Search results for ""Basic Books""
Basic Books Exercises for the Feynman Lectures on Physics
Combined into one volume for the first time, the updated and clarified Exercises for the Feynman Lectures on Physics provides comprehensive, hands-on practice in all the most important areas of physics,from Newtonian mechanics through the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.A perfect complement to The Feynman Lectures on Physics , these exercises have all been assigned in Caltech's mandatory two-year introductory physics course, either when Richard Feynman was teaching it, or during the nearly two decades that followed when The Feynman Lectures on Physics was used as the textbook. With this modern, easy-to-use volume, students of physics will have a chance to apply what they have learned in the Lectures and to enhance and reinforce the concepts taught by the inimitable Richard Feynman.
£20.00
Basic Books Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy
What really happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963? Was the assassination of John F. Kennedy simply the work of a warped, solitary young man, or was something more nefarious afoot? Pulling together a wealth of evidence, including rare photos, documents, and interviews, veteran Texas journalist Jim Marrs reveals the truth about that fateful day. Thoroughly revised and updated with the latest findings about the assassination, Crossfire is the most comprehensive, convincing explanation of how, why, and by whom our thirty-fifth president was killed.
£20.00
Basic Books The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the Discovery of the Earth's Antiquity
There are three men whose life's work helped free science from the strait-jacket of religion. Two of the three,Nicolaus Copernicus and Charles Darwin,are widely heralded for their breakthroughs. The third, James Hutton, is comparatively unknown, yet he profoundly changed our understanding of the earth, its age, and its dynamic forces. A Scottish gentleman farmer, Hutton's observations on his small tract of land led him to a theory that directly contradicted biblical claims that the Earth was only 6,000 years old. This expertly crafted narrative tells the story not only of Hutton, but also of Scotland and the Scottish Enlightenment, including many of the greatest thinkers of the age, such as David Hume and Adam Smith.
£14.39
Basic Books Freedom's Dominion (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize): A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power
American freedom is typically associated with the fight of the oppressed for a better world. But for centuries, whenever the federal government intervened on behalf of nonwhite people, many white Americans fought back in the name of freedom-their freedom to dominate others. In Freedom's Dominion, historian Jefferson Cowie traces this complex saga by focusing on a quintessentially American place: Barbour County, Alabama, the ancestral home of political firebrand George Wallace. In a land shaped by settler colonialism and chattel slavery, white people weaponized freedom to seize Native lands, champion secession, overthrow Reconstruction, question the New Deal, and fight against the civil rights movement. A riveting history of the long-running clash between white people and federal authority, this book radically shifts our understanding of what freedom means in America.
£28.04
Basic Books False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet
The New York Times-bestselling "skeptical environmentalist" argues that panic over climate change is causing more harm than goodHurricanes batter our coasts. Wildfires rage across the American West. Glaciers collapse in the Artic. Politicians, activists, and the media espouse a common message: climate change is destroying the planet, and we must take drastic action immediately to stop it. Children panic about their future, and adults wonder if it is even ethical to bring new life into the world.Enough, argues bestselling author Bjorn Lomborg. Climate change is real, but it's not the apocalyptic threat that we've been told it is. Projections of Earth's imminent demise are based on bad science and even worse economics. In panic, world leaders have committed to wildly expensive but largely ineffective policies that hamper growth and crowd out more pressing investments in human capital, from immunization to education.False Alarm will convince you that everything you think about climate change is wrong -- and points the way toward making the world a vastly better, if slightly warmer, place for us all.
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Basic Books A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution
The principles of the French Revolution remain the only possible basis for a just society -- even if, after more than two hundred years, they are more contested than ever before. In A New World Begins, Jeremy D. Popkin offers a riveting account of the revolution that puts the reader in the thick of the debates and the violence that led to the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of a new society. We meet Mirabeau, Robespierre, and Danton, in all of their brilliance and vengefulness; we witness the failed escape and execution of Louis XVI; we see women demanding equal rights and black slaves wresting freedom from revolutionaries who hesitated to act on their own principles; and we follow the rise of Napoleon out of the ashes of the Reign of Terror.Based on decades of scholarship, A New World Begins is the definitive treatment of the French Revolution.
£17.99
Basic Books Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions
"A rewarding read for anyone who wants to know the unvarnished truth about how science really gets done." - Financial TimesAmerican taxpayers spend $30 billion annually funding biomedical research, but over half of these studies can't be replicated due to poor experimental design, improper methods, and sloppy statistics. Bad science doesn't just hold back medical progress, it can sign the equivalent of a death sentence for terminal patients. In Rigor Mortis, Richard Harris explores these urgent issues with vivid anecdotes, personal stories, and interviews with the top biomedical researchers. We need to fix our dysfunctional biomedical system--before it's too late.
£13.99
Basic Books Philip and Alexander: Kings and Conquerors
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Basic Books The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy (Revised)
Hailed by Jerome Frank as "the best book that exists on the subject," Irvin D. Yalom and Molyn Leszcz's The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy has been the standard text in the field for decades.In this completely revised and updated sixth edition, Dr. Yalom and his collaborator Dr. Molyn Leszcz draw on a decade of new research as well as their broad clinical wisdom and expertise. Each chapter is completely updated in accordance with the most recent developments in the field. There are new sections throughout, including discussions of mindfulness, CBT, modern analytic approaches, psychoeducational groups, group therapy for veterans, and group therapy for psychological trauma. At once scholarly and lively, this is the most up-to-date, incisive, and comprehensive text available on group psychotherapy.
£60.00
Basic Books Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do about It
From phishing scams to Ponzi schemes, fraudulent science to fake art, chess cheaters to crypto hucksters, and marketers to magicians, our world brims with deception. In Nobody's Fool, psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris show us how to avoid being taken in. They describe the key habits of thinking and reasoning that serve us well most of the time but make us vulnerable-like our tendency to accept what we see, stick to our commitments, and overvalue precision and consistency. Each chapter illustrates their new take on the science of deception, describing scams you've never heard of and shedding new light on some you have. Simons and Chabris provide memorable maxims and practical tools you can use to spot deception before it's too late. Informative, illuminating, and entertaining, Nobody's Fool will protect us from charlatans in all their forms-and delight us along the way.?
£25.00
Basic Books The Republic of Plato
Long regarded as the most accurate rendering of Plato's Republic that has yet been published, this widely acclaimed work is the first strictly literal translation of a timeless classic. In addition to the annotated text, there is also a rich and valuable essay,as well as indices,which will better enable the reader to approach the heart of Plato's intention. This new edition includes a new introduction by acclaimed critic Adam Kirsch, setting the work in its intellectual context for a new generation of readers.
£18.99
Basic Books A Mood Apart: Depression, Mania, and Other Afflictions of the Self
When first published in 1997 this ground-breaking work on the science of mood both redefined the field and,with compassion, understanding, and scientific rigor,made it accessible to those who would most benefit from the latest findings. Now, Peter Whybrow, one of the world's most distinguished psychiatrists, has updated his definitive account of mood disorders. In A Mood Apart he argues that disorders such as depression constitute afflictions of the self, exploring the human experience of manic depressive illness, and rediscovering the human being behind the diagnosis. Drawing on cutting-edge research and his experience as a clinician, he shows how the science and culture surrounding mood disorders have changed since the first edition. Nearly two decades since its original publication, A Mood Apart remains an essential book for anyone who has been affected by depression.
£12.59
Basic Books Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies
What is economic growth? And why, historically, has it occurred in only a few places? Previous efforts to answer these questions have focused on institutions, geography, finances, and psychology. But according to MIT's antidisciplinarian César Hidalgo, understanding the nature of economic growth demands transcending the social sciences and including the natural sciences of information, networks, and complexity. To understand the growth of economies, Hidalgo argues, we first need to understand the growth of order.At first glance, the universe seems hostile to order. Thermodynamics dictates that over time, order,or information,disappears. Whispers vanish in the wind just like the beauty of swirling cigarette smoke collapses into disorderly clouds. But thermodynamics also has loopholes that promote the growth of information in pockets. Although cities are all pockets where information grows, they are not all the same. For every Silicon Valley, Tokyo, and Paris, there are dozens of places with economies that accomplish little more than pulling rocks out of the ground. So, why does the US economy outstrip Brazil's, and Brazil's that of Chad? Why did the technology corridor along Boston's Route 128 languish while Silicon Valley blossomed? In each case, the key is how people, firms, and the networks they form make use of information.Seen from Hidalgo's vantage, economies become distributed computers, made of networks of people, and the problem of economic development becomes the problem of making these computers more powerful. By uncovering the mechanisms that enable the growth of information in nature and society, Why Information Grows lays bare the origins of physical order and economic growth. Situated at the nexus of information theory, physics, sociology, and economics, this book propounds a new theory of how economies can do not just more things, but more interesting things.
£22.00
Basic Books Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men
Something scary is happening to boys today. From kindergarten to college, American boys are, on average, less resilient and less ambitious than they were a mere twenty years ago. The gender gap in college attendance and graduation rates has widened dramatically. While Emily is working hard at school and getting A's, her brother Justin is goofing off. He's more concerned about getting to the next level in his videogame than about finishing his homework. Now, Dr. Leonard Sax delves into the scientific literature and draws on more than twenty years of clinical experience to explain why boys and young men are failing in school and disengaged at home. He shows how social, cultural, and biological factors have created an environment that is literally toxic to boys. He also presents practical solutions, sharing strategies which educators have found effective in re-engaging these boys at school, as well as handy tips for parents about everything from homework, to videogames, to medication.
£14.99
Basic Books Knowledge And Decisions
With a new preface by the author, this reissue of Thomas Sowell's classic study of decision making updates his seminal work in the context of The Vision of the Annointed , Sowell, one of America's most celebrated public intellectuals, describes in concrete detail how knowledge is shared and disseminated throughout modern society. He warns that society suffers from an ever-widening gap between firsthand knowledge and decision making,a gap that threatens not only our economic and political efficiency, but our very freedom because actual knowledge gets replaced by assumptions based on an abstract and elitist social vision f what ought to be. Knowledge and Decisions , a winner of the 1980 Law and Economics centre Prize, was heralded as a "landmark work" and selected for this prize "because of its cogent contribution to our understanding of the differences between the market process and the process of government." In announcing the award, the centre acclaimed Sowell, whose "contribution to our understanding of the process of regulation alone would make the book important, but in reemphasizing the diversity and efficiency that the market makes possible, [his] work goes deeper and becomes even more significant."
£27.08
Basic Books The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think
Why do three out of four professional football players go bankrupt? How can illiterate jungle dwellers pass a test that tricks Harvard philosophers? And why do billionaires work so hard,only to give their hard-earned money away?When it comes to making decisions, the classic view is that humans are eminently rational. But growing evidence suggests instead that our choices are often irrational, biased, and occasionally even moronic. Which view is right,or is there another possibility?In this animated tour of the inner workings of the mind, psychologist Douglas T. Kenrick and business professor Vladas Griskevicius challenge the prevailing views of decision making, and present a new alternative grounded in evolutionary science. By connecting our modern behaviours to their ancestral roots, they reveal that underneath our seemingly foolish tendencies is an exceptionally wise system of decision making.From investing money to choosing a job, from buying a car to choosing a romantic partner, our choices are driven by deep-seated evolutionary goals. Because each of us has multiple evolutionary goals, though, new research reveals something radical,there's more than one you" making decisions. Although it feels as if there is just one single self" inside your head, your mind actually contains several different subselves , each one steering you in a different direction when it takes its turn at the controls. The Rational Animal will transform the way you think about decision making. And along the way, you'll discover the intimate connections between ovulating strippers, Wall Street financiers, testosterone-crazed skateboarders, Steve Jobs, Elvis Presley, and you.
£28.78
Basic Books Letters to a Young Contrarian
From bestselling author and provocateur Christopher Hitchens, the classic guide to the art of principled dissent and disagreementIn Letters to a Young Contrarian, bestselling author and world-class provocateur Christopher Hitchens inspires the radicals, gadflies, mavericks, rebels, and angry young (wo)men of tomorrow. Exploring the entire range of "contrary positions"--from noble dissident to gratuitous nag--Hitchens introduces the next generation to the minds and the misfits who influenced him, invoking such mentors as Emile Zola, Rosa Parks, and George Orwell. As is his trademark, Hitchens pointedly pitches himself in contrast to stagnant attitudes across the ideological spectrum. No other writer has matched Hitchens's understanding of the importance of disagreement--to personal integrity, to informed discussion, to true progress, to democracy itself.
£12.99
Basic Books Intellectuals and Society: Revised and Expanded Edition
This much revised and reorganized edition of Intellectuals and Society is more than half again larger than the first edition. Four new chapters have been added on intellectuals and race, including a chapter on race and intelligence. These new chapters show the radically different views of race prevailing among the intelligentsia at the beginning of the twentieth century and at the end- and yet how each of these opposite views of race had the same dogmatic quality and the same refusal to countenance differing opinions among their contemporaries, much less engage dissenting opinions in serious debate. Moreover, each of these very different views of race produced flourishes of rhetoric and travesties of logic, leading to dire social consequences, though of very different sorts in the two eras. Other additions to this edition include a critique of John Rawls' conception or justice and a re-examination of the so-called "trickle-down theory" behind "tax cuts for the rich." There are other revisions, from the preface to the final chapter, the latter being extensively rewritten to bring together and highlight the themes of the other chapters, and to make unmistakably clear what Intellectuals and Society is, and is not, seeking to do.
£22.00
Basic Books The First Three Minutes
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Basic Books Loves Executioner
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Basic Books Existential Psychotherapy
Existential therapy has been practiced and continues to be practiced in many forms and situations throughout the world. But until now, it has lacked a coherent structure, and analysis of its tenets, and an evaluation of its usefulness. Irvin Yalom, whose Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy has rendered such a service to that discipline since 1970, provides existential psychotherapy with a background, a synthesis, and a framework.Organized around what Yalom identifies as the four ultimate concerns of life",death, freedom, existential isolation, and meaninglessness,the book takes up the meaning of each existential concern and the type of conflict that springs from our confrontation with each. He shows how these concerns are manifested in personality and psychopathology, and how treatment can be helped by our knowledge of them.Drawing from clinical experience, empirical research, philosophy, and great literature, Yalom has written a broad and comprehensive book. It will provide an intellectual home base for those psychotherapists who have sensed the incompatability of orthodox theories with their own clinical experience, and it opens new doors for empirical research. The fundamental concerns of therapy and the central issues of human existence are woven together here as never before, with intellectual and clinical results that will surprise and enlighten all readers.
£50.00
Basic Books The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism
When most people think of the history of modern conservatism, they think of Ronald Reagan. Yet this narrow view leaves many to question: How did Donald Trump win the presidency? And what is the future of the Republican Party?In The Right, Matthew Continetti gives a sweeping account of movement conservatism's evolution, from the Progressive Era through the present. He tells the story of how conservatism began as networks of intellectuals, developing and institutionalizing a vision that grew over time, until they began to buckle under new pressures, resembling national populist movements. Drawing out the tensions between the desire for mainstream acceptance and the pull of extremism, Continetti argues that the more one studies conservatism's past, the more one becomes convinced of its future.Deeply researched and brilliantly told, The Right is essential reading for anyone looking to understand American conservatism.
£22.50
Basic Books Celestial Bodies: How to Look at Ballet
A distinguished dance critic offers an enchanting introduction to the art of balletAs much as we may enjoy Swan Lake or The Nutcracker, for many of us ballet is a foreign language. It communicates through movement, not words, and its history lies almost entirely abroad-in Russia, Italy, and France. In Celestial Bodies, dance critic Laura Jacobs makes the foreign familiar, providing a lively, poetic, and uniquely accessible introduction to the world of classical dance. Combining history, interviews with dancers, technical definitions, descriptions of performances, and personal stories, Jacobs offers an intimate and passionate guide to watching ballet and understanding the central elements of choreography.Beautifully written and elegantly illustrated with original drawings, Celestial Bodies is essential reading for all lovers of this magnificent art form.
£19.80
Basic Books The Einstein Syndrome: Bright Children Who Talk Late
The Einstein Syndrome is a follow-up to Late-Talking Children, which established Thomas Sowell as a leading spokesman on the subject. While many children who talk late suffer from developmental disorders or autism, there is a certain well-defined group who are developmentally normal or even quite bright, yet who may go past their fourth birthday before beginning to talk. These children are often misdiagnosed as autistic or retarded, a mistake that is doubly hard on parents who must first worry about their apparently handicapped children and then must see them lumped into special classes and therapy groups where all the other children are clearly very different.Since he first became involved in this issue in the mid-1990s, Sowell has joined with Stephen Camarata of Vanderbilt University, who has conducted a much broader, more rigorous study of this phenomenon than the anecdotes reported in Late-Talking Children. Sowell can now identify a particular syndrome, a cluster of common symptoms and family characteristics, that differentiates these late-talking children from others relate this syndrome to other syndromes speculate about its causes and describe how children with this syndrome are likely to develop.
£14.26
Basic Books Intellectuals and Race
Intellectuals and Race is a radical book in the original sense of one that goes to the root of the problem. The role of intellectuals in racial strife is explored in an international context that puts the American experience in a wholly new light. The views of individual intellectuals have spanned the spectrum, but the views of intellectuals as a whole have tended to cluster. Indeed, these views have clustered at one end of the spectrum in the early twentieth century and then clustered at the opposite end of the spectrum in the late twentieth century. Moreover, these radically different views of race in these two eras were held by intellectuals whose views on other issues were very similar in both eras. Intellectuals and Race is not, however, a book about history, even though it has much historical evidence, as well as demographic, geographic, economic and statistical evidence- all of it directed toward testing the underlying assumptions about race that have prevailed at times among intellectuals in general, and especially intellectuals at the highest levels. Nor is this simply a theoretical exercise. The impact of intellectuals' ideas and crusades on the larger society, both past and present, is the ultimate concern. These ideas and crusades have ranged widely from racial theories of intelligence to eugenics to "social justice" and multiculturalism. In addition to in-depth examinations of these and other issues, Intellectuals and Race explores the incentives, the visions and the rationales that drive intellectuals at the highest levels to conclusions that have often turned out to be counterproductive and even disastrous, not only for particular racial or ethnic groups, but for societies as a whole.
£20.00
Basic Books The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out is a magnificent treasury of the best short works of Richard P. Feynman,from interviews and speeches to lectures and printed articles. A sweeping, wide-ranging collection, it presents an intimate and fascinating view of a life in science-a life like no other. From his ruminations on science in our culture to his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, this book will fascinate anyone interested in the world of ideas.
£14.99
Basic Books Without Roots: Europe, Relativism, Christianity, Islam
Bringing together their unique vantage points as leaders of Church and State, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and Marcello Pera challenge us to imagine what can be the future of a civilization that has abandoned its moral and cultural history. They call on the West to embrace a spiritual rather than political renewal -and to accept the moral values that alone can help us to make sense of changes in technology, economics, and society.
£12.99
Basic Books The End of Everything
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
£22.50
Basic Books Wealth, Poverty and Politics
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.
£31.50
Basic Books Economic Facts and Fallacies: Second Edition
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.
£15.99
Basic Books The Blood of Free Men: The Liberation of Paris, 1944
As the Allies struggled inland from Normandy in August of 1944, the fate of Paris hung in the balance. Other jewels of Europe,sites like Warsaw, Antwerp, and Monte Cassino,were, or would soon be, reduced to rubble during attempts to liberate them. But Paris endured, thanks to a fractious cast of characters, from Resistance cells to Free French operatives to an unlikely assortment of diplomats, Allied generals, and governmental officials. Their efforts, and those of the German forces fighting to maintain control of the city, would shape the course of the battle for Europe and colour popular memory of the conflict for generations to come.In The Blood of Free Men , celebrated historian Michael Neiberg deftly tracks the forces vying for Paris, providing a revealing new look at the city's dramatic and triumphant resistance against the Nazis. The salvation of Paris was not a foregone conclusion, Neiberg shows, and the liberation was a chaotic operation that could have easily ended in the city's ruin. The Allies were intent on bypassing Paris so as to strike the heart of the Third Reich in Germany, and the French themselves were deeply divided feuding political cells fought for control of the Resistance within Paris, as did Charles de Gaulle and his Free French Forces outside the city. Although many of Paris's citizens initially chose a tenuous stability over outright resistance to the German occupation, they were forced to act when the approaching fighting pushed the city to the brink of starvation. In a desperate bid to save their city, ordinary Parisians took to the streets, and through a combination of valiant fighting, shrewd diplomacy, and last-minute aid from the Allies, managed to save the City of Lights. A ground-breaking, arresting narrative of the liberation, The Blood of Free Men tells the full story of one of the war's defining moments, when a tortured city and its inhabitants narrowly survived the deadliest conflict in human history.
£27.00
Basic Books Discrimination and Disparities
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.
£25.00
Basic Books Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie -- And Why Trump Is Worse
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.
£22.50
Basic Books Worked Over: How Round-the-Clock Work Is Killing the American Dream
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.
£25.00
Basic Books South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War
The Underground Railroad to the North was salvation for many US slaves before the Civil War. But during the same decades, thousands of people in the south-central United States escaped slavery not by heading north but by crossing the southern border into Mexico.In South to Freedom historian Alice Baumgartner tells the story of Mexico's rise as an antislavery republic and a promised land for enslaved people in North America. She describes how Mexico's abolition of slavery challenged US institutions and helped to set the international stage for the US Civil War. In 1837, shortly after Texas rebelled against Mexican rule, Mexico's Congress formally abolished slavery, and enslaved people began to head south. Some were helped by free blacks, ship captains, Mexicans, Germans, gamblers, preachers, mail riders, and other "lurking scoundrels," but most escaped by their own ingenuity -- with stolen rifles, forged slave passes, and, in one instance, a wig made from horsehair and pitch. As they fled across the Rio Grande, and the US government failed to secure their return, their owners began to suspect an international conspiracy against the "peculiar institution." Meanwhile, Northern Congressmen balked at reestablishing slavery in the Southwestern territories taken from Mexico after the Mexican-American War. Feeling increasingly embattled, slavers in Texas and Louisiana came to believe that their interests would best be protected outside the union. With the Southern slave regime under pressure from both the north and south, the conditions were in place for the coming of the US Civil War.Today, our attention is fixed on people seeking opportunity by moving north across our southern border, but South to Freedom reveals what happened when the reverse was true: when American slaves fled "the land of the free" for freedom in Mexico.
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Basic Books The Age of Revolutions
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
£27.00
Basic Books Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (Third Edition)
Technology has become the architect of our intimacies. Online, we fall prey to the illusion of companionship, gathering thousands of Twitter and Facebook friends, and confusing tweets and wall posts with authentic communication. But this relentless connection leads to a new solitude. We turn to new technology to fill the void, but as MIT technology and society specialist Sherry Turkle argues, as technology ramps up, our emotional lives ramp down. Even the presence of sociable robots in our lives that pretend to demonstrate empathy makes us feel more isolated, as Turkle explains in a new introduction updating the book to the present day. Alone Together is the result of Turkle's nearly fifteen-year exploration of our lives on the digital terrain. Based on interviews with hundreds of children and adults, it describes new, unsettling relationships between friends, lovers, parents, and children, and new instabilities in how we understand privacy and community, intimacy and solitude.
£14.99
Basic Books EMDR: The Breakthrough Therapy for Overcoming Anxiety, Stress, and Trauma
When EMDR was first published in 1997, it was hailed as the most important method to emerge in psychotherapy in decades. In the twenty years since, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy has successfully treated psychological problems for millions of sufferers worldwide. In this updated edition, Francine Shapiro offers a new introduction that presents the latest applications of this remarkable therapy, as well as new scientific data demonstrating its efficacy. Drawing on the experiences of thousands of clinicians as well as a vast research literature on depression, addiction, PTSD, and other disorders, she explains how life experiences are physically stored in our brains, making us feel and act in harmful ways, and how EMDR therapy can bring relief, often in a remarkably short period of time. Applicable to survivors of trauma as well as people suffering from phobias and other experience-based disorders, EMDR is essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand why we hurt, how we heal, and how we get better.
£18.00
Basic Books Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life
A leading expert in childhood development makes the case for why self-directed learning -- "unschooling" -- is the best way to get kids to learn.In Free to Learn, developmental psychologist Peter Gray argues that in order to foster children who will thrive in today's constantly changing world, we must entrust them to steer their own learning and development. Drawing on evidence from anthropology, psychology, and history, he demonstrates that free play is the primary means by which children learn to control their lives, solve problems, get along with peers, and become emotionally resilient. A brave, counterintuitive proposal for freeing our children from the shackles of the curiosity-killing institution we call school, Free to Learn suggests that it's time to stop asking what's wrong with our children, and start asking what's wrong with the system. It shows how we can act-both as parents and as members of society-to improve children's lives and to promote their happiness and learning.
£13.99
Basic Books The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America, From Slavery to the War on Terror
On a typical day, you might make a call on a cell phone, withdraw money at an ATM, visit the mall, and make a purchase with a credit card. Each of these routine transactions leaves a digital trail for government agencies and businesses to access. As cutting-edge historian and journalist Christian Parenti points out, these everyday intrusions on privacy, while harmless in themselves, are part of a relentless (and clandestine) expansion of routine surveillance in American life over the last two centuries-from controlling slaves in the old South to implementing early criminal justice and tracking immigrants. Parenti explores the role computers are playing in creating a whole new world of seemingly benign technologies-such as credit cards, website "cookies," and electronic toll collection-that have expanded this trend in the twenty-first century. The Soft Cage offers a compelling, vitally important history lesson for every American concerned about the expansion of surveillance into our public and private lives.
£15.99
Basic Books Math on Trial: How Numbers Get Used and Abused in the Courtroom
In the wrong hands, math can be deadly. Even the simplest numbers can become powerful forces when manipulated by politicians or the media, but in the case of the law, your liberty,and your life,can depend on the right calculation.In Math on Trial , mathematicians Leila Schneps and Coralie Colmez describe ten trials spanning from the nineteenth century to today, in which mathematical arguments were used,and disastrously misused,as evidence. They tell the stories of Sally Clark, who was accused of murdering her children by a doctor with a faulty sense of calculation of nineteenth-century tycoon Hetty Green, whose dispute over her aunt's will became a signal case in the forensic use of mathematics and of the case of Amanda Knox, in which a judge's misunderstanding of probability led him to discount critical evidence,which might have kept her in jail. Offering a fresh angle on cases from the nineteenth-century Dreyfus affair to the murder trial of Dutch nurse Lucia de Berk, Schneps and Colmez show how the improper application of mathematical concepts can mean the difference between walking free and life in prison.A colourful narrative of mathematical abuse, Math on Trial blends courtroom drama, history, and math to show that legal expertise isn't always enough to prove a person innocent.
£22.50
Basic Books The Art Spirit
Embodying the entire system of Robert Henri's teaching, The Art Spirit contains much valuable advice, critical comment, and inspiration to every student of the arts.
£15.99
Basic Books The MVP Machine: How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players
£15.61
Basic Books The Song of Our Scars: The Untold Story of Pain
£23.21
£17.75
£28.19
Basic Books The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World
The story of humanity is the story of textiles-as old as civilization itself. Textiles created empires and powered invention. They established trade routes and drew nations' borders. Since the first thread was spun, fabric has driven technology, business, politics, and culture. In The Fabric of Civilization, Virginia Postrel traces this surprising history, exposing the hidden ways textiles have made our world. The origins of chemistry lie in the coloring and finishing of cloth. The beginning of binary code-and perhaps all of mathematics-is found in weaving. Selective breeding to produce fibers heralded the birth of agriculture. The belt drive came from silk production. So did microbiology. The textile business funded the Italian Renaissance and the Mughal Empire; it left us double-entry bookkeeping and letters of credit, the David and the Taj Mahal. From the Minoans who exported woolen cloth colored with precious purple dye to Egypt, to the Romans who wore wildly expensive Chinese silk, the trade and production of textiles paved the economic and cultural crossroads of the ancient world. As much as spices or gold, the quest for fabrics and dyes drew sailors across strange seas, creating an ever-more connected global economy. Synthesizing groundbreaking research from economics, archaeology, and anthropology, Postrel weaves a rich tapestry of human cultural development.
£14.99