientific discovery in an area of research close to the heart of what it means to be human--what language is, how it works, and how it passes from generation to generation, even where historical…
The single best short survey in America, now updated. Includes a New Preface and Afterward In terms of accessibility and comprehensive coverage, Kolchin's American Slavery is a singularly important achievement. Now updated to address a decade of new…
Introduction by Arnold Rampersad. Langston Hughes, born in 1902, came of age early in the 1920s. In "The Big Sea he recounts those memorable years in the two great playgrounds of the decade--Harlem and Paris. In Paris he was a cook and waiter in nig…
First published in 1977, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes is the great literary theorist's most original work a brilliant and playful text, gracefully combining the personal and the theoretical to reveal Roland Barthes's tastes, his childhood, his e…
The Earthmen came by the handful, then the hundreds, then the millions. They swept aside the majestic, dying Martian civilization to build their homes, shopping malls, and cities. Mars began as a place of boundless hopes and dreams, a planet to repl…
The essential primer on the most influential American documents between 1831 and 1900 The Great American Documents series, written by the graphic-book author Ruth Ashby and illustrated by the renowned Ernie Col n, tells the history of America throug…
"Ark of the Liberties" recovers a long-forgotten success story: America's lengthy and laudatory history of expanding world liberty. Our country's decline in popularity over the past eight years has been nothing short of astonishing, and with wit, br…
Arguing that partisan politics ultimately caused the Civil War, the author paints a portrait of short-sighted politicos during the 1840s and 1850s using the slavery issue as political leverage in a variety of contests between the major parties. Repr…
Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West includes the texts of the Nobel Prize-winning author's three speeches in the United States in the summer of 1975, his first major public addresses since his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974: on Jun…
Prada stores carry a few obscenely expensive items in order to boost sales for everything else (which look like bargains in comparison). People used to download music for free, then Steve Jobs convinced them to pay. How? By charging 99 cents. That p…
The true history of a legendary American folk heroIn the 1820s, a fellow named Sam Patch grew up in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, working there (when he wasn't drinking) as a mill hand for one of America's new textile companies. Sam made a name for himse…
"Not All of Us Are Saints: A Doctor's Journey with the Poor "is a book by David Hilfiker, M.D.
President James Monroe's 1823 message to Congress declaring opposition to European colonization in the Western Hemisphere became the cornerstone of nineteenth-century American statecraft. Monroe's message proclaimed anticolonial principles, yet it r…
"Clash of Extremes" takes on the reigning orthodoxy that the American Civil War was waged over high moral principles. Marc Egnal contends that economics, more than any other factor, moved the country to war in 1861. Drawing on a wealth of primary an…
Dan Ariely, the New York Times bestselling author of Predictably Irrational, and illustrator Matt R. Trower present a playful graphic novel guide to better decision-making, based on the author's groundbreaking research in behavioral economics, neuro…
Napoli introduces a remarkable group of young New Yorkers who went abroad with high hopes only to find a bewildering conflict. We meet, for instance, a nurse who staged a hunger strike to promote peace while working at a field hospital, and a black…
Mexico's struggle for independence was as much a series of civil wars and failed social revolutions as it was a war to separate Mexico from Spain. Some Mexicans fought to bring profound social change to the country, some to achieve autonomy, some fo…
Camilla Townsend's stunning new book, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, differs from all previous biographies of Pocahontas in capturing how similar seventeenth century Native Americans were--in the way they saw, understood, and struggled to cont…
First published in France in 1937, this important essay marked a turning point in Sartre's philosophical development. Before writing it, he had been closely allied with phenomenologists such as Husserl and Heidegger. Here, however, Sartre attacked H…
A memorial edition of Elie Wiesel's seminal memoir of surviving the Nazi death camps, with tributes by President Obama and Samantha Power When Elie Wiesel died in July 2016, the White House issued a memorial statement in which President Barack Obama…
Believe in climate change. Or don't. It doesn't matter. But you'd better understand this: the best route to rebuilding our economy, our cities, and our job markets, as well as assuring national security, is doing precisely what you would do if you w…
The Hill and Wang Critical Issues Series: concise, affordable works on pivotal topics in American history, society, and politics. Stephanson explores the origins of Manifest Destiny--the American idea of providential and historical chosenness--and s…
In Masters of Empire, the historian Michael A. McDonnell reveals the vital role played by the native peoples of the Great Lakes in the history of North America. Though less well known than the Iroquois or Sioux, the Anishinaabeg, who lived across La…
"Goldberger's War" chronicles one of the U.S. Public Health Service's most renowned heroes--an immigrant Jew who trained as a doctor at Bellevue, became a young recruit to the federal government's health service, and ended an American plague. He did…
A reissue of a now classic American drama. If the law is of such a nature that it requires you to be an agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. So wrote the young Henry David Thoreau in 1849. Three years earlier, Thoreau had put hi…
Statistics help us create Internet technologies, develop medicines, win elections, invest in stocks, predict the weather, and much more. But the methods that produce important numbers remain beyond many of us. How do we determine the proper size of…
