Search results for ""basic books""

Evolution has, ever since its inception, been one of the most ideologically fraught fields in all of science. It has given birth to the myth about biological racial “types,” with distinct rankings of “genetic superiority”. Evolution has always been mistrusted by religious fundamentalists, contributing to a rise in creationist education that dovetails with the mass scientific illiteracy we see today. And today the coronavirus is mutating into ever more dangerous strands because huge swaths of the population have rejected the science that predicted this outcome if people remained unvaccinated. With so much fear and misunderstanding, it is crucial to set the record straight. Enter evolutionary biologist Joseph Graves. In A Voice in the Wilderness, he makes the case that widespread understanding of evolution is crucial to solving all these problems. Graves shows how the science of evolution can lead us to new paths of achieving social unity. He refutes common, pseudoscientific misconceptions that undergird racism, homophobia, sexism, classism, and more—all issues on which many perceive evolutionary biology to be a reactionary force. He shows how evolution can either make pandemics better, or—if its lessons are unheeded—worse. And he tackles the political and religious objections to the study of evolution as well. Graves' own experience powers much of the narrative. As a pioneering Black biologist, a leftist, and a Christian, Graves uses his personal story from a child of the Jim Crow south to a major researcher leader in his field to rewrite his field—and show how it can be a force not for reaction, but for justice. Provocative and timely, A Voice in the Wilderness is at once a powerful work of scientific antiracism and a moving history of a trailblazing life.

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Between 250,000 and 500,000 boy soldiers fought in the U.S. Civil War. Many more children were exposed to the war's ravages in their home towns,in Atlanta, Baton Rouge, Columbia, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Harper's Ferry, Richmond, and Vicksburg,and during Sherman's March to the Sea. Based on eyewitness accounts of 120 children, ages four to sixteen, Reluctant Witnesses tells their story of the war: their experience of the hardships they endured and how they managed to cope. Their voices speak of courage and despair, of horror and heroism, and of the bonds of family and community and the powers of faith that helped them survive. Their diaries, letters, and reminiscences are a testimony to the astonishing resiliency in the face of great adversity and their extraordinary capacity to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives. Like children of contemporary wars, these children from the Union and the Confederacy speak to us across centuries without hate but with the stubborn hope that peace might prevail in the end.

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Inspired by Albert Einstein's theory of relativity and Bertrand Russell and David Hilbert's pursuit of the fundamental rules of mathematics, some of the most brilliant minds of the generation came together in post-World War I Vienna to present the latest theories in mathematics, science, and philosophy and to build a strong foundation for scientific investigation. Composed of such luminaries as Kurt Gödel and Rudolf Carnap, and stimulated by the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, the Vienna Circle left an indelible mark on science. Exact Thinking in Demented Times tells the often outrageous, sometimes tragic, and never boring stories of the men who transformed scientific thought. A revealing work of history, this landmark book pays tribute to those who dared to reinvent knowledge from the ground up.

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In 1119, the people of the Near East came together in an epic clash of horses, swords, sand, and blood that would decide the fate of the city of the Aleppo-and the eastern Crusader states. Fought between tribal Turkish warriors on steppe ponies, Arab foot soldiers, Armenian bowmen, and European knights, the battlefield was the amphitheatre into which the people of Eurasia poured their full gladiatorial might. Carrying a piece of the true cross before them, the Frankish army advanced, anticipating a victory that would secure their dominance over the entire region. But the famed Frankish cavalry charge failed them, and the well-arranged battlefield dissolved into a melee. Surrounded by enemy forces, the crusaders suffered a colossal defeat. With their advance in Northern Syria stalled, the momentum of the crusader conquest began to evaporate, and would never be recovered.

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Creativity has long been thought of as an individual gift, best pursued alone; schools, organizations, and whole industries are built on this idea. But what if this most common belief about how creativity works is wrong? In this revised and expanded edition, psychologist Keith Sawyer tears down some of the most popular myths about creativity and erects new principles in their place. He reveals that creativity is always collaborative-even when you're alone. Sawyer draws on compelling stories of inventions and innovations: the inventors of the ATM, the mountain bike, and open source operating systems, among others, to demonstrate the freewheeling ways of true innovation. He shares the results of his own acclaimed research on jazz ensembles, improv groups, and conversation analysis, to show us how to be more creative in collaborative group settings, how to change organizational dynamics for the better, and how to tap into our own reserves of creativity. Now with a new chapter on web-based developments that have made collaboration central to everyone's lives, this revised and updated edition is a must read for anyone seeking to thrive and succeed by tapping into collaborative creativity

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When the US Constitution won widespread popular approval in 1788, it was the culmination of decades of passionate argument about legal and political first principles-a furious debate over the nature of government and the rights and duties of citizens that boiled over into Revolution. But ratification hardly ended America's constitutional conversation. For the next fifty years, both ordinary Americans and statesmen like George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson continued to wrestle with weighty constitutional questions, from the halls of government to the pages of newspapers. Should the nation's borders be pushed beyond its original footprint? Should America allow slavery to spread westward? Where did Indian tribes fit into the picture? Women? Free blacks? What rule should the Constitution's then-weakest branch, led for more than thirty years by Chief Justice John Marshall, play in these resolving such questions? In The Words That Made Us, celebrated Constitutional scholar Akhil Reed Amar tells the story of America's constitutional conversation during its first eighty years-from its birth in 1760 through the 1830s, when the last of America's early leaders died and bequeathed this boisterous and sophisticated conversation to posterity. Amar traces the threads of Constitutional discourse, uniting history and law in a vivid and sweeping narrative that seeks both to reveal this history anew and to make clear who was right and who was wrong on the biggest legal issues confronting early America. Without proper popular understanding of the Constitution, America and the world suffer. In The Words That Made Us, Amar offers an essential history of the Constitution's formative decades and an indispensable guide for anyone seeking to understand America's Constitution and its relevance today.

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Fights about the fate of the state of Israel, and the Zionist movement that gave birth to it, have long been a staple of both Jewish and American political culture. But despite these arguments' significance to American politics, American Jewish life, and to Israel itself, no one has ever systematically examined their history and explained why they matter. In We Are Not One, historian Eric Alterman traces this debate from its nineteenth-century origins. Following Israel's 1948-1949 War of Independence (called the "nakba" or "catastrophe" by Palestinians), few Americans, including few Jews, paid much attention to Israel or the challenges it faced. Following the 1967 Six-Day War, however, almost overnight support for Israel became the primary component of American Jews' collective identity. Over time, Jewish organizations joined forces with conservative Christians and neoconservative pundits and politicos to wage a tenacious fight to define Israel's image in the US media, popular culture, Congress, and college campuses. Deeply researched, We Are Not One reveals how our consensus on Israel and Palestine emerged and why, today, it is fracturing.

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The symmetrical, exuberant heart is everywhere: it gives shape to candy, pendants, the frothy milk on top of a cappuccino, and much else. How can we explain the ubiquity of what might be the most recognizable symbol in the world?In The Amorous Heart, Marilyn Yalom tracks the heart metaphor and heart iconography across two thousand years, through Christian theology, pagan love poetry, medieval painting, Shakespearean drama, Enlightenment science, and into the present. She argues that the symbol reveals a tension between love as romantic and sexual on the one hand, and as religious and spiritual on the other. Ultimately, the heart symbol is a guide to the astonishing variety of human affections, from the erotic to the chaste and from the unrequited to the conjugal.

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A groundbreaking examination of the transformational power of affect and a technique for harnessing it in the psychotherapeutic setting The first model of accelerated psychodynamic therapy to make the theoretical why as important as the formula for how, Fosha''s original technique for catalyzing change mandates explicit empathy and radical engagement by the therapist to elicit and harness the patient''s own healing affects. Its wide-open window on contemporary relational and attachment theory ushers in a safe, emotionally intense, experience-based pathway for processing previously unbearable feelings. This is a rich fusion of intellectual rigor, clinical passion, and practical moment-by-moment interventions.

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From an esteemed scholar of American religion and sexuality, a sweeping account of the century of religious conflict that produced our culture warsGay marriage, transgender rights, birth control--sex is at the heart of many of the most divisive political issues of our age. The origins of these conflicts, historian R. Marie Griffith argues, lie in sharp disagreements that emerged among American Christians a century ago. From the 1920s onward, a once-solid Christian consensus regarding gender roles and sexual morality began to crumble, as liberal Protestants sparred with fundamentalists and Catholics over questions of obscenity, sex education, and abortion. Both those who advocated for greater openness in sexual matters and those who resisted new sexual norms turned to politics to pursue their moral visions for the nation. Moral Combat is a history of how the Christian consensus on sex unraveled, and how this unraveling has made our political battles over sex so ferocious and so intractable.

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A leading Catholic intellectual explains why the teachings of the Second Vatican Council are essential to the Church's future—and the world'sThe Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) was the most important Catholic event in the past five hundred years. Yet sixty years after its opening on October 11, 1962, its meaning remains sharply contested and its promise unfulfilled.In To Sanctify the World, George Weigel explains the necessity of Vatican II and explores the continuing relevance of its teaching in a world seeking a deeper experience of freedom than personal willfulness. The Council’s texts are also a critical resource for the Catholic Church as it lives out its original, Christ-centered evangelical purpose.Written with insight and verve, To Sanctify the World recovers the true meaning of Vatican II as the template for a Catholicism that can propose a path toward genuine human dignity and social solidarity.

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What lies behind America's economic and social decline? Can racism explain the ghetto tragedy if two-thirds of America's blacks have made it into the middle class? Why have Chinese, Japanese, and Korean immigrants done so much better than Mexicans? According to Lawrence E. Harrison, the key to answering these and other questions is culture,the values of a people with respect to work, education, frugality, community, fair play, and progress.

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In 1942, a team at the University of Chicago achieved what no one had before: a nuclear chain reaction. At the forefront of this breakthrough stood Enrico Fermi. Straddling the ages of classical physics and quantum mechanics, equally at ease with theory and experiment, Fermi truly was the last man who knew everything-at least about physics. But he was also a complex figure who was a part of both the Italian Fascist Party and the Manhattan Project, and a less-than-ideal father and husband who nevertheless remained one of history's greatest mentors. Based on new archival material and exclusive interviews, The Last Man Who Knew Everything lays bare the enigmatic life of a colossus of twentieth century physics.

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Now with a new postscript covering the unfolding health care revolutionMobile technology has transformed our lives, and personal genomics is revolutionizing biology. But despite the availability of technologies that can provide wireless, personalized health care at lower cost, the medical community has resisted change. In The Creative Destruction of Medicine , Eric Topol,one of the nation's top physicians,calls for consumer activism to demand innovation and the democratization of medical care. The Creative Destruction of Medicine is the definitive account of the coming disruption of medicine, written by the field's leading voice.

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The decades after World War II were a golden age across much of the world. It was a time of economic miracles, an era when steady jobs were easy to find and families could see their living standards improving year after year. And then, around 1973, the good times vanished. The world economy slumped badly, then settled into the slow, erratic growth that had been the norm before the war. The result was an era of anxiety, uncertainty, and political extremism that we are still grappling with today.In An Extraordinary Time , acclaimed economic historian Marc Levinson describes how the end of the postwar boom reverberated throughout the global economy, bringing energy shortages, financial crises, soaring unemployment, and a gnawing sense of insecurity. Politicians, suddenly unable to deliver the prosperity of years past, railed haplessly against currency speculators, oil sheikhs, and other forces they could not control. From Sweden to Southern California, citizens grew suspicious of their newly ineffective governments and rebelled against the high taxes needed to support social welfare programs enacted when coffers were flush.Almost everywhere, the pendulum swung to the right, bringing politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan to power. But their promise that deregulation, privatization, lower tax rates, and smaller government would restore economic security and robust growth proved unfounded. Although the guiding hand of the state could no longer deliver the steady economic performance the public had come to expect, free-market policies were equally unable to do so. The golden age would not come back again.A sweeping reappraisal of the last sixty years of world history, An Extraordinary Time forces us to come to terms with how little control we actually have over the economy.

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World War II reached into the homes and lives of ordinary people in an unprecedented way. Civilian men, women, and children made up the vast majority of those killed by the war, and the conflict displaced millions more. On Europe's home fronts, the war brought the German blitzkrieg, followed by long occupations and the racial genocide of the Holocaust. In An Iron Wind , historian Peter Fritzsche draws on diaries, letters, and other first-person accounts to show how civilians in occupied Europe struggled to understand this terrifying chaos. As the Third Reich targeted Europe's Jews for deportation and death, confusion and mistrust reigned. What were Hitler's aims? Did Germany's rapid early victories mark the start of an enduring new era? Was collaboration or resistance the wisest response to occupation? How far should solidarity and empathy extend? And where was God? People tried desperately to answer such questions and make sense of the horrors around them, but the stories they told themselves often justified a selfish indifference to their neighbours' fates.Piecing together the broken words of World War II's witnesses and victims,probing what they saw and what they failed to see,Fritzsche offers a haunting picture of the most violent conflict in modern history.

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For much of the twentieth century, Americans saw their nation as part of a shared Western civilization rooted in European Enlightenment ideals of liberty and self-government and the heritage of classical Greece and Rome. And for much of the century, a vision of Western liberty guided America's foreign affairs, from the crusades of the world wars to its strategic alliances with Europe in the Cold War against the Communist East. But today, other ideas drive American foreign policy: on one side, the pursuit of a universal 'liberal international order,' and on the other, the illiberal nationalism of 'America First.' In The Abandonment of the West, historian Michael Kimmage traces the West's rise and its decline in American foreign policy since the 1890s - and argues that reviving the West today is essential to fostering national unity and resisting new geopolitical threats.The roots of America's affinity for the West run deep, from the embrace of Columbus as a national hero to the neoclassical design of the nation's capital. After the First World War, despite Woodrow Wilson's failed efforts to persuade Americans to take up leadership of the West, American universities advanced new Western civilization curricula. By 1945, after the Second World War, the West was the dominant American foreign-policy concept. Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy fostered the bipartisan project of saving the West from the Soviet East in the Cold War. Then this consensus unraveled. With the Vietnam War and the rights revolutions of the 1960s, the left raised new questions about the West's association with empire and white supremacy; American universities moved on to frameworks such as multiculturalism and ethnic studies. The right advanced a narrower, more religious vision of the West, almost as critical of liberals at home as it was of communists abroad. After the end of the Cold War, presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama increasingly avoided invoking the West, seeking instead to create liberal democracies everywhere. Donald Trump has broadly rejected Western ideals of liberty, instead embracing authoritarian leaders and denigrating Western institutions such as NATO.The Abandonment of the West concludes with a defense of the West as a framework for American foreign affairs today. Despite its past shortcomings, Kimmage argues, reviving the West is essential to restoring a foreign policy rooted in liberty and self-governance and resisting the authoritarianism of Russia and China. Here at home, a revitalized and expansive West can offer an inspiring alternative to identity politics on the right and the left. Sweeping and full of rich insights, The Abandonment of the West is an urgent portrait of modern America's search for identity and its emergence as a superpower, revealing the crossroads at which the country now stands.

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Unlike other barnyard animals, which pull plows, give eggs or milk, or grow wool, a pig produces only one thing: meat. Incredibly efficient at converting almost any organic matter into nourishing, delectable protein, swine are nothing short of a gastronomic godsend,yet their flesh is banned in many cultures, and the animals themselves are maligned as filthy, lazy brutes.As historian Mark Essig reveals in Lesser Beasts , swine have such a bad reputation for precisely the same reasons they are so valuable as a source of food: they are intelligent, self-sufficient, and omnivorous. What's more, he argues, we ignore our historic partnership with these astonishing animals at our peril. Tracing the interplay of pig biology and human culture from Neolithic villages 10,000 years ago to modern industrial farms, Essig blends culinary and natural history to demonstrate the vast importance of the pig and the tragedy of its modern treatment at the hands of humans. Pork, Essig explains, has long been a staple of the human diet, prized in societies from Ancient Rome to dynastic China to the contemporary American South. Yet pigs' ability to track down and eat a wide range of substances (some of them distinctly unpalatable to humans) and convert them into edible meat has also led people throughout history to demonize the entire species as craven and unclean. Today's unconscionable system of factory farming, Essig explains, is only the latest instance of humans taking pigs for granted, and the most recent evidence of how both pigs and people suffer when our symbiotic relationship falls out of balance.An expansive, illuminating history of one of our most vital yet unsung food animals, Lesser Beasts turns a spotlight on the humble creature that, perhaps more than any other, has been a mainstay of civilization since its very beginnings,whether we like it or not.

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In the last decade, school shootings have decimated communities and terrified parents, teachers, and children in even the most family friendly" American towns and suburbs. These tragedies appear to be the spontaneous acts of disconnected teens, but this important book argues that the roots of violence are deeply entwined in the communities themselves. Rampage challenges the loner theory" of school violence and shows why so many adults and students miss the warning signs that could prevent it.

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Hofstadter's collection of quirky essays is unified by its primary concern: to examine the way people perceive and think.

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From the big bang to black holes, from dark matter to dark energy, from the origins of the universe to its ultimate destiny, The Edge of the Sky tells the story of the most important discoveries and mysteries in modern cosmology,with a twist. The book's lexicon is limited to the thousand most common words in the English language, excluding physics , energy , galaxy , or even universe . Through the eyes of a fictional scientist (Student-People) hunting for dark matter with one of the biggest telescopes (Big-Seers) on Earth (Home-World), cosmologist Roberto Trotta explores the most important ideas about our universe (All-there-is) in language simple enough for anyone to understand.A unique blend of literary experimentation and science popularization, this delightful book is a perfect gift for any aspiring astronomer. The Edge of the Sky tells the story of the universe on a human scale, and the result is out of this world.

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With contributions from Jorge Luis Borges, Richard Dawkins, John Searle, and Robert Nozick, The Mind's I explores the meaning of self and consciousness through the perspectives of literature, artificial intelligence, psychology, and other disciplines. In selections that range from fiction to scientific speculations about thinking machines, artificial intelligence, and the nature of the brain, Hofstadter and Dennett present a variety of conflicting visions of the self and the soul as explored through the writings of some of the twentieth century's most renowned thinkers.

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In this remarkable exploration of the Catholic world, prominent Catholic author and papal biographer George Weigel offers a luminous collection of letters to young Catholics, not-so-young Catholics, and curious souls who wonder what it means to be Catholic today. Weigel takes readers on an epistolary tour of Catholic landmarks,from Chartres Cathedral to St. Mary's Church in Greenville, South Carolina from the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem to G.K. Chesterton's favourite pub in Oxford and from the grave of a modern martyr in Warsaw to the Sistine Chapel. Weaving together insights from history, literature, theology, and music, Weigel illuminates the beliefs that give Catholicism its distinctive texture and explores the theological importance of grace, prayer, vocation, sin and forgiveness, suffering, and,most importantly,love. Revised and updated with five new tour stops," Letters to a Young Catholic will inspire not only the young generation of Catholics whose World Youth Day celebrations have launched an era of renewal for the Church, but also the faithful, the doubtful, and the searchers of every age.

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Feynman's Tips on Physics is a delightful collection of Richard P. Feynman's insights and an essential companion to his legendary Feynman Lectures on Physics With characteristic flair, insight, and humour, Feynman discusses topics physics students often struggle with and offers valuable tips on addressing them. Included here are three lectures on problem-solving and a lecture on inertial guidance omitted from The Feynman Lectures on Physics . An enlightening memoir by Matthew Sands and oral history interviews with Feynman and his Caltech colleagues provide firsthand accounts of the origins of Feynman's landmark lecture series. Also included are incisive and illuminating exercises originally developed to supplement The Feynman Lectures on Physics , by Robert B. Leighton and Rochus E. Vogt. Feynman's Tips on Physics was co-authored by Michael A. Gottlieb and Ralph Leighton to provide students, teachers, and enthusiasts alike an opportunity to learn physics from some of its greatest teachers, the creators of The Feynman Lectures on Physics .

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They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks. But what about relativity? Physics professor Chad Orzel and his inquisitive canine companion, Emmy, tackle the concepts of general relativity in this irresistible introduction to Einstein's physics. Through armchair- and sometimes passenger-seat- conversations with Emmy about the relative speeds of dog and cat motion or the logistics of squirrel-chasing, Orzel translates complex Einsteinian ideas- the slowing of time for a moving observer, the shrinking of moving objects, the effects of gravity on light and time, black holes, the Big Bang, and of course, E=mc2- into examples simple enough for a dog to understand. A lively romp through one of the great theories of modern physics, How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog will teach you everything you ever wanted to know about space, time, and anything else you might have slept through in high school physics class.

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Part psychological study, part self-help book, Finding Flow is a prescriptive guide that helps us reclaim ownership of our lives. Based on a far-reaching study of thousands of individuals, Finding Flow contends that we often walk through our days unaware and out of touch with our emotional lives. Our inattention makes us constantly bounce between two extremes: during much of the day we live filled with the anxiety and pressures of our work and obligations, while during our leisure moments, we tend to live in passive boredom. The key, according to Csikszentmihalyi, is to challenge ourselves with tasks requiring a high degree of skill and commitment. Instead of watching television, play the piano. Transform a routine task by taking a different approach. In short, learn the joy of complete engagement. Thought they appear simple, the lessons in Finding Flow are life-altering.

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The Ottoman Empire was one of the largest and most influential empires in world history. Its reach extended to three continents and it survived for more than six centuries, but its history is too often colored by the memory of its bloody final throes on the battlefields of World War I. In this magisterial work-the first definitive account written for the general reader-renowned scholar and journalist Caroline Finkel lucidly recounts the epic story of the Ottoman Empire from its origins in the thirteenth century through its destruction in the twentieth.

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Three decades ago, renowned literary expert Robert Alter radically expanded the horizons of biblical scholarship by recasting the Bible as not only a human creation but a work of literary art deserving studied criticism. In The Art of Biblical Poetry , his companion to the seminal The Art of Biblical Narrative , Alter takes his analysis beyond narrative craft to investigate the use of Hebrew poetry in the Bible. Updated with a new preface, myriad revisions, and passages from Alter's own critically acclaimed biblical translations, The Art of Biblical Poetry is an indispensable tool for understanding the Bible and its poetry.

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The respect for religious difference has formed the bedrock of our nation and made equality possible. Yet today we are told that moral values",code for a government shaped by religious concerns,must be the keystone of our social compact. A rich and compelling chronicle of an essential idea, Liberty of Conscience tells the story of America's great tradition of religious freedom. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum's ambitious book is both a work of history and a pointed rejoinder to conservative efforts to break down barriers between church and state.

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In this book Robert Crunden puts the "jazz" back in the Jazz Age. Jazz was America's greatest contribution to the Modernist movement, yet it is much overlooked. When we hear the term "Jazz Age," we conjure the ghosts of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Eliot, not Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, George Gershwin, and Duke Ellington. In order to correct this imbalance, Crunden re-introduces us to these musical luminaries who gave the era its name as he traces the early history of jazz from New Orleans to Chicago to New York. While Crunden emphasizes music over literature and the visual arts, he never fails to map the complex cross-currents of literature that passed between jazz musicians and their "Lost Generation" peers, a veritable pageant of the glittering personalities of the day-James Joyce, Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, Paul Strand, John Dos Passos, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein.

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We all know we should give to charity, but who really does? In his controversial study of America's giving habits, Arthur C. Brooks shatters stereotypes about charity in America-including the myth that the political Left is more compassionate than the Right. Brooks, a preeminent public policy expert, spent years researching giving trends in America, and even he was surprised by what he found. In Who Really Cares , he identifies the forces behind American charity: strong families, church attendance, earning one's own income (as opposed to receiving welfare), and the belief that individuals-not government-offer the best solution to social ills. But beyond just showing us who the givers and non-givers in America really are today, Brooks shows that giving is crucial to our economic prosperity, as well as to our happiness, health, and our ability to govern ourselves as a free people.

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An inside look at how congressional deference to the presidency and State Department has led to such foreign policy failures as Somalia, Bosnia and Iraq.

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Havana knew me by my shoes," begins Tom Miller's lively and entertaining account of his sojourn for more than eight months traveling through Cuba, mixing with its literati and black marketers, its cane cutters and cigar rollers. Granted unprecedented access to travel throughout the country, the author presents us with a rare insight into one of the world's only Communist countries. Its best-known personalities and ordinary citizens talk to him about the U.S. embargo and tell their favourite Fidel jokes as they stand in line for bread at the Socialism or Death Bakery. Miller provides a running commentary on Cuba's food shortages, exotic sensuality, and baseball addiction as he follows the scents of Graham Greene, José Marti, Ernest Hemingway, and the Mambo Kings. The result of this informed and adventurous journey is a vibrant, rhythmic portrait of a land and people too long shielded from American eyes.

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Newly revised and updated, this classic manifesto is a foundational text for anyone hoping to understand transgender politics and culture in the U.S. today (NPR)*Named as one of 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of All Time by Ms. Magazine*A landmark of trans and feminist nonfiction, Whipping Girl is Julia Serano''s indispensable account of what it means to be a transgender woman in a world that consistently derides and belittles anything feminine. In a series of incisive essays, Serano draws on gender theory, her training as a biologist, her career in queer activism, and her own experiences before and after her gender transition to examine the deep connections between sexism and transphobia. She coins the term transmisogyny to describe the specific discrimination trans women face-and she shows how, in a world where masculinity is seen as unquestionably superior to femininity, transgender women''s very existence becomes a threat to the est

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Instant New York Times Bestseller  In this “gripping account of catastrophic defeat” (Barry Strauss), a New York Times–bestselling historian charts how and why some societies chose to utterly destroy their foes, and warns that similar wars of obliteration are possible in our time “In The End of Everything, Hanson tells compelling and harrowing stories of how civilizations perished. He helps us consider contemporary affairs in light of that history, think about the unthinkable, and recognize the urgency of trying to prevent our own demise.” — H. R. McMaster, author of Battlegrounds War can settle disputes, topple tyrants, and bend the trajectory of civilization—sometimes to the breaking point. From Troy to Hiroshima, moments when war has ended in utter annihilation have reverberated through the centuries, signaling the end of political systems, cultures, and

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In Wealth, Poverty, and Politics , Dr. Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, examines the reasons for large differences in income and wealth between nations and among groups within nations. A wide range of geographic, demographic, cultural, and political factors are examined, not to find a single factor or a single combination of factors that will explain all economic differences, but to show how particular combinations of factors limit or expand the possibilities for specific nations and peoples at specific times and places.Dr. Sowell also examines some popular explanations of these differences and shows why they will not stand up under scrutiny. In doing so, he takes on some of the reigning titans of the redistributionist movement,including John Rawls, Thomas Piketty, Paul Krugman, and Joseph Stiglitz,and shows how a remarkable number of their claims cannot withstand plain common sense, expressed in plain English.

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Thomas Sowell "both surprises and overturns received wisdom" in this indispensable examination of widespread economic fallacies (The Economist)Economic Facts and Fallacies exposes some of the most popular fallacies about economic issues-and does so in a lively manner and without requiring any prior knowledge of economics by the reader. These include many beliefs widely disseminated in the media and by politicians, such as mistaken ideas about urban problems, income differences, male-female economic differences, as well as economics fallacies about academia, about race, and about Third World countries. One of the themes of Economic Facts and Fallacies is that fallacies are not simply crazy ideas but in fact have a certain plausibility that gives them their staying power-and makes careful examination of their flaws both necessary and important, as well as sometimes humorous. Written in the easy-to-follow style of the author's Basic Economics, this latest book is able to go into greater depth, with real world examples, on specific issues.

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Economic and other outcomes differ vastly among individuals, groups, and nations. Many explanations have been offered for the differences. Some believe that those with less fortunate outcomes are victims of genetics. Others believe that those who are less fortunate are victims of the more fortunate.Discrimination and Disparities gathers a wide array of empirical evidence to challenge the idea that different economic outcomes can be explained by any one factor, be it discrimination, exploitation, or genetics. This revised and enlarged edition also analyzes the human consequences of the prevailing social vision of these disparities and the policies based on that vision--from educational disasters to widespread crime and violence.

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If there's one thing we know about our current president, it's that he lies. Donald Trump's lies are so ubiquitous, so incessant, and so habitual that they have become inescapable -- from his false claims about the size of his inauguration crowd to his whole cloth invention of a terrorist attack in Sweden to his assertion that Democrats are planning to give free cars to undocumented immigrants. But while he may lie more frequently and brazenly than any other American president, he is certainly not the first to mislead the public.With Lying in State, bestselling historian and commentator Eric Alterman asks how we ended up with such a pathologically dishonest commander in chief -- and what consequences his serial mendacity might have for the future. To answer these questions, Alterman explores the long history of presidential lying, showing that from early on, the United States has persistently expanded its power and hegemony on the basis of presidential lies. Over time, these deceptions have had a cumulative and pernicious effect: each lie a president tells makes it easier and more acceptable for subsequent presidents to lie. Worse still, the media have largely abandoned their responsibility as referees of news and information, uncritically repeating presidential lies and failing to issue corrections even after lies are revealed. Donald Trump, then, represents not an aberration but the culmination of an age-old trend.Full of vivid historical examples and trenchant analysis, Lying in State is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how we arrived in this age of alternative facts.

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Americans are overworked. After declining for a century through hard-fought labor movement victories, average annual work hours increased approximately 8 percent for all working adults from 1979 to 2016. In Worked Over, sociologist Jamie McCallum reveals how the battle over time on the job has been central to conflicts over capitalism from the beginning, how overwork is at the heart of the inequities and injustices in America's economy today, and why workers must fight to take control of the time they spend working.From Amazon warehouses to Silicon Valley campuses, from late night Uber deliveries to later night strip clubs, from factories in Ohio to retail floors everywhere, McCallum explains how the contemporary American workplace exploits workers' time and constrains their lives. Whether it's the manager's stopwatch, the scheduling algorithm's dispassionate authority, or our own internal clock that pushes us because we're afraid of falling behind or losing our jobs, ordinary people have lost much say over when and how much we work. Work, more than anything else, dictates when we sleep, eat, raise our kids, and live the rest of our lives. Popular discussions of overwork tend to focus on striving professionals, but as McCallum demonstrates, it's the hours of low-wage workers have increased the most, and it's their working lives that remain the most precarious and unpredictable in a service-oriented, on-demand economy. What's needed is not individual solutions but collective struggle. Throughout Worked Over, McCallum offers inspiring stories of how the battle to win back control of time has been renewed today by those most vulnerable to the capitalist society's electronic whip.Combining the rigor of a scholar, the storytelling of a journalist, and the vision of an activist, McCallum shows that winning shorter hours will require a radical break from our current political and economic system. Worked Over is an inside look at why our lives became tethered to work -- and how we might regain a greater say over our work time and build a more just society in the process.

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A panoramic, 'persuasive and inspiring' (New Yorker) new history of the revolutionary decades between 1760 and 1825, from North America and Europe to Haiti and Spanish America, showing how progress and reaction went hand in hand The revolutions that raged across Europe and the Americas over seven decades, from 1760 to 1825, created the modern world. Revolutionaries shattered empires, toppled social hierarchies, and birthed a world of republics. But old injustices lingered on and the powerful engines of revolutionary change created new and insidious forms of inequality.    In The Age of Revolutions, historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal offers the first narrative history of this entire era. Through a kaleidoscope of lives both familiar and unknown—from John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Napoleon to an ambitious French naturalist and a seditious Peruvian nun—he retells the revolutionary epic as a generational story. The

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