Search results for ""Basic Books""

Humans are storytelling animals. Stories are what make our societies possible. Countless books celebrate their virtues. But Jonathan Gottschall, an expert on the science of stories, argues that there is a dark side to storytelling we can no longer ignore. Storytelling, the very tradition that built human civilization, may be the thing that destroys it.In The Story Paradox, Gottschall explores how a broad consortium of psychologists, communications specialists, neuroscientists, and literary quants are using the scientific method to study how stories affect our brains. The results challenge the idea that storytelling is an obvious force for good in human life. Yes, storytelling can bind groups together, but it is also the main force dragging people apart. And it's the best method we've ever devised for manipulating each other by circumventing rational thought. Behind all civilization's greatest ills-environmental destruction, runaway demagogues, warfare-you will always find the same master factor: a mind-disordering story.Gottschall argues that societies succeed or fail depending on how they manage these tensions. And it has only become harder, as new technologies that amplify the effects of disinformation campaigns, conspiracy theories, and fake news make separating fact from fiction nearly impossible.With clarity and conviction, Gottschall reveals why our biggest asset has become our greatest threat, and what, if anything, can be done. It is a call to stop asking, "How we can change the world through stories?" and start asking, "How can we save the world from stories?"

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The staggering story of the most influential Chinese political dissident of the Mao era, a devout Christian who was imprisoned, tortured, and executed by the regimeBlood Letters tells the astonishing tale of Lin Zhao, a Chinese poet and journalist arrested by the regime in 1960 and executed eight years later, at the height of the Cultural Revolution. Alone among the victims of Mao's dictatorship, she maintained a stubborn and open opposition during the years she was imprisoned. She rooted her dissent in her Christian faith--and expressed it in long, prophetic writings done in her own blood, and at times on her clothes and on cloth torn from her bedsheets.Miraculously, Lin Zhao's prison writings survived, though they have only recently come to light. Drawing on these works and others from the years before her arrest, as well as interviews with friends, family, and classmates, Lian Xi paints an indelible portrait of courage and faith in the face of unrelenting evil.

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A renowned psychologist argues that free will is not only real but essential to our well-being It’s become fashionable to argue that free will is a fiction: that we humans are in the thrall of animal urges and unconscious biases and only think that we are choosing freely. In?Freely Determined, research psychologist Kennon?Sheldon?argues that this perception is not only wrong but also dangerous. Drawing on decades of his own groundbreaking empirical research into motivation and goal setting, Sheldon shows us that embracing the ability to choose our path in life makes us happier, healthier, and more fulfilled. He also shows that this insight can help us choose better goals—ones that are concordant with our values and that, critically, we’re more likely to actually see through. Providing readers insight into how they can live a more self-directed, satisfying life, Freely Determined offers an essential guide for how we might recognize our freedom and use it wisely.

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Schizophrenics in the United States currently fare worse than patients in the world's poorest countries. In Mad in America, medical journalist Robert Whitaker argues that modern treatments for the severely mentally ill are just old medicine in new bottles, and that we as a society are deeply deluded about their efficacy. The widespread use of lobotomies in the 1920s and 1930s gave way in the 1950s to electroshock and a wave of new drugs. In what is perhaps Whitaker's most damning revelation, Mad in America examines how drug companies in the 1980s and 1990s skewed their studies to prove that new antipsychotic drugs were more effective than the old, while keeping patients in the dark about dangerous side effects. A haunting, deeply compassionate book-updated with a new introduction and prologue bringing in the latest medical treatments and trends-Mad in America raises important questions about our obligations to the mad, the meaning of "insanity," and what we value most about the human mind.

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In April 2020, the United States will embark on what has been called "the largest peacetime mobilization in American history": the decennial population census. It is part of a long, if uneven, tradition of counting people that extends back at least three millennia. Tracing the remarkable history of the census from ancient China, through the Roman Empire, revolutionary America, and Nazi-occupied Europe, right up to today's Supreme Court battles, The Sum of the People shows how the impulse to count ourselves is universal, how the census has evolved with time, and how it has always profoundly shaped the societies we have built. As data scientist Andrew Whitby reveals, the earliest censuses in ancient China and the Fertile Crescent had purely extractive aims: taxation and conscription. Later, as Enlightenment-era governments began to answer to citizens, the census was reinvented to support political representation and to delimit the boundaries of new nation-states. As the role of government grew through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, censuses became more complex and scientific. Census bureaus spun out dozens of other surveys, which formed the statistical foundation of modern, technocratic, data-driven government. For the first time, counting every person on the planet became a real possibility-and debates about who was counted, who was not, and what questions they were asked became the subject of intense political controversy in places from Australia to South Africa to the United States. The census at its best is a marvel of democracy, but it has at times been an instrument of exclusion, and, as in the case of Nazi Germany, a tool of tyranny and genocide.Today, governments and businesses alike now routinely collect "big data" that would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago, prompting fears similar to those the census once provoked and leading to some to suggest that traditional censuses will soon be obsolete. The Sum of the People closes by making the case that, for all its past faults, the census can be an alternative and an antidote to a future of constant, invasive surveillance.

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To most Americans, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. represent contrasting ideals: self-defense versus nonviolence, Black Power versus civil rights, the sword versus the shield. The struggle for Black freedom is wrought with the same contrasts. While nonviolent direct action is remembered as an unassailable part of American democracy, the movement's militancy is either vilified or erased outright.In The Sword and the Shield, Peniel E. Joseph upends these misconceptions and reveals a nuanced portrait of two men who, despite markedly different backgrounds, inspired and pushed each other throughout their adult lives. Now updated with a new afterword, this is a strikingly revisionist account of Malcolm and Martin, the era they defined, and their lasting impact on today's Movement for Black Lives.

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Today's teenagers spend an average of nine hours per day with their noses immersed in the glow of their screens. Tweens are not far behind, at six hours a day. Parents of this new, ultra-connected generation struggle with decisions completely new to parenting: Should they limit a child's screen time? Should an eight-year old be allowed to go on social media? What about playing video games with strangers? How can we keep them safe from harm when they go online? Are they going to grow up less socially able if their friendships are mostly conducted via text and emojis? In The Connected Parent, acclaimed childhood development and technology experts John Palfrey and Urs Gasser tackle these and other concerns of parents in the digital age. The book is organized by the topics parents have asked about most often, from screen time and safety to addiction and aggressive behaviour. But rather than pretending to have the only-or even the best-advice for every child and every family, the authors share the evidence as well as their own (sometimes strong) point of view, all in order to empower parents with ground-breaking insights that they can use to inform their approach for their own unique situations.The outcome of over a decade of research on children and technology conducted at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, The Connected Parent is required reading for any parent trying to help their kids safely navigate the fast-changing, uncharted territory our hyper-connected world.

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In his modern classic The Rise of the Creative Class, urbanist Richard Florida identifies the emergence of a new social class that is reshaping the twenty-first century's economy, geography, and workplace. This Creative Class is made up of people-engineers and managers, academics and musicians, researchers, designers, entrepreneurs and lawyers, poets and programmers-whose work turns on the creation of new forms. Increasingly, Florida observes, this Creative Class determines how workplaces are organized, which companies prosper or go bankrupt, and which cities thrive.Florida offers a detailed occupational, demographic, psychological, and economic profile of the Creative Class, examines its global impact, and explores the factors that shape "quality of place" in our changing cities and suburbs. Now updated with a new preface that considers the latest developments in our changing cities, The Rise of the Creative Class is the definitive edition of this foundational book on our contemporary economy.

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According to a leading cognitive scientist, we've been teaching reading wrong. The latest science reveals how we can do it right.In 2011, when an international survey reported that students in Shanghai dramatically outperformed American students in reading, math, and science, President Obama declared it a "Sputnik moment": a wake-up call about the dismal state of American education. Little has changed, however, since then: over half of our children still read at a basic level and few become highly proficient. Many American children and adults are not functionally literate, with serious consequences. Poor readers are more likely to drop out of the educational system and as adults are unable to fully participate in the workforce, adequately manage their own health care, or advance their children's education.In Language at the Speed of Sight, internationally renowned cognitive scientist Mark Seidenberg reveals the underexplored science of reading, which spans cognitive science, neurobiology, and linguistics. As Seidenberg shows, the disconnect between science and education is a major factor in America's chronic underachievement. How we teach reading places many children at risk of failure, discriminates against poorer kids, and discourages even those who could have become more successful readers. Children aren't taught basic print skills because educators cling to the disproved theory that good readers guess the words in texts, a strategy that encourages skimming instead of close reading. Interventions for children with reading disabilities are delayed because parents are mistakenly told their kids will catch up if they work harder. Learning to read is more difficult for children who speak a minority dialect in the home, but that is not reflected in classroom practices. By building on science's insights, we can improve how our children read, and take real steps toward solving the inequality that illiteracy breeds.Both an expert look at our relationship with the written word and a rousing call to action, Language at the Speed of Sight is essential for parents, educators, policy makers, and all others who want to understand why so many fail to read, and how to change that.

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An award-winning historian's "searing" (Wall Street Journal) account of America's internal slave trade-and its role in the making of AmericaSlave traders are peripheral figures in most histories of American slavery. But these men-who trafficked and sold over half a million enslaved people from the Upper South to the Deep South-were essential to slavery's expansion and fuelled the growth and prosperity of the United States.In The Ledger and the Chain, acclaimed historian Joshua D. Rothman recounts the shocking story of the domestic slave trade by tracing the lives and careers of Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard, who built the largest and most powerful slave-trading operation in American history. Far from social outcasts, they were rich and widely respected businessmen, and their company sat at the centre of capital flows connecting southern fields to north-eastern banks. Bringing together entrepreneurial ambition and remorseless violence toward enslaved people, domestic slave traders produced an atrocity that forever transformed the nation.

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In this "incisive" (Vanity Fair) and "authoritative" (New York Times) instant New York Times bestseller, America's top historians set the record straight on the most pernicious myths about our nation's pastThe United States is in the grip of a crisis of bad history. Distortions of the past promoted in the conservative media have led large numbers of Americans to believe in fictions over facts, making constructive dialogue impossible and imperilling our democracy.In Myth America, Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer have assembled an all-star team of fellow historians to push back against this misinformation. The contributors debunk narratives that portray the New Deal and Great Society as failures, immigrants as hostile invaders, and feminists as anti-family warriors-among numerous other partisan lies. Based on a firm foundation of historical scholarship, their findings revitalize our understanding of American history.Replacing myths with research and reality, Myth America is essential reading amid today's heated debates about our nation's past. With Essays By: Akhil Reed Amar Kathleen Belew Carol Anderson Kevin M. Kruse Erika Lee Daniel Immerwahr Elizabeth Hinton Naomi Oreskes Erik M. Conway Ari Kelman Geraldo Cadava David A. Bell Joshua Zeitz Sarah Churchwell Michael Kazin Karen L. Cox Eric Rauchway Glenda Gilmore Natalia Mehlman Petrzela Lawrence B. Glickman ?Julian E. Zelizer

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A road map for how businesses can grow and make money while reducing poverty and conflict in some of the world’s most challenging environments   Many companies worry that expanding into emerging markets is a risky—and even dangerous—move. Professors Viva Ona Bartkus and Emily S. Block see things differently. They argue that by entering markets in the world’s frontline regions—areas stuck in cycles of violence and extreme poverty—businesses can actually create stability and expand opportunity for communities and corporations alike. From helping Colombian farmers transition from growing coca to produce to disrupting human trafficking rings by creating more construction jobs in the Philippines, Business on the Edge proves that businesses can make money while advancing corporate social responsibility, environmental conservation, and social justice. Partnering with groups including multinational companies, NGOs, a

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From a prize-winning Harvard legal scholar, "a damning portrait" (New York Review of Books) of the misdemeanor machine that unjustly brands millions of Americans as criminals Punishment Without Crime offers an urgent new perspective on inequality and injustice in America by examining the paradigmatic American offense: the lowly misdemeanor. Based on extensive original research, legal scholar Alexandra Natapoff reveals the inner workings of a massive petty offense system that produces over thirteen million criminal cases each year, over 80 percent of the national total. People arrested for minor crimes are swept through courts where defendants often lack lawyers, judges process cases in mere minutes, and nearly everyone pleads guilty. This misdemeanor machine starts punishing people long before they are convicted, it punishes the innocent, and it punishes conduct that never should have been a crime. As a result, vast numbers of Americans-most of them poor and disproportionately people of color-are stigmatized as criminals, impoverished through fines and fees, and stripped of driver's licenses, jobs, and housing. And as the nation learned from the police killings of Eric Garner, George Floyd, and too many others, misdemeanor enforcement can be lethal. Now updated with a new afterword, Punishment Without Crime shows how America's sprawling misdemeanor system makes our entire country less safe, less fair, and less equal.

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A theoretical physicist takes readers on an awe-inspiring journey—found in 'no other book' (Science)—to discover how the universe generates everything from nothing at all: 'If you want to know what's really going on in the realms of relativity and particle physics, read this book' (Sean Carroll, author of The Biggest Ideas in the Universe). In Waves in an Impossible Sea, physicist Matt Strassler tells a startling tale of elementary particles, human experience, and empty space. He begins with a simple mystery of motion. When we drive at highway speeds with the windows down, the wind beats against our faces. Yet our planet hurtles through the cosmos at 150 miles per second, and we feel nothing of it. How can our voyage be so tranquil when, as Einstein discovered, matter warps space, and space deflects matter?   The answer, Strassler reveals, is that empty space is a sea, albeit a paradoxically strange one.

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'Deeply personal and infinitely digestible, Then I Am Myself the World is a remarkable must-read for anyone interested in knowing their mind.”―Judson Brewer MD, PhD, New York Times–bestselling author of Unwinding Anxiety The world’s leading investigator of consciousness argues that by understanding what consciousness does—cause change in the world—we can understand its origins and its future  In Then I Am Myself the World, Christof Koch explores the only thing we directly experience: consciousness. At the book’s heart is integrated-information theory, the idea that the essence of consciousness is the ability to exert causal power over itself, to be an agent of change. Koch investigates the physical origins of consciousness in the brain and how this knowledge can be used to measure consciousness in natural and artificial systems.        Enabled by s

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The United States is in the grip of a crisis of bad history. Distortions of the past promoted in the conservative media have led large numbers of Americans to believe in fictions over facts, making constructive dialogue impossible and imperilling our democracy. In Myth America, Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer have assembled an all-star team of fellow historians to push back against this misinformation. The contributors debunk narratives that portray the New Deal and Great Society as failures, immigrants as hostile invaders, and feminists as anti-family warriors-among numerous other partisan lies. Based on a firm foundation of historical scholarship, their findings revitalize our understanding of American history. Replacing myths with research and reality, Myth America is essential reading amid today's heated debates about our nation's past. With Essays ByAkhil Reed Amar Kathleen Belew Carol Anderson Kevin Kruse Erika Lee Daniel Immerwahr Elizabeth Hinton Naomi Oreskes Erik M. Conway Ari Kelman Geraldo Cadava David A. Bell Joshua Zeitz Sarah Churchwell Michael Kazin Karen L. Cox Eric Rauchway Glenda Gilmore Natalia Mehlman Petrzela Lawrence B. Glickman Julian E. Zelizer

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NAMED A BEST GIFT BOOK OF THE YEAR BY: Instyle, Oprah Daily, Business Insider, Esquire, Boston Globe, and RedbookRevered as much for her fierce spirit as she is for her art, Frida Kahlo stands today as a feminist symbol of daring creativity. Her paintings have earned her admirers around the world, but perhaps her greatest work of art was her own life. What Would Frida Do? celebrates this icon's signature style, outspoken politics, and boldness in love and art-even in the face of hardship and heartbreak. We see her tumultuous marriage with the famous muralist Diego Rivera and rumored flings with Leon Trotsky and Josephine Baker. In this irresistible read, writer Arianna Davis conjures Frida's brave spirit, encouraging women to create fearlessly and stand by their own truths.

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Every year, thousands of college students invade Washington, D.C. and the fifty state capitals to volunteer as political interns. Unfortunately, they are rarely able to hit the ground running," lacking the tools to help them do so. The Insider's Guide to Political Internships provides those tools. This volume contains practical, concise essays written by political professionals and scholars with extensive experience supervising internships, as well as advice from many former interns. The book highlights internships on Capitol Hill, at the White House, in the executive branch, at the state level, in the Congressional district office, and at non-profit groups.

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A beloved folk singer presents an impassioned account of the fall and rise of the small American towns she cherishesDubbed by the New Yorker as "one of America's very best singer-songwriters," Dar Williams has made her career not in stadiums, but touring America's small towns. She has played their venues, composed in their coffee shops, and drunk in their bars. She has seen these communities struggle, but also seen them thrive in the face of postindustrial identity crises.Here, Williams muses on why some towns flourish while others fail, examining elements from the significance of history and nature to the uniting power of public spaces and food. Drawing on her own travels and the work of urban theorists, Williams offers real solutions to rebuild declining communities.What I Found in a Thousand Towns is more than a love letter to America's small towns, it's a deeply personal and hopeful message about the potential of America's lively and resilient communities.

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A groundbreaking examination of our system of imprisonment, revealing the true causes of mass incarceration as well as the best path to reformIn the 1970s, the United States had an incarceration rate comparable to those of other liberal democracies-and that rate had held steady for over 100 years. Yet today, though the US is home to only about 5 percent of the world's population, we hold nearly one quarter of its prisoners. Mass incarceration is now widely considered one of the biggest social and political crises of our age. How did we get to this point?Locked In is a revelatory investigation into the root causes of mass incarceration by one of the most exciting scholars in the country. Having spent fifteen years studying the data on imprisonment, John Pfaff takes apart the reigning consensus created by Michelle Alexander and other reformers, revealing that the most widely accepted explanations-the failed War on Drugs, draconian sentencing laws, an increasing reliance on private prisons-tell us much less than we think. Pfaff urges us to look at other factors instead, including a major shift in prosecutor behavior that occurred in the mid-1990s, when prosecutors began bringing felony charges against arrestees about twice as often as they had before. He describes a fractured criminal justice system, in which counties don't pay for the people they send to state prisons, and in which white suburbs set law and order agendas for more-heavily minority cities. And he shows that if we hope to significantly reduce prison populations, we have no choice but to think differently about how to deal with people convicted of violent crimes-and why some people are violent in the first place.An authoritative, clear-eyed account of a national catastrophe, Locked In transforms our understanding of what ails the American system of punishment and ultimately forces us to reconsider how we can build a more equitable and humane society.

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In 1801, a 45-year-old Revolutionary War veteran and politician, slovenly, genial, brilliant, and persuasive, became the fourth chief justice of the United States, a post he would hold for a record thirty-four years. Before John Marshall joined the Court, the judicial branch was viewed as the poor sister of the federal government, lacking in dignity and clout. After his passing, the Supreme Court of the United States would never be ignored again. John Marshall is award-winning and bestselling author Richard Brookhiser's definitive biography of America's longest-serving Chief Justice.Marshall (1755-1835) was born in Northern Virginia and served as a captain during the Revolutionary War and then as a delegate to the Virginia state convention. He was a friend and admirer of George Washington, and a cousin and enemy of Thomas Jefferson. His appointment to the Supreme Court came almost by chance-Adams saw him as the last viable option, after previous appointees declined the nomination. Yet he took to the court immediately, turning his sharp mind toward strengthening America's fragile legal order.Americans had inherited from their colonial past a deep distrust of judges as creatures of arbitrary royal power; in reaction, newly independent states made them pawns of legislative whim. The result was legal caprice, sometimes amounting to chaos. Marshall wanted a strong federal judiciary, led by the Supreme Court, to define laws, protect rights, and balance the power of the legislative and executive branches. However, America's legal system, he believed, was threatened by specific individuals-namely Thomas Jefferson and the early Republican Party-who were intent on undermining the Constitution and respect for law in order to empower themselves.As a Federalist and a follower of Washington and Hamilton, he also wanted a strong national government, favorable to business. In his three decades on the court, Marshall accomplished just that. As Brookhiser vividly relates, in a string of often-colorful cases involving businessmen, educators, inventors, scoundrels, Native Americans, and slaves, Marshall clipped the power of the states vis-à-vis the federal government, established the Supreme Court's power to correct or rebuke Congress or the president, and bolstered commerce and contracts. John Marshall's modus operandi was charm and wit, frequently uniting his fellow justices around unanimous decisions in even the most controversial cases. For better and for worse, he made the Supreme Court a central part of American life.John Marshall is the definitive biography of America's greatest judge and most important early Chief Justice.

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The Vatican's silence in the face of Nazi atrocities remains one of the great controversies of our time. History has accused wartime pontiff Pius the Twelfth of complicity in the Holocaust and dubbed him Hitler's Pope." But a key part of the story has remained untold.Pope Pius in fact ran the world's largest church, smallest state, and oldest spy service. Saintly but secretive, he sent birthday cards to Hitler,while secretly plotting to kill him. He skimmed from church charities to pay covert couriers, and surreptitiously tape-recorded his meetings with top Nazis. Under his leadership the Vatican spy ring actively plotted against the Third Reich.Told with heart-pounding suspense and drawing on secret transcripts and unsealed files, Church of Spies throws open the Vatican's doors to reveal some of the most astonishing events in the history of the papacy. Riebling reveals here how the world's greatest moral institution met the greatest moral crisis in history.

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Punishment Without Crime provides a sweeping and revelatory new account of America's broken criminal justice system from the perspective of the paradigmatic American crime-the lowly misdemeanor. While felony trials grab headlines, the petty offense system is far more representative of criminal justice as most Americans actually encounter it. Petty offenses make up 80 percent of state and local criminal dockets; over 13 million misdemeanor cases are filed every year, four times the number of felony cases. Misdemeanors are one of the largest and most unappreciated causes of our criminal system's size and its harshness-and a crucial source of American inequality.Misdemeanor cases are by definition "minor," but their impact is not. Each year, the petty offense process sweeps millions of people from arrest to a guilty plea or conviction. In effect, police get to decide who will be convicted of minor crimes, simply by arresting them for offenses like driving on a suspended licenses, marijuana possession, disorderly conduct, and loitering. In thousands of low-level courts around the country, prosecutors do little vetting, most defendants lack lawyers, legal rules and evidence are often ignored, and judges process cases in minutes or even seconds. The consequences are serious and lasting: stigmatizing criminal records, burdensome fines, jail for those who can't afford to pay bail or fees, and collateral effects including loss of jobs, housing, and benefits. Punishment Without Crime offers an urgent new explanation for America's racial and economic inequalities, showing starkly how misdemeanor arrests and prosecutions brand vast numbers of disadvantaged Americans as criminals and punish them accordingly. For the first time, prize-winning legal scholar Alexandra Natapoff illuminates the full scale, scope, and workings of the misdemeanor process, drawing on never-before-compiled data as well as revealing narrative examples. The misdemeanor system, she reveals, targets and stigmatizes racial minorities as "criminals," exacerbates economic inequality by funding its own operation through fines and fees, and produces wrongful convictions on a massive scale. For too long, misdemeanors have been ignored as petty. Reckoning with the misdemeanor machine is crucial to understanding America's punitive and unfair criminal justice system and our widening economic and racial divides.

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Most people are familiar with history's great equations: Newton's Law of Gravity, for instance, or Einstein's theory of relativity. But the way these mathematical breakthroughs have contributed to human progress is seldom appreciated. In In Pursuit of the Unknown, celebrated mathematician Ian Stewart untangles the roots of our most important mathematical statements to show that equations have long been a driving force behind nearly every aspect of our lives. Using seventeen of our most crucial equations--including the Wave Equation that allowed engineers to measure a building's response to earthquakes, saving countless lives, and the Black-Scholes model, used by bankers to track the price of financial derivatives over time--Stewart illustrates that many of the advances we now take for granted were made possible by mathematical discoveries. An approachable, lively, and informative guide to the mathematical building blocks of modern life, In Pursuit of the Unknown is a penetrating exploration of how we have also used equations to make sense of, and in turn influence, our world.

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Our current system of higher education dates to the period from 1865 to 1925, when the nation's new universities created grades and departments, majors and minors in an attempt to prepare young people for a world transformed by the telegraph and the Model T.As Cathy Davidson argues in The New Education, this approach to education is wholly unsuited to the era of the gig economy. From the Ivy League to community colleges, she introduces us to innovators who are remaking college for our own time, by emphasizing student-centered learning that values creativity in the face of change above all. The New Education ultimately shows how we can teach students not only to survive but to thrive amid the challenges to come.

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America's leading role in today's information revolution may seem simply to reflect its position as the world's dominant economy and most powerful state. But by the early nineteenth century, when the United States was neither a world power nor a primary centre of scientific discovery, it was already a leader in communications-in postal service and newspaper publishing, then in development of the telegraph and telephone networks, later in the whole repertoire of mass communications.In this wide-ranging social history of American media, from the first printing press to the early days of radio, Paul Starr shows that the creation of modern communications was as much the result of political choices as of technological invention. With his original historical analysis, Starr examines how the decisions that led to a state-run post office and private monopolies on the telegraph and telephone systems affected a developing society. He illuminates contemporary controversies over freedom of information by exploring such crucial formative issues as freedom of the press, intellectual property, privacy, public access to information, and the shaping of specific technologies and institutions. America's critical choices in these areas, Starr argues, affect the long-run path of development in a society and have had wide social, economic, and even military ramifications. The Creation of the Media not only tells the history of the media in a new way it puts America and its global influence into a new perspective.

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The New York Times bestselling account of one of history's most brutal- and forgotten- massacres, when the Japanese army destroyed China's capital city on the eve of World War IIIn December 1937, one of the most horrific atrocities in the long annals of wartime barbarity occurred. The Japanese army swept into the ancient city of Nanking (what was then the capital of China), and within weeks, more than 300,000 Chinese civilians and soldiers were systematically raped, tortured, and murdered. In this seminal work, Iris Chang, whose own grandparents barely escaped the massacre, tells this history from three perspectives: that of the Japanese soldiers, that of the Chinese, and that of a group of Westerners who refused to abandon the city and created a safety zone, which saved almost 300,000 Chinese.Drawing on extensive interviews with survivors and documents brought to light for the first time, Iris Chang's classic book is the definitive history of this horrifying episode."Chang vividly, methodically, records what happened, piecing together the abundant eyewitness reports into an undeniable tapestry of horror." - Adam Hochschild, Salon

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With the planned withdrawal of US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, the longest conflicts in our nation's history were supposed to end. Yet we remain at war against expanding terrorist movements, and our security forces have had to continually adapt to a nihilistic foe that operates in the shadows.The result of fifteen years of reporting, Twilight Warriors is the untold story of the tight-knit brotherhood that changed the way America fights. James Kitfield reveals how brilliant innovators in the US military, Special Forces, and the intelligence and law enforcement communities forged close operational bonds in the crucibles of Iraq and Afghanistan, breaking down institutional barriers to create a relentless, intelligence-driven style of operations. At the forefront of this profound shift were Stanley McChrystal and his interagency team at Joint Special Operations Command, the pioneers behind a hybrid method of warfighting: find, fix, finish, exploit, and analyze. Other key figures include Michael Flynn, the visionary who redefined the intelligence gathering mission the FBI's Brian McCauley, who used serial-killer profilers to track suicide bombers in Afghanistan and the Delta Force commander Scott Miller, responsible for making team players out of the US military's most elite and secretive counterterrorism units. The result of their collaborations is a globe-spanning network that is elegant in its simplicity and terrifying in its lethality. As Kitfield argues, this style of operations represents our best hope for defending the nation in an age of asymmetric warfare. Twilight Warriors is an unprecedented account of the American way of war,and the iconoclasts who have brought it into the twenty-first century.

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In 1521, the Catholic Church declared war on Martin Luther. The German monk had already been excommunicated the year before, after nailing his Ninety-Five Theses,which accused the Church of rampant corruption,to the door of a Saxon church. Now, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V called for Luther to be apprehended and punished as a notorious heretic." The edict was akin to a death sentence: If Luther was caught, he would almost inevitably be burned at the stake, his fragile movement crushed, and the nascent Protestant Reformation strangled in its cradle.In Luther's Fortress , acclaimed historian James Reston, Jr. describes this crucial but little-known episode in Luther's life and reveals its pivotal role in Christian history. Realizing the danger to their leader, Luther's followers spirited him away to Wartburg Castle, deep in central Germany. There he hid for the next ten months, as his fate,and that of the Reformation,hung in the balance. Yet instead of cowering in fear, Luther spent his time at Wartburg strengthening his movement and refining his theology in ways that would guarantee the survival of Protestantism. He devoted himself to biblical study and spiritual contemplation he fought both his papist critics and his own inner demons (and, legend has it, the devil himself) and he held together his fractious and increasingly radicalized reform movement from afar. During this time Luther also crystallized some of his most significant ideas about Christianity and translated the New Testament into German,an accomplishment that, perhaps more than any other, solidified his legacy and spread his bold new religious philosophy across Europe.Drawing on Luther's correspondence, notes, and other writings, Luther's Fortress presents an earthy, gripping portrait of the Reformation's architect at this transformational moment, revealing him at his most productive, courageous, and profound.

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A haunting portrait of Arthur Rosenberg, one of Nazism's chief architects, and his obsession with one of history's most influential Jewish thinkersIn The Spinoza Problem, Irvin Yalom spins fact and fiction into an unforgettable psycho-philosophical drama. Yalom tells the story of the seventeenth-century thinker Baruch Spinoza, whose philosophy led to his own excommunication from the Jewish community, alongside that of the rise and fall of the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, who two hundred years later during World War II ordered his task force to plunder Spinoza's ancient library in an effort to deal with the Nazis' "Spinoza Problem." Seamlessly alternating between Golden Age Amsterdam and Nazi Germany, Yalom investigates the inner lives of these two enigmatic men in a tale of influence and anxiety, the origins of good and evil, and the philosophy of freedom and the tyranny of terror.

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In its eerie likeness to Earth, Mars has long captured our imaginations,both as a destination for humankind and as a possible home to extraterrestrial life. It is our twenty-first century New World its explorers robots, shipped 350 million miles from Earth to uncover the distant planet's secrets.Its most recent scout is Curiosity,a one-ton, Jeep-sized nuclear-powered space labouratory,which is now roving the Martian surface to determine whether the red planet has ever been physically capable of supporting life. In Red Rover , geochemist Roger Wiens, the principal investigator for the ChemCam laser instrument on the rover and veteran of numerous robotic NASA missions, tells the unlikely story of his involvement in sending sophisticated hardware into space, culminating in the Curiosity rover's amazing journey to Mars.In so doing, Wiens paints the portrait of one of the most exciting scientific stories of our time: the new era of robotic space exploration. Starting with NASA's introduction of the Discovery Program in 1992, scrappier, more nimble missions became the order of the day, as manned missions were confined to Earth orbit, and behemoth projects went extinct. This strategic shift presented huge scientific opportunities, but tight budgets meant that success depended more than ever on creative engineering and human ingenuity. Beginning with the Genesis mission that launched his career, Wiens describes the competitive, DIY spirit of these robotic enterprises, from conception to construction, from launch to heart-stopping crashes and smooth landings.An inspiring account of the real-life challenges of space exploration, Red Rover vividly narrates what goes into answering the question: is there life elsewhere in the universe?

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Martin Luther King Jr today is an uncontroversial figure, and we tend to see him as a saint whose legacy is entirely uncomplicated. But in 1968, King was a polarizing figure, and his assassination was met with uncomfortably mixed reactions. At the time of his death, King was scorned by many white Americans, worshiped by a segment of African Americans and liberal whites, deemed irrelevant by the younger generation of African Americans, and beloved overseas. He was a hero to many. But to some, he was part of an old guard that was no longer relevant, and to others he was nothing more than a troublemaker and a threat to the Southern way of life. In The Heavens Might Crack, historian Jason Sokol traces the diverse range of reactions to King's death, exploring how Americans - as well as others across the globe--experienced King's assassination, in the days, weeks, and months afterward. He looks at everything from rioting in inner cities to turbulence in Germany, from celebrations in many parts of the South to the growing gun control movement. Across all these responses, we see one clear trend: with King gone and the cities exploding, it felt like a gear in the machinery of the universe had shifted. Just a few years prior, with the enactment of landmark civil rights laws, interracial harmony appeared conceivable; peaceful progress toward civil rights even seemed probable. In an instant, such optimism had vanished. For many, King's death extinguished that final flicker of hope for a multiracial America. With that hope gone, King's assassination would have an indelible impact on American sentiments about race, and the civil rights landscape.The Heavens Might Crack is a deeply empathetic portrait of country grappling with the death of a complicated man. By highlighting how this moment was perceived across the nation, Sokol reveals the enduring consequences King's assassination had for the shape of his own legacy, the course of the Civil Rights Movement, and race relations in America.

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What makes a good missionary makes a good American spy, or so thought Office of Special Services (OSS) founder "Wild" Bill Donovan when he recruited religious activists into the first ranks of American espionage. Called upon to serve Uncle Sam, Donovan's recruits saw the war as a means of expanding their godly mission, believing an American victory would guarantee the safety of their fellow missionaries and their coreligionists abroad.Drawing on never-before-seen archival materials, acclaimed historian Matthew Sutton shows how religious activists proved to be true believers in Franklin Roosevelt's crusade for global freedom of religion. Sutton focuses on William Eddy, a warrior for Protestantism who was fluent in Arabic; Stewart Herman, a young Lutheran minister rounded up by the Nazis while pastoring in Berlin; Stephen B. L. Penrose, Jr., who left his directorship over missionary schools in the Middle East to join the military rank and file; and John Birch, a fundamentalist missionary in China. Donovan chose these men because they already had the requisite skills for good intelligence analysis, espionage, and covert operations, skills that allowed them to seamlessly blend into different environments. Working for eternal rewards rather than temporal spoils, they proved willing to sacrifice and even to die for their country during the conflict, becoming some of the United States' most loyal secret soldiers.Acutely aware of how their actions conflicted with their spiritual calling, these spies nevertheless ran covert operations in the centers of global religious power, including Mecca, the Vatican, and Palestine. In the end, they played an outsized role in leading the US to victory in WWII: Eddy laid the groundwork for the Allied invasion of North Africa, while Birch led guerilla attacks against the Japanese and, eventually, Chinese Communists. After the war, some of them -- those who survived -- helped launch the Central Intelligence Agency, so that their nation, and American Christianity, could maintain a strong presence throughout the rest of the world.Surprising and absorbing at every turn, Double Crossedis an untold story of World War II spycraft and a profound account of the compromises and doubts that war forces on those who wage it.

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As WWI drew to a close, change reverberated through the halls of England's country homes. As the sun set slowly on the British Empire, the shadows lengthened on the lawns of a thousand stately homes. In The Long Weekend, historian Adrian Tinniswood introduces us to the tumultuous, scandalous and glamourous history of English country houses during the years between World Wars. As estate taxes and other challenges forced many of these venerable houses onto the market, new sectors of British and American society were seduced by the dream of owning a home in the English countryside. Drawing on thousands of memoirs, letters, and diaries, as well as the eye-witness testimonies of belted earls and bibulous butlers, Tinniswood brings the stately homes of England to life as never before, opening the door to a world by turns opulent and ordinary, noble and vicious, and forever wrapped in myth. We are drawn into the intrigues of legendary families such as the Astors, the Churchills and the Devonshires as they hosted hunting parties and balls that attracted the likes of Charlie Chaplin, T.E. Lawrence, and royals such as Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. We waltz through aristocratic soirees, and watch as the upper crust struggle to fend off rising taxes and underbred outsiders, property speculators and poultry farmers. We gain insight into the guilt and the gingerbread, and see how the image of the country house was carefully protected by its occupants above and below stairs. Through the glitz of estate parties, the social tensions between old money and new, the hunting parties, illicit trysts, and grand feasts, Tinniswood offers a glimpse behind the veil of these great estates--and reveals a reality much more riveting than the dream.

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