Search results for ""Basic Books""

What is math? How exactly does it work? And what do three siblings trying to share a cake have to do with it? In How to Bake Pi, math professor Eugenia Cheng provides an accessible introduction to the logic and beauty of mathematics, powered, unexpectedly, by insights from the kitchen. We learn how the bechamel in a lasagna can be a lot like the number five, and why making a good custard proves that math is easy but life is hard. At the heart of it all is Cheng's work on category theory, a cutting-edge "mathematics of mathematics," that is about figuring out how math works. Combined with her infectious enthusiasm for cooking and true zest for life, Cheng's perspective on math is a funny journey through a vast territory no popular book on math has explored before. So, what is math? Let's look for the answer in the kitchen.

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Science has produced explanations for everything from the mechanisms of insect navigation to the formation of black holes and the workings of black markets. But how much can we trust science, and can we actually know the world through it? How does science work and how does it fail? And how can the work of scientists help--or hurt--everyday people? These are not questions that science can answer on its own. This is where philosophy of science comes in. Studying science without philosophy is, to quote Einstein, to be "like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest." Cambridge philosopher Tim Lewens shows us the forest. He walks us through the theories of seminal philosophers of science Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn and considers what science is, how far it can and should reach, and how we can determine the nature of its truths and myths. These philosophical issues have consequences that stretch far beyond the laboratory. For instance: What role should scientists have in policy discussions on environmental issues such as fracking? What are the biases at play in the search for a biological function of the female orgasm? If brain scans can be used to demonstrate that a decision was made several seconds before a person actually makes a conscious choice, what does that tell us about the possibility of free will? By examining science through this philosophical lens, Lewens reveals what physics can teach us about reality, what biology teaches us about human nature, and what cognitive science teaches us about human freedom. A masterful analysis of the biggest scientific and ethical issues of our age, The Meaning of Science forces us to confront the practical, personal, and political purposes of science--and why it matters to all of us.

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"Adventures in Human Being, with its deft mix of the clinical and the lyrical, is a triumph of the eloquent brain and the compassionate heart."--Wall Street Journal We assume we know our bodies intimately, but for many of us they remain uncharted territory, an enigma of bone and muscle, neurons and synapses. How many of us understand the way seizures affect the brain, how the heart is connected to well-being, or the why the foot holds the key to our humanity? In Adventures in Human Being, award-winning author Gavin Francis leads readers on a journey into the hidden pathways of the human body, offering a guide to its inner workings and a celebration of its marvels. Drawing on his experiences as a surgeon, ER specialist, and family physician, Francis blends stories from the clinic with episodes from medical history, philosophy, and literature to describe the body in sickness and in health, in life and in death. When assessing a young woman with paralysis of the face, Francis reflects on the age-old difficulty artists have had in capturing human expression. A veteran of the war in Iraq suffers a shoulder injury that Homer first described three millennia ago in the Iliad. And when a gardener pricks her finger on a dirty rose thorn, her case of bacterial blood poisoning brings to mind the comatose sleeping beauties in the fairy tales we learn as children. At its heart, Adventures in Human Being is a meditation on what it means to be human. Poetic, eloquent, and profoundly perceptive, this book will transform the way you view your body.

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"As panoramic as it is learned, this is ancient history for our globalized world." Tom Holland, author of Dynasty and Rubicon Twenty-five-hundred years ago, civilizations around the world entered a revolutionary new era that overturned old order and laid the foundation for our world today. In the face of massive social changes across three continents, radical new forms of government emerged; mighty wars were fought over trade, religion, and ideology; and new faiths were ruthlessly employed to unify vast empires. The histories of Rome and China, Greece and India-the stories of Constantine and Confucius, Qin Shi Huangdi and Hannibal-are here revealed to be interconnected incidents in the midst of a greater drama. In Ancient Worlds, historian Michael Scott presents a gripping narrative of this unique age in human civilization, showing how diverse societies responded to similar pressures and how they influenced one another: through conquest and conversion, through trade in people, goods, and ideas. An ambitious reinvention of our grandest histories, Ancient Worlds reveals new truths about our common human heritage. "A bold and imaginative page-turner that challenges ideas about the world of antiquity." Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads

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In Don't Read Poetry, award winning poet and literary critic Stephanie Burt offers an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry. She dispels preconceptions about poetry, explains how poems speak to one another, and how they can speak to our lives. It shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to poetry of the present.Unlike other guides, Burt does not approach poetry chronologically, or by school, form, or poet. Instead, her book moves through six reasons to read poetry. These include "feeling and attitude," or how poems can embody, reflect, and share emotions, and "difficulty and frustration," or how poets present us with problems and let us see the world anew. Each chapter explores the theme through the works of various poets and their histories. Burt moves seamlessly from the "classics" - Sappho, Wordsworth, Plath &c - to poetry circulated in Riot Grrrl fanzines or on Twitter. She challenges the assumptions that most people make about "poetry," whether they think they like it or think they don't (it's all old; it's all incomprehensible; it's sappy, or soppy; it's lovely; it's uplifting; it's good if it's in the New Yorker; it can't be good if it's in the New Yorker) in order to help us cherish-and distinguish among-individual poems. If the book has one governing argument, it's this: Don't read "poetry"; read poems.Burt seeks to fill a gap by providing a book that, while suitable for course adoption, is written for the average trade reader. Don't Read Poetry stands apart from other books as well in the sheer range of forms considered (from aubades to zeugma-based, Twitter-friendly epigrams), and the timeline covered. For the first time, Burt will take full account of new styles of poetry from the past few decades-poetry dependent on the digital environment, for example, or on practices imported from gallery art, from radical social thought (CAConrad, or books from Ugly Duckling Presse), or the culture and language of Korean, and Native, and Chinese, and Latina/o/x, Americans, from Carter Revard to the current U.S Poet Laureate.Destined to become a classic, Don't Read Poetry is the perfect book for anyone confronting poetry for the first time, but also has much to teach the those fully immersed in the genre.

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We live in an age of awesome technological potential. From nanotechnology to synthetic organisms, new technologies stand to revolutionize whole domains of human experience. But with awesome potential comes awesome risk: drones can deliver a bomb as readily as they can a new smartphone makers and hackers can 3D-print guns as well as tools and supercomputers can short-circuit Wall Street just as easily as they can manage your portfolio.One thing these technologies can''t do is answer the profound moral issues they raise. Who should be held accountable when they go wrong? What responsibility do we, as creators and users, have for the technologies we build? In A Dangerous Master , ethicist Wendell Wallach tackles such difficult questions with hard-earned authority, imploring both producers and consumers to face the moral ambiguities arising from our rapid technological growth. There is no doubt that scientific research and innovation are a source of promise and productivity, but, as Walla

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In 1973, a young filmmaker named George Lucas scribbled some notes for a far-fetched space-fantasy epic. Some forty years and 37 billion later, Star Wars -related products outnumber human beings, a growing stormtrooper army spans the globe, and Jediism" has become a religion in its own right. Lucas's creation has grown into far more than a cinematic classic it is, quite simply, one of the most lucrative, influential, and interactive franchises of all time. Yet incredibly, until now the complete history of Star Wars ,its influences and impact, the controversies it has spawned, its financial growth and long-term prospects,has never been told. In How Star Wars Conquered the Universe , veteran journalist Chris Taylor traces the series from the difficult birth of the original film through its sequels, the franchise's death and rebirth, the prequels, and the preparations for a new trilogy. Providing portraits of the friends, writers, artists, producers, and marketers who laboured behind the scenes to turn Lucas's idea into a legend, Taylor also jousts with modern-day Jedi, tinkers with droid builders, and gets inside Boba Fett's helmet, all to find out how Star Wars has attracted and inspired so many fans for so long.Since the first film's release in 1977, Taylor shows, Star Wars has conquered our culture with a sense of lightness and exuberance, while remaining serious enough to influence politics in far-flung countries and spread a spirituality that appeals to religious groups and atheists alike. Controversial digital upgrades and poorly received prequels have actually made the franchise stronger than ever. Now, with a savvy new set of bosses holding the reins and Episode VII on the horizon, it looks like Star Wars is just getting started. An energetic, fast-moving account of this creative and commercial phenomenon, How Star Wars Conquered the Universe explains how a young filmmaker's fragile dream beat out a surprising number of rivals to gain a diehard, multigenerational fan base,and why it will be galvanizing our imaginations and minting money for generations to come.

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Each generation of therapists can boast of only a few writers like Deborah Luepnitz, whose sympathy and wit shine through a fine, luminous prose. In Schopenhauer's Porcupines she recounts five true stories from her practice, stories of patients who range from the super-rich to the homeless and who grapple with panic attacks, psychosomatic illness, marital despair, and sexual recklessness. Intimate, original, and triumphantly funny, Schopenhauer's Porcupines goes further than any other book in unveiling the secrets of "how talking helps."

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Whether building a road or fighting a war, leaders from ancient Mesopotamia to the present have relied on financial accounting to track their state's assets and guide its policies. Basic accounting tools such as auditing and double-entry bookkeeping form the basis of modern capitalism and the nation-state. Yet our appreciation for accounting and its formative role throughout history remains minimal at best,and we remain ignorant at our peril. The 2008 financial crisis is only the most recent example of how poor or risky practices can shake, and even bring down, entire societies.In The Reckoning , historian and MacArthur Genius" Award-winner Jacob Soll presents a sweeping history of accounting, drawing on a wealth of examples from over a millennia of human history to reveal how accounting has shaped kingdoms, empires, and entire civilizations. The Medici family of 15th century Florence used the double-entry method to win the loyalty of their clients, but eventually began to misrepresent their accounts, ultimately contributing to the economic decline of the Florentine state itself. In the 17th and 18th centuries, European rulers shunned honest accounting, understanding that accurate bookkeeping would constrain their spending and throw their legitimacy into question. And in fact, when King Louis XVI's director of finances published the crown's accounts in 1781, his revelations provoked a public outcry that helped to fuel the French Revolution. When transparent accounting finally took hold in the 19th Century, the practice helped England establish a global empire. But both inept and willfully misused accounting persist, as the catastrophic Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Recession of 2008 have made all too clear.A masterwork of economic and political history, and a radically new perspective on the recent past, The Reckoning compels us to see how accounting is an essential instrument of great institutions and nations,and one that, in our increasingly transparent and interconnected world, has never been more vital.

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Ever since Korea was first divided at the end of World War II, the tension between its northern and southern halves has riveted,and threatened to embroil,the rest of the world. In this landmark history, now thoroughly revised and updated in conjunction with Korea expert Robert Carlin, veteran journalist Don Oberdorfer grippingly describes how a historically homogenous people became locked in a perpetual struggle for supremacy,and how they might yet be reconciled.

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Between 1939 and 1945 India underwent extraordinary and irreversible change. Hundreds of thousands of Indians suddenly found themselves in uniform, fighting in the Middle East, North and East Africa, Europe and--something simply never imagined--against a Japanese army poised to invade eastern India. With the threat of the Axis powers looming, the entire country was pulled into the vortex of wartime mobilization. By the war's end, the Indian Army had become the largest volunteer force in the conflict, consisting of 2.5 million men, while many millions more had offered their industrial, agricultural, and military labor. It was clear that India would never be same--the only question was: would the war effort push the country toward or away from independence? In India's War, historian Srinath Raghavan paints a compelling picture of battles abroad and of life on the home front, arguing that the war is crucial to explaining how and why colonial rule ended in South Asia. World War II forever altered the country's social landscape, overturning many Indians' settled assumptions and opening up new opportunities for the nation's most disadvantaged people. When the dust of war settled, India had emerged as a major Asian power with her feet set firmly on the path toward Independence. From Gandhi's early urging in support of Britain's war efforts, to the crucial Burma Campaign, where Indian forces broke the siege of Imphal and stemmed the western advance of Imperial Japan, Raghavan brings this underexplored theater of WWII to vivid life. The first major account of India during World War II, India's War chronicles how the war forever transformed India, its economy, its politics, and its people, laying the groundwork for the emergence of modern South Asia and the rise of India as a major power.

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These wide-ranging essays- on many individual political, economic, cultural and legal issues- have as a recurring, underlying theme the decline of the values and institutions that have sustained and advanced American society for more than two centuries. This decline has been more than an erosion. It has, in many cases, been a deliberate dismantling of American values and institutions by people convinced that their superior wisdom and virtue must over-ride both the traditions of the country and the will of the people. Whether these essays (originally published as syndicated newspaper columns) are individually about financial bailouts, illegal immigrants, gay marriage, national security, or the Duke University rape case, the underlying concern is about what these very different kinds of things say about the general direction of American society. This larger and longer-lasting question is whether the particular issues discussed reflect a degeneration or dismantling of the America that we once knew and expected to pass on to our children and grandchildren. There are people determined that this country's values, history, laws, traditions and role in the world are fundamentally wrong and must be changed. Such people will not stop dismantling America unless they get stopped- and the next election may be the last time to stop them, before they take the country beyond the point of no return.

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In May 1915, Italy declared war on the Habsburg Empire. Nearly 750,000 Italian troops were killed in savage, hopeless fighting on the stony hills north of Trieste and in the snows of the Dolomites. To maintain discipline, General Luigi Cadorna restored the Roman practice of decimation, executing random members of units that retreated or rebelled. With elegance and pathos, historian Mark Thompson relates the saga of the Italian front, the nationalist frenzy and political intrigues that preceded the conflict, and the towering personalities of the statesmen, generals, and writers drawn into the heart of the chaos. A work of epic scale, The White War does full justice to the brutal and heart-wrenching war that inspired Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms .

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Praised by Entertainment Weekly as "the man who put the fizz into physics," Dr. Len Fisher turns his attention to the science of cooperation in his lively and thought-provoking book. Fisher shows how the modern science of game theory has helped biologists to understand the evolution of cooperation in nature, and investigates how we might apply those lessons to our own society. In a series of experiments that take him from the polite confines of an English dinner party to crowded supermarkets, congested Indian roads, and the wilds of outback Australia, not to mention baseball strategies and the intricacies of quantum mechanics, Fisher sheds light on the problem of global cooperation. The outcomes are sometimes hilarious, sometimes alarming, but always revealing. A witty romp through a serious science, Rock, Paper, Scissors will both teach and delight anyone interested in what it what it takes to get people to work together.

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In 1992, Vasili Mitrokhin, a former KGB archivist, snuck out of Russia carrying with him a vast cache of transcriptions of top-secret KGB intelligence files. The FBI later described his trove of documents as "the most complete and extensive intelligence ever achieved from any source." Renowned historian Christopher Andrew had exclusive access to both Mitrokhin and his archive. In 1999, they published the explosive bestseller The Sword and the Shield, which provided a complete account of KGB operations in Europe and America. In The World Was Going Our Way, Andrew now chronicles the KGB's extensive penetration of governments throughout the Third World-the battlefield on which the U.S.S.R. sought to achieve global supremacy. Andrew's definitive account fundamentally revises the history of the Cold War, and sheds new light on the state of the world today. The KGB worked tirelessly for decades to foster anti-Americanism in the developing world, making this book essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the intractable hostility America faces in the ongoing war on terror.

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A decade ago, James Lang banned cell phones in his classroom. Frustrated by how easily they could sidetrack his students, Lang sought out a distraction-free environment, hoping it would help his students pay attention to his lessons. But after just a few years, Lang gave in. Not only was his no-cellphones policy ineffective (even his best students ignored it), he realized that he, like many of his fellow teachers, was missing an important point. The problem isn't phones. It's our antiquated notions of the brain. In Distracted, Lang makes the case for a new way of thinking about how to teach young minds based on the emerging neuroscience of attention.Although we have long prized the ability to focus, the most natural way of thinking is distraction. Our brains are designed to continually scan our environment, looking for new information, occasionally wandering off in different directions in search of new insights. This is not to say that iPhones are not good at distracting us, but that what they represent is in principle nothing new, because sustained periods of intense focus are not what humans are good at. Of course, we still do need to pay attention to learn. The problem is that we think of learning as a matter of managing distraction, when we should instead think of it as actively cultivating attention. This starts with letting go of technology bans, which are little more than a fig leaf applied to the objective difficulty of paying attention. But it involves more active ways of rethinking classroom conventions too. For example, rather than structuring lessons as 45 or 60-minute blocks of lecturing, teachers could segment their classes into a series of smaller lessons, with regular shifts in focus, appealing to the brain's interest in novelty. Simple changes can drastically improve students' performance, and in Distracted, Lang takes readers on a sprawling tour of how some of America's best teachers are improving student performance using concepts such as modular classrooms, flow states, and student-directed learning. Together, these insights offer a new way of thinking about how to not only more effectively teach a lesson plan, but to teach students the most important lesson of all: how to learn.

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We live in an era in which many of the men occupying the highest seats of power--from the movie producer's chair to the desk chair of the Oval Office--think misogyny is perfectly permissible. The same dynamics repeat themselves at every scale. And yet, while we may criticise the vulgarity and violence of these men, much of our society at best gives the behaviour a pass, or at worst, subscribes to an ideology that actively permits it. And whether one approves of or loathes the behaviour, in most cases it's still explained as men being men, either with a "boys will be boys" wink, or a disapproving description of Donald Trump's high testosterone levels (from Frank Bruni in the New York Times) or a claim that Barack Obama's were too low (from Kathleen Parker in the Washington Post).In Are Men Animals?, anthropologist Matthew Gutmann argues that biology alone is an insufficient explanation for bad behaviour--and turns everything we thought we knew about masculinity, testosterone, and the modern male on its head. The trick, he reveals, is to figure out where the line between nature and nurture really lies. To find out, Gutmann embarks on a global investigation of machismo spanning from Mexico City to Shanghai, from close-knit communities to sprawling college campuses, from rehab programmes in Oakland to the frontlines of war in Iraq. Along the way, he questions the extent to which we think men's bodies control their destinies, and how that changes how we understand matters like competition, conflict, and international combat. Ultimately, Gutmann implores us to expand our ideas of what a modern man should or could look like, for the benefit of our society as a whole.Provocative and incredibly timely, this book will be the definitive manifesto for a revamped understanding of modern masculinity, one that every man--and woman--needs.

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Why are we alive? Most things in the universe aren't. And if you trace the evolutionary history of plants and animals back far enough, you will find that, at some point, neither were we. Scientists have wrestled with this problem for centuries, and no one has been able to offer a credible theory. But in 2013, at just 30 years old, biophysicist Jeremy England published a paper that has utterly upended the ongoing study of life's origins. In Every Life Is on Fire, he describes, for the first time, his highly publicized theory known as dissipative adaptation. In any disordered system, matter clumps together and breaks apart, mostly randomly, without consequence. But some of the clumps that form are momentarily better at doing one specific job: dissipating energy. These structures are less likely to fall apart. Over time, they become better at both withstanding the disorder surrounding them and creating copies of themselves. From this deep insight, grounded in thermodynamics, England is able to isolate the emergence of the first life-like behaviors. Scientists have always thought that life began as a stroke of spectacular luck. But in fact, life may be inevitable, a product of the iron physical laws of the universe.England is both a world-class physicist and an ordained rabbi, and so his enquiry doesn't end with the physics of life. We ask questions like "How did life begin?" not just for the fun of scientific inquiry, but because we want a deeper understanding of who we are and why we're here. Even if physics can explain how life-like behaviors emerged, England doubts that reducing life down to the energy flows of a bunch of microscopic particles can ever give us a satisfying answer to what it means to be alive?. He believes that life is fundamentally a philosophical distinction, not a natural one. So before we can seriously look for life's physical origins, we must first make basic choices about what we think life means. This is something researchers often fail to recognize, and it is why, throughout In Every Life Is on Fire, England informs the premises of his theory with a careful exploration of what life is for.For anyone who reads this book, no matter their creed, In Every Life Is On Fire offers a rare work of popular science that explores not just what science does, but how it imbues our lives with meaning.

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A new history of school desegregation in America, revealing how girls and women led the fight for interracial educationThe struggle to desegregate America's schools was a grassroots movement, and young women were its vanguard. In the late 1940s, parents began to file desegregation lawsuits with their daughters, forcing Thurgood Marshall and other civil rights lawyers to take up the issue and bring it to the Supreme Court. After the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, girls far outnumbered boys in volunteering to desegregate formerly all-white schools.In A Girl Stands at the Door, historian Rachel Devlin tells the remarkable stories of these desegregation pioneers. She also explains why black girls were seen, and saw themselves, as responsible for the difficult work of reaching across the color line in public schools. Highlighting the extraordinary bravery of young black women, this bold revisionist account illuminates today's ongoing struggles for equality

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A distinguished political theorist sounds the alarm about the counterinsurgency strategies used to govern AmericansMilitarized police officers with tanks and drones. Pervasive government surveillance and profiling. Social media that distract and track us. All of these, contends Bernard E. Harcourt, are facets of a new and radical governing paradigm in the United States--one rooted in the modes of warfare originally developed to suppress anticolonial revolutions and, more recently, to prosecute the war on terror.The Counterrevolution is a penetrating and disturbing account of the rise of counterinsurgency, first as a military strategy but increasingly as a way of ruling ordinary Americans. Harcourt shows how counterinsurgency's principles--bulk intelligence collection, ruthless targeting of minorities, pacifying propaganda--have taken hold domestically despite the absence of any radical uprising. This counterrevolution against phantom enemies, he argues, is the tyranny of our age. Seeing it clearly is the first step to resisting it effectively.

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You didn't choose to live this life, in this body, in these conditions-this delicate and difficult life. Yet when you consider that your existence is fleeting, an inspired sense of urgency can spring forth. Say you often hike with a friend. One day, they propose that you skydive instead. You're wavering, and they insist:?Come?on. You only live once! And soon you're flying through the air. Why embrace a life you did not choose?In?This Beauty, philosopher Nick Riggle explores the beauty of being alive by investigating the things we say to inspire ourselves and each other: seize the day, treat yourself, you only live once. These clichés are at best vague, at worst stupid. They imply that you should do something wild with your life because your life is precious, a little like saying you should go swimming with your grandfather's watch because it is irreplaceable.Drawing on insights from aesthetics and his experiences as a professional skater and new father, he develops the thought that beauty-the beauty of this day, this body, this moment, these people-can make life worth embracing, worth engaging with and amplifying as beautiful. Insightful and deeply humane, This Beauty is a searching inquiry into the mystery of life's beauty and a call to create and share it.

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