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Nine types of graphic organizers help students hone the skills essential for success in the course, including cause and effect, chronological reasoning, comparison, contextualization, continuity and change over time, defining the period, historical argument and turning points.

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The best-selling storytelling approach with more support for student success.

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When you are facing down a blank page (or screen), a constraint-based prompt—for example, “you must use the words ‘cloud’ and ‘green’” or “you must set the scene in a crowded grocery store”—can get your brain working in unexpected ways. In this creative writing guide, long-time teacher and novelist Alice LaPlante shares 100 original exercises that will simultaneously push you into a corner and give you the tools to write yourself out of it. LaPlante explains the purpose of each exercise—to sharpen your ear for dialogue, generate surprising images or access intense emotions—and breaks down student examples to reveal how to achieve these goals. Whether you are looking to jumpstart new ideas or find a fresh angle on a work in progress, and whether you write fiction, creative nonfiction or poetry, Write Yourself Out of a Corner will strengthen your imagination and your craft.

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The ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius compared children to tender sprouts, shaped by soil, sunlight, water, and the efforts of patient gardeners. At times children require our protection, other times we must take a step back and allow them to grow. A practical parenting manual, philosophical reflection on the relationship between parent and child, and necessary response to modern stereotypes of Eastern parenting, Little Sprouts and the Dao of Parenting reconsiders cultural definitions of success and explores how we might support and nourish young people. Engaging deeply with foundational Daoist and Confucian thinkers, philosopher Erin Cline shows how we can strengthen innate virtues of compassion, generosity, and individuality in our own tender sprouts.

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In H.M.S. Surprise, British naval officer Jack Aubrey and surgeon Stephen Maturin face near-death and tumultuous romance in the distant waters ploughed by the ships of the East India Company. Tasked with ferrying a British ambassador to the Sultan of Kampong, they find themselves on a prolonged voyage aboard a Royal Navy frigate en route to the Malay Peninsula. In this new sphere, Aubrey is on the defensive, pitting wits and seamanship against an enemy who enjoys overwhelming local superiority. But somewhere in the Indian Ocean lies the prize that could secure him a marriage to his beloved Sophie and make him rich beyond his wildest dreams: the ships sent by Napoleon to attack the China Fleet.

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The Intelligence Trap explores cutting-edge ideas in our understanding of intelligence and expertise, including “motivated reasoning,” “meta-forgetfulness,” and “functional stupidity.” David Robson reveals the surprising ways that even the brightest minds and most talented organizations can go wrong?from some of Thomas Edison’s worst ideas to failures at NASA—while offering practical advice to avoid mistakes based on the timeless lessons of Benjamin Franklin, Richard Feynman, and Daniel Kahneman.

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In this moving, playful and deeply philosophical volume, Gregory Orr seeks innovative ways for the imagination to respond to and create meaning out of painful experiences, while at the same time rejoicing in love and language. A passionate exploration of the forces that shape us, The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write explores themes of survival and the powerlessness of the self in a chaotic and unfair world, finding hope in the emotions and vitality of poetry. With characteristic meditative lyricism, the poet reflects on grief and the power of language in extended odes (“Ode to Nothing”, “Ode to Words”) and slips effortlessly from personal trauma (“Song of What Happens”) to public catastrophe (“Charlottesville Elegy”). The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write confirms Orr’s place among the preeminent lyric poets of his generation, engaging the deepest existential issues with wisdom and humour and transforming them into celebratory song.

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Said Sayrafiezadeh has been hailed by Philip Gourevitch as "a masterful storyteller working from deep in the American grain." His new collection of stories—some of which have appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and the Best American Short Stories—is set in a contemporary America full of the kind of emotionally bruised characters familiar to readers of Denis Johnson and George Saunders. These are people contending with internal struggles—a son’s fractured relationship with his father, the death of a mother, the loss of a job, drug addiction—even as they are battered by larger, often invisible, economic, political, and racial forces of American society. Searing, intimate, often slyly funny, and always marked by a deep imaginative sympathy, American Estrangement is a testament to our addled times. It will cement Sayrafiezadeh’s reputation as one of the essential twenty-first-century American writers.

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Raising the Eleventh Pillar brings to life the debates surrounding ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Delegates to the New York State Ratifying Convention first debate the nature of representative government before considering issues such as the size of the lower house and recall. Drawing on primary sources, Federalists and Antifederalists must convince undecided voters—and the ending could prove explosive. From the award-winning Reacting to the Past community, Flashpoints is a new series of immersive role-playing activities designed to help students bring historical ideas and forces to life. Games are designed to take about one week of class time in a survey course, between two and four class sessions. Drawing on primary sources to craft arguments and inform debates, students develop critical thinking and historical empathy. Classroom-tested materials for students and instructors ensure a smooth “flipped classroom” experience.

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A vibrant introduction to the science and societal impacts of disasters.

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Born into a former slaveholding family, Elizabeth, Grace and Katharine Lumpkin were raised in a culture of white supremacy. While Elizabeth remained a lifelong believer, her sisters reinvented themselves as radical thinkers, working for racial justice, women’s liberation and labour rights. National Humanities Award-winning historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall traces the sisters from their childhood in the Deep South to the progressive zeal of the early twentieth century and towards our contemporary moment. By threading these women’s stories through a century of history, social movements and intellectual debates, Hall makes visible forgotten sites of experimentation and creative thinking. She demonstrates how the fraught ties of sisterhood were tested and frayed as each sister struggled, albeit in radically different ways, to reinvent herself as a modern woman, grapple with a legacy of racism and remake the American South as a place to call home.

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Across Russia’s easternmost shores and through the territories of the Inupiat and Yupik in Alaska, Bathsheba Demuth reveals how, over 150 years, people turned ecological wealth in a remote region into economic growth and state power. Beginning in the 1840s, capitalism and then communism, with their ideas of progress, transformed the area around the Bering Strait into a historical experiment in remaking ecosystems. Rendered even more urgent in a warming climate, Floating Coast is a profoundly resonant tale of the impact that human needs and ambitions have brought (and will continue to bring) to a finite planet. • Shortlisted for the The Pushkin House Book Prize 2020.

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In A Memory of the Future, critically acclaimed poet Elizabeth Spires reflects on selfhood and the search for a core identity. Inspired by the tradition of poetic interest in Zen, Spires explores the noisy space of the mind, interrogating the necessary divide between the social persona that navigates the world and the artist’s secret self. With vivid, careful attention to the minute details of everyday moments, A Memory of the Future observes, questions and meditates on the ordinary, attempting to make sense of the boundaries of existence. As the poems move from Zen reflections outward into the identifiable worlds of Manhattan, Maine and Maryland’s Eastern shore, houses, both real and imagined, become metaphorical extensions of the self and psyche. These poems ask the unanswerable questions that become more pressing in the second half of life. How are we changed by the passage of time? How does memory define and shape us? As Spires reminds us, any memory of the future will become, paradoxically, a memory of the past and of forgetting.

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In her The New York Times best-selling Between You & Me (ISBN 978 0 393 352146), Mary Norris delighted readers with her irreverent tales of pencils, punctuation and punctiliousness over three decades in The New Yorker’s celebrated copy department. In Greek to Me, she delivers another wise and witty paean to the art of expressing oneself clearly and convincingly, this time filtered through her greatest passion: all things Greek. From convincing her The New Yorker bosses to pay for Ancient Greek studies to travelling the sacred way in search of Persephone, Greek to Me is an unforgettable account of both her lifelong love affair with words and her solo adventures in the land of olive trees and ouzo. Along the way, Norris explains how the alphabet originated in Greece, makes the case for Athena as a feminist icon and reveals the surprising ways Greek helped form English. Filled with Norris’s memorable encounters with Greek words, Greek gods, Greek wine—and more than a few Greek waiters—Greek to Me is the Comma Queen’s fresh take on Greece and the exotic yet strangely familiar language that so deeply influences our own.

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Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work. Here, for the first time, these women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments recovers these women’s radical aspirations and insurgent desires.

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The Beatles and Duke Ellington’s Orchestra stand as the two greatest examples of collaboration in music history. Thomas Brothers delivers a portrait of the creative process at work, demonstrating that the cooperative method at the foundation of these two artist-groups was the primary reason for their unmatched musical success. While clarifying the historical record of who wrote what, with whom and how, Brothers brings the past to life with photos, anecdotes and more than thirty years of musical knowledge, and analysis of songs from “Strawberry Fields Forever” to “Chelsea Bridge”. Help! describes in rich detail the music and mastery of two cultural leaders whose popularity has never dimmed, and the process of collaboration that allowed them to achieve an artistic vision greater than the sum of their parts.

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Michael Lewis’s brilliant narrative of the Trump administration’s botched presidential transition takes us into the engine rooms of a government under attack by its leaders through willful ignorance and greed. The government manages a vast array of critical services that keep us safe and underpin our lives from ensuring the safety of our food and drugs and predicting extreme weather events to tracking and locating black market uranium before the terrorists do. The Fifth Risk masterfully and vividly unspools the consequences if the people given control over our government have no idea how it works.

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In the years surrounding the Second World War, a serendipitous confluence of events created a healthy balance between the market and the polity—between the engine of capitalism and the egalitarian ideals of democracy. Yet, from the 1970s on, a power shift occurred in which financial regulations were rolled back, taxes were cut, inequality worsened and disheartened voters turned to far-right, faux populism. Robert Kuttner lays out the events that led to the post-war miracle and charts its dissolution all the way to Trump, Brexit and the tenuous state of the EU. He asks whether today’s poisonous alliance of reckless finance and ultra-nationalism is inevitable, and whether democracy can find a way to survive.

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An exploration into the psychology of eating in today’s unprecedented first world pantry of abundance, access and excess, Why You Eat What You Eat examines the sensory, psychological, neuroscientific and physiological factors that influence our eating habits. Rachel Herz uncovers the fascinating and surprising facts that affect food consumption: bringing reusable bags to the supermarket encourages us to buy more treats; our beliefs about food affect the number of calories we burn; TV alters how much we eat; and what we see and hear changes how food tastes. Herz reveals useful techniques for managing cravings, such as resisting repeated trips to the buffet table, and how aromas can be used to curb overeating. Why You Eat What You Eat mixes the social with the scientific to uncover how psychology, neurology and physiology shape our relationship with food and how food alters the relationships we have with ourselves and with one another.

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Fully updated, this matter-of-fact handbook includes the most recent discoveries about drug use, including new information on electronic smoking devices, abuse of prescription stimulants and the opioid crisis. “Lively, highly informative, unbiased, [and] thorough” (Addiction Research & Theory), Buzzed surveys drugs from caffeine to heroin to reveal how these drugs affect the body, the different “highs” they produce and the circumstances in which they can be deadly. Neither a “Just Say No” treatise nor a “How to” manual, Buzzed is based on the conviction that people make better decisions with accurate information at hand.

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At the crux of America’s history stand two astounding events: the immediate and complete destruction of the most powerful system of slavery in the modern world, followed by a political reconstruction in which new constitutions established the fundamental rights of citizens for formerly enslaved people. Few people living in 1860 would have dared imagine either event, and yet, in retrospect, both seem to have been inevitable. In a beautifully crafted narrative, Edward L. Ayers restores the drama of the unexpected to the history of the Civil War. From the same vantage point occupied by his unforgettable characters, Ayers captures the strategic savvy of Lee and his local lieutenants, and the clear vision of equal rights animating black troops from Pennsylvania. We see the war itself become a scourge to the Valley, its pitched battles punctuating a cycle of vicious attack and reprisal in which armies burned whole towns for retribution. In the weeks and months after emancipation, from the streets of Staunton, Virginia, we see black and white residents testing the limits of freedom as political leaders negotiate the terms of readmission to the Union. With analysis as powerful as its narrative, here is a landmark history of the Civil War.

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An accomplished painter, architect and diplomat, Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) is best known for Lives of the Artists, his classic account of the great masters—an extraordinary book that invented the genre of artistic biography, single-handedly established the canon of Italian Renaissance art and founded the cults of Raphael, Leonardo and Michelangelo that persist to this day. Vasari positioned art as an intellectual pursuit instead of just a technical skill, teaching us to view artists as geniuses and visionaries rather than as simple craftsmen. Immersing readers in the world of the Medici and the popes, Ingrid Rowland and Noah Charney show the great works of Western culture taking shape amid the thrilling culture of Renaissance Italy.

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At a time when America’s founding principles are being debated as never before, Russell Shorto looks back to the era in which those principles were forged. In Revolution Song, Shorto weaves the lives of six people into a seamless narrative that casts fresh light on the range of experience in colonial America on the cusp of revolution. The result is a brilliant defence of American values with a compelling message: the American Revolution is still being fought today, and its ideals are worth defending.

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"We are provincials no longer", said Woodrow Wilson on 5 March 1917, at his second inaugural. He spoke on the eve of America’s entrance into the First World War, as Russia teetered between autocracy and democracy. Just ten days after Wilson’s declaration, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated the throne, ending a three-centuries-long dynasty and ushering in the false dawn of a democratic Russia. Wilson asked Congress to declare war against Germany a few short weeks later, asserting the United States’s new role as a global power and its commitment to spreading American ideals abroad. Will Englund draws on a wealth of contemporary diaries, memoirs and newspaper accounts to add texture and personal detail to the story of that month. March 1917 celebrates the dreams of warriors, pacifists, revolutionaries and reactionaries, even as it demonstrates how their successes and failures constitute the origin story of the complex world we inhabit a century later.

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After the Civil War and Reconstruction, a new struggle raged in the Northern Rockies. In the summer of 1877, General Oliver Otis Howard, a champion of African American civil rights, ruthlessly pursued hundreds of Nez Perce families who resisted moving onto a reservation. Standing in his way was Chief Joseph, a young leader who never stopped advocating for Native American sovereignty and equal rights. Thunder in the Mountains is the spellbinding story of two legendary figures and their epic clash of ideas about the meaning of freedom and the role of government in American life.

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In her admired works of fiction, Ann Hood explores the transformative power of literature. Now, with warmth and honesty, Hood reveals the personal story behind these works of fiction. Growing up in a household that didn’t foster the love of literature, Hood channelled her imagination and curiosity by devouring The Bell Jar, Marjorie Morningstar, The Harrad Experiment and other works. These titles introduced her to topics that could not be discussed at home: desire, fear, sexuality and madness. Later, Johnny Got His Gun and The Grapes of Wrath influenced her political thinking and Dr. Zhivago and Les Miserables stoked her ambition to travel the world. With characteristic insight and charm, Hood showcases the ways in which books gave her life and can transform–even save—our own.

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The Great Lakes—Erie, Huron, Michigan, Ontario, and Superior—hold 20 percent of the world’s supply of surface fresh water and provide sustenance, work, and recreation for tens of millions of Americans. But they are under threat as never before, and their problems are spreading across the continent. The Death and Life of the Great Lakes is prize-winning reporter Dan Egan’s compulsively readable portrait of an ecological catastrophe happening right before our eyes, blending the epic story of the lakes with an examination of the perils they face and the ways we can restore and preserve them for generations to come.

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Many people believe that, at its core, biological sex is a fundamental force in human development. According to this false-yet-familiar story, the divisions between men and women are in nature alone and not part of culture. Drawing on evolutionary science, psychology, neuroscience, endocrinology, and philosophy, Testosterone Rex disproves this ingrained myth and calls for a more equal society based on both sexes’ full human potential.

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Passionate and irreverent, Mortal Trash transports the readers into a world of wit, lament, and desire. In a section called “Over the Bright and Darkened Lands,” canonical poems are torqued into new shapes. “Except Thou Ravish Me,” reimagines John Donne’s famous “Batter my heart, Three-person’d God” as told from the perspective of a victim of domestic violence. Like Pablo Neruda, Addonizio hears “a swarm of objects that call without being answered”: hospital crash carts, lawn gnomes, Evian bottles, wind-up Christmas creches, edible panties, cracked mirrors. Whether comic, elegiac, or ironic, the poems in Mortal Trash remind us of the beauty and absurdity of our time on earth. From “Scrapbook”: We believe in the one-ton rose and the displaced toilet equally. Our blues assume you understand not much, and try to be alive, just as we do, and that it may be helpful to hold the hand of someone as lost as you.

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Shaped by his twenty-five years traveling the world, and enlivened by encounters with villagers from Rio to Beijing, tycoons, and presidents, Ruchir Sharma’s The Rise and Fall of Nations rethinks the "dismal science" of economics as a practical art. Narrowing the thousands of factors that can shape a country’s fortunes to ten clear rules, Sharma explains how to spot political, economic, and social changes in real time. He shows how to read political headlines, black markets, the price of onions, and billionaire rankings as signals of booms, busts, and protests. Set in a post-crisis age that has turned the world upside down, replacing fast growth with slow growth and political calm with revolt, Sharma’s pioneering book is an entertaining field guide to understanding change in this era or any era.

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This revelatory volume brings together significant works in translations from nearly fifty Chinese writers. It includes poems, essays, fiction, songs and speeches written in an astonishing array of moods and styles, from sublime lyricism to witty surrealism, poignant documentary to the ironic, the absurd, the transgressive and the defiant. Yunte Huang provides essential context in an opening essay and in headnotes, timelines and brief introductions to the Republican, Revolutionary and Post-Mao eras. Both personal and authoritative, his selections make for a joyously informative read. From belles lettres to literary propaganda, from poetic revolution to pulp fiction, The Big Red Book is an eye-opening portrait of China in the tumultuous twentieth century.

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For months in early 1980, scientists, journalists and ordinary people listened anxiously to rumblings in the long quiescent volcano Mount St. Helens. Still, when a massive explosion took the top off the mountain, no one was prepared. Fifty-seven people died and the lives of many others were changed forever. Steve Olson interweaves history, science and vivid personal stories to portray the disaster as a multi-faceted turning point. Powerful economic, political and historical forces influenced who died when the volcano erupted. The eruption of Mount St. Helens transformed volcanic science, the study of environmental resilience and our perceptions of how to survive on an increasingly dangerous planet.

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Prohibition has long been portrayed as a “noble experiment” that failed, a newsreel story of glamorous gangsters, flappers and speakeasies. Now Lisa McGirr dismantles this myth to reveal a much more significant history. Prohibition was the seedbed for a pivotal expansion of the federal government and the genesis of America’s contemporary penal state.

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“Earthling” is one of the oldest words in the English language, our original word for ploughman, a keeper of the earth. In poems simultaneously ordinary and otherworldly, James Longenbach traces the life of a modern-day earthling as he looks squarely at his little patch of earth and at the vast emptiness of interstellar space. Beginning with the death of the earthling’s mother and ending with a confrontation with his own mortality, the poems within Earthling resist complaint or agitation. In them, the real and the imagined, the material and the allegorical, intersect at shifting angles and provide fresh perspectives and lasting consolation.

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Drawing on two decades worth of award-winning poetry, Marilyn Hacker’s generous selections in A Stranger’s Mirror include work from four previous volumes along with twenty-five new poems, ranging in locale from a solitary bedroom to a refugee camp. In a multiplicity of voices, Hacker engages with translations of French and Francophone poets. Her poems belong to an urban world of cafés, bookshops, bridges, traffic, demonstrations, conversations and solitudes. From there, Hacker reaches out to other sites and personas: a refugee camp on the Turkish/Syrian border; contrapuntal monologues of a Palestinian and an Israeli poet; intimate and international exchanges abbreviated on Skype—perhaps with gunfire in the background. These poems course through sonnets and ghazals, through sapphics and syllabics, through every historic-organic pattern, from renga to rubaiyat to Hayden Carruth’s “paragraph”. Each is also an implicit conversation with the poets who came before, or who are writing as we read. A Stranger’s Mirror is not meant only for poets. These poems belong to anyone who has sought in language an expression and extension of his or her engagement with the world—far off or up close as the morning’s first cup of tea.

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After leaving Atlanta in disgrace three years before, detective Thomas Canby is called back to the city on the eve of Atlanta’s 1881 International Cotton Exposition to partner with Atlanta’s first African American police officer, Cyrus Underwood. They are assigned a chilling case: a serial murderer who seems to be violently targeting Atlanta’s wealthiest black entrepreneurs. After Canby’s arrival the murders become increasingly disturbing and unpredictable, and his interference threatens to send the investigation spinning off in the wrong direction. Canby must face down enduring racism, and his own prejudices, to see clearly the source of these bloody crimes. Meanwhile, if he can restore his reputation, he might win back the woman he loves.

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We are drawn to smooth, harmonious movement. Both social and physical graces have been taught since the dawn of civilization. Yet grace seems forgotten in our pushy, hectic modern world. Sarah L. Kaufman argues that we should bring it back. She celebrates grace in the way bodies move; exploring how to stand, walk and dress well. She deplores the rarity of grace among public figures and glories in it where found. She singles out grace in sports and in the arts—from tennis and football to sculpture, music and dance—and in the everyday ways people interact, from the grace of a good host to the kindness of strangers. Cary Grant is this book’s muse. His ease flowed from training as an acrobat but also from his wit, humility and genuine concern for others. So, Kaufman suggests, we might unearth the potential for grace in ourselves.

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The speakers of Oracle occupy the outer-borough cityscape of New York's Staten Island, where they move through worlds glittering with refuse and peopled by ghosts—of a dead lover, of a friend lost to suicide, of a dog with glistening eyes. Marvin's haunting, passionate poems explore themes of loss, of the vulnerability of womanhood in a world hostile to it, and of the fraught, strangely compelling landscape of adolescence.

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Norman Mailer and William F. Buckley Jr. were towering figures who argued publicly about every major issue of the 1960s: the counterculture, Vietnam, feminism, civil rights, the Cold War. Behind the scenes, the two were close friends and trusted confidantes who lived surprisingly parallel lives. In Buckley and Mailer, Kevin M. Schultz delves into their personal archives to tell the rich story of their friendship, arguments and the tumultuous decade they did so much to shape. He delivers a fresh chronicle of the ‘60s and its long aftermath as well as an entertaining work of narrative history that explores these extraordinary figures’ contrasting visions of America and the future.

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Matthew Battles explores the questions of why writing exists and what it means to those who write. Born from the interplay of natural and cultural history, the seemingly magical act of writing has continually expanded our consciousness. It has been used as both an instrument of power and a channel of the divine; a means of social bonding and of individual self-definition. Now, as the revolution once wrought by the printed word gives way to the digital age, many fear that the art of writing—and the nuanced thinking nurtured by writing—are under threat. But writing itself, despite striving for permanence, is always in the midst of growth and transfiguration. Celebrating the impulse to record, to invent, to make one’s mark, Battles re-enchants the written word for all those susceptible to the power and beauty of writing in all its forms.

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Barb and Lily, two friends at opposite ends of the beauty spectrum, have the same problem: each fears she will never find a love that can overcome her looks. To complicate matters, they discover that they may have a murderer in their midst, that Barb’s calm disposition is more dangerously provocative than her beauty and Lily’s musical talents are more powerful than anyone could have imagined. “Funny, surreal, absurd and charmingly preposterous” (The New York Times), The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty is a modern day, “loopily entertaining” (The Washington Post), fairy tale. With biting wit and offbeat charm, Amanda Filipacchi illuminates the labyrinthine relationship between beauty, desire and identity.

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Adrienne Rich’s Later Poems Selected and New displays the strong trajectory of the work of one of the most distinguished artists of American letters. After her death Rich left a manuscript that speaks for her concern with a poetics of relation along with a passionate attention to craft. In addition to her selections from twelve volumes of published work, Later Poems Selected and New contains ten powerful new poems. Among these, "From Strata" is a kind of archaeology of the present day; "Itinerary" searches for an "indefinite future" in a menaced landscape; "For the Young Anarchists" offers a trope of skilled labour for political action; and the haunting voice of the "Teethsucking Bird" reminds us of what we have been told to forget. These and other poems look back into history and forward into the future while engaging with contemporary moments. Rich’s singular command of language continues to the end.

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A monumental work of musical history, Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! traces the story of pop music through songs, bands, musical scenes, and styles from Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock around the Clock” (1954) to Beyoncé’s first megahit, “Crazy in Love” (2003). Bob Stanley—himself a musician, music critic, and fan—teases out the connections and tensions that animated the pop charts for decades, and ranges across the birth of rock, soul, R&B, punk, hip hop, indie, house, techno, and more. Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! is a vital guide to the rich soundtrack of the second half of the twentieth century and a book as much fun to argue with as to quote.

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The Blind Watchmaker is the seminal text for understanding evolution today. In the eighteenth century, theologian William Paley developed a famous metaphor for creationism: that of the skilled watchmaker. In The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins crafts an elegant riposte to show that the complex process of Darwinian natural selection is unconscious and automatic. If natural selection can be said to play the role of a watchmaker in nature, it is a blind one—working without foresight or purpose. In an eloquent, uniquely persuasive account of the theory of natural selection, Dawkins illustrates how simple organisms slowly change over time to create a world of enormous complexity, diversity, and beauty.

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This astonishing novel in verse tells the story of a haunted young man hiding from the Vietnam War in the basement of a San Francisco building and translating his mother’s diaries. The diaries concern the Jedwabne massacre that took place in Poland in 1941. Wildly inventive, dark, beautiful and unrelenting, The Wherewithal is a meditation on the nature of evil and the destruction of war.

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Rollo May brings together the ideas of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and other great thinkers to offer insight into the ideas and techniques of existential psychotherapy, of which he was a major force. He pays particular attention to the causes of loneliness and isolation and to our search for stability in order to move towards a future where responsibility, creativity and love can play a role.

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In August 2006, the International Astronomical Union voted Pluto out of planethood. It is a wonder Pluto has any fans, yet during the mounting debate over Pluto’s status, people rallied behind the extraterrestrial underdog. Pluto is entrenched in the American cultural, patriotic view of the cosmos and Neil deGrasse Tyson is on a quest to discover why. Only Tyson can tell this story: he was involved in the first exhibition to demote Pluto and consequently, Pluto lovers have freely shared their opinions with him. In his typically witty way, Tyson explores the history of planet classification and America’s obsession with the “planet” that has recently been judged a dwarf.

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In an age of connection supercharged by the Internet, we often assume that more people online means a smaller, more cosmopolitan world. In reality, it is easier to ship bottles of water from Fiji to Atlanta than it is to get news from Tokyo to New York. In Digital Cosmopolitans Ethan Zuckerman draws on contemporary research in psychology, sociology and his own work on how humans "flock together" to explain why the technological ability to reach someone does not inevitably lead to increased connection. For those who seek a wider picture—a picture now critical for global success—Zuckerman highlights the challenges and the headway already made by attempts to bridge cultures through translation, cross-cultural inspiration and the search for new, serendipitous experience. Digital Cosmopolitans offers a map of the innovations needed to more tightly connect the world.

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