Search results for ""Basic Books""

In Synchronicity Paul Halpern tells the little-known story of the unlikely friendship between the Nobel-prize-winning quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli and the father of psychoanalysis, Carl Jung. In the 1930s, Pauli and Jung began collaborating on a unified theory of quantum and the mind, the result of which was Jung's synchronicity principle-the idea that events connected by meaning need not be explained by causality. Pauli's work on entanglement theory, which allowed for instantaneous cause and effect relationships, was particularly appealing to Jung, as it seemed to give weight to his controversial theory of a collective unconscious.Casting their relationship within a larger intellectual history of entanglement theory, Halpern poses a question that has mystified physicists and philosophers alike since the times of Aristotle: Is the speed of light finite, as Einstein posited, or is it, as Pauli and the proponents of entanglement theory asserted, variable across time and dimensions? As Halpern works his way through the history of the physics of cause and effect, he shows that this centuries-old debate is not only relevant at the smallest scales of particle physics but also at the largest scales of the cosmos itself.

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In the wake of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, countless words have been written and uttered about nationalism-many accusing nationalists of racism, hatred, and violence. But nationalism wasn't always considered evil. Indeed, such venerated figures as John Stuart Mill, Churchill, Eisenhower, and Ben-Gurion considered themselves nationalists. Were the men and women of that era misguided in their emphasis on self-determination for all peoples?In The Virtue of Nationalism, the philosopher Yoram Hazony offers an incisively original case for national sovereignty in an era when it is under attack from many sides. He recounts how in the 17th and 18th centuries, English, Dutch, and American Protestants revived the Old Testament's love of national independence, and how their nationalism freed the world from the vision of universal empire promoted by German-Catholic Holy Roman Emperors. Their vision became the basis of opposition to imperialists of later eras, and eventually brought freedom to peoples from Poland to India, and from Israel to Ethiopia.But since the 1960s, the tide has turned against national independence. "Globalists" say that self-determination brought us two World Wars and the Holocaust. The answer they offer us-global governance-is well-intentioned. Yet it has reawakened hatreds, stoking chaos and revolt across the world.Hazony argues that we will be forced to choose between a world of independent states, or a renewal of universal empire-in the form of the European Union or American hegemony. The Virtue of Nationalism makes clear that anyone who values their freedoms should fight for a world of nations.

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Trauma and Recovery is the foundational text on understanding trauma survivors. By placing individual experience in a political frame, psychiatrist Judith L. Herman argues that psychological trauma is inseparable from its social and political context. Drawing on her own research on incest, as well as a vast literature on combat veterans and victims of political terror, she shows surprising parallels between private horrors like child abuse and public horrors like war.This edition includes a new epilogue by the author assessing what has-and hasn't-changed in understanding and treating trauma over the last three decades.Hailed by the New York Times as "one of the most important psychiatry works to be published since Freud," Trauma and Recovery is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how we heal.

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When Abraham Lincoln helped create the Republican Party on the eve of the Civil War, his goal was to promote economic opportunity for all Americans, not just the slaveholding Southern planters who steered national politics. Yet, despite the egalitarian dream at the heart of its founding, the Republican Party quickly became mired in a fundamental identity crisis. Would it be the party of democratic ideals? Or would it be the party of moneyed interests? In the century and a half since, Republicans have vacillated between these two poles, with dire economic, political, and moral repercussions for the entire nation.In To Make Men Free, celebrated historian Heather Cox Richardson traces the shifting ideology of the Grand Old Party from the antebellum era to the present, revealing the insidious cycle of boom and bust that has characterized the Party since its inception. While in office, progressive Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower revived Lincoln's vision of economic freedom and expanded the government, attacking the concentration of wealth and nurturing upward mobility. But they and others like them have been continually thwarted by powerful business interests in the Party. Their opponents appealed to Americans' latent racism and xenophobia to regain political power, linking taxation and regulation to redistribution and socialism. The results of the Party's wholesale embrace of big business are all too familiar: financial collapses like the Panic of 1893, the Great Depression in 1929, and the Great Recession in 2008. With each passing decade, with each missed opportunity and political misstep, the schism within the Republican Party has grown wider, pulling the GOP ever further from its founding principles.Now with a new epilogue that reflects on the Trump era and what comes after it, To Make Men Free is a sweeping history of the Party that was once considered America's greatest political hope, but now lies in disarray.

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Data, data, data: It's all one ever hears about these days. Science is all about big data. Our bosses call out for analytics, whatever those might be. And everyone wants to predict what will happen next. Can we accurately predict if a company's stock will rise, whether or not a disease will spread, or who will become the next President of the United States? As anyone who has ever opened up a spreadsheet groaning with weeks, months, or years of data knows, numbers aren't enough: we have to know how to make them talk.Enter Scott Page and The Model Thinker. A leading professor of quantitative social science at the University of Michigan, he has taken his expertise as both a teacher and researcher and distilled it into the one book anyone will need to master data and turn it to professional use. This is no armchair exercise in imagined understanding, like The Signal and the Noise or The Black Swan or a legion of books on networks, the purposes of which are to make us look good in meetings (or in our own minds) than they are to enable us to do something useful. The Model Thinker is the guide to turning data into understanding. Underneath it all is what Page calls the "many-model paradigm", where the key isn't to just find one related set of statistical tools and work with them over and over, but to test our understanding of things by modeling them from several perspectives. The result is both a deep, quantitative acquaintance with tools ranging from Markov chains to game theory to Taleb-style long-tail statistics to network analysis and complexity theory, and a profound trip through the thought-process of a world-class data modeler. All the major tools of modeling--which readers will have heard of in everything from Wired to The Economist to The New York Times--will finally yield their secrets.As The Theoretical Minimum showed, readers in quantitative fields aren't just looking for entertainment. They want to change their understanding of, and ability to act, in the real world. Businesspeople, students, and scientists alike will find much to learn from The Model Thinker.

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Leave It to Beaver was not a documentary, a man's home has never been his castle, the'male breadwinner marriage' is the least traditional family in history, and rape and sexual assault were far higher in the 1970s than they are today. In The Way We Never Were , acclaimed historian Stephanie Coontz provides a myth-shattering examination of two centuries of the American family, sweeping away misconceptions about the past that cloud current debates about domestic life. The 1950s do not present a workable model of how to conduct our personal lives today, Coontz argues, and neither does any other era from our cultural past. This revised edition includes a new introduction and epilogue, looking at what has and has not changed since the original publication in 1992, and exploring how the clash between growing gender equality and growing economic inequality is reshaping family life, marriage, and male-female relationships in our modern era. Now more relevant than ever, The Way We Never Were continues to be a potent corrective to dangerous nostalgia for an American tradition that never really existed.

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For more than two decades, Winning at New Products has served as the bible for product developers everywhere. Robert G. Cooper demonstrates why consistent product development is so vital to corporate growth and how to maximize your chances of success. Winning at New Products cites the author's most recent research and showcases innovative practices by industry leaders to present a field-tested game plan for achieving product leadership. Cooper outlines specific strategies for making sound business decisions at every step--from idea generation to launch. This fully updated and expanded edition is an essential resource for product developers around the world.

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In 1528, a mission set out from Spain to colonize Florida. But the expedition went horribly wrong: Delayed by a hurricane, knocked off course by a colossal error of navigation, and ultimately doomed by a disastrous decision to separate the men from their ships, the mission quickly became a desperate journey of survival. Of the three hundred men who had embarked on the journey, only four survived,three Spaniards and an African slave. This tiny band endured a horrific march through Florida, a harrowing raft passage across the Louisiana coast, and years of enslavement in the American Southwest. They journeyed for almost ten years in search of the Pacific Ocean that would guide them home, and they were forever changed by their experience. The men lived with a variety of nomadic Indians and learned several indigenous languages. They saw lands, peoples, plants, and animals that no outsider had ever seen before. In this enthralling tale of four castaways wandering in an unknown land, Andrés Reséndez brings to life the vast, dynamic world of North America just a few years before European settlers would transform it forever.

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Did you ever wonder why cheap wine tastes better in fancy glasses? Why sales of Macintosh computers soared when Apple introduced the colourful iMac? New research on emotion and cognition has shown that attractive things really do work better, as Donald Norman amply demonstrates in this fascinating book, which has garnered acclaim everywhere from Scientific American to The New Yorker . Emotional Design articulates the profound influence of the feelings that objects evoke, from our willingness to spend thousands of dollars on Gucci bags and Rolex watches, to the impact of emotion on the everyday objects of tomorrow.Norman draws on a wealth of examples and the latest scientific insights to present a bold exploration of the objects in our everyday world. Emotional Design will appeal not only to designers and manufacturers but also to managers, psychologists, and general readers who love to think about their stuff.

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Examine the inner workings of the mind and learn what consciousness and a sense of self really means - and if it even exists. We're used to thinking about the self as an independent entity, something that we either have or are. In The Ego Tunnel, philosopher Thomas Metzinger claims otherwise: No such thing as a self exists. The conscious self is the content of a model created by our brain-an internal image, but one we cannot experience as an image. Everything we experience is "a virtual self in a virtual reality."But if the self is not "real," why and how did it evolve? How does the brain construct it? Do we still have souls, free will, personal autonomy, or moral accountability? In a time when the science of cognition is becoming as controversial as evolution, The Ego Tunnel provides a stunningly original take on the mystery of the mind.

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This book is the culmination of 15 years of research and travels that have taken the author completely around the world twice, as well as on other travels in the Mediterranean, the Baltic, and around the Pacific rim. Its purpose has been to try to understand the role of cultural differences within nations and between nations, today and over centuries of history, in shaping the economic and social fates of peoples and of whole civilizations. Focusing on four major cultural areas(that of the British, the Africans (including the African diaspora), the Slavs of Eastern Europe, and the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere, Conquests and Cultures reveals patterns that encompass not only these peoples but others and help explain the role of cultural evolution in economic, social, and political development.

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Deemed the dean of leadership gurus" by Forbes magazine, Warren Bennis has for years persuasively argued that leaders are not born,they are made. Delving into the qualities that define leadership, the people who exemplify it, and the strategies that anyone can apply to achieve it, his classic work On Becoming a Leader has served as a source of essential insight for countless readers. In a world increasingly defined by turbulence and uncertainty, the call to leadership is more urgent than ever. Featuring a provocative new introduction, this new edition will inspire a fresh generation of potential leaders to excellence.

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With profound insight into the complexities of the human experience, Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport organized a mass of research to produce a landmark study on the roots and nature of prejudice. First published in 1954, The Nature of Prejudice remains the standard work on discrimination. Now this classic study is offered in a special unabridged edition with a new introduction by Kenneth Clark of Columbia University and a new preface by Thomas Pettigrew of Harvard University.Allport's comprehensive and penetrating work examines all aspects of this age-old problem: its roots in individual and social psychology, its varieties of expression, its impact on the individuals and communities. He explores all kinds of prejudice-racial, religious, ethnic, economic and sexual-and offers suggestions for reducing the devastating effects of discrimination.The additional material by Clark and Pettigrew updates the social-psychological research in prejudice and attests to the enduring values of Allport's original theories and insights.

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Toussaint Louverture's life was one of hardship, triumph, and contradiction. Born into bondage in Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), the richest colony in the Western Hemisphere, he witnessed first-hand the torture of the enslaved population. Yet he managed to secure his freedom and establish himself as a small-scale planter. He even purchased slaves of his own.In Toussaint Louverture , Philippe Girard reveals the dramatic story of how Louverture transformed himself from lowly freedman to revolutionary hero. In 1791, the unassuming Louverture masterminded the only successful slave revolt in history. By 1801, he was general and governor of Saint-Domingue, and an international statesman who forged treaties with Britain, France, Spain, and the United States,empires that feared the effect his example would have on their slave regimes. Louveture's ascendency was short-lived, however. In 1802, he was exiled to France, dying soon after as one of the most famous men in the world, variously feared and celebrated as the Black Napoleon."As Girard shows, in life Louverture was not an idealist, but an ambitious pragmatist. He strove not only for abolition and independence, but to build Saint-Domingue's economic might and elevate his own social standing. He helped free Saint-Domingue's slaves yet immediately restricted their rights in the interests of protecting the island's sugar production. He warded off French invasions but embraced the cultural model of the French gentility.In death, Louverture quickly passed into legend, his memory inspiring abolitionist, black nationalist, and anti-colonialist movements well into the 20th century. Deeply researched and bracingly original, Toussaint Louverture is the definitive biography of one of the most influential people of his era, or any other.

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Around 2000, people began to believe that books were on verge of extinction. Their obsolescence, in turn, was expected to doom the habits of mind that longform print had once prompted: the capacity to follow a demanding idea from start to finish, to look beyond the day's news, or even just to be alone. The "death of the book" is an anxiety that has spawned a thousand jeremiads about the dumbing down of American culture, the ever-shorter attention spans of our children, the collapse of civilized discourse. All of these anxieties rely on the idea of a golden age, when children and adults alike sat quietly for long stretches reading edifying literature that improved our minds and souls. A booklover by temperament as much as profession, literature professor Leah Price wanted to believe that. But as a historian of the book, searching out the traces of long-dead readers through their marginalia and their unbroken spines, she began to wonder if our current digital discontents were stirring up nostalgia for a past that had never existed.When you look at old books, what do you find? A few well-greased pagespreads limply scattered among hundreds that remained spotlessly crisp; essays stained with beer from reading aloud at the pub; novels crumpled from being hidden in a pocket. From the eighteenth-century dawn of mass literacy to the Cold-War-era triumph of the paperback, few books were read cover-to-cover, meditatively, in silence. We have been shocked - shocked!--by data from Kindle that shows that most readers start books but rarely finish them, or skip large sections in between. But it has always been so. And in fact, for much of history, "deep" reading was strongly discouraged. Doctors and clergymen warned that print could addict, distract, or corrupt--not the ideas it contained, but the very experience of running one's eyes over a page. Over the centuries, children and women especially were repeatedly warned not to spend too much time reading, lest it excite their minds and distract them from other, more edifying tasks. Impatient with untempered book worship, Price emphasizes the continuities between past and present reading practices, and dispels the myth of the Golden Age of Print on multiple fronts. An anti-nostalgic examination of the past, present and future of reading, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books will fascinate bibliophiles and readers of all stripes.

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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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