Odd Lots Recommended Books

In this National Book Award–winning novel from a “brilliantly breathtaking writer,” a young Southerner searches for meaning in the midst of Mardi Gras (The New York Times Book Review) On the cusp of his thirtieth birthday, Binx Bolling is a lost soul A stockbroker and member of an established New Orleans family, Binx’s one escape is the movie theater that transports him from the falseness of his life

With Mardi Gras in full swing, Binx, along with his cousin Kate, sets out to find his true purpose amid the excesses of the carnival that surrounds him Buoyant yet powerful, The Moviegoer is a poignant indictment of modern values, and an unforgettable story of a week that will change two lives forever This ebook features an illustrated biography of Walker Percy including rare photos from the author’s estate.

Understanding the political and socio-economic factors which give rise to youth recruitment into militant organizations is central to grasping some of the most important issues that affect the contemporary Middle East and Africa In this book, Khalid Mustafa Medani explains why youth are attracted to militant organizations, examining the specific role economic globalization plays in determining how and why militant activists emerge Based on extensive fieldwork, Medani offers an in-depth analysis of the impact of globalization, neoliberal reforms and informal economic networks on the rise and evolution of moderate and militant Islamist movements

In an original contribution to the study of Islamist and ethnic politics, he shows the importance of understanding when and under what conditions religious rather than other forms of identity become politically salient This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Alphonse, a young Walloon officer, is travelling to join his regiment in Madrid in 1739 But he soon finds himself mysteriously detained at a highway inn in the strange and varied company of thieves, brigands, cabbalists, noblemen, coquettes and gypsies, whose stories he records over sixty-six days The resulting manuscript is discovered some forty years later in a sealed casket, from which tales of characters transformed through disguise, magic and illusion, of honour and cowardice, of hauntings and seductions, leap forth to create a vibrant polyphony of human voices Jan Potocki (1761-1812) used a range of literary styles - gothic, picaresque, adventure, pastoral, erotica - in his novel of stories-within-stories, which, like the Decameron and Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, provides entertainment on an epic scale.

The untold story of how America's brightest academic minds revolutionized intelligence analysis at the CIA In the early days of the Cold War, the United States faced a crisis in intelligence analysis A series of intelligence failures in 1949 and 1950, including the failure to warn about the North Korean invasion of South Korea, made it clear that gut instinct and traditional practices were no longer sufficient for intelligence analysis in the nuclear age

The new director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Walter Bedell Smith, had a mandate to reform it Based on new archival research in declassified documents and the participants' personal papers, The Intelligence Intellectuals reveals the neglected history of how America's brightest academic minds were recruited by the CIA to revolutionize intelligence analysis during this critical period Peter C

Grace describes how the scientifically sound analysis methods that they introduced significantly helped the United States gain an advantage in the Cold War, and these new analysts legitimized the role of the recently created CIA in the national security community Grace demonstrates how these professors—such as William Langer from Harvard, Sherman Kent from Yale, and Max Millikan from MIT—developed systematic approaches to intelligence analysis that shaped the CIA's methodology for decades to come Readers interested in the history of the Cold War and in intelligence, scholars of intelligence studies, Cold War historians, and intelligence practitioners seeking to understand their craft's foundations will all value this insightful history about the place of social science in national security.

In the spring of 1750 children began to disappear from the streets of Paris as they made their way to school, as they ran errands for their parents, even from the presence of their parents-- no child was safe Astonishing rumors quickly spread .. In fact, the police had been given sweeping powers of arrest to control the problems of vagrancy; some were clearly abusing that power

An atmosphere of mounting fear and suspicion between the populace and the police erupted in a two-day series of riots which culminated in the lynching and murder of an alleged abductor The authors use this incident to view broader issues concerning the power of rumor, the logic of mob psychology, and the exercise of authority and the maintenance of peace in Paris under the Ancien Régime.

A 2,500-year history of international currencies that reveals new insights about the future of the U.S. dollar—as well as crypto and central bank digital currencies Doubts about the international dominance of the dollar are only growing amid worries about tariffs, political dysfunction, and fraying international alliances Will the dollar continue to reign supreme In Money Beyond Borders, the leading authority on international currencies, Barry Eichengreen, puts the dollar’s prospects in deep historical perspective by chronicling the entire history of cross-border currencies, from the invention of coins in the seventh century BCE to the cryptocurrencies of today and the central bank digital currencies of tomorrow

Money Beyond Borders recounts how Greek and Roman coins became the first true international currencies It tells how the Florentine gold florin became the “greenback of the Renaissance,” and how it was succeeded by Spanish silver and a Dutch fiat currency

The book explains why the British pound dominated the international economy in the nineteenth century, why the dollar rose to the top during World War II, and why the dollar has survived predictions of the imminent loss of its preeminence since the 1970s The long history of international currencies shows that the same factors that encourage their widespread use eventually lead to their abandonment Money Beyond Borders makes a powerful case that the dollar is now on the downside of this cycle, and it considers who the winners and losers will be when there is flight away from the greenback Revealing important patterns in the life cycles of international currencies over the past 2,500 years, the book offers valuable lessons and insights about how currencies rise—and why they fall.

From Pulitzer Prize finalist John Fabian Witt comes the captivating secret history of an epic experiment to remake American democracy Before the dark money of the Koch Brothers, before the billions of the Ford Foundation, there was the Garland Fund In 1922, a young idealist named Charles Garland rejected a million-dollar inheritance

In a world of shocking wealth disparities, shameless racism, and political repression, Garland opted instead to invest in a future where radical ideas—like working-class power, free speech, and equality—might flourish Over the next two decades, the Garland Fund would nurture a new generation of wildly ambi­tious progressive projects The men and women around the Fund were rich and poor, white and Black

They cooperated and bickered; they formed rivalries, fell in and out of love, and made mistakes Yet shared beliefs linked them throughout They believed that Amer­ican capitalism was broken They believed that American democracy (if it had ever existed) stole from those who had the least

And they believed that American institutions needed to be radically remade for the modern age By the time they spent the last of the Fund’s resources, their outsider ideas had become mass movements battling to transform a nation A luminous testament to the power of visionary organizations and a meditation on the vexed role of money in American life, The Radical Fund is a hopeful book for our anxious, angry age—an empowering road map for how people with heretical ideas can bring about audacious change.

The author relates his experiences in the State Department during a period that witnessed World War II, European reconstruction, the Korean War and McCarthyism.

A leading economist trains a lens on his own discipline to uncover when it fails and when it works In the wake of the financial crisis and the Great Recession, economic science seems anything but In this sharp, masterfully argued book, Dani Rodrik, a leading critic from within the science, renders a surprisingly upbeat judgment on economics

Sifting through the failings of the discipline, he homes in on its greatest strength: its many—and often contradictory—explanatory frameworks Drawing on the history of the field and his deep experience as a practitioner, Rodrik insists that economic activity defies universal laws But when economists embrace their expertise as a set of tools, not as a grand unified theory, they can improve the world

From successful antipoverty programs in Mexico to growth strategies in Africa and intelligent remedies for domestic inequality, Rodrik highlights the profound positive influence of economics properly applied At once a forceful critique and a defense of the discipline, Economics Rules charts a path toward a more humble but more effective science.

The winner of the 1961 Hugo Award for Best Novel, Miller's bestselling work is a true landmark of 20th-century literature--a chilling and still-provocative look at a post-apocalyptic future.

From two leading economists comes a groundbreaking new portrait of the hidden fortunes of Main Street business owners—ordinary Americans who built extraordinary wealth and are quietly rewriting the rules of money and power Most people think the path to great wealth runs through Wall Street or Silicon Valley We’re told you must be a Zuckerberg, a Musk, or a Jamie Dimon to get rich

But this story is wrong Drawing on unprecedented data from a decade of research and vivid real-life stories of entrepreneurs—from a self-made hot-dog stand billionaire to the heirs of an auto dealer—Zidar and Zwick reveal a surprising truth: prosperity is more attainable, more widely distributed, and closer to home than we imagine A multitude of Americans have built staggering fortunes by running often unglamorous businesses far from the spotlight

A quiet revolution in the business world—the rise of “pass-through” firms like S-corporations and partnerships—supercharged this wealth, channeling vast income directly to business owners rather than traditional corporations Part economic detective story, part roadmap to riches, this book reveals: —The Hidden 1%: They might be a local beer distributor, a dentist with a regional network of practices, a commercial HVAC contractor with trucks around town, or a restaurateur who keeps opening new locations

For every public company CEO, more than a thousand private business owners each have transformational wealth. — The Blueprint for Wealth: Zidar and Zwick describe where Main Street Millionaires come from, how they grew rich, and how much money they make Their stories suggest the American Dream is not dead and many paths to prosperity remain open today. — Power Brokers: Armed with their fortunes, Main Street Millionaires wield power in city halls, statehouses, and Washington, often bending policy to protect what they’ve built

They are both growing the economic pie and grabbing bigger slices for themselves The Everywhere Millionaire celebrates the stories of entrepreneurs who seized opportunities while asking hard questions about how concentrated wealth and power shape society It is an essential guide to seeing the economy as it really is and recognizing the surprising paths to prosperity—and influence—everywhere.

This book is a history of firearms across the world from the 1100s up to the 1700s, from the time of their invention in China to the time when European firearms had become clearly superior It asks why it was the Europeans who perfected firearms when it was the Chinese who had invented them, but it answers this question by looking at how firearms were used throughout the world.

"An illuminating and convincing account of the enormous change in the whole conception of morals and human personality which took place during the centuries covered by Homer, the early lyric poets, the dramatists, and Socrates." — The Times (London) Literary Supplement European thinking began with the Greeks Science, literature, ethics, philosophy — all had their roots in the extraordinary civilization that graced the shores of the Mediterranean a few millennia ago

The rise of thinking among the Greeks was nothing less than a revolution; they did not simply map out new areas for thought and discussion, they literally created the idea of man as an intellectual being — an unprecedented concept that decisively influenced the subsequent evolution of European thought In this immensely erudite book, German classicist Bruno Snell traces the establishment of a rational view of the nature of man as evidenced in the literature of the Greeks — in the creations of epic and lyric poetry, and in the drama

Here are the crucial stages in the intellectual evolution of the Greek world: the Homeric world view, the rise of the individual in the early Greek lyric, myth and reality in Greek tragedy, Greek ethics, the origin of scientific thought, and Arcadia Drawing extensively on the works of Homer, Pindar, Archilochus, Aristophanes, Sappho, Heraclitus, the Greek tragedians, Parmenides, Callimachus, and a host of other writers and thinkers, Snell shows how the Homeric myths provided a blueprint for the intellectual structure the Greeks erected; how the notion of universality in Greek tragedy broadened into philosophical generalization; how the gradual unfolding of the concepts of intellect and soul provided the foundation for philosophy, science, ethics, and finally, religion

Unquestionably one of the monuments of the Geistegeschichte (History of Ideas) tradition, The Discovery of the Mind throws fresh light on many long-standing problems and has had a wide influence on scholars of the Greek intellectual tradition Closely reasoned, replete with illuminating insight, the book epitomizes the best in German classical scholarship — a brilliant exploration of the archetypes of Western thought; a penetrating explanation of how we came to think the way we do.

The 1980s saw spirited debate in China, as officials and the public pressed for economic and political liberalization But after Tiananmen, the Communist Party erased the reform debate from memory Julian Gewirtz shows how the leadership expunged alternative visions of China’s future and set the stage for the policing of history under Xi Jinping.

Why Wendell Berry, Michael Pollan, and other slow-food-loving locavores are wrong about food in America—and why Waffle House can save us all The food industry is a major driver of climate change, pollution, obesity, animal suffering, and workplace exploitation Many food writers blame the industrial food system and tell individual eaters to fix these problems by buying local, artisanal food from small farmers—a solution most Americans can’t afford But, as food policy experts Gabriel Rosenberg and Jan Dutkiewicz remind us, modern technology has made food more affordable, abundant, varied, and tastier than at any other time in history

In Feed the People!, they argue that modern food pleasures like Waffle House waffles, and the industrial systems that make them possible, are actually good With smart technology and commonsense policies, we can make them even better Rosenberg and Dutkiewicz have traveled around the United States to find the people changing the way we make and eat food, from the innovators behind plant-based burgers to the cooks serving free school lunches to the labor organizers unionizing fast food joints

They show that building a food system that works for everyone will take more than just eating your vegetables Feed the People! invites you to sit at the table and join this delicious movement.

"This packed account makes food science feel like an urgent and essential undertaking." —Publishers Weekly (Top Ten New Release in Science) Good Food Institute founder and president Bruce Friedrich offers a hopeful and rigorously researched exploration of how science, policy, and industry can work together to satisfy the world’s soaring demand for meat, while building a healthier and more sustainable world The human love of meat appears to be hard-wired

The world consumes more than 550 million metric tons of meat and seafood each year That number has been climbing for decades and is expected to continue to rise through at least 2050 What if we could give humanity the meat it craves, but produced differently Plant-based and cultivated meat that are just as delicious as the meat you love, but more affordable and healthier

Think it’s not possible With examples ranging from the “horseless carriage” (car) to the smart phone in your pocket, Meat reminds readers that scientific innovations often move from disbelief or opposition to inevitability and ubiquity, much faster than almost anyone expects Envisioning a future where meat is both a delight and a force for good, Friedrich explores: Humanity’s 12,000-year-old practice of raising animals for meat, and why we need to figure out a better way

The science and scientists behind the efforts to create plant-based and cultivated meat that is indistinguishable from conventional animal meat, but less expensive, more nutritious, and safer How plant-based and cultivated meat can preserve forests and biodiversity, mitigate climate change and ocean pollution, and lower antimicrobial resistance and pandemic risk The economic and food security benefits of making meat more efficiently, which include trillions of dollars in economic output annually, tens of millions of good jobs, and the possibility of a revitalized farm economy Meat offers a vision of the next agricultural revolution that is optimistic, achievable, and delicious.

The first full-scale biography of one of the most pivotal and complex political figures in American history George Wallace formulated the themes that have helped elect every president from Nixon to Clinton and fueled the third-party candidacy of Ross Perot A revealing look that reveals both good and bad.

A kaleidoscopic and original new history of urbanization—from Lisbon to New York, Paris to Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires to Lagos For the past three centuries, urban dwellers and planners have imagined future cities that would be radically different from those of the past Planners pursued progress, whether focused on flying vehicles above, sewage systems below, or daily life in between Yet, as Bruno Carvalho shows in this original and wide-ranging history, which features some sixty illustrations, modern cities continuously defied predictions

Visionary designs and technological innovations created dramatic, unforeseen outcomes, and the ongoing urban boom is a story of continuity as well as rupture A compelling history of imagined futures and the transformation of urban life, The Invention of the Future also suggests what we might learn from the stories of our cities as we shape them for the twenty-first century Moving between large-scale changes and detailed examples, this captivating narrative tells the story of key moments and turning points: the rebuilding of Lisbon after the 1755 earthquake; the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan for Manhattan; Parisian reforms from 1853 to 1870; Le Corbusier’s plans for South American cities in the 1920s and 1930s; the postwar victory of the car; the utopian capital of Brasília; and urban growth in Africa

In recent decades, Carvalho argues, the capacity to invent urban futures has become increasingly constrained Social and environmental challenges loom large But the story is not over While cities helped create current problems, compact and transit-rich urbanization might be our best hope to combine high living standards with sustainability Sometimes, moving forward can involve reaching back to the future.

A modern amorality play about a 17-year-old girl, the wilder shores of connoisseurship, and the power of false friends Maman was exigeante—there is no English word–and I had the benefit of her training Others may not be so fortunate If some other young girl, with two million dollars at stake, finds this of use I shall count myself justified

Raised in Marrakech by a French mother and English father, a 17-year-old girl has learned above all to avoid mauvais ton ("bad taste" loses something in the translation) One should not ask servants to wait on one during Ramadan: they must have paid leave while one spends the holy month abroad One must play the piano; if staying at Claridge’s, one must regrettably install a Clavinova in the suite, so that the necessary hours of practice will not be inflicted on fellow guests

One should cultivate weavers of tweed in the Outer Hebrides but have the cloth made up in London; one should buy linen in Ireland but have it made up by a Thai seamstress in Paris (whose genius has been supported by purchase of suitable premises) All this and much more she has learned, governed by a parent of ferociously lofty standards But at 17, during the annual Ramadan travels, she finds all assumptions overturned

Will she be able to fend for herself Will the dictates of good taste suffice when she must deal, singlehanded, with the sharks of New York?

Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin tales are now widely acknowledged to be the greatest series of historical novels ever written All eighteen books are being re-issued in hardback by HarperCollins with stunning new jackets Captain Jack Aubrey is ashore on half-pay without a command -- until his friend, and occasional intelligence agent, Stephen Maturin, arrives with secret orders for Aubrey to take a frigate to the Cape of Good Hope, under a Commodore's pennant But the difficulties of carrying out his orders are compounded by two of his own captains -- Lord Clonfert, a pleasure-seeking dilettante, and Captain Corbett, whose severity can push his crews to the verge of mutiny.

Jane Eyre meets American Psycho Gloriously outrageous, sensationally unhinged' SUNDAY TIMES ‘Simmering with rage, propulsive and laugh-out-loud funny' CATRIONA WARD 'Weird and wonderful' LUCY MANGAN, GUARDIAN

A Best Book of the Year: Vanity Fair, The Boston Globe, The Week, The New Statesman A Must-Read: The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, Marie Claire, Frieze, Literary Hub, The Millions, BBC, Our Culture, i news “Sexy, intelligent . . . biting, too.” —Keziah Weir, Vanity Fair The debut novel by the acclaimed author of Flâneuse and Art Monsters, Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding is a story of Paris, desire, love, psychoanalysis, and the turbulent affairs of two couples across time Paris, 2019

An apartment in Belleville Following a miscarriage and a breakdown, Anna, a psychoanalyst, finds herself unable to return to work Instead, she obsesses over a kitchen renovation and befriends a new neighbor—a younger woman called Clémentine who has just moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective

Paris, 1972 The same apartment in Belleville Florence and Henry are renovating their kitchen She is finishing her degree in psychology, dropping into feminist activities, and devotedly attending the groundbreaking, infamous seminars held by the renowned analyst Jacques Lacan

She is hoping to conceive their first child, though Henry isn’t sure he’s ready for fatherhood Two couples, fifty years apart, face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy They inhabit this same small space in separate but similar times—times charged with political upheaval and intellectual controversy A novel in the key of Éric Rohmer, Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding is about the way our homes collect and hold our memories and our stories, about the bonds we create and the difficulty of ever fully severing them, about the ways all the people we’ve loved live on in us.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 BOOKER PRIZE* *LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD* *LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 PEN FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION* *AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER* *NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2024 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE ATLANTIC, VULTURE, VOGUE, THE WASHINGTON POST, KIRKUS REVIEWS, NPR, THE ECONOMIST, THE CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY, VOX, and more* From Rachel Kushner, two-time finalist for both the Booker Prize and National Book Award, a “vital” (The Washington Post) and “wickedly entertaining” (The Guardian) novel about a seductive and cunning American woman who infiltrates an anarchist collective in France—a propulsive page-turner filled with dark humor Creation Lake is a novel about a secret agent, a thirty-four-year-old American woman of ruthless tactics and clean beauty who is sent to do dirty work in France. “Sadie Smith” is how the narrator introduces herself to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to her lover, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian she has met by “cold bump”—making him believe the encounter was accidental

Like everyone she targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her “contacts”—shadowy figures in business and government—instruct First, these contacts want her to incite provocation Then they want more

In this region of old farms and prehistoric caves, Sadie becomes entranced by a mysterious figure named Bruno Lacombe, a mentor to the young activists who believes that the path to emancipation is not revolt but a return to the ancient past Just as Sadie is certain she’s the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils, Bruno is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story Written in short, vaulting sections, Rachel Kushner’s rendition of “noir” is taut and dazzling Creation Lake is Kushner’s finest achievement yet—a work of high art, high comedy, and unforgettable pleasure.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER One of The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2025 “Probably the most gripping, memorable, eye-opening book I’ve read in months.” —David Wallace-Wells, The New York Times “Propulsive.” —The Washington Post “Engrossing. . . Truly shocking.” —The New Republic “The Fort Bragg Cartel opens like a nonfiction thriller and never lets up A page-turning investigation into the dark side of our forever wars.” —Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ghost Wars and Directorate S A groundbreaking investigation into a string of unsolved murders at America’s premier special operations base, and what the crimes reveal about drug trafficking and impunity among elite soldiers in today’s military In December 2020, a deer hunter discovered two dead bodies that had been riddled with bullets and dumped in a forested corner of Fort Bragg, North Carolina

One of the dead men, Master Sergeant William “Billy” Lavigne, was a member of Delta Force, the most secretive “black ops” unit in the military A deeply traumatized veteran of America’s classified assassination program, Lavigne had done more than a dozen deployments in his lengthy career, was addicted to crack cocaine, dealt drugs on base, and had committed a series of violent crimes before he was mysteriously killed The other victim, Chief Warrant Officer Timothy Dumas, was a quartermaster attached to the Special Forces who used his proximity to clandestine missions to steal guns and traffic drugs into the United States from abroad, and had written a blackmail letter threatening to expose criminality in the special operations task force in Afghanistan

As soon as Seth Harp, an Iraq war veteran and investigative reporter, begins looking into the double murder, he learns that there have been many more unexplained deaths at Fort Bragg recently, other murders connected to drug trafficking in elite units, and dozens of fatal overdoses Drawing on declassified documents, trial transcripts, police records, and hundreds of interviews, Harp tells a scathing story of narco-trafficking in the Special Forces, drug conspiracies abetted by corrupt police, blatant military cover-ups, American complicity in the Afghan heroin trade, and the pernicious consequences of continuous war.

Utterly riveting, Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) is the grand opening of her speculative fiction septology, winner of the 2022 Nordic Council Literature Prize (Scandinavia’s most important literary award) for being “a masterpiece of its time.” A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2024 A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF 2024 SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons

She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin Will she ever be able to share her new life with her beloved and now chronically befuddled husband And on top of her profound isolation and confusion, Tara takes in with pain how slight a difference she makes in the world. (As she puts it: “That’s how little the activities of one person matter on the eighteenth of November.”) Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs

The first volume’s gravitational pull—a force inverse to its constriction—has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating Solvej Balle’s seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects As one Danish reviewer beautifully put it, Balle’s fiction consists of writing that listens. “Reading her is like being caressed by language itself.”

An Economist Best Book of the Year A Financial Times Best Book of the Year A major historian tells the dramatic and untold story of the shadowy networks of revolutionaries across Asia who laid the foundations in the early twentieth century for the end of European imperialism on their continent This is the epic tale of how modern Asia emerged out of conflict between imperial powers and a global network of revolutionaries in the turbulent early decades of the twentieth century

In 1900, European empires had not yet reached their territorial zenith But a new generation of Asian radicals had already planted the seeds of their destruction They gained new energy and recruits after the First World War and especially the Bolshevik Revolution, which sparked utopian visions of a free and communist world order led by the peoples of Asia

Aided by the new technologies of cheap printing presses and international travel, they built clandestine webs of resistance from imperial capitals to the front lines of insurgency that stretched from Calcutta and Bombay to Batavia, Hanoi, and Shanghai Tim Harper takes us into the heart of this shadowy world by following the interconnected lives of the most remarkable of these Marxists, anarchists, and nationalists, including the Bengali radical M N

Roy, the iconic Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, and the enigmatic Indonesian communist Tan Malaka He recreates the extraordinary milieu of stowaways, false identities, secret codes, cheap firearms, and conspiracies in which they worked He shows how they fought with subterfuge, violence, and persuasion, all the while struggling to stay one step ahead of imperial authorities

Underground Asia shows for the first time how Asia’s national liberation movements crucially depended on global action And it reveals how the consequences of the revolutionaries’ struggle, for better or worse, shape Asia’s destiny to this day Previous praise for Tim Harper Praise for Forgotten Wars: “[A] compelling book.”—Philip Delves Broughton, Wall Street Journal “Lucid...majestic.”—Peter Preston, The Observer “Authoritative.”—Pankaj Mishra, New Yorker Praise for Forgotten Armies: “Panoramic.. Vivid.”—Benjamin Schwarz, New York Times Book Review “A spectacular book.”—Martin Jacques, The Guardian

Offering a revision of the understanding of the rise of the American regulatory state in the late 19th century, this book argues that politically mobilised farmers were the driving force behind most of the legislation that increased national control.

The Command of the Ocean describes with unprecedented authority and scholarship the rise of Britain to naval greatness, and the central place of the Navy and naval activity in the life of the nation and government Based on the author's own research in half a dozen languages over nearly a decade, and synthesising a vast quantity of secondary material, it describes not just battles and cruises but how the Navy was manned, how it was supplied with timber, hemp and iron, how its men (and sometimes women) were fed, and above all how it was financed and directed

It was during the century and a half covered by this book that the successful organising of these last three victualling, money and management took the Navy to the heart of the British state It is the great achievement of the book to show how completely integrated and mutually dependent Britain and the Navy then became.

An NYRB Classics Original The trouble begins in Venice, the first stop on Erzsi and Mihály’s honeymoon tour of Italy Here Erzsi discovers that her new husband prefers wandering back alleys on his own to her company The trouble picks up in Ravenna, where a hostile man zooms up on a motorcycle as the couple are sitting at an outdoor café

It’s János, someone Mihály hasn’t seen for years, and he wants Mihály to come with him in search of Ervin, their childhood friend The trouble comes to a head when Mihály misses the train he and Erzsi are due to take to Rome Off he goes across Italy, wandering from city to city, haunted and accosted by a strange array of figures from the troubled youth that he thought he had left behind: There are the charismatic siblings, Éva and Tamás, whose bizarre amateur theatricals linked sex and death forever in his mind; Ervin, a Jew turned Catholic monk who was his rival for Éva’s love; and again, that ruffian on the motorcycle

Antal Szerb’s dreamlike adventure, like Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, is an intoxicating, utterly individual mix of magic, madness, eros, and menace In the words of the critic Nicholas Lezard, “No one who has read it has failed to love it.”

In the age of big data, no company embodies its promise and its perils more than Palantir This software firm sells some of the most powerful and dangerous technology in the world, ingesting huge quantities of data and spotting patterns, trends, and connections that would likely elude most people Apart from Facebook, you'd be hard-pressed to find another tech company that's making as big of a splash - or fraught with more potential pitfalls

Founded in 2003 to help the US government in the war on terror, Palantir now has more than thirty federal agencies as clients From climate change and terrorism to poverty to immigration, money laundering, and the future of warfare, Palantir is at the nexus of the most critical issues of the 21st century At its helm is cofounder and CEO Alex Karp, an atypical tech boss with a law degree from Stanford and a doctorate in social theory from Germany's Goethe University, yet no background in either computer science or business

Now, in The Philosopher in the Valley, journalist Michael Steinberger delves deeply into Karp and the company he's leading, highlighting the risks to privacy and civil liberties that come with big data Can we get the good without the bad and if not, what are the trade-offs Karp's unique political and philosophical views put him and the company at odds with fellow cofounder Peter Thiel, a big supporter of Donald Trump in Silicon Valley

The technology they created has the potential to shape the global power dynamic and the way individuals interact with governments Urgent and important, this illuminating work shows us what this future might look like.

From Neanderthal string to 3D knitting, an "expansive" global history that highlights "how textiles truly changed the world" (Wall Street Journal) The story of humanity is the story of textiles--as old as civilization itself Since the first thread was spun, the need for textiles has driven technology, business, politics, and culture In The Fabric of Civilization, Virginia Postrel synthesizes groundbreaking research from archaeology, economics, and science to reveal a surprising history

From Minoans exporting wool colored with precious purple dye to Egypt, to Romans arrayed in costly Chinese silk, the cloth trade paved the crossroads of the ancient world Textiles funded the Renaissance and the Mughal Empire; they gave us banks and bookkeeping, Michelangelo's David and the Taj Mahal The cloth business spread the alphabet and arithmetic, propelled chemical research, and taught people to think in binary code Assiduously researched and deftly narrated, The Fabric of Civilization tells the story of the world's most influential commodity. "We are taken on a journey as epic, and varying, as the Silk Road itself.... [The Fabric of Civilization is] like a swatch of a Florentine Renaissance brocade: carefully woven, the technique precise, the colors a mix of shade and shine and an accurate representation of the whole cloth." --New York Times "Textile-making hasn't gotten enough credit for its own sophistication, and for all the ways it undergirds human technological innovation--an error Virginia Postrel's erudite and complete book goes a long way toward correcting at last." --Wired

In this, his most accessible and evocative book, France’s leading philosopher of postmodernism takes to the freeways in a collection of traveler’s tales from the land of hyperreality.

The development of the energy concept in Western physics and its subsequent effect on the emergence of neoclassical economics are traced to reveal how economics has sought to emulate physics, especially with regard to the theory of value.

The Last Days of Budapest tells the powerful story of one of the least-known but most important episodes of the Second World War: life and death in the Hungarian capital from autumn 1940 to early 1945, a gripping story of spies, fanaticism, genocide and military disaster.

THE RUNAWAY NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER & ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2025 A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOK OF 2025 ALSO NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2025 BY NPR, VOGUE, TIME MAGAZINE, THE NEW YORKER, AND MORE “This is nonfiction that reads like fiction – the best kind Elmhirst’s retelling is a triumph, second only to the seemingly impossible feat of Maurice and Maralyn themselves You won’t be able to put it down.” – USA Today “Remarkable… I found myself, alternately, holding my breath as I read at top speed, wandering rooms in search of someone to read aloud to, and placing the book facedown, arrested by quiet statements that left me reeling with their depth.” – The New York Times “Such an emotionally vivid portrait of a couple in isolation that I was shocked it wasn’t fiction

How could a writer get so deeply into the minds of two real people in such extraordinary circumstances? … So brilliantly depicted.” – Elle “A beautiful meditation on endurance, codependence, and the power of love A dazzling book.” – Patrick Radden Keefe “An enthralling, engrossing story of survival and the resilience of the human spirit.” —Bill Bryson An instant New York Times bestseller, this is the electrifying true story of a young couple shipwrecked at sea: a mind-blowing tale of obsession, survival, and partnership stretched to its limits

Maurice and Maralyn make an odd couple He’s a loner, awkward and obsessive; she’s charismatic and ambitious But they share a horror of wasting their lives And they dream – as we all dream – of running away from it all

What if they quit their jobs, sold their house, bought a boat, and sailed away Most of us begin and end with the daydream But in June 1972, Maurice and Maralyn set sail For nearly a year all went well, until deep in the Pacific, a breaching whale knocked a hole in their boat and it sank beneath the waves

What ensues is a jaw-dropping fight to survive in the wild ocean, with little hope of rescue Alone together for months in a tiny rubber raft, starving and exhausted, Maurice and Maralyn have to find not only ways to stay alive but ways to get along, as their inner demons emerge and their marriage is put to the greatest of tests Although they could run away from the world, they can’t run away from themselves Taut, propulsive, and dazzling, A Marriage at Sea pairs an adrenaline-fueled high seas adventure with a gutting love story that asks why we love difficult people, and who we become under the most extreme conditions imaginable.

The Thousand-Mile War is a powerful story of the battles of the United States and Japan on the bitter rim of the North Pacific, that has been acclaimed as one of the great accounts of World War II Author Brian Garfield, a novelist and screenwriter whose works have sold some 20 million copies, was searching for a new story when he came upon this "forgotten war" in Alaska He found the history of the brave men who had served in the Aleutians so compelling that he wrote the first full-length history of the Aleutian campaign

The book remains a favorite among Alaskans and WWII history buffs The war in the Aleutians was fought in some of the worst climatic conditions on earth for men, ships, and airplanes The sea was rough, the islands craggy and unwelcoming, but the most fearful enemy was the weather—the savage wind, fog, and rain of the Aleutian chain

The fog seemed to reach even into the minds of the military commanders on both sides, as they directed their men into situations with often had tragic results Frustrating, befuddling, and still the subject of debate, the Aleutian campaign nevertheless marked an important turn of the war in favor of the United States More than half a century after the war ended, more of the fog has been lifted In this updated edition, Garfield supplements his original account drawn from statistics, personal interviews, letters, and diaries, with more recently declassified photographs and significant additional illustrations.

By the author of the acclaimed bestseller The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, a "brilliant" and "beautifully told" new history of mammals, illuminating the lost story of the extraordinary family tree that led to us [New Scientist; The Times UK] National Bestseller • Top 10 Nonfiction of the Year: Kirkus • Best Science Book of the Year: The Times UK We humans are the inheritors of a dynasty that has reigned over the planet for nearly 66 million years, through fiery cataclysm and ice ages: the mammals Our lineage includes saber-toothed tigers, woolly mammoths, armadillos the size of a car, cave bears three times the weight of a grizzly, clever scurriers that outlasted Tyrannosaurus rex, and even other types of humans, like Neanderthals

Indeed humankind and many of the beloved fellow mammals we share the planet with today—lions, whales, dogs—represent only the few survivors of a sprawling and astonishing family tree that has been pruned by time and mass extinctions How did we get here In his acclaimed bestseller The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs—hailed as “the ultimate dinosaur biography” by Scientific American—American paleontologist Steve Brusatte enchanted readers with his definitive history of the dinosaurs

Now, picking up the narrative in the ashes of the extinction event that doomed T-rex and its kind, Brusatte explores the remarkable story of the family of animals that inherited the Earth—mammals— and brilliantly reveals that their story is every bit as fascinating and complex as that of the dinosaurs Beginning with the earliest days of our lineage some 325 million years ago, Brusatte charts how mammals survived the asteroid that claimed the dinosaurs and made the world their own, becoming the astonishingly diverse range of animals that dominate today’s Earth

Brusatte also brings alive the lost worlds mammals inhabited through time, from ice ages to volcanic catastrophes Entwined in this story is the detective work he and other scientists have done to piece together our understanding using fossil clues and cutting-edge technology A sterling example of scientific storytelling by one of our finest young researchers, The Rise and Reign of the Mammals illustrates how this incredible history laid the foundation for today’s world, for us, and our future.

"One of the most important books written on the American West in many years." - True West Magazine From the New York Times bestselling author of The Big Rich and Forget the Alamo comes an epic reconsideration of the time and place that spawned America’s most legendary gunfighters, from Jesse James and Billy the Kid to Butch and Sundance The “Wild West” gunfighter is such a stock figure in our popular culture that some dismiss it all as a corny myth, more a product of dime novels and B movies than a genuinely important American history In fact, as Bryan Burrough shows us in his dazzling and fast-paced new book, there’s much more below the surface

For three decades at the end of the 1800s, a big swath of the American West was a crucible of change, with the highest murder rate per capita in American history The reasons behind this boil down to one word: Texas Texas was born in violence, on two fronts, with Mexico to the south and the Comanche to the north

The Colt revolver first caught on with the Texas Rangers Southern dueling culture transformed into something wilder and less organized in the Lone Star State The collapse of the Confederacy and the presence of a thin veneer of Northern occupiers turned the heat up further And the explosion in the cattle business after the war took that violence and pumped it out from Texas across the whole of the West

The stampede of longhorn cattle brought with it an assortment of rustlers, hustlers, gamblers, and freelance lawmen who carried a trigger-happy honor culture into a widening gyre, a veritable blood meridian When the first newspapermen and audiences discovered what good copy this all was, the flywheel of mythmaking started spinning It’s never stopped

The Gunfighters brilliantly sifts the lies from the truth, giving both elements their due And the truth is sufficiently wild for any but the most unhinged tastes All the legendary figures are here, and their escapades are told with great flair—good, bad, and ugly Like all great stories, this one has a rousing end—as the railroads and the settlers close off the open spaces for good, the last of the breed, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, really do get on a boat for South America, ending their era in a blaze of glory

Burrough knits these histories together into something much deeper and more provocative than simply the sum of its parts To understand the truth of the Wild West is to understand a crucial dimension of the American story.

A study reconstructed through a wide range of ancient sources, from histories to documentary papyri and inscriptions to archaeological finds The Ptolemaic Dynasty ruled Egypt and much of the eastern Mediterranean basin for nearly 300 years As a Macedonian dynasty, they derived much of their legitimacy from military activity

As an Egyptian dynasty, they derived much of their real wealth and power from maintaining a secure hold on their new homeland As lords of a far-flung empire, they maintained much of their authority through garrisons and the threat of military action To achieve this they devoted much of their activity to the development and maintenance of a large army and navy

This work focuses on the period of the first four Ptolemies, from the acquisition of Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great to the great battle of Raphia more than a century later It offers a study of the Ptolemaic army as an institution, and of its military operations, both reconstructed through a wide range of ancient sources, from histories to documentary papyri and inscriptions to archaeological finds It examines the reasons for Ptolemaic successes and failures, the causes and nature of military change and reform, and the particular details of the Ptolemaic army's soldier classes, unit organization, equipment, tactics, and the Ptolemaic state's strategy to compile a military history of the golden age of one of the classical world's significant forces.

Fifth Sun offers a comprehensive history of the Aztecs, spanning the period before conquest to a century after the conquest, based on rarely-used Nahuatl-language sources written by the indigenous people.

An Economist Best Book of 2025 A Financial Times Best Book of 2025 A Sunday Times Best Book of 2025 "Hu Anyan’s I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, translated by Jack Hargreaves, offers an unvarnished dispatch from the front lines of the gig economy...The Cinderella bit of it is that now he can add a new title: internationally best-selling author." —Leah Greenblatt, The New York Times Book Review A runaway bestseller in China, sold in 20+ countries, this delightfully honest and humorous account gives a face and voice to the future of work—as if Nomadland met Nickel and Dimed In 2023, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing became the literary sensation of the year in China

Hu Anyan’s story, about short-term jobs in various anonymous megacities, hit a nerve with a generation of young people who feel at odds with an ever-growing pressure to perform and succeed Hu started posting essays about his experiences online during COVID lockdowns His recollection of night shifts in a huge logistics center in the south of China went viral: his nights were so hot that he could drink three liters of water without taking a toilet break; his days were spent searching for affordable rooms with proper air-conditioning; and his few moments of leisure were consumed by calculations of the amount of alcohol needed to sleep but not feel drowsy a few hours later

Hu Anyan tells us about brutal work, where there is no real future in sight But Hu is armed with deadpan humor and a strong idea of self He moves on when he feels stuck—from logistics in the south, to parcel delivery in Beijing, to other impossible jobs Along the way, he turns to reading and writing for strength and companionship I Deliver Parcels in Beijing is an honest and startling first-person portrait of Hu Anyan's struggle against the dehumanizing nature of our contemporary global work system—and his discovery of the power of sharing a story.

Highlighting the critical role of midwestern farmers in the creation of the American Century Though often left out of the story of the making of the American Century, the farmers of the Midwest were at its center, fueling the nation’s growing power in the midtwentieth century In Global Heartland, Peter Simons explores how, after decades of slipping to the margins of an urbanizing economy, these farmers assumed renewed strategic and cultural importance as they produced essential sustenance for overseas troops and food rations for a domestic population

During the mid-1900s, once-isolationist midwestern farmers came to see the continental interior not as an insulated space but as an environmentally rich landscape that mandated them to accept a larger stake in global affairs Simons traces this transformation from an older agrarian internationalism rooted in religion and ties to family abroad to illuminate the increasing influence of the U.S. agricultural community during the Cold War Examining regional political parties, Lend-Lease programs, wartime mass media, and farmer-led relief programs, and interspersing this history with vignettes revisiting the Mercy Wheat campaign of 1947, the postwar International Farm Youth Exchange, and the Flying Farmers organization, Simons offers an enlightening consideration of midwestern farmers’ involvement in America’s international ascent Unique in its focus on farmers and their work rather than the more common attention to food or agricultural commodities, Global Heartland complicates and expands ideas of the farm industry’s role in American history.

In Darfur: The Long Road to Disaster, Burr and Collins have updated their original 1999 volume with additional chapters The new title is not a publisher's gimmick: this is indeed the prehistory of Darfur's tragedy, and it is essential, if difficult, reading for any serious student of the crisis.. Not only does it provide an account of a history indispensable for understanding Darfur, but it is a salutary reminder of how intractable conflicts in the Chad basin can be. --African Studies Review Millard Burr and Robert Collins' book documents the twists and turns in this long-running saga...

This edition brings the story almost up to date. - Times Higher Education Supplement A lively and informative study.. The authors consider ethnic, religious, cultural, technological, geographic, and meteorological variables and present brief enlightening political portraits of the stories' protagonists. - Foreign Affairs Review a timely, useful contribution... well documented and lucidly written. - International Journal of Middle East Studie

From an acclaimed historian comes an epic tale of power and betrayal: the dual biography of Richard II and Henry IV, two cousins whose tumultuous reigns shaped the course of English history Richard of Bordeaux and Henry of Bolingbroke, cousins born just three months apart, were ten years old when Richard became king of England They were thirty-two when Henry deposed him and became king in his place

Now, the story behind one of the strangest and most fateful events in English history (and the inspiration behind Shakespeare’s most celebrated history plays) is brought to vivid life by the acclaimed author of Blood and Roses, Helen Castor Castor showcases the enigmatic Richard II, a king who clung to his divine right to rule but lacked the leadership to sustain his throne His reign, marred by narcissism and disdain for constitutional principles, spiraled into chaos, ultimately leading to his downfall at the hands of his cousin

Enter Henry IV—a stark contrast Castor portrays him as a chivalric hero, a leader who inspired loyalty and camaraderie Yet, his journey to the throne was anything but smooth, plagued by rebellion and political turmoil What makes Castor’s account so compelling is her ability to weave these personal stories into the bigger picture

She explores the turbulent themes of masculinity, identity, and the fragile nature of power, offering a timely reminder of the perils of self-obsessed rulers—and the challenges faced by those who follow in their wake Richly researched and beautifully written, The Eagle and the Hart isn’t just a history book—it’s a gripping tale of leadership, legacy, and the timeless struggle for power For anyone fascinated by medieval England or the universal dynamics of power and ambition, this is not to be missed.

The American West, blessed with an abundance of earth and sky but cursed with a scarcity of life's most fundamental need, has long dreamed of harnessing all its rivers to produce unlimited wealth and power In Rivers of Empire, award-winning historian Donald Worster tells the story of this dream and its outcome He shows how, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Mormons were the first attempting to make that dream a reality, damming and diverting rivers to irrigate their land

He follows this intriguing history through the 1930s, when the federal government built hundreds of dams on every major western river, thereby laying the foundation for the cities and farms, money and power of today's West Yet while these cities have become paradigms of modern American urban centers, and the farms successful high-tech enterprises, Worster reminds us that the costs have been extremely high Along with the wealth has come massive ecological damage, a redistribution of power to bureaucratic and economic elites, and a class conflict still on the upswing As a result, the future of this "hydraulic West" is increasingly uncertain, as water continues to be a scarce resource, inadequate to the demand, and declining in quality.

How competing visions of world order in the 1940s gave rise to the modern concept of globalism During and after the Second World War, public intellectuals in Britain and the United States grappled with concerns about the future of democracy, the prospects of liberty, and the decline of the imperial system Without using the term "globalization," they identified a shift toward technological, economic, cultural, and political interconnectedness and developed a "globalist" ideology to reflect this new postwar reality

The Emergence of Globalism examines the competing visions of world order that shaped these debates and led to the development of globalism as a modern political concept Shedding critical light on this neglected chapter in the history of political thought, Or Rosenboim describes how a transnational network of globalist thinkers emerged from the traumas of war and expatriation in the 1940s and how their ideas drew widely from political philosophy, geopolitics, economics, imperial thought, constitutional law, theology, and philosophy of science

She presents compelling portraits of Raymond Aron, Owen Lattimore, Lionel Robbins, Barbara Wootton, Friedrich Hayek, Lionel Curtis, Richard McKeon, Michael Polanyi, Lewis Mumford, Jacques Maritain, Reinhold Niebuhr, H G Wells, and others Rosenboim shows how the globalist debate they embarked on sought to balance the tensions between a growing recognition of pluralism on the one hand and an appreciation of the unity of humankind on the other An engaging look at the ideas that have shaped today's world, The Emergence of Globalism is a major work of intellectual history that is certain to fundamentally transform our understanding of the globalist ideal and its origins.

Interweaving literature, history, and religion, an exquisite meditation on the turning of the seasons in medieval England—now in paperback Winters in the World is a beautifully observed journey through the cycle of the year in Anglo-Saxon England, exploring the festivals, customs, and traditions linked to the different seasons

Drawing on a wide variety of source material, including poetry, histories, and religious literature, Eleanor Parker investigates how Anglo-Saxons felt about the annual passing of the seasons and the profound relationship they saw between human life and the rhythms of nature Many of the festivals celebrated in the United Kingdom today have their roots in the Anglo-Saxon period, and this book traces their surprising history while unearthing traditions now long forgotten It celebrates some of the finest treasures of medieval literature and provides an imaginative connection to the Anglo-Saxon world.

The Death of the French Atlantic examines the sudden and irreversible decline of France's Atlantic empire in the Age of Revolution, and shows how three major forces undermined the country's competitive position as an Atlantic commercial power The first was war, especially war at sea against France's most consistent enemy and commercial rival in the eighteenth century, Great Britain A series of colonial wars, from the Seven Years' War and the War of American Independence to the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars did much to drive France out of the North Atlantic

The second was anti-slavery and the rise of a new moral conscience which challenged the right of Europeans to own slaves or to sacrifice the freedom of others to pursue national economic advantage The third was the French Revolution itself, which not only raised French hopes of achieving the Rights of Man for its own citizens but also sowed the seeds of insurrection in the slave societies of the New World, leading to the loss of Saint-Domingue and the creation of the first black republic in Haiti at the beginning of the nineteenth century

This proved critical to the economy of the French Caribbean, driving both colons and slaves from Saint-Domingue to seek shelter across the Atlantic world, and leaving a bitter legacy in the French Caribbean It has also created an uneasy memory of the slave trade in French ports like Nantes, La Rochelle, and Bordeaux, and has left an indelible mark on race relations in France today.

A brilliant foray into the nature of information, of history, and of making meaning in the face of death and decay Our lives are collections of information—from mundane official documents, poignant family photos, and random artifacts to the cues embodied in our genes Never is this more evident than in the wake of a parent’s death

Yet from all these elusive, even evanescent, data points, history is written and a future is made This information is stored on clay tablets and wood pulp; in vinyl grooves, compact discs, and magnetic patterns; and relayed over undersea cables and satellite cell networks But all information decays Everything that we put “in formation” eventually collapses into randomness

In this wide–ranging examination of the micro and macro, world–renowned scholar Thomas S Mullaney reflects on the deaths of his parents, and on how human lives “disappear.” Lyrical and poignant, his erudite, inspiring meditation offers eye–opening insight on the miracle of existence, and on what it means to forge meaning from a chaotic universe.

This first truly global history of the suppression of piracy links maritime raiding to empire building in the nineteenth century In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, imperial powers around the world came into direct confrontation with local resistance in the form of maritime raiding From the Atlantic basin to the western Mediterranean Sea, the Persian Gulf and the east coast of Africa, and Southeast Asia and China, imperial powers claimed that progress was being held back by the barbarity and greed of pirates, who repeatedly attacked imperial vessels

The suppression of piracy, justified under the banner of spreading civilization and free trade and abolishing slavery and the slave trade, provided both western and non-western powers with a back door for territorial expansion and the enforcement of imperialist agendas Historian Manuel Barcia tells the story of these conflicts, showing how imperialist powers frequently used anti–maritime raiding efforts as excuses to cement western supremacy in various parts of the world, while simultaneously resorting to violent means that were indistinguishable from the methods of those they accused of being pirates.

“A damn good read.”—Alan Furst A brilliant debut novel, at once teasing literary thriller and a darkly comic blend of history and invention, The Torqued Man is set in wartime Berlin and propelled by two very different but equally mesmerizing voices: a German spy handler and his Irish secret agent, neither of whom are quite what they seem Berlin—September, 1945 Two manuscripts are found in rubble, each one narrating conflicting versions of the life of an Irish spy during the war

One of them is the journal of a German military intelligence officer and an anti-Nazi cowed into silence named Adrian de Groot, charting his relationship with his agent, friend, and sometimes lover, an Irishman named Frank Pike In De Groot’s narrative, Pike is a charismatic IRA fighter sprung from prison in Spain to assist with the planned German invasion of Britain, but who never gets the chance to consummate his deal with the devil

Meanwhile, the other manuscript gives a very different account of the Irishman’s doings in the Reich Assuming the alter ego of the Celtic hero Finn McCool, Pike appears here as the ultimate Allied saboteur His mission: an assassination campaign of high-ranking Nazi doctors, culminating in the killing of Hitler’s personal physician The two manuscripts spiral around each other, leaving only the reader to know the full truth of Pike and De Groot’s relationship, their ultimate loyalties, and their efforts to resist the fascist reality in which they are caught.

Father Damien Karras: 'Where is Regan'Regan MacNeil: 'In here With us'.The terror begins unobtrusively Noises in Regan's room, an odd smell, the displacement of furniture, an icy chill Easy explanations are offered Then frightening changes start in

The Electrification of Russia, 1880–1926 is the first full account of the widespread adoption of electricity in Russia, from the beginning in the 1880s to its early years as a state technology under Soviet rule Jonathan Coopersmith has mined the archives for both the tsarist and the Soviet periods to examine a crucial element in the modernization of Russia Coopersmith shows how the Communist Party forged an alliance with engineers to harness the socially transformative power of this science-based enterprise

A centralized plan of electrification triumphed, to the benefit of the Communist Party and the detriment of local governments and the electrical engineers Coopersmith’s narrative of how this came to be elucidates the deep-seated and chronic conflict between the utopianism of Soviet ideology and the reality of Soviet politics and economics.

Trilling is concerned with the process by which the arduous enterprise of sincerity, of being true to one’s self, came to occupy a place of supreme importance in the moral life—and the further shift which finds that place now usurped by the darker and still more strenuous modern ideal of authenticity.

The rollicking saga of reality television, a “sweeping” (The Washington Post) cultural history of America’s most influential, most divisive artistic phenomenon, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning New Yorker writer—“a must-read for anyone interested in television or popular culture” (NPR) “Passionate, exquisitely told . . With muscular prose and an exacting eye for detail . . . [Nussbaum] knits her talents for sharp analysis and telling reportage well.”—The New York Times (Editors’ Choice) In development as a docuseries from the studio behind Spencer and Spotlight ONE OF THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE AND THE CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY’S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Boston Globe FINALIST FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTION Who invented reality television, the world’s most dangerous pop-culture genre

And why can’t we look away In this revelatory, deeply reported account of the rise of “dirty documentary”—from its contentious roots in radio to the ascent of Donald Trump—Emily Nussbaum unearths the origin story of the genre that ate the world, as told through the lively voices of the people who built it At once gimlet-eyed and empathetic, Cue the Sun! explores the morally charged, funny, and sometimes tragic consequences of the hunt for something real inside something fake

In sharp, absorbing prose, Nussbaum traces the jagged fuses of experimentation that exploded with Survivor at the turn of the millennium She introduces the genre’s trickster pioneers, from the icy Allen Funt to the shambolic Chuck Barris; Cops auteur John Langley; cynical Bachelor ringmaster Mike Fleiss; and Jon Murray and Mary-Ellis Bunim, the visionaries behind The Real World—along with dozens of stars from An American Family, The Real World, Big Brother, Survivor, and The Bachelor

We learn about the tools of the trade—like the Frankenbite, a deceptive editor’s best friend—and ugly tales of exploitation But Cue the Sun! also celebrates reality’s peculiar power: a jolt of emotion that could never have come from a script What happened to the first reality stars, the Louds—and why won’t they speak to the couple who filmed them

Which serial killer won on The Dating Game Nussbaum explores reality TV as a strike-breaker, the queer roots of Bravo, the dark truth behind The Apprentice, and more A shrewd observer who adores television, Nussbaum is the ideal voice for the first substantive history of the genre that, for better or worse, made America what it is today.

This Open Access book marks the beginning of a new era in the study of Chinese history Since the beginning of the computer age, quantitative techniques have been increasingly used to study specific topics like family, population, and living standards in China's past

However, sample sizes have usually been small due to either historical archives' availability constraints or limited human processing capacity With much increased computing power and machine-assisted reading/processing capacity, many big historical databases have become available, offering quantitative historians and social scientists great opportunities to study China's past development experience This volume showcases a collection of new findings concerning China's political, social, and economic history and typically based on newly constructed large historical datasets

Most of the work has involved an interdisciplinary team of economists, sociologists, political scientists, historians and econometricians, demonstrating how new big data and quantitative methods may be brought to bear on some of the biggest questions related to China's development over the past three millennia and on the implications of distant past events on contemporary China Topics covered range from the roles of war, state formation, religion, culture, finance and institutions in long-run development and technological innovations, to regicide history, to the organization and capacity of the bureaucracy

Contributors include leading figures in the quantitative study of China's long-run socioeconomic and political history This volume will be of value to anyone with an interest in Chinese economic, political, social and/or institutional history as well as anyone interested in quantitative history more generally.

Named a Best Book of the Year by TheTimes (London) As told by one of our greatest historians, the story of the scandal that took down two Lutheran preachers in the heart of nineteenth-century Prussia—a chamber piece of cultish esotericism, pseudoscience, and political resistance that conjures up Europe at the end of the age of reason and presages our current age of misinformation In 1835, Johannes Ebel and Georg Heinrich Diestel were tried for having started a cult Worse: It was a cult that encouraged scandalous sexual behavior in women, including the daughters of prestigious Prussian families—causing the deaths of two young women from sexual exhaustion

The trial would absorb and polarize the city of Königsberg for half a decade and ruin the lives and careers of its defendants, despite their eventual legal exoneration The historical moment it encapsulates—a Europe reeling from the triumph and horror of a new industrial, imperial era, struggling to decide which principles will reign in the aftermath of Enlightenment reason—is a fable for our present time of political, social, and existential disquiet

The great Cambridge historian Christopher Clark—known for The Sleepwalkers, his monumental, defining study of the causes of the First World War—came across the files containing this story three decades ago; it has been swirling in his mind ever since In gripping, narrative prose, Clark immerses us in a Königsberg scarred by the horrors of the Napoleonic Wars, where Immanuel Kant had recently inaugurated the theory of consciousness that completely reshaped humanity’s understanding of itself—but where the distinction between reason and fanaticism was now up for grabs

A Scandal in Königsberg is a European history in exquisite miniature—and a peerless lesson in the theological and philosophical debates that animated the Western world at one of its great moments of transformation Rich and provocative, A Scandal in Königsberg articulates an unsettling antecedent for our most fiercely litigated contemporary questions of sexual identity, freedom of thought, and who gets to decide what constitutes the truth.

A compelling, necessary, and timely investigation into the diagnosis crisis in the American healthcare system, from the patients living with undiagnosed illnesses, to the doctors searching for answers, and what their quests reveal about our flawed medical system An estimated tens of millions of Americans live with conditions that elude diagnosis, often navigating a healthcare system that fails to recognize or effectively address their suffering Journalist Alexandra Sifferlin has spent years investigating the diagnosis crisis in America—what it means to live without a diagnosis and how both medical and patient communities are working to improve the diagnostic process

The National Institute of Health’s Undiagnosed Diseases Network, a series of clinics of last resort where physicians work tirelessly to solve some of medicine’s most confounding cases, is at the forefront of change, showing what’s possible when healthcare providers and scientists are freed from the bureaucracy of a system beholden to insurance companies, and encouraged to work together with the aim of solving some of medicine’s most perplexing mysteries A correct diagnosis is more than a label; it’s a lifeline that opens doors to treatment options, financial support, and an understanding community Weaving the profound, maddening, and uplifting stories of patients seeking answers to unexplainable symptoms, the doctors trying to help them, and the latest research on diagnosis, The Elusive Body illuminates the diagnostic journey, revealing why diagnoses matter and how they have the power to transform lives, the medical system, and even society, one case at a time.

Ranging with authority from the Talmud to Maimonides, from Marx to Nietzsche and on to G.E Moore, this account of a subject central to our culture also has much to say about metaphor, myth, and the application of philosophical analysis to religious concepts and sensibilities.

Two copies in Circulation.

How did modern territoriality emerge and what are its consequences This book examines these key questions with a unique global perspective Kerry Goettlich argues that linear boundaries are products of particular colonial encounters, rather than being essentially an intra-European practice artificially imposed on colonized regions

He reconceptualizes modern territoriality as a phenomenon separate from sovereignty and the state, based on expert practices of delimitation and demarcation Its history stems from the social production of expertise oriented towards these practices Employing both primary and secondary sources, From Frontiers to Borders examines how this expertise emerged in settler colonies in North America and in British India - cases which illuminate a range of different types of colonial rule and influence It also explores some of the consequences of the globalization of modern territoriality, exposing the colonial origins of Boundary Studies, and the impact of boundary experts on the Paris Peace Conference of 1919-20.

Hubert Humphrey, a fallen hero and a dying man, rose on rickety legs to approach the podium of the Philadelphia Convention Hall, his pulpit for the commencement address at the University of Pennsylvania He clutched a sheaf of paper with his speech for the occasion, typed and double-spaced by an assistant from his extemporaneous dictation, and then marked up in pencil by Humphrey himself A note on the first page, circled to draw particular attention, read simply, "30 years ago--Here." In this place, at that time, twenty-nine years earlier to be precise, he had made history

From the dais now, Humphrey beheld five thousand impending graduates, an ebony sea of gowns and mortarboards, broken by one iconoclast in a homemade crown, two in ribboned bonnets, and another whose headgear bore the masking-tape message HI MA PA In the horseshoe curve of the arena's double balcony loomed eight thousand parents and siblings, children, and friends Wearing shirtsleeves and cotton shifts amid the stale heat, they looked like pale confetti from where Humphrey stood, and their flash cameras flickered away, a constellation of pinpricks"--

A sweeping, resonant, revelatory history of how the expropriation of property made the modern world, by a brilliant young historian Expropriation – the forced transfer of property rights – is usually associated with dictators, unstable countries, and violent revolution But in fact, it has been integral to the political and economic history of the West, enabling everything from the abolition of serfdom and slavery to decolonization, Allied victory in two world wars and the birth of the modern welfare state

For better and for worse, much of our modern world was built through coercive acquisition of property In this groundbreaking international history of expropriation, Nicholas Mulder charts a gripping course from the eighteenth century to the present, ranging from the French Revolution to the Russo-Ukrainian War, from colonial companies to railway empires, from sales of church land to oil nationalizations, and from the confiscation of patents to asset freezing in the Eurodollar market

He shows how all kinds of political movements – liberal and nationalist, socialist and fascist, imperialist and anticolonial – both dissolved and redistributed property rights Successful state-building did not depend on extinguishing the confiscatory state, but on capitalists mastering its powers and redeploying them for their own purposes

Drawing on a vast range of sources and data across history, politics, and economics, Mulder unfolds a bold revisionist history of how property was made and unmade, transferred and converted, stolen and restored The Age of Confiscation reveals how much expropriation has been part of our recent past, and how amid rising geopolitical competition, growing inequality, and climate change, it will mark our future.

The bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea, Mayflower, and In the Hurricane's Eye tells the story of the Boston battle that ignited the American Revolution, in this "masterpiece of narrative and perspective." (Boston Globe) In the opening volume of his acclaimed American Revolution series, Nathaniel Philbrick turns his keen eye to pre-Revolutionary Boston and the spark that ignited the American Revolution In the aftermath of the Boston Tea Party and the violence at Lexington and Concord, the conflict escalated and skirmishes gave way to outright war in the Battle of Bunker Hill

It was the bloodiest conflict of the revolutionary war, and the point of no return for the rebellious colonists Philbrick gives us a fresh view of the story and its dynamic personalities, including John Adams, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere, and George Washington With passion and insight, he reconstructs the revolutionary landscape—geographic and ideological—in a mesmerizing narrative of the robust, messy, blisteringly real origins of America.

The Russian master's most infamous novel, a dystopian fever dream about cloning, alternative histories, and world domination Blue Lard is an act of desecration Blue Lard is what's left after the towering masterpieces of Russian literature have been blown to smithereens, the most graphic, shocking, controversial, and celebrated book to be published in Russia since the end of Communism

Denounced as an abomination on publication in 1999—a crowd of angry Putin supporters gathered in front of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater to toss shredded copies of Sorokin’s books into an enormous papier-mâché toilet—this ferocious takedown of Russian greatness has since found its way into the canon of Russian literature itself The book begins in a futuristic laboratory where genetic scientists speak in a dialect of Russian mixed with Chinese There they work to clone famous Russian writers, who are then made to produce texts in the style of their forebears

The goal of this “script-process” is not the texts themselves but the blue lard that collects in the small of their backs as they write This substance is to be used to power reactors on the moon—that is, until a sect of devout nationalists breaks in to steal the blue lard, planning to send it back in time to an alternate version of the Soviet Union, one that exists on the margins of a Europe conquered by a long-haired Hitler with the ability to shoot electricity from his hands

What will come of this blue lard Who will finally make use of its mysterious powers Max Lawton’s translation of Blue Lard, the first into English, captures this key work in all its grotesque, havoc-making, horrifying, visceral intensity.

A thrilling exposé recounting how members of Opus Dei—a secretive, ultra-conservative Catholic sect—pushed its radical agenda within the Church and around the globe, using billions of dollars siphoned from one of the world’s largest banks For over half a century, Banco Popular was one of the most profitable banks in the world—until one day, in 2017, when the Spanish bank suddenly collapsed overnight When investigative journalist Gareth Gore was dispatched to report on the story, he expected to find yet another case of unbridled capitalist ambition gone wrong

Instead, he uncovered decades of deception that hid one of the most brazen cases of corporate pillaging in history, perpetrated by a group of men sworn to celibacy and self-flagellation who had secretly controlled Popular and abused their positions there to help spread Opus Dei to every corner of the world Drawing on unparalleled access to bank records, insider accounts, and exclusive interviews with whistle-blowers from within Opus Dei, Gore reveals how money from the bank was used to lure unsuspecting recruits—some of them only children—into a life of servitude

He also tracks the ascent of Opus Dei within the United States, exposing its role in bankrolling many right-wing causes, including the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade In an era of disinformation and deep fakes, here is a real-life conspiracy which hid in plain sight for more than sixty years

Gore tells a shocking story of money and power that spans decades and continents Documenting Opus Dei’s secret history for the first time, this thrilling work of investigative storytelling raises important questions about the dark forces that shape our society.

In 1978, Ed Koch assumed control of a city plagued by filth, crime, bankruptcy, and racial tensions By the end of his mayoral run in 1989 and despite the Wall Street crash of 1987, his administration had begun rebuilding neighborhoods and infrastructure Unlike many American cities, Koch's New York was growing, not shrinking

Gentrification brought new businesses to neglected corners and converted low-end rental housing to coops and condos Nevertheless, not all the changes were positive--AIDS, crime, homelessness, and violent racial conflict increased, marking a time of great, if somewhat uneven, transition For better or worse, Koch's efforts convinced many New Yorkers to embrace a new political order subsidizing business, particularly finance, insurance, and real estate, and privatizing public space

Each phase of the city's recovery required a difficult choice between moneyed interests and social services, forcing Koch to be both a moderate and a pragmatist as he tried to mitigate growing economic inequality Throughout, Koch's rough rhetoric (attacking his opponents as "crazy," "wackos," and "radicals") prompted charges of being racially divisive The first book to recast Koch's legacy through personal and mayoral papers, authorized interviews, and oral histories, this volume plots a history of New York City through two rarely studied yet crucial decades: the bankruptcy of the 1970s and the recovery and crash of the 1980s.

The long-held view of the peasantry as a passive social group has gradually been replaced by a positive narrative that stresses peasant agency in economic, social, and even political terms Contributing to this shift, Luis Almenar Fernández explores the objects that peasants used to store, cook, and serve their food in late medieval Valencia

Drawing on a range of archival, visual, material, and literary evidence from c. 1280 to c. 1460, the book examines the materiality of food to shed light on the consumer behaviour of agriculturalists during pivotal economic, social, and material transformation It builds on discussions about changes in living standards, consumption patterns, and material culture in pre-industrial European societies The materiality of food improved significantly among Valencian peasants during this period This phenomenon had widespread implications for the economy and underpinned the development of new industries, contributing to the economic growth of this prominent Mediterranean polity.

Traditionally, economists have considered the accumulation of conventional inputs such as labour and capital to be the primary force behind economic growth In the late-1990s however, many economists place technological progress at the centre of the growth process This shift is due to theoretical developments that allow researchers to link microeconomic outcomes.

Approaches the history of the Mughal Empire at the level of human experience, through a diverse group of autobiographical narratives Starting from 1526, the Mughals ruled over much of India for three centuries, perhaps the most important Islamic empire in the early modern world This period saw the production of a fascinating variety of memoirs and autobiographies in which residents of the empire reflected on their own lives, on Islam in a Hindu context, and on the relationship of individual subjects to their new rulers

Those written by Mughal royalty—especially Babur and Jahangir—are well known This book considers the less well-known writings of diverse others, from the poet laureate Faizi to those who were not part of elite society but a few notches below it, such as the lowly envoy Asad Beg and characters like Mirza Nathan and Abdul Latif, who lived dangerously on the Bengal frontier Also considered are prolific Hindu writers, such as Bhimsen Saksena and the witty Anand Ram Mukhlis, who lived in Delhi through the turbulent 1730s and 1740s

Together, they offer an original and differently critical perspective on the empire—its religious, social, and political tensions, as well as its strategies for overcoming them Covering over two centuries of such materials, Mirrors of Empire is a work of cultural history that is also firmly rooted in social history It incorporates extensive translations from Persian, including materials that are little-known even to historians and specialists, and shows the transformation of the empire from its difficult emergence, to its expansive height, to its phase of disintegration in the middle of the eighteenth century Gracefully written, the book approaches the Mughal Empire at the level of human experience, rendering it accessible and not a mere abstraction.

For centuries the Bay of Bengal served as a maritime highway between India and China, and as a battleground for European empires, while being shaped by monsoons and human migration Integrating environmental history and mining a wealth of sources, Sunil S Amrith offers insights to the many challenges facing Asia in the decades ahead.

“Captivating . . . [Lowenstein] makes what subsequently occurred at Treasury and on Wall Street during the early 1860s seem as enthralling as what transpired on the battlefield or at the White House.” —Harold Holzer, Wall Street Journal “Ways and Means, an account of the Union’s financial policies, examines a subject long overshadowed by military narratives . . Lowenstein is a lucid stylist, able to explain financial matters to readers who lack specialized knowledge.” —Eric Foner, New York Times Book Review From renowned journalist and master storyteller Roger Lowenstein, a revelatory financial investigation into how Lincoln and his administration used the funding of the Civil War as the catalyst to centralize the government and accomplish the most far-reaching reform in the country’s history Upon his election to the presidency, Abraham Lincoln inherited a country in crisis

Even before the Confederacy’s secession, the United States Treasury had run out of money The government had no authority to raise taxes, no federal bank, no currency But amid unprecedented troubles Lincoln saw opportunity—the chance to legislate in the centralizing spirit of the “more perfect union” that had first drawn him to politics

With Lincoln at the helm, the United States would now govern “for” its people: it would enact laws, establish a currency, raise armies, underwrite transportation and higher education, assist farmers, and impose taxes for them Lincoln believed this agenda would foster the economic opportunity he had always sought for upwardly striving Americans, and which he would seek in particular for enslaved Black Americans Salmon Chase, Lincoln’s vanquished rival and his new secretary of the Treasury, waged war on the financial front, levying taxes and marketing bonds while desperately battling to contain wartime inflation

And while the Union and Rebel armies fought increasingly savage battles, the Republican-led Congress enacted a blizzard of legislation that made the government, for the first time, a powerful presence in the lives of ordinary Americans The impact was revolutionary The activist 37th Congress legislated for homesteads and a transcontinental railroad and involved the federal government in education, agriculture, and eventually immigration policy

It established a progressive income tax and created the greenback—paper money While the Union became self-sustaining, the South plunged into financial free fall, having failed to leverage its cotton wealth to finance the war Founded in a crucible of anticentralism, the Confederacy was trapped in a static (and slave-based) agrarian economy without federal taxing power or other means of government financing, save for its overworked printing presses

This led to an epic collapse Though Confederate troops continued to hold their own, the North’s financial advantage over the South, where citizens increasingly went hungry, proved decisive; the war was won as much (or more) in the respective treasuries as on the battlefields Roger Lowenstein reveals the largely untold story of how Lincoln used the urgency of the Civil War to transform a union of states into a nation Through a financial lens, he explores how this second American revolution, led by Lincoln, his cabinet, and a Congress studded with towering statesmen, changed the direction of the country and established a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

COMING SEPTEMBER 2026 From the bestselling and award-winning master of speculative fiction comes a deeply moving, decade- and continent-spanning epic: forced to investigate a devastating personal tragedy, an ordinary woman stumbles on dark conspiracies, and provokes the attention of uncanny forces.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION • A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR "A master comedian with a virtuoso prose style has produced an audacious, original and highly disturbing book . . . an incandescent satire." —Giles Harvey, The New York Times Magazine From the Whiting and O Henry–winning author of Private Citizens (“the first great millennial novel,” New York Magazine), an electrifying novel-in-stories that follows a cast of intricately linked characters as rejection throws their lives and relationships into chaos

Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet In “The Feminist,” a young man’s passionate allyship turns to furious nihilism as he realizes, over thirty lonely years, that it isn’t getting him laid

A young woman’s unrequited crush in “Pics” spirals into borderline obsession and the systematic destruction of her sense of self And in “Ahegao; or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression,” a shy late bloomer’s flailing efforts at a first relationship leads to a life-upending mistake As the characters pop up in each other’s dating apps and social media feeds, or meet in dimly lit bars and bedrooms, they reveal the ways our delusions can warp our desire for connection

These brilliant satires explore the underrated sorrows of rejection with the authority of a modern classic and the manic intensity of a manifesto Audacious and unforgettable, Rejection is a stunning mosaic that redefines what it means to be rejected by lovers, friends, society, and oneself. "Rejection is unrelentingly brutal and gut-bustingly funny and spares no one—not you, not me Tulathimutte is a pervert and a madman and a stone-cold genius." —Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties “One of the foremost fiction writers exploring the subject of his own generation.” —Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker

Kim Philby has been called "one of the most remarkable double-agents to have been exposed in our time" Harry St. John Bridger Philby, Kim Philby's father and mentor, was one of the most intriguing intellectuals and adventurers of our time, a manipulator who played a key role in establishing the modern Middle East In this dual biography, Anthony Cave Brown, tells the extraordinary story of two men whose lives were directly opposed to the establishment into which they were born and for which they were bred

St. John, the brilliant Arabist, became a Moslem and political adviser to King Ibn Saud He was the middleman in the U.S. acquisition of the Saudi oil concession, called by the State Department "the greatest commercial prize in the history of the planet" And as St. John turned to Mecca, Kim turned to the Kremlin, serving as a secret agent against the Anglo-American intelligence services for fifty-three years.

The first in-depth exploration of maintenance—and a powerful argument for its civilizational importance—from the author of How Buildings Learn and creator of the Whole Earth Catalog Maintenance is what keeps everything going It’s what keeps life going Yet it’s also easy to shirk or defer—until the thing breaks, the system falters, and everything stops

The apparent paradox is profound: Maintenance is absolutely necessary and maintenance is optional The first in a multi-volume work, Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One offers a comprehensive overview of the civilizational importance of maintenance

The book begins with a dramatic contest of maintenance styles under life-critical conditions: the Golden Globe around-the-world solo sailboat race of 1968 It goes on to explore the insights that can be gleaned from vehicle maintenance, from the zeal of motorcycle maintainers to the maintenance philosophies that fought for dominance of the auto industry to the state of electric vehicle manufacturing today, with absorbing detours into the evolution of precision in manufacturing, the enduring importance of manuals, sustainment in the military, and the never-ending battle against corrosion

Maintenance: Of Everything is a wide-ranging and provocative call to expand what we mean by “maintenance”—not just the tiresome preventative tasks but the whole grand process of keeping a thing going It invites us to understand not only the profound impact maintenance has on our daily lives but also why taking responsibility for maintaining something—whether a motorcycle, a monument, or our very planet—can be a radical act. “No one else but Stewart Brand is talking about the art and science of maintenance and how to do it well This will be an instant classic.” —Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired “A deliciously good book.” —Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist

A New York Times Notable Book of 2025 A 2025 International Booker Prize Shortlist Nominee Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award for Translated Literature Winner of AIRMAIL's Inaugural Tom Wolfe Literary Prize for Fiction A scathing, provocative novel about contemporary existence by a rising star in Italian literature Anna and Tom, an expat couple, have fashioned a dream life for themselves in Berlin They are young digital "creatives" exploring the excitements of the city, freelancers without too many constraints, who spend their free time cultivating house plants and their images online

At first, they reasonably deduce that they've turned their passion for aesthetics into a viable, even enviable career, but the years go by, and Anna and Tom grow bored As their friends move back home or move on, so their own work and sex life—and the life of Berlin itself—begin to lose their luster An attempt to put their politics into action fizzles in embarrassed self-doubt

Edging closer to forty, they try living as digital nomads only to discover that, wherever they go, "the brand of oat milk in their flat whites was the same." Perfection—Vincenzo Latronico's first book to be translated into English—is a scathing novel about contemporary existence, a tale of two people gradually waking up to find themselves in various traps, wondering how it all came to be Was it a lack of foresight, or were they just born too late?

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the bestselling author of House of Leaves comes a magisterial novel about two friends determined to rescue a pair of horses set for slaughter. “This is an amazing work of fiction I absolutely loved it At the heart you’ll find a blood-drenched story of pursuit and two brave and resourceful children

But there’s so much more I immersed myself Have never read anything like it.” —Stephen King Hard to figure how so much awful horror could've started out with just them two horses and not a one yet named.. While folks still like to focus on the crimes that shocked the small city of Orvop, Utah, back in the fall of 1982, not to mention the trials that followed, far more remember the adventure that took place beyond municipal lines

For sure no one expected the dead to rise, but they did No one expected the mountain to fall either, but it did No one expected an act of courage so great, and likewise so appalling, that it still staggers the heart and mind of anyone who knows anything about the Katanogos massif, to say nothing of Pillars Meadow As one Orvop high school teacher described that extraordinary feat just days before she died, Fer sure no one expected Kalin March to look Old Porch in the eye and tell him: You get what you deserve when you ride with cowards.

Three-generation story of a family of German architects who, in rebuilding their destroyed abbey, personify the alternate destruction and rebuilding of their country.

Challenges popular misconceptions to reveal the unrecognized scientific accomplishments of medieval Islam, profiling innovations that played significant roles in bridging the ancient and modern worlds while promoting the European Renaissance.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “It is one of the best narrative histories I’ve read.” —The Wall Street Journal Named a Most Anticipated Book by New York Times Books Review, TIME, Washington Post, Associated Press, Town & Country, New York Post, and more From the bestselling author of Too Big to Fail, “the definitive history of the 2008 banking crisis,” (The Atlantic) comes a riveting narrative of the most infamous stock market crash in history—one with ripple effects that still shape our society today In 1929, the world watched in shock as the unstoppable Wall Street bull market went into a freefall, wiping out fortunes and igniting a depression that would reshape a generation

But behind the flashing ticker tapes and panicked traders, another drama unfolded—one of visionaries and fraudsters, titans and dreamers, euphoria and ruin With unparalleled access to historical records and newly uncovered documents, New York Times bestselling author Andrew Ross Sorkin takes readers inside the chaos of the crash, behind the scenes of a raging battle between Wall Street and Washington and the larger-than-life characters whose ambition and naivete in an endless boom led to disaster

The dizzying highs and brutal lows of this era eerily mirror today’s world—where markets soar, political tensions mount, and the fight over financial influence plays out once again This is not just a story about money. 1929 is a tale of power, psychology, and the seductive illusion that this time is different It’s about disregarded alarm bells, financiers who fell from grace, and skeptics who saw the crash coming—only to be dismissed until it was too late

Hailed as a landmark book, Too Big to Fail reimagined how financial crises are told Now, with 1929, Sorkin delivers an immersive, electrifying account of the most pivotal market collapse of all time—with lessons that remain as urgent as ever More than just a history, 1929 is a crucial blueprint for understanding the cycles of speculation, the forces that drive financial upheaval, and the warning signs we ignore at our peril.

The author draws on his background in physics to suggest a scientific approach to aspects of human behaviour which have been traditionally described as cultural or social.

Prescient yet timeless, perfect for fans of Klara and the Sun and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, this highly anticipated, sweeping debut set in a unified Korea tells the story of three estranged siblings—two human, one robot—as they collide against the backdrop of a murder investigation to settle old scores and make sense of their shattered childhood. “I once had a family At least, the earliest version of me had a family.” In a reunified Korea of the near future, the sun beats down on a junkyard filled with abandoned robots, broken down for parts

Eleven-year-old Ruijie sifts through the scraps, searching for a piece that might support her failing body There among the piles of trash, something catches her eye: a robot boy—so lifelike and strange, unlike anything she’s ever seen before Siblings Jun and Morgan haven’t spoken for years When they were children, their brother Yoyo disappeared suddenly, leaving behind only distant memories of his laughter and near-human warmth

Yoyo—an early prototype of a humanoid robot designed by their father—was always bound for something darker and more complex Now Morgan makes robots for a living and is on the verge of losing control of her most important creation Jun is a detective with the Robot Crimes Unit whose investigation is digging up truths that want to stay buried

And whether they like it or not, Ruijie’s discovery will thrust their family back together in ways they could have never imagined At once a thrilling work of speculative fiction and a poignant exploration of what it really means to be human, Luminous is an unforgettably brilliant debut.

A groundbreaking history of how the decades-long war on terror changed virtually every aspect of American life, from the erosion of citizenship down to the cars we bought and TV we watched—by an acclaimed n+1 writer “Richard Beck, like many people alive today, has spent his adult life living in the shadow of 9/11, and Homeland is a devastating inquiry into the new world that day created.”—Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America A PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR For twenty years after September 11, the war on terror was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere With all of the military violence occurring overseas even as the threat of sudden mass death permeated life at home, Americans found themselves living in two worlds at the same time

In one of them, soldiers fought overseas so that nothing at home would have to change at all In the other, life in the United States took on all kinds of unfamiliar shapes, changing people’s sense of themselves, their neighbors, and the strangers they sat next to on airplanes In Homeland, Richard Beck delivers a gripping exploration of how much the war changed life in the United States and explains why there is no going back

Though much has been made of the damage that Donald Trump did to the American political system, Beck argues that it was the war on terror that made Trump’s presidency possible, fueling and exacerbating a series of crises that all came to a head with his rise to power Homeland brilliantly isolates and explores four key issues: the militarism that swept through American politics and culture; the racism and xenophobia that boiled over in much of the country; an economic crisis that, Beck convincingly argues, connects the endurance of the war on terror to at least the end of the Second World War; and a lack of accountability that produced our “impunity culture”—the government-wide inability or refusal to face consequences that has transformed how the U.S. government relates to the people it governs

To see American life through the lens of Homeland’s sweeping argument is to understand the roots of our current condition In its startling analysis of how the war on terror hollowed out the very idea of citizenship in the United States, Beck gives the most compelling explanation yet offered for the ongoing disintegration of America’s social, political, and cultural fabric.

During the 1930's, 23 million peasants left their villages and moved to Soviet cities, where they comprised almost half the urban population and more than half the nation's industrial workers Drawing on previously inaccessible archival materials, David L Hoffmann shows how this massive migration to the cities—an influx unprecedented in world history—had major consequences for the nature of the Soviet system and the character of Russian society even today.Hoffmann focuses on events in Moscow between the launching of the industrialization drive in 1929 and the outbreak of war in 1941

He reconstructs the attempts of Party leaders to reshape the social identity and behavior of the millions of newly urbanized workers, who appeared to offer a broad base of support for the socialist regime The former peasants, however, had brought with them their own forms of cultural expression, social organization, work habits, and attitudes toward authority Hoffmann demonstrates that Moscow's new inhabitants established social identities and understandings of the world very different from those prescribed by Soviet authorities

Their refusal to conform to the authorities' model of a loyal proletariat thwarted Party efforts to construct a social and political order consistent with Bolshevik ideology The conservative and coercive policies that Party leaders adopted in response, he argues, contributed to the Soviet Union's emergence as an authoritarian welfare state.

Prior accounts have portrayed Islamic Spain either as a paradise of enlightened tolerance, or as the site where civilisations clashed Award-winning historian Brian A Catlos taps a wide array of original sources to paint a more complex picture, showing how Muslims, Christians, and Jews together built a sophisticated civilisation that transformed the Western world, even as they waged relentless war against each other and amongst themselves Religion was often the language of conflict, but seldom its cause--a lesson we would do well to learn in our own time.Kingdoms of Faith rewrites Spain's Islamic past from the ground up, evoking the cultural splendour of al-Andalus and the many forces that shaped it.

White coats, Bunsen burners, beakers, flasks, and pipettes—the furnishings of the chemistry laboratory are familiar to most of us from our school days, but just how did these items come to be the crucial tools of science Examining the history of the laboratory, Peter J T Morris offers a unique way to look at the history of chemistry itself, showing how the development of the laboratory helped shape modern chemistry

Chemists, Morris shows, are one of the leading drivers of innovation in laboratory design and technology He tells of fascinating lineages of invention and innovation, for instance, how the introduction of coal gas into Robert Wilhelm Bunsen’s laboratory led to the eponymous burner, which in turn led to the development of atomic spectroscopy Comparing laboratories across eras, from the furnace-centered labs that survived until the late eighteenth century to the cleanrooms of today, he shows how the overlooked aspects of science—the architectural design and innovative tools that have facilitated its practice—have had a profound impact on what science has been able to do and, ultimately, what we have been able to understand.

Drawing upon a wide array of sources, Martin Wiener explores the English ambivalence to modern industrial society.

A history of the postal system that once connected the Ottoman Empire Before the advent of steamships or the telegraph, the premier technology for long-distance communication was the horse-run relay system Every empire had one--including the Ottoman Empire In The Sublime Post, Choon Hwee Koh examines how the vast Ottoman postal system worked across three centuries by tracking the roles of eight small-scale actors--the Courier, the Tatar, Imperial Decrees, the Bookkeeper, the Postmaster, the Villager, Money, and the Horse

There are stories of price-gouging postmasters; of murdered couriers and their bereaved widows; of moonlighting officials transporting merchandise; of neighboring villages engaged in long-running feuds; of bookkeepers calculating the annual costs of horseshoes, halters, and hay; of Tatar couriers and British travelers sharing drunken nights at post stations; of swimming with horses across rivers; and of hiding from marauding bandits in the desert By weaving together chronicles, sharia court records, fiscal registers, collective petitions, appointment contracts, and imperial decrees from the Ottoman archive, this study of a large-scale communications infrastructure reveals the interdependence of an empire and its diverse imperial subjects Koh traces this evolving interdependence between 1500 and 1840 to tell the history of the Ottoman Empire and its changing social order.

A bold redefinition of historical inquiry based on the "cropscape"--the people, creatures, technologies, ideas, and places that surround a crop Human efforts to move crops from one place to another have been a key driving force in history Crops have been on the move for millennia, from wildlands into fields, from wetlands to dry zones, from one imperial colony to another This book is a bold but approachable attempt to redefine historical inquiry based on the "cropscape": the assemblage of people, places, creatures, technologies, and other elements that form around a crop

The cropscape is a method of reconnecting the global with the local, the longue durée with microhistory, and people, plants, and places with abstract concepts such as tastes, ideas, skills, politics, and economic forces Through investigating a range of contrasting cropscapes spanning millennia and the globe, the authors break open traditional historical structures of period, geography, and direction to glean insight into previously invisible actors and forces.

In the second half of the sixteenth century, most of the Christian states of Western Europe were on the defensive against a Muslim superpower - the Empire of the Ottoman sultans There was violent conflict, from raiding and corsairing to large-scale warfare, but there were also many forms of peaceful interaction across the surprisingly porous frontiers of these opposing power-blocs Agents of Empire describes the paths taken through the eastern Mediterranean and its European hinterland by members of a Venetian-Albanian family, almost all of them previously invisible to history

They include an archbishop in the Balkans, the captain of the papal flagship at the Battle of Lepanto, the power behind the throne in the Ottoman province of Moldavia, and a dragoman (interpreter) at the Venetian embassy in Istanbul Through the life-stories of these adventurous individuals over three generations, Noel Malcolm casts the world between Venice, Rome and the Ottoman Empire in a fresh light, illuminating subjects as diverse as espionage, diplomacy, the grain trade, slave-ransoming and anti-Ottoman rebellion

He describes the conflicting strategies of the Christian powers, and the extraordinarily ambitious plans of the sultans and their viziers Few works since Fernand Braudel's classic account of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean, published more than sixty years ago, have ranged so widely through this vital period of Mediterranean and European history A masterpiece of scholarship as well as story-telling, Agents of Empire builds up a panoramic picture, both of Western power-politics and of the interrelations between the Christian and Ottoman worlds.

The history of the Black Sea as a source of Mediterranean slaves stretches from ancient Greek colonies to human trafficking networks in the present day At its height during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the Black Sea slave trade was not the sole source of Mediterranean slaves; Genoese, Venetian, and Egyptian merchants bought captives taken in conflicts throughout the region, from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, the Balkans, and the Aegean Sea

Yet the trade in Black Sea slaves provided merchants with profit and prestige; states with military recruits, tax revenue, and diplomatic influence; and households with the service of women, men, and children Even though Genoa, Venice, and the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt and Greater Syria were the three most important strands in the web of the Black Sea slave trade, they have rarely been studied together Examining Latin and Arabic sources in tandem, Hannah Barker shows that Christian and Muslim inhabitants of the Mediterranean shared a set of assumptions and practices that amounted to a common culture of slavery

Indeed, the Genoese, Venetian, and Mamluk slave trades were thoroughly entangled, with wide-ranging effects Genoese and Venetian disruption of the Mamluk trade led to reprisals against Italian merchants living in Mamluk cities, while their participation in the trade led to scathing criticism by supporters of the crusade movement who demanded commercial powers use their leverage to weaken the force of Islam Reading notarial registers, tax records, law, merchants' accounts, travelers' tales and letters, sermons, slave-buying manuals, and literary works as well as treaties governing the slave trade and crusade propaganda, Barker gives a rich picture of the context in which merchants traded and enslaved people met their fate.

A New York Times Bestseller • A New York Times, Washington Post, and Associated Press Notable Book • Named a Best Book of the Year by The Los Angeles Times, Vulture, TIME, The Guardian, The New Republic, and LitHub The new novel from Thomas Pynchon, author of Gravity's Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice. “A masterpiece.” —The Telegraph “Bonkers and brilliant fun.” —The Washington Post “Late Pynchon at his finest Dark as a vampire’s pocket, light-fingered as a jewel thief, Shadow Ticket capers across the page with breezy, baggy-pants assurance — and then pauses on its way down the fire escape just long enough to crack your heart open.” —The Los Angeles Times Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labor-management relations to the more domestic kind

Hicks McTaggart, a onetime strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering Before he knows it, he’s been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement—and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he’s supposed to be chasing

By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to Lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question.

America is in crisis In the space of a generation, it has become more than ever a country of winners and losers, as industries have failed, institutions have disappeared and the country's focus has shifted to idolise celebrity and wealth George Packer narrates the story of America over the past three decades, bringing to the task his empathy with people facing difficult challenges, his sharp eye for detail and a gift for weaving together engaging narratives

The Unwinding moves deftly back and forth through the lives of its people, including Dean Price, the son of tobacco farmers who becomes an evangelist for a new economy in the rural South; Tammy Thomas, a factory worker in the industrial Midwest attempting to survive the collapse of her city; Jeff Connaughton, a political careerist in Washington; and Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire Their stories are interspersed with biographical sketches of the era's leading public figures, from Oprah Winfrey to Steve Jobs, to create a rich, wise and very human portrait of the USA in these hard times

The Unwinding portrays a superpower coming apart at the seams, its elites and institutions no longer working, leaving ordinary people to improvise their own schemes for salvation George Packer is also the author of The Assassin's Gate, which was named one of the ten best books of 2005 by the New York Times and won the Helen Bernstein Book Award. 'A tour de force . . A fascinating journey through an America that has largely remained hidden from view There are echoes of Don DeLillo's Underworld in the scope of Packer's vision and his deft eye for language and detail.' Sunday Business Post

Examining sectarian divergence in the early modern Middle East, this study provides a fresh perspective on the Sunni-Shi'i division Drawing on Ottoman Turkish, Persian, and European sources, Ayşe Baltacıoğlu-Brammer explores the paradox of an Ottoman state that combined rigid ideological discourses with pragmatic governance Through an analysis of key figures, events, periods, and policies, it reveals how political, economic, and religious forces intersected, challenging simplistic sectarian binaries

Baltacıoğlu-Brammer provides a comprehensive historical account of Ottoman governance during the 'long sixteenth century', focusing on its relationship with non-Sunni Muslim subjects, particularly the Qizilbash As both the founders of the Safavid Empire and the largest Shiʿi-affiliated group within the Ottoman realm, the Qizilbash occupied a crucial yet often misunderstood position Boundaries of Belonging examines their role within the empire, challenging the notion that they were merely persecuted outsiders by highlighting their agency in shaping imperial policies, negotiating their status, and influencing the Ottoman-Safavid rivalry in Anatolia, Kurdistan, and Mesopotamia.

From the vogue for nubile models to the explosion in the juvenile crime rate, this modern classic of social history and media traces the precipitous decline of childhood in America today−and the corresponding threat to the notion of adulthood Deftly marshaling a vast array of historical and demographic research, Neil Postman, author of Technopoly, suggests that childhood is a relatively recent invention, which came into being as the new medium of print imposed divisions between children and adults

But now these divisions are eroding under the barrage of television, which turns the adult secrets of sex and violence into popular entertainment and pitches both news and advertising at the intellectual level of ten-year-olds Informative, alarming, and aphorisitc, The Disappearance of Childhood is a triumph of history and prophecy.

This book examines the relationship between Quebec and the rest of Canada, from its historical roots, the roles of governments such as Trudeau and Mulroney, issues of official bilingualism, multiculturalism, the 1995 Quebec Referendum and the impact Quebec separatism would have on the future of Canada.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S FIVE BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY “A brilliant and stirring epic . . Ms. Wilkerson does for the Great Migration what John Steinbeck did for the Okies in his fiction masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath; she humanizes history, giving it emotional and psychological depth.”—John Stauffer, The Wall Street Journal “What she’s done with these oral histories is stow memory in amber.”—Lynell George, Los Angeles Times WINNER: The Mark Lynton History Prize • The Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction • The Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize • The Hurston-Wright Award for Nonfiction • The Hillman Prize for Book Journalism • NAACP Image Award for Best Literary Debut • Stephen Ambrose Oral History Prize FINALIST: The PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction • Dayton Literary Peace Prize ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times • USA Today • Publishers Weekly • O: The Oprah Magazine • Salon • Newsday • The Daily Beast ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker • The Washington Post • The Economist •Boston Globe • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • Entertainment Weekly • Philadelphia Inquirer • The Guardian • The Seattle Times • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Christian Science Monitor In this beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson presents a definitive and dramatic account of one of the great untold stories of American history: the Great Migration of six million Black citizens who fled the South for the North and West in search of a better life, from World War I to 1970

Wilkerson tells this interwoven story through the lives of three unforgettable protagonists: Ida Mae Gladney, a sharecropper’s wife, who in 1937 fled Mississippi for Chicago; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, and Robert Foster, a surgeon who left Louisiana in 1953 in hopes of making it in California Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous cross-country journeys by car and train and their new lives in colonies in the New World

The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is a modern classic.

First of this two-volume work providing an imaginative interpretation of the image of women in the collective unconscious of the fascist "warrior" through a study of the fantasies of the men centrally involved in the rise of Nazism.

Samanth Subramanian has written about politics, culture, and history for the New York Times and the New Yorker Now, Subramanian takes on a complex topic that touched millions of lives in This Divided Island In the summer of 2009, the leader of the dreaded Tamil Tiger guerrillas was killed, bringing to an end the civil war in Sri Lanka

For nearly thirty years, the war's fingers had reached everywhere, leaving few places, and fewer people, untouched What happens to the texture of life in a country that endures such bitter conflict What happens to the country's soul Subramanian gives us an extraordinary account of the Sri Lankan war and the lives it changed

Taking us to the ghosts of summers past, he tells the story of Sri Lanka today Through travels and conversations, he examines how people reconcile themselves to violence, how the powerful become cruel, and how victory can be put to the task of reshaping memory and burying histories.

A journey into the glittering, surreal heart of 21st century Russia: into the lives of Hells Angels convinced they are messiahs, professional killers with the souls of artists, bohemian theatre directors turned Kremlin puppet-masters, supermodel sects, post-modern dictators and oligarch revolutionaries This is a world erupting with new money and new power, changing so fast it breaks all sense of reality, where life is seen as a whirling, glamorous masquerade where identities can be switched and all values are changeable

It is home to a new form of authoritarianism, far subtler than 20th century strains, and which is rapidly expanding to challenge the global order An extraordinary book - one which is as powerful and entertaining as it is troubling - Nothing is True and Everything is Possible offers a wild ride into this political and ethical vacuum.

“A blistering and truly original work of reporting and analysis, uncovering America’s role in homogenizing how the world defines wellness and healing” (Po Bronson) In Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters reveals that the most devastating consequence of the spread of American culture has not been our golden arches or our bomb craters but our bulldozing of the human psyche itself: We are in the process of homogenizing the way the world goes mad It is well known that American culture is a dominant force at home and abroad; our exportation of everything from movies to junk food is a well-documented phenomenon

But is it possible America's most troubling impact on the globalizing world has yet to be accounted for American-style depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anorexia have begun to spread around the world like contagions, and the virus is us Traveling from Hong Kong to Sri Lanka to Zanzibar to Japan, acclaimed journalist Ethan Watters witnesses firsthand how Western healers often steamroll indigenous expressions of mental health and madness and replace them with our own In teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we have been homogenizing the way the world goes mad.

For seven years in the 1970s, the author lived in a village in northeast China as an ordinary farmer In 1989, he returned to the village as an anthropologist to begin the unparalleled span of eleven years’ fieldwork that has resulted in this book—a comprehensive, vivid, and nuanced account of family change and the transformation of private life in rural China from 1949 to 1999 The author’s focus on the personal and the emotional sets this book apart from most studies of the Chinese family

Yan explores private lives to examine areas of family life that have been largely overlooked, such as emotion, desire, intimacy, privacy, conjugality, and individuality He concludes that the past five decades have witnessed a dual transformation of private life: the rise of the private family, within which the private lives of individual women and men are thriving.

Zahra handles this immensely complicated and multidimensional history with remarkable clarity and feeling. —Robert Levgold, Foreign Affairs Between 1846 and 1940, more than 50 million Europeans moved to the Americas in one of the largest migrations of human history, emptying out villages and irrevocably changing both their new homes and the ones they left behind With a keen historical perspective on the most consequential social phenomenon of the twentieth century, Tara Zahra shows how the policies that gave shape to this migration provided the precedent for future events such as the Holocaust, the closing of the Iron Curtain, and the tragedies of ethnic cleansing In the epilogue, she places the current refugee crisis within the longer history of migration.

A delightful account of one woman's two-year stay in a tiny rural village in Iraq, where she assumed the dress and sheltered life of a harem woman. "A most enjoyable book abouut [Muslim women]—simple, dignified, human, colorful, sad and humble as the life they lead." —Muhsin Mahdi, Jewett Professor of Arabic Literature, Harvard Unversity A wonderful, well-written, and vastly informative ethnographic study that offers a unique insight into a part of the Midddle Eastern life seldom seen by the West.

A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Nonfiction Book of 2017 A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2017 A Shelf Awareness Best Book of 2017 " Ants Among Elephants is an arresting, affecting and ultimately enlightening memoir It is quite possibly the most striking work of non-fiction set in India since Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, and heralds the arrival of a formidable new writer." — The Economist The stunning true story of an untouchable family who become teachers, and one, a poet and revolutionary Like one in six people in India, Sujatha Gidla was born an untouchable

While most untouchables are illiterate, her family was educated by Canadian missionaries in the 1930s, making it possible for Gidla to attend elite schools and move to America at the age of twenty-six It was only then that she saw how extraordinary—and yet how typical—her family history truly was Her mother, Manjula, and uncles Satyam and Carey were born in the last days of British colonial rule

They grew up in a world marked by poverty and injustice, but also full of possibility In the slums where they lived, everyone had a political side, and rallies, agitations, and arrests were commonplace The Independence movement promised freedom Yet for untouchables and other poor and working people, little changed

Satyam, the eldest, switched allegiance to the Communist Party Gidla recounts his incredible transformation from student and labor organizer to famous poet and founder of a left-wing guerrilla movement And Gidla charts her mother's battles with caste and women's oppression Page by page, Gidla takes us into a complicated, close-knit family as they desperately strive for a decent life and a more just society A moving portrait of love, hardship, and struggle, Ants Among Elephants is also that rare thing: a personal history of modern India told from the bottom up.

An eye-opening and previously untold story, Factory Girls is the first look into the everyday lives of the migrant factory population in China China has 130 million migrant workers—the largest migration in human history In Factory Girls, Leslie T Chang, a former correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, tells the story of these workers primarily through the lives of two young women, whom she follows over the course of three years as they attempt to rise from the assembly lines of Dongguan, an industrial city in China’s Pearl River Delta

As she tracks their lives, Chang paints a never-before-seen picture of migrant life—a world where nearly everyone is under thirty; where you can lose your boyfriend and your friends with the loss of a mobile phone; where a few computer or English lessons can catapult you into a completely different social class Chang takes us inside a sneaker factory so large that it has its own hospital, movie theater, and fire department; to posh karaoke bars that are fronts for prostitution; to makeshift English classes where students shave their heads in monklike devotion and sit day after day in front of machines watching English words flash by; and back to a farming village for the Chinese New Year, revealing the poverty and idleness of rural life that drive young girls to leave home in the first place

Throughout this riveting portrait, Chang also interweaves the story of her own family’s migrations, within China and to the West, providing historical and personal frames of reference for her investigation A book of global significance that provides new insight into China, Factory Girls demonstrates how the mass movement from rural villages to cities is remaking individual lives and transforming Chinese society, much as immigration to America’s shores remade our own country a century ago.

The figure of the white hunter sahib proudly standing over the carcass of a tiger with a gun in hand is one of the most powerful and enduring images of the empire This book examines the colonial politics that allowed British imperialists to indulge in such grand posturing as the rulers and protectors of indigenous populations This work studies the history of hunting and conservation in colonial India during the high imperial decades of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

At this time, not only did hunting serve as a metaphor for colonial rule signifying the virile sportsmanship of the British hunter, but it also enabled vital everyday governance through the embodiment of the figure of the officer–hunter–administrator Using archival material and published sources, the author examines hunting and wildlife conservation from various social and ethnic perspectives, and also in different geographical contexts, extending our understanding of the link between shikar and governance.

A powerful deconstruction of humanity’s most influential invention, from the acclaimed economists J W Mason and Arjun Jayadev Money is unavoidably fundamental to our daily lives It lurks behind the swipe of a card when buying groceries; in looming student-loan debts; in the prices of things we want; and in our subconscious navigation of the modern world

Money is an invisible convenience that saves us, as a society, the hassle of bartering for goods and services—a reflection, in our pockets and on our phones, of the hard facts of scarcity and desire Or is it something more In this revelatory book, economists J W

Mason and Arjun Jayadev explain how and why money is so deeply misunderstood by the world it dominates—and what the dangerous implications of this misunderstanding are Against Money tackles the most strongly held “truths” of economics, arguing that the world of money actually never has been an impartial representation of the world of things Instead, its existence in different forms—debt, capital, liquidity, and interest—increasingly shapes events in the real world rather than just reflecting them; sometimes opening new forms of cooperation, and sometimes exercising a malevolent domination

Human existence is not just facilitated by money, but also governed by it Perfect for fans of Thomas Piketty and David Graeber, Against Money is an erudite, disruptive intervention against the illusions and tyrannies of money Mason and Jayadev present a radically different way of thinking about money—imagining a hopeful future in which it no longer defines the possibilities of our collective existence.

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER*** There are many miles from the business school and basketball court at the University of Southern California to 50 million viewers for the final episode of a TV show called Magnum P.I Tom Selleck has lived every one of those miles in his own iconoclastic and joyful way Frank, funny and open-hearted, You Never Know is an intimate memoir from one of the most beloved actors of our time, the highly personal story of a remarkable life and thoroughly accidental career

In his own voice and uniquely unpretentious style, the famed actor brings readers on his uncharted but serendipitous journey to the top in Hollywood, his temptations and distractions, his misfires and mistakes and, over time, his well-earned success Along the way, he clears up an armload of misconceptions and shares dozens of never-told stories from all corners of his personal and professional life His rambunctious California childhood

His clueless arrival as a good-looking college jock in Hollywood (from the Dating Game to the Fox New Talent Program to co-starring with Mae West and escorting her to black-tie social functions) What it was like to emerge as a mega-star in his mid-thirties and remain so for decades to come, an actor whose authenticity and ease in front of the camera connected with audiences worldwide while embodying and also redefining the clichés of onscreen manhood

In You Never Know, Selleck recounts his personal friendships with a vivid army of A-listers, everyone from Frank Sinatra to Carol Burnett to Sam Elliott, paying special tribute to his mentor James Garner of The Rockford Files, who believed, like Selleck, that TV protagonists are far more interesting when they have rough edges He also more than tips his hat to the American western and the scruffy band of actors, directors and other ruffians who helped define that classic genre, where Selleck has repeatedly found a happy home

Magnum fans will be fascinated to learn how Selleck put his career on the line to make Thomas Magnum a more imperfect hero and explains why he walked away from a show that could easily have gone on for years longer Hollywood is never easy, even for stars who make it look that way In You Never Know, Selleck explains how he’s struggled to balance his personal and professional lives, frequently adjusting his career to protect his family’s privacy and normalcy

His journey offers a truly fresh perspective on a changing industry and a changing world Beneath all the charm and talent and self-deprecating humor, Selleck’s memoir reveals an American icon who has reached remarkable heights by always insisting on being himself.

A comprehensive analysis of the role of labour policy in the development and ultimate collapse of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms.

A renowned literary critic examines the impact of information technology on the experience of reading in this "thoughtful and heartfelt" essay collection ( Washington Post ) In our zeal to embrace the wonders of the electronic age, are we sacrificing our literary culture Renowned critic Sven Birkerts believes the answer is an alarming yes

Drawing on his own passionate, lifelong love of books, Birkerts examines how literature intimately shapes and nourishes the inner life What does it mean to "hear" a book on audiotape, decipher its words on a screen, or interact with it on CD-ROM Are books as we know them dead At once a celebration of the complex pleasures of reading and a boldly original challenge to the new information technologies, The Gutenberg Elegies is an essential volume for anyone who cares about the past and future of books

Includes a new introduction and afterword by the author "Provocative . . Compelling . . Powerfully conveys why reading matters, why it is both a delight and a necessity." — The Harvard Review

Having set global warming in irreversible motion, we are facing the possibility of ecological catastrophe But the environmental emergency is also a crisis for our philosophical habits of thought, confronting us with a problem that seems to defy not only our control but also our understanding Global warming is perhaps the most dramatic example of what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects”—entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place

In this book, Morton explains what hyperobjects are and their impact on how we think, how we coexist with one another and with nonhumans, and how we experience our politics, ethics, and art Moving fluidly between philosophy, science, literature, visual and conceptual art, and popular culture, the book argues that hyperobjects show that the end of the world has already occurred in the sense that concepts such as world, nature, and even environment are no longer a meaningful horizon against which human events take place

Instead of inhabiting a world, we find ourselves inside a number of hyperobjects, such as climate, nuclear weapons, evolution, or relativity Such objects put unbearable strains on our normal ways of reasoning Insisting that we have to reinvent how we think to even begin to comprehend the world we now live in, Hyperobjects takes the first steps, outlining a genuinely postmodern ecological approach to thought and action.

In this new book, Bauman examines how we have moved away from a 'heavy' and 'solid', hardware-focused modernity to a 'light' and 'liquid', software-based modernity This passage, he argues, has brought profound change to all aspects of the human condition The new remoteness and un-reachability of global systemic structure coupled with the unstructured and under-defined, fluid state of the immediate setting of life-politics and human togetherness, call for the rethinking of the concepts and cognitive frames used to narrate human individual experience and their joint history

This book is dedicated to this task Bauman selects five of the basic concepts which have served to make sense of shared human life - emancipation, individuality, time/space, work and community - and traces their successive incarnations and changes of meaning Liquid Modernity concludes the analysis undertaken in Bauman's two previous books Globalization: The Human Consequences and In Search of Politics Together these volumes form a brilliant analysis of the changing conditions of social and political life by one of the most original thinkers writing today.

Now with a new introduction for the Tor Essentials line, A Fire Upon the Deep is sure to bring a new generation of SF fans to Vinge's award-winning works A Hugo Award-winning Novel! “Vinge is one of the best visionary writers of SF today.”-David Brin Thousands of years in the future, humanity is no longer alone in a universe where a mind's potential is determined by its location in space, from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures, and technology, can function

Nobody knows what strange force partitioned space into these "regions of thought," but when the warring Straumli realm use an ancient Transcendent artifact as a weapon, they unwittingly unleash an awesome power that destroys thousands of worlds and enslaves all natural and artificial intelligence Fleeing this galactic threat, Ravna crash lands on a strange world with a ship-hold full of cryogenically frozen children, the only survivors from a destroyed space-lab

They are taken captive by the Tines, an alien race with a harsh medieval culture, and used as pawns in a ruthless power struggle Tor books by Vernor Vinge Zones of Thought Series A Fire Upon The Deep A Deepness In The Sky The Children of The Sky Realtime/Bobble Series The Peace War Marooned in Realtime Other Novels The Witling Tatja Grimm's World Rainbows End Collections Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge True Names At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

“Brilliant.” —The Washington Post Book World * “Magnificent.” —The Palm Beach Post * “Rich in history yet urgently relevant to current events.” —The New Republic The Everglades in southern Florida were once reviled as a liquid wasteland, and Americans dreamed of draining it Now it is revered as a national treasure, and Americans have launched the largest environmental project in history to try to save it The Swamp is the stunning story of the destruction and possible resurrection of the Everglades, the saga of man's abuse of nature in southern Florida and his unprecedented efforts to make amends

Michael Grunwald, a prize-winning national reporter for The Washington Post, takes readers on a riveting journey from the Ice Ages to the present, illuminating the natural, social and political history of one of America's most beguiling but least understood patches of land The Everglades was America's last frontier, a wild country long after the West was won Grunwald chronicles how a series of visionaries tried to drain and “reclaim” it, and how Mother Nature refused to bend to their will; in the most harrowing tale, a 1928 hurricane drowned 2,500 people in the Everglades

But the Army Corps of Engineers finally tamed the beast with levees and canals, converting half the Everglades into sprawling suburbs and sugar plantations And though the southern Everglades was preserved as a national park, it soon deteriorated into an ecological mess The River of Grass stopped flowing, and 90 percent of its wading birds vanished

Now America wants its swamp back Grunwald shows how a new breed of visionaries transformed Everglades politics, producing the $8 billion rescue plan That plan is already the blueprint for a new worldwide era of ecosystem restoration And this book is a cautionary tale for that era Through gripping narrative and dogged reporting, Grunwald shows how the Everglades is still threatened by the same hubris, greed and well-intentioned folly that led to its decline.

First published in 1987 Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Be seduced, amazed, and shocked by one of the world's greatest and strangest nations Past, present, and future Brazil, with all its color, passion, and shifting realities, come together in a novel that is part SF, part history, part mystery, and entirely enthralling Three characters, three time periods, three stories that bind together

Sao Paulo 2031: Edson is a self-made talent impresario one step up from the slums A chance encounter draws him into the dangerous world of illegal quantum computing, but where can you run in a total surveillance society where every move, face, and centavo is constantly tracked Rio 2006: Marcelina is an ambitious Rio TV producer looking for that big reality TV hit to make her name

When her hot idea sets her on the track of a disgraced World Cup soccer goalkeeper, she becomes enmeshed in an ancient conspiracy that threatens not just her life, but her very soul The Amazon 1732: Father Luis is a Jesuit missionary sent into the maelstrom of 18th-century Brazil to locate and punish a rogue priest who has strayed beyond the articles of his faith and set up a vast empire in the hinterland In the company of a French geographer and spy, what he finds in the backwaters of the Amazon tries both his faith and the nature of reality itself to the breaking point

Three characters, three stories, three Brazils, linked across time, space, and reality in a hugely ambitious story that will challenge the way you think about everything Praise for Brasyl "McDonald's outstanding SF novel channels the vitality of South America's largest country into an edgy, post-cyberpunk free-for-all.. Chaotic, heartbreaking and joyous [a] must-read..." — Publishers Weekly "BRASYL is classic McDonald: a deep thinking, high-paced adventure story, exploring the quantum universe, combining sassy, believable characters with a captivating delight in language and storytelling

McDonald inhabits the Brazil – or rather, the Brazils – of this world and sweeps you along as no other writer in the field could manage." — The Guardian "A beautiful story, one that cries out to be read again and again McDonald's light is still shining brightly, and considering the consistent quality of his titles, we say long may it burn." — SciFi Now "Ian McDonald's BRASYL, with its three storylines, is as close to perfect as any novel in recent memory

It works because of great characterization, but also because McDonald envisions Brazil as a dynamic, living place that is part postmodern trash pile, part trashy reality-TV-driven ethical abyss... and yet also somehow spiritual.. McDonald's novel is always in motion This movement extends through time and alternate realities in ways both wonderful and wise, as the three storylines interlock for a satisfying and often stunning conclusion McDonald has found new myths for old places; in doing so, he has cemented his reputation as an amazing storyteller." — Washington Post

Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K Dick Awards, Neuromancer is a science fiction masterpiece—a classic that ranks as one of the twentieth century’s most potent visions of the future Case was the sharpest data-thief in the matrix—until he crossed the wrong people and they crippled his nervous system, banishing him from cyberspace

Now a mysterious new employer has recruited him for a last-chance run at an unthinkably powerful artificial intelligence With a dead man riding shotgun and Molly, a mirror-eyed street-samurai, to watch his back, Case is ready for the adventure that upped the ante on an entire genre of fiction Neuromancer was the first fully-realized glimpse of humankind’s digital future—a shocking vision that has challenged our assumptions about technology and ourselves, reinvented the way we speak and think, and forever altered the landscape of our imaginations.

Michael Crichton meets Marvel’s Venom in award-winning author Seth Dickinson’s science fiction debut, named one of The New York Times' Best SFF Books of 2024. "Agonizing and mesmerizing, a devastating and extraordinary achievement."—The New York Times “Magnificent. . . A science fiction action juggernaut.”—Tamsyn Muir “Anna, I came to Earth tracking a very old story, a story that goes back to the dawn of time It’s very unlikely that you’ll die right now

It wouldn’t be narratively complete.” Anna Sinjari—refugee, survivor of genocide, disaffected office worker—has a close encounter that reveals universe-threatening stakes Enter Ssrin, a many-headed serpent alien who is on the run from her own past Ssrin and Anna are inexorably, dangerously drawn to each other, and their contact reveals universe-threatening stakes

While humanity reels from disaster, Anna must join a small team of civilians, soldiers, and scientists to investigate a mysterious broadcast and unknowable horror If they can manage to face their own demons, they just might save the world At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

This fascinating new study shows how the CIA and the British secret service, in collaboration with the military alliance NATO and European military secret services, set up a network of clandestine anti-communist armies in Western Europe after World War II These secret soldiers were trained on remote islands in the Mediterranean and in unorthodox warfare centres in England and in the United States by the Green Berets and SAS Special Forces The network was armed with explosives, machine guns and high-tech communication equipment hidden in underground bunkers and secret arms caches in forests and mountain meadows

In some countries the secret army linked up with right-wing terrorist who in a secret war engaged in political manipulation, harrassement of left wing parties, massacres, coup d'états and torture Codenamed 'Gladio' ('the sword'), the Italian secret army was exposed in 1990 by Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti to the Italian Senate, whereupon the press spoke of "The best kept, and most damaging, political-military secret since World War II" (Observer, 18

November 1990) and observed that "The story seems straight from the pages of a political thriller." (The Times, November 19, 1990) Ever since, so-called 'stay-behind' armies of NATO have also been discovered in France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Austria, Greece and Turkey They were internationally coordinated by the Pentagon and NATO and had their last known meeting in the NATO-linked Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) in Brussels in October 1990.

A new account of the Mediterranean economy in the 10th to 12th centuries, forcing readers to entirely rethink the underlying logic to medieval economic systems Chris Wickham re-examines documentary and archaeological sources to give a detailed account of both individual economies, and their relationships with each other Chris Wickham offers a new account of the Mediterranean economy in the tenth to twelfth centuries, based on a completely new look at the sources, documentary and archaeological

Our knowledge of the Mediterranean economy is based on syntheses which are between 50 and 150 years old; they are based on outdated assumptions and restricted data sets, and were written before there was any usable archaeology; and Wickham contends that they have to be properly rethought This is the first book ever to give a fully detailed comparative account of the regions of the Mediterranean in this period, in their internal economies and in their relationships with each other

It focusses on Egypt, Tunisia, Sicily, the Byzantine empire, Islamic Spain and Portugal, and north-central Italy, and gives the first comprehensive account of the changing economies of each; only Byzantium has a good prior synthesis It aims to force our rethinking of how economies worked in the medieval Mediterranean It also offers a rethinking of how we should understand the underlying logic of the medieval economy in general.

The idea that with the decline of the Roman Empire Europe entered into some immense ‘dark age’ has long been viewed as inadequate by many historians How could a world still so profoundly shaped by Rome and which encompassed such remarkable societies as the Byzantine, Carolingian and Ottonian empires, be anything other than central to the development of European history How could a world of so many peoples, whether expanding, moving or stable, of Goths, Franks, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, whose genetic and linguistic inheritors we all are, not lie at the heart of how we understand ourselves

The Inheritance of Rome is a work of remarkable scope and ambition Drawing on a wealth of new material, it is a book which will transform its many readers’ ideas about the crucible in which Europe would in the end be created From the collapse of the Roman imperial system to the establishment of the new European dynastic states, perhaps this book’s most striking achievement is to make sense of an immensely long period of time, experienced by many generations of Europeans, and which, while it certainly included catastrophic invasions and turbulence, also contained long periods of continuity and achievement From Ireland to Constantinople, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, this is a genuinely Europe-wide history of a new kind, with something surprising or arresting on every page.

A masterful new history of Europe's last unchristianised peoples in the period between 1387 and 1900, from the Sámi of northern Fennoscandia to the Balts and the Finno-Ugric peoples of European Russia, exploring the reasons for their late adoption of Christianity and their creative religious responses to encounters with missionaries--

The Spanish Crown had initially hoped to establish an orderly aristocratic society in the New World Yet from the late 1520s, Spanish and Indigenous people throughout the colonies radically challenged the social order Surprisingly, they did so not through violence but through the power of paperwork: petitions, complaints, and legal testimony.

One of the most influential published works on naval strategy which analyses British naval domination, first published in 1890.

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's 'On Growth and Form' is a groundbreaking exploration of the relationship between biological forms and the mathematical principles underlying their growth Published in 1917, this work melds scientific observation with eloquent prose, revealing how organisms develop according to natural laws that can be expressed mathematically Thompson's intricate analysis transcends traditional biology by blending the depths of morphology, physics, and the theory of evolution, all while embracing a vivid, illustrative style that captivates readers

Thompson, a pioneering biologist and mathematician, was profoundly influenced by the early 20th-century intellectual climate, including the burgeoning fields of both biology and mathematics His academic journey encompassed studies in natural history and classical languages, which instilled in him an appreciation for the beauty of nature as a mathematical construct This background informed his innovative perspectives on how organisms are shaped by and respond to their environments, elevating the discussion of biology into a realm that intersected art and science. 'On Growth and Form' is highly recommended for anyone fascinated by the intersection of art and science, and for readers eager to deepen their understanding of the natural world

Thompson's insights remain remarkably relevant, bridging a century of scientific thought to contemporary discussions in evolutionary biology and biomathematics In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.

A New York Times bestseller • A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, 2025 Kirkus Prize, 2025 Cundill History Prize, and 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction • Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker,The New Republic, and Mother Jones “An extraordinarily ambitious book . . America, América reads at times as the historical equivalent of the great epic novels of Gabriel García Márquez.” —Irish Times From the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, the first comprehensive history of the Western Hemisphere, a sweeping five-century narrative of North and South America that redefines our understanding of both The story of how the United States’ identity was formed is almost invariably told by looking east to Europe

But as Greg Grandin vividly demonstrates, the nation’s unique sense of itself was in fact forged facing south toward Latin America In turn, Latin America developed its own identity in struggle with the looming colossus to the north In this stunningly original reinterpretation of the New World, Grandin reveals how North and South emerged from a constant, turbulent engagement with each other

America, América traverses half a millennium, from the Spanish Conquest—the greatest mortality event in human history—through the eighteenth-century wars for independence, the Monroe Doctrine, the coups and revolutions of the twentieth century, and beyond Grandin shows, among other things, how in response to U.S. interventions, Latin Americans remade the rules, leading directly to the founding of the United Nations; and how the Good Neighbor Policy allowed FDR to assume the moral authority to lead the fight against world fascism

Grandin’s book sheds new light on well-known historical figures like Bartolomé de las Casas, Simón Bolívar, and Woodrow Wilson, as well as lesser-known actors such as the Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda, who almost lost his head in the French Revolution and conspired with Alexander Hamilton to free America from Spain; the Colombian Jorge Gaitán, whose unsolved murder inaugurated the rise of Cold War political terror, death squads, and disappearances; and the radical journalist Ernest Gruening, who, in championing non-interventionism in Latin America, helped broker the most spectacularly successful policy reversal in United States history This is a monumental work of scholarship that will fundamentally change the way we think of Spanish and English colonialism, slavery and racism, and the rise of universal humanism

At once comprehensive and accessible, America, América shows that centuries of bloodshed and diplomacy not only helped shape the political identities of the United States and Latin America but also the laws, institutions, and ideals that govern the modern world In so doing, Grandin argues that Latin America’s deeply held culture of social democracy can be an effective counterweight to today’s spreading rightwing authoritarianism A culmination of a decades-long engagement with hemispheric history, drawing on a vast array of sources, and told with authority and flair, this is a genuinely new history of the New World.

A poignant consideration of the material aspect of sound and how it fundamentally shapes our experience of the world, both in its presence and absence From the joyous communal connections fostered through shared auditory experience to the devastating impact of noise pollution in the deep sea, musician and author Damon Krukowski urges readers to reconsider the significance of sound and its role in both our personal and collective well-being He looks despairingly at how the multipronged efforts of urban dwellers to mitigate city noise have led to increased isolation, loss of community, and a sense of physical detachment from one’s surroundings

He considers the consequences of the commodification of sound in the digital era And he looks at what’s at stake in trying to preserve the world’s dwindling quiet places Interspersed with personal reflections from years of working in the music business, this book investigates sound’s role in the environment, its value as a material, its relationship to labor, and how it affects our interactions with one another

Krukowski invites you to hear the world anew and renew your relationship with one of our most precious natural resources So listen up!

The future of the book is the blurb, said Marshall McLuhan As the future arrives, this book is written in tweets-1,295 of them Gathered in thread-chapters, they explore and explain what media evolution does to us Cars help people get around faster

But when their use hits certain limits, their effect of speed and mobility reverses into traffic jams And so it is with any medium: when it reaches its extremes or limits, it reverses its effect into the opposite This is what we face now Digital media have sped up human interaction with the world to its limit-instantaneity

No wonder everything is now reversing into its opposite, merging into one global, cataclysmic Digital Reversal The abundance of signals reverses into noise The abundance of facts reverses into fakes Free access to self-expression leads to abuse by trolls and bad actors and reverses into censorship

The revolt of the public reverses into anarcho-tyranny Text reverses into texting, and texting reverses print literacy into digital orality Abstraction reverses into anecdotal evidence Feelings reverse into intensities

Boosted by the overload of empathy, identity reverses into credentials Journalism reverses into postjournalism The overload of news reverses into news avoidance Reading books reverses into asking the search box

Knowledge reverses into knowing Academia flips into activism Objective truth reverses into crowdsourced importance Everything is media effects In the digital era, the study of media effects is the study of reversals

Reversals are everywhere Like verses in a saga, 1,295 tweets across 248 pages cover the development of media from orality to literacy and now in reverse-to digital orality Also read other books by Andrey Mir - available on Amazon: - The Viral Inquisitor and Other Essays on Postjournalism and Media Ecology (2024) - Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers' Axial Age and Logan's Alphabet Effect (2024) - Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers: The Media After Trump: Manufacturing Anger and Polarization (2020) - Human as Media: The Emancipation of Authorship (2014)

Before the advent of synthetic fibers and cargo containers, jute sacks were the preferred packaging material of global trade, transporting the world's grain, cotton, sugar, tobacco, coffee, wool, guano, and bacon Jute was the second-most widely consumed fiber in the world, after cotton While the sack circulated globally, the plant was cultivated almost exclusively by peasant smallholders in a small corner of the world: the Bengal delta

This book examines how jute fibers entangled the delta's peasantry in the rhythms and vicissitudes of global capital Taking readers from the nineteenth-century high noon of the British Raj to the early years of post-partition Pakistan in the mid-twentieth century, Tariq Omar Ali traces how the global connections wrought by jute transformed every facet of peasant life: practices of work, leisure, domesticity, and sociality; ideas and discourses of justice, ethics, piety, and religiosity; and political commitments and actions

Ali examines how peasant life was structured and restructured with oscillations in global commodity markets, as the nineteenth-century period of peasant consumerism and prosperity gave way to debt and poverty in the twentieth century A Local History of Global Capital traces how jute bound the Bengal delta's peasantry to turbulent global capital, and how global commodity markets shaped everyday peasant life and determined the difference between prosperity and poverty, survival and starvation.

How beef conquered America and gave rise to the modern industrial food complex By the late nineteenth century, Americans rich and poor had come to expect high-quality fresh beef with almost every meal Beef production in the United States had gone from small-scale, localized operations to a highly centralized industry spanning the country, with cattle bred on ranches in the rural West, slaughtered in Chicago, and consumed in the nation’s rapidly growing cities

Red Meat Republic tells the remarkable story of the violent conflict over who would reap the benefits of this new industry and who would bear its heavy costs Joshua Specht puts people at the heart of his story—the big cattle ranchers who helped to drive the nation’s westward expansion, the meatpackers who created a radically new kind of industrialized slaughterhouse, and the stockyard workers who were subjected to the shocking and unsanitary conditions described by Upton Sinclair in his novel The Jungle

Specht brings to life a turbulent era marked by Indian wars, Chicago labor unrest, and food riots in the streets of New York He shows how the enduring success of the cattle-beef complex—centralized, low cost, and meatpacker dominated—was a consequence of the meatpackers’ ability to make their interests overlap with those of a hungry public, while the interests of struggling ranchers, desperate workers, and bankrupt butchers took a backseat America—and the American table—would never be the same again A compelling and unfailingly enjoyable read, Red Meat Republic reveals the complex history of exploitation and innovation behind the food we consume today.

A detailed historical look at how copyright was negotiated and protected by authors, publishers, and the state in late imperial and modern China In Pirates and Publishers, Fei-Hsien Wang reveals the unknown social and cultural history of copyright in China from the 1890s through the 1950s, a time of profound sociopolitical changes Wang draws on a vast range of previously underutilized archival sources to show how copyright was received, appropriated, and practiced in China, within and beyond the legal institutions of the state

Contrary to common belief, copyright was not a problematic doctrine simply imposed on China by foreign powers with little regard for Chinese cultural and social traditions Shifting the focus from the state legislation of copyright to the daily, on-the-ground negotiations among Chinese authors, publishers, and state agents, Wang presents a more dynamic, nuanced picture of the encounter between Chinese and foreign ideas and customs Developing multiple ways for articulating their understanding of copyright, Chinese authors, booksellers, and publishers played a crucial role in its growth and eventual institutionalization in China

These individuals enforced what they viewed as copyright to justify their profit, protect their books, and crack down on piracy in a changing knowledge economy As China transitioned from a late imperial system to a modern state, booksellers and publishers created and maintained their own economic rules and regulations when faced with the absence of an effective legal framework Exploring how copyright was transplanted, adopted, and practiced, Pirates and Publishers demonstrates the pivotal roles of those who produce and circulate knowledge.

A Shared Turn : Opium and the Rise of Prohibition -- The Different Lives of Southeast Asia's Opium Monopolies -- "Morally Wrecked" in British Burma, 1870s-1890s -- Fiscal Dependency in British Malaya, 1890s-1920s -- Disastrous Abundance in French Indochina, 1920s-1940s -- Colonial Legacies.

Among the biggest challenges facing leaders of the newly established People's Republic of China (PRC) was how much they did not know In 1949, at the end of a long sequence of wars, the government of one of the largest states in the world committed to fundamentally re-engineering its society and economy via socialist planning while having almost no hard, reliable statistical data about their own country This book is a history of attempts made to resolve this crisis in counting

Drawing on a wealth of official, institutional, and private sources culled from China, India, and the United States, the author explores the choices made and the effects they engendered through a series of vivid encounters with political leaders, professional statisticians, academics, ordinary statistical workers, and even literary figures Early reliance on Soviet-inspired methods of enumeration became increasingly untenable in China by the middle of the 1950s

A series of unprecedented and unexpected exchanges with Indian statisticians followed, as the Chinese sought to learn about the then exciting new technology of random sampling These developments were, in turn, overtaken by the tumult of the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961), when both probabilistic and exhaustive methods were rejected and statistics was refashioned into an essentially ethnographic enterprise The author argues that this history, usually narrowly described as a universal, if European history, cannot be understood without acknowledging Soviet and Indian influences which not only revises existing models of Cold War science but also globalizes the wider developments in the history of statistics and data For historians of China and social science, and political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists studying modern China.--

A full-scale historical treatment of the advent of printing and its importance as an agent of change, first published in 1980.

Although the importance of the advent of printing for the Western world has long been recognized, it was Elizabeth Eisenstein, in her monumental, two-volume work, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, who provided the first full-scale treatment of the subject This edition gives a stimulating survey of the communications revolution of the fifteenth century

After summarizing the initial changes introduce by the establishment of printing shops, it goes on to discuss how printing effected three major cultural movements: the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the rise of modern science Specific examples show how the use of the new presses enabled churchmen, scholars, and craftsmen to move beyond the limits handcopying had imposed and thus to pose new challenges to traditional institutions.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice “This captivating history of the decades leading up to the French Revolution…immerse[s] readers in what agitated Parisians read, wore, ate and sang on the way to toppling the monarchy of Louis XVI.” —New York Times Book Review A groundbreaking account of the coming of the French Revolution from a historian of worldwide acclaim When a Parisian crowd stormed the Bastille in July 1789, it triggered an event of global consequence: the overthrow of the monarchy and the birth of a new society

Most historians account for the French Revolution by viewing it in retrospect as the outcome of underlying conditions such as a faltering economy, social tensions, or the influence of Enlightenment thought But what did Parisians themselves think they were doing—how did they understand their world What were the motivations and aspirations that guided their actions

In this dazzling history, Robert Darnton addresses these questions by drawing on decades of close study to conjure a past as vivid as today’s news He explores eighteenth-century Paris as an information society much like our own, its news circuits centered in cafés, on park benches, and under the Palais-Royal’s Tree of Cracow Through pamphlets, gossip, underground newsletters, and public performances, the events of some forty years—from disastrous treaties, official corruption, and royal debauchery to thrilling hot-air balloon ascents and new understandings of the nation—all entered the churning collective consciousness of ordinary Parisians

As public trust in royal authority eroded and new horizons opened for them, Parisians prepared themselves for revolution Darnton’s authority and sure judgment enable readers to confidently navigate the passions and complexities of controversies over court politics, Church doctrine, and the economy And his compact, luminous prose creates an immersive reading experience Here is a riveting narrative that succeeds in making the past a living presence.

“[R]evelatory…Deeply researched and masterfully told.” —Brian Goldstone, New York Times Book Review The explosive account of the arson wave that hit the Bronx and other American cities in the 1970s—and its legacy today. “Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning!” That legendary and apocryphal phrase, allegedly uttered by announcers during the 1977 World Series as flames rose above Yankee Stadium, seemed to encapsulate an entire era in this nation’s urban history Across that decade, a wave of arson coursed through American cities, destroying entire neighborhoods home to poor communities of color

Yet as historian Bench Ansfield demonstrates in Born in Flames, the most destructive of the fires were not set by residents, as is commonly assumed, but by landlords looking to collect insurance payouts Driven by perverse incentives—new government-sponsored insurance combined with tanking property values—landlords hired “torches,” mostly Black and Brown youth, to set fires in the buildings, sometimes with people still living in them Tens of thousands of families lost their homes to these blazes, yet for much of the 1970s, tenant vandalism and welfare fraud stood as the prevailing explanations for the arson wave, effectively indemnifying landlords

Ansfield’s book, based on a decade of research, introduces the term “brownlining” for the destructive insurance practices imposed on poor communities of color under the guise of racial redress Ansfield shows that as the FIRE industries—finance, insurance, and real estate— eclipsed manufacturing in the 1970s, they began profoundly reshaping Black and Brown neighborhoods, seeing them as easy sources of profit At every step, Ansfield charts the tenant-led resistance movements that sprung up in the Bronx and elsewhere, as well as the explosion of popular culture around the fires, from iconic movies like The Towering Inferno to hit songs such as “Disco Inferno.” Ultimately, they show how similarly pernicious dynamics around insurance and race are still at play in our own era, especially in regions most at risk of climate shocks.

An alarming exposé of the new challenges to literary freedom in the age of social media—when anyone with an identity and an internet connection can be a censor In That Book Is Dangerous!, Adam Szetela investigates how well-intentioned and often successful efforts to diversify American literature have also produced serious problems for literary freedom Although progressives are correct to be focused on right-wing attempts at legislative censorship, Szetela argues for attention to the ways that left-wing censorship controls speech within the publishing industry itself

The author draws on interviews with presidents and vice presidents at the Big Five publishers, literary agents at the most prestigious agencies, award-winning authors, editors, marketers, sensitivity readers, and other industry professionals to examine the new publishing landscape What he finds is unsettling: mandatory sensitivity reads; morality clauses in author contracts; even censorship of “dangerous” books in the name of antiracism, feminism, and other forms of social justice

These changes to acquisition practices, editing policies, and other aspects of literary culture are a direct outgrowth of the culture of public outcries on X, Goodreads, Change.org, and other online platforms, where users accuse authors—justifiably or not—of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other transgressions But rather than genuinely address the economic inequities of literary production, this current moral crusade over literature serves only to entrench the status quo. “While the right is remaking the world in its image,” he writes, “the left is standing in a circular firing squad.” Compellingly argued and incisively written, the book is a much-needed wake-up call for anyone who cares about reading, writing, and the publication of books—as well as the generations of young readers we are raising.

The first full-scale history of Hannibal's Carthage in decades and "a convincing and enthralling narrative." (The Economist ) Drawing on a wealth of new research, archaeologist, historian, and master storyteller Richard Miles resurrects the civilization that ancient Rome struggled so mightily to expunge This monumental work charts the entirety of Carthage's history, from its origins among the Phoenician settlements of Lebanon to its apotheosis as a Mediterranean empire whose epic land-and-sea clash with Rome made a legend of Hannibal and shaped the course of Western history Carthage Must Be Destroyed reintroduces readers to the ancient glory of a lost people and their generations-long struggle against an implacable enemy.

The Great War and the Transformation of Habsburg Central Europe examines how the First World War transformed the multinational Austro-Hungarian Monarchy into a fractured landscape of mistrust, scarcity, and dissolution and laid the foundation for the new postwar world.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “thrilling and superbly crafted” (The Wall Street Journal) account of the most momentous voyage of the Age of Exploration, which culminated in Captain James Cook’s death in Hawaii, and left a complex and controversial legacy still debated to this day One of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES, TIME, THE ECONOMIST, NPR, THE NEW YORKER, THE SMITHSONIAN, AND KIRKUS REVIEWS “In this masterly history, Sides tracks the 18th-century English naval officer James Cook’s third and final voyage across the globe, painting a vivid and propulsive portrait."—The New York Times Book Review On July 12th, 1776, Captain James Cook, already lionized as the greatest explorer in British history, set off on his third voyage in his ship the HMS Resolution

Two-and-a-half years later, on a beach on the island of Hawaii, Cook was killed in a conflict with native Hawaiians How did Cook, who was unique among captains for his respect for Indigenous peoples and cultures, come to that fatal moment Hampton Sides’ bravura account of Cook’s last journey both wrestles with Cook’s legacy and provides a thrilling narrative of the titanic efforts and continual danger that characterized exploration in the 1700s

Cook was renowned for his peerless seamanship, his humane leadership, and his dedication to science On previous expeditions, Cook mapped huge swaths of the Pacific, including the east coast of Australia, and initiated first European contact with numerous peoples He treated his crew well and endeavored to learn about the societies he encountered with curiosity and without judgment

Yet something was different on this last voyage Cook became mercurial, resorting to the lash to enforce discipline, and led his two vessels into danger time and again Uncharacteristically, he ordered violent retaliation for perceived theft on the part of native peoples

This may have had something to do with his secret orders, which were to chart and claim lands before Britain’s imperial rivals could, and to discover the fabled Northwest Passage Whatever Cook’s intentions, his scientific efforts were the sharp edge of the colonial sword, and the ultimate effects of first contact were catastrophic for Indigenous people around the world The tensions between Cook’s overt and covert missions came to a head on the shores of Hawaii

His first landing there was harmonious, but when Cook returned after mapping the coast of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, his exploitative treatment of the Hawaiians led to the fatal encounter At once a ferociously-paced story of adventure on the high seas and a searching examination of the complexities and consequences of the Age of Exploration, THE WIDE WIDE SEA is a major work from one of our finest narrative nonfiction writers.

In Draining New Orleans, the first full-length book devoted to “the world’s toughest drainage problem,” renowned geographer Richard Campanella recounts the epic challenges and ingenious efforts to dewater the Crescent City With forays into geography, public health, engineering, architecture, politics, sociology, race relations, and disaster response, he chronicles the herculean attempts to “reclaim” the city’s swamps and marshes and install subsurface drainage for massive urban expansion

The study begins with a vivid description of a festive event on Mardi Gras weekend 1915, which attracted an entourage of elite New Orleanians to the edge of Bayou Barataria to witness the christening of giant water pumps President Woodrow Wilson, connected via phoneline from the White House, planned to activate the station with the push of a button, effectively draining the West Bank of New Orleans What transpired in the years and decades that followed can only be understood by examining the large swath of history dating back two centuries earlier—to the geological formation and indigenous occupation of this delta—and extending through the colonial, antebellum, postbellum, and Progressive eras to modern times

The consequences of dewatering New Orleans proved both triumphant and tragic The city’s engineering prowess transformed it into a world leader in drainage technology, yet the municipality also fell victim to its own success Rather than a story about mud and machinery, this is a history of people, power, and the making of place Campanella emphasizes the role of determined and sometimes unsavory individuals who spearheaded projects to separate water from dirt, creating lucrative opportunities in the process not only for the community but also for themselves.

David Reich describes how the revolution in the ability to sequence ancient DNA has changed our understanding of the deep human past This book tells the emerging story of our often surprising ancestry - the extraordinary ancient migrations and mixtures of populations that have made us who we are.

With the moral stamina and intellectual pose of a twentieth-century Titan, this slightly built, duitful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose He was profoundly in touch with the minutest workings of the most endearing human events and with the most contempible What has survived in Levi's writing isn't just his memory of the unbearable, but also, in THE PERIODIC TABLE and THE WRENCH, his delight in what made the world exquisite to him He was himself a "magically endearing man, the most delicately forceful enchanter I've ever known."

'Brilliant' TIM SPECTOR 'Excellent' HENRY MARSH 'Thrilling' VENKI RAMAKRISHNAN Antibiotics: one of humanity’s greatest achievements – but invented by microbes An epic narrative of discovery and innovation – but also of extraction and exploitation This is the spellbinding story of how we have burned through the fossil fuels of medicine

Since their advent, antibiotics have saved millions of lives, marking one of the greatest medical advances in our history Dangerous Miracle weaves together the grand arc of the evolution of antibiotics over millions of years with a history of the past century: first as we mined the earth for naturally occurring antibiotic molecules, then as we learned to synthesise our own But like fossil fuels, antibiotics are a finite resource which we’ve regarded as a cheap, everlasting fuel

They are unlike other drugs: every time we use them we increase the possibility of antibiotic resistance emerging, risking their future effectiveness If we want antibiotics to have a future, we need to prepare to adapt And fast Rich with pioneering characters, great breakthroughs and grave risks, Dangerous Miracle is a grand drama of science, history and politics

It is a revelatory account of the miraculous history and uncertain future of antibiotics. ‘An enjoyable, compelling and absolutely essential read’ KATE BINGHAM ‘Eye-opening and thrilling .. Both an important history and a vital call to arms to change the way new drugs are discovered’ MATTHEW COBB

The Highest Exam provides a detailed, research-driven survey of the gaokao, China's high-stakes college entrance exam Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li--past test-takers themselves--show how the exam system shapes schooling, serves state interests, inspires individualistic attitudes, and has lately become a touchstone in US education debates.

Eli Hurvitz (April 1932-November 2011) has become a legend in Israel and beyond His accomplishments in the business world from the 1980s onward earned him a prominent place in the Israeli public consciousness Considered a pillar of Israeli industry, he was the financial and business genius who transformed Teva into one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies and launched Israeli industry into the international arena

Under Eli's deft management, Teva doubled its sales every four years and by 2011, the company was worth $54 billion, making it the most successful company in Israel.In addition to his standing as a respected business leader in Israel and around the world, Eli was a well-known Israeli public figure He received more awards and prizes than any other industrialist in the country's history Israeli prime minister's eager to expand the "miracle of Teva" to the entire Israeli economy asked him to serve as finance minister more than once and the heads of the country's major political parties courted him.

Community and Consensus in Islam, first published in 1989, represented a bold attempt to introduce the role of ideas in the interpretation of Indo-Muslim politics between 1860 and the Partition of India in 1947 It questioned the widely held view at the time that Indian Muslim politics of the period could be explained by reference to pragmatic interests alone Instead, Farzana Shaikh argued that the influence of ideas rooted in Islamic tradition must form a crucial dimension of any wellgrounded explanation of the determinants of Indo-Muslim political practice

In this masterful study the configurations of colonial politics in India are set against the backdrop of tensions between two contrasting intellectual traditions - the Islamic and the liberal-democratic - to show how their different assumptions about the proper ends of political action sharpened the opposition between diverse constitutional positions that led to Partition Today it stands as a vital contribution to the debate about this momentous event.

Mohammad Ali Jinnah has been both celebrated and reviled for his role in the Partition of India, and the controversies surrounding his actions have only increased in the seven decades and more since his death Ishtiaq Ahmed places Jinnah's actions under intense scrutiny to ascertain the Quaid-i-Azam's successes and failures and the meaning and significance of his legacy

Using a wealth of contemporary records and archival material, Dr Ahmed traces Jinnah's journey from Indian nationalist to Muslim communitarian, and from a Muslim nationalist to, finally, Pakistan's all-powerful head of state How did the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity become the inflexible votary of the two-nation theory Did Jinnah envision Pakistan as a theocratic state

What was his position on Gandhi and federalism Asking these crucial questions against the backdrop of the turbulent struggle against colonialism, this book is a path-breaking examination of one of the most controversial figures of the twentieth century.

Over 1.5 million Canadians were on relief, one in five was a public dependant, and 70,000 young men travelled like hoboes Ordinary citizens were rioting in the streets, but their demonstrations met with indifference, and dissidents were jailed Canada emerged from the Great Depression a different nation

The most searing decade in Canada's history began with the stock market crash of 1929 and ended with the Second World War With formidable story-telling powers, Berton reconstructs its engrossing events vividly: the Regina Riot, the Great Birth Control Trial, the black blizzards of the dust bowl and the rise of Social Credit The extraordinary cast of characters includes Prime Minister Mackenzie King, who praised Hitler and Mussolini but thought Winston Churchill "one of the most dangerous men I have ever known"; Maurice Duplessis, who padlocked the homes of private citizens for their political opinions; and Tim Buck, the Communist leader who narrowly escaped murder in Kingston Penitentiary

In this #1 best-selling book, Berton proves that Canada's political leaders failed to take the bold steps necessary to deal with the mass unemployment, drought and despair A child of the era, he writes passionately of people starving in the midst of plenty.

Evoking the tumultuous history of the relationship between Britain and Ireland, These Divided Isles investigates the complexities of culture and colonization to ask what the future holds for both countries Ireland is Britain's closest neighbor—the sea crossing from Scotland measures only twelve miles Ireland was also its first conquered territory in what became Britain's empire

The two nation's stories have been intertwined since Anglo-Norman invaders crossed the Irish Sea during the twelfth century These Divided Isles tells the extraordinary history of the past century in this tumultuous relationship, from the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1922 to the present day This is a tale of deep division between Catholic nationalism and Protestant unionism, of wars and terrorist violence, and of occasional moments of great courage on the part of British and Irish leaders

Today, the post-Brexit weakening of the UK's constitutional ties has coincided with the march of demography in Northern Ireland as the Protestant unionist majority continues to shrink Sinn Féin's historic string of electoral victories in Northern Ireland since 2022 has once more resurfaced the unfinished business of partition Here, Philip Stephens explores how Ireland might escape its troubled past by deploying history to inform the future rather than hold it in place.

Do leading social-scientific experts, or technocrats, know what they are doing In Power without Knowledge, Jeffrey Friedman maintains that they do not Friedman shows that people are too heterogeneous to act as predictably as technocracy requires of them Technocratic reason, then, entails a drastically oversimplified understanding of human decision making in modern society.

A landmark comparative history of Europe and China that examines why the Industrial Revolution emerged in the West The Great Divergence sheds light on one of the great questions of history: Why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe Historian Kenneth Pomeranz shows that as recently as 1750, life expectancy, consumption, and product and factor markets were comparable in Europe and East Asia

Moreover, key regions in China and Japan were no worse off ecologically than those in Western Europe, with each region facing corresponding shortages of land-intensive products Pomeranz’s comparative lens reveals the two critical factors resulting in Europe's nineteenth-century divergence—the fortunate location of coal and access to trade with the New World As East Asia’s economy stagnated, Europe narrowly escaped the same fate largely due to favorable resource stocks from underground and overseas This Princeton Classics edition includes a preface from the author and makes a powerful historical work available to new readers.

In 1644, the Manchus, a relatively unknown people inhabiting China's northeastern frontier, overthrew the Ming, Asia's mightiest rulers, and established the Qing dynasty, This book supplies a radically new perspective on the formative period of the modern Chinese nation.

A single volume history of China, offering a look into the past of the global superpower and its significance today Michael Wood has travelled the length and breadth of China, the world's oldest civilization and longest lasting state, to tell a thrilling story of intense drama, fabulous creativity, and deep humanity that stretches back thousands of years

After a century and a half of foreign invasion, civil war, and revolution, China has once again returned to center stage as a global superpower and the world's second largest economy But how did it become so dominant Wood argues that in order to comprehend the great significance of China today, we must begin with its history

The Story of China takes a fresh look at the Middle Kingdom in the light of the recent massive changes inside the country Taking into account exciting new archeological discoveries, the book begins with China's prehistory—the early dynasties, the origins of the Chinese state, and the roots of Chinese culture in the age of Confucius Wood looks at particular periods and themes that are now being reevaluated by historians, such as the renaissance of the Song with its brilliant scientific discoveries

He paints a vibrant picture of the Qing Empire in the 18th century, just before the European impact, a time when China's rich and diverse culture was at its height Then, Wood explores the encounter with the West, the Opium Wars, the clashes with the British, and the extraordinarily rich debates in the late 19th century that pushed China along the path to modernity Finally, he provides a clear up-to-date account of post-1949 China, including revelations about the 1989 crisis based on newly leaked inside documents, and fresh insights into the new order of President Xi Jinping All woven together with landscape history and the author's own travel journals, The Story of China is the indispensable book about the most intriguing and powerful country on the world stage today.

“Nothing I’ve read has cut to the heart of the ’00s like Y2K.” — Bustle Perfect for fans of Jia Tolentino and Chuck Klosterman, Y2K is a delightfully nostalgic and bitingly told exploration about how the early 2000s forever changed us and the world we live in THE EARLY 2000s conjures images of inflatable furniture, flip phones, and low-rise jeans It was a new millennium and the future looked bright, promising prosperity for all

The internet had arrived, and technology was shiny and fun For many, it felt like the end of history: no more wars, racism, or sexism But then history kept happening Twenty-five years after the ball dropped on December 31st, 1999, we are still living in the shadows of the Y2K Era

In Y2K, one of our most brilliant young critics Colette Shade offers a darkly funny meditation on everything from the pop culture to the political economy of the period By close reading Y2K artifacts like the Hummer H2, Smash Mouth’s “All Star,” body glitter, AOL chatrooms, Total Request Live, and early internet porn, Shade produces an affectionate yet searing critique of a decade that started with a boom and ended with a crash In one essay Colette unpacks how hearing Ludacris’s hit song “What’s Your Fantasy” shaped a generation’s sexual awakening; in another she interrogates how her eating disorder developed as rail-thin models from the collapsed USSR flooded the pages of Vogue; in another she reveals how the McMansion became an ominous symbol of the housing collapse Perfect for fans of Jia Tolentino and Chuck Klosterman, Y2K is the first book to fully reckon with the mixed legacy of the Y2K Era—a perfectly timed collection that holds a startling mirror to our past, present, and future.

The role of large-scale business enterprise—big business and its managers—during the formative years of modern capitalism (1850s–1920s) is delineated in this pathmarking book Alfred Chandler, Jr., sets forth the reasons for the dominance of big business in American transportation, communications, and central sectors of production and distribution.

The story of Koyaga, dictator and president of the Gulf Coast, an imaginary former French African colony, is told by Bingo, his sora, part storyteller, part court fool Bingo tells of Koyaga's father, born in an obscure and backward mountain tribe, which he leaves for success as a wrestler, and heroic exploits on the Somme as a French fusilier only to die of hunger in a French colonial prison; and of Koyaga himself, a French solider in Vietnam and Algeria, and then the leader of a coup that overthrows a shortlived post colonial democracy Koyaga is part an archetypal third world dictator, part hero of a folktale his story is told in a prose of haunting simplicity, in a novel that by turns brings to mind Gabriel Marquez and Giles Foden.

How the world’s oldest asset secretly shapes our modern economy In The Land Trap, Mike Bird—Wall Street editor at The Economist—reveals how this ancient asset still exerts outsize influence over the modern world From the speculative land grabs of colonial America to China's real estate crisis today, Bird shows how fortunes are built—and destroyed—on the bedrock of land Tracing three centuries of history, Bird explores how land quietly became the linchpin of the global banking system, driving everything from soaring housing prices to rising geopolitical tensisons

As governments wrestle with inequality and land grows ever scarcer, The Land Trap offers a powerful new framework for understanding the hidden force behind today's most urgent challenges This is the book for anyone who wants to see beyond markets and money to the real game being played on a foundation as old as civilization itself Timely, provocative, and essential, The Land Trap will change how you see the ground beneath your feet.

A Sea of Wealth is a sweeping retelling of the Omani position in the Indian Ocean Here the reign of Oman’s longest-serving ruler, Saʿid bin Sultan, offers a keyhole through which we can peer to see the entangled histories of Arabia and the Gulf, South Asia, and East Africa in the Omani Empire In centering this empire, Nicholas P

Roberts shows how Arabs, Africans, and Asians actively shaped the conditions of commercial engagement in the Western Indian Ocean, uniting the empire’s domains into a single oceanic marketplace in which Europeans and Americans had to accede if they wished to succeed Drawing upon sources in three languages from four continents, A Sea of Wealth is a vivid narrative full of colorful characters that upturns many conventional understandings of our modern world.

The gripping story of an explosive turning point in the history of modern India On the night of June 25, 1975, Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency in India, suspending constitutional rights and rounding up her political opponents in midnight raids across the country In the twenty-one harrowing months that followed, her regime unleashed a brutal campaign of coercion and intimidation, arresting and torturing people by the tens of thousands, razing slums, and imposing compulsory sterilization on the poor

Emergency Chronicles provides the first comprehensive account of this understudied episode in India’s modern history Gyan Prakash strips away the comfortable myth that the Emergency was an isolated event brought on solely by Gandhi’s desire to cling to power, arguing that it was as much the product of Indian democracy’s troubled relationship with popular politics

Drawing on archival records, private papers and letters, published sources, film and literary materials, and interviews with victims and perpetrators, Prakash traces the Emergency’s origins to the moment of India’s independence in 1947, revealing how the unfulfilled promise of democratic transformation upset the fine balance between state power and civil rights He vividly depicts the unfolding of a political crisis that culminated in widespread popular unrest, which Gandhi sought to crush by paradoxically using the law to suspend lawful rights

Her failure to preserve the existing political order had lasting and unforeseen repercussions, opening the door for caste politics and Hindu nationalism Placing the Emergency within the broader global history of democracy, this gripping book offers invaluable lessons for us today as the world once again confronts the dangers of rising authoritarianism and populist nationalism.

Paul P Mariani charts China’s fraught Catholic revival after the Cultural Revolution, as Catholics loyal to Rome clashed with a state-sanctioned church Focusing on Shanghai, where the state-appointed Bishop Louis Jin Luxian found himself at odds with underground church leaders, Mariani details a community perilously divided.

The National Bolshevik Party, founded in the mid-1990s by Eduard Limonov and Aleksandr Dugin, began as an attempt to combine radically different ideologies In the years that followed, Limonov, Dugin, and the movements they led underwent dramatic shifts The two leaders eventually became political adversaries, with Dugin and his organizations strongly supporting Putin’s regime while Limonov and his groups became part of the liberal opposition

To illuminate the role of these right-wing ideas in contemporary Russian society, Fabrizio Fenghi examines the public pronouncements and aesthetics of this influential movement He analyzes a diverse range of media, including novels, art exhibitions, performances, seminars, punk rock concerts, and even protest actions His interviews with key figures reveal an attempt to create an alternative intellectual class, or a “counter-intelligensia.” This volume shows how certain forms of art can transform into political action through the creation of new languages, institutions, and modes of collective participation.

The historiography of modern India is largely a pageant of presumed virtues: harmonious territorial unity, religious impartiality, the miraculous survival of electoral norms in the world’s most populous democracy Even critics of Indian society still underwrite such claims But how well does the “Idea of India” correspond to the realities of the Union

In an iconoclastic intervention, Marxist historian Perry Anderson provides an unforgettable reading of the Subcontinent’s passage through Independence and the catastrophe of Partition, the idiosyncratic and corrosive vanities of Gandhi and Nehru, and the close interrelationship of Indian democracy and caste inequality The Indian Ideology caused uproar on first publication in 2012, not least for breaking with euphemisms for Delhi’s occupation of Kashmir This new, expanded edition includes the author’s reply to his critics, an interview with the Indian weekly Outlook, and a postscript on India under the rule of Narendra Modi.

For years, China’s transformation from one of the world’s poorest nations was lauded as a triumph that lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty There were always questions about data reliability and growth sustainability, but the general views on China have recently taken a decidedly sour turn Concerns abound about state interference in the economy, an ageing population, and high debt level

Making Sense of China's Economy untangles China’s complex economic structure, evolving issues and curious contradictions, and explains some key features of this most puzzling of global economic powerhouses This book reveals how factors such as demographics, the initial stage of development in 1978, the transition away from full state ownership and central planning, the dual urban-rural society, and a decentralised governance structure have combined to shape the economy, its development and its reforms

It shows how the pragmatic and adaptive nature of China’s policymaking upends familiar perspectives and hinders simple cross-country comparisons The book also explores crucial topics including the property market, debt accumulation and environmental challenges In this book, Tao Wang innovatively weaves the multiple strands of China’s economy into a holistic and organic tapestry that gives us unique insights from both a Chinese and an international perspective This book is critical reading for business leaders, investors, policymakers, students, and anyone else hoping to understand China’s economy and its future evolution and impact, written by a specialist who has studied the country from both inside and out.

An examination of how production processes—from penicillin to steel to semiconductors—get more efficient over time, and a powerful argument for efficiency as an underrated driver of progress Efficiency is the engine that powers human civilization It’s the reason rates of famine have fallen precipitously, literacy has risen, and humans are living longer, healthier lives compared to preindustrial times

But where do improvements in production efficiency come from In The Origins of Efficiency, Brian Potter argues that improving production efficiency—finding ways to produce goods and services in less time, with less labor, using fewer resources—is the force behind some of the biggest and most consequential changes in human history With unprecedented depth and detail, Potter examines the fundamental characteristics of a production process and how it can be made less time- and resource-intensive, and therefore less expensive

The book is punctuated with examples of production efficiency in practice, including how high-yield manufacturing methods made penicillin the “miracle drug” that reduced battlefield infection deaths by 80 percent during World War II; the 100-year history of process improvements in incandescent light bulb production; and how automakers like Ford, Toyota, and Tesla developed innovative production methods that transformed not just the automotive industry but manufacturing as a whole He concludes by looking at sectors where production costs haven’t fallen, and explores how we might harness the mechanisms of production efficiency to change that The Origins of Efficiency is a comprehensive companion for anyone seeking to understand how we arrived at this age of relative abundance—and how we can push efficiency improvements further into domains like housing, medicine, and education, where much work is left to be done.

Barbara W Tuchman won her second Pulitzer Prize for this nonfiction masterpiece—an authoritative work of history that recounts the birth of modern China through the eyes of one extraordinary American General Joseph W Stilwell was a man who loved China deeply and knew its people as few Americans ever have

Barbara W Tuchman’s groundbreaking narrative follows Stilwell from the time he arrived in China during the Revolution of 1911, through his tours of duty in Peking and Tientsin in the 1920s and ’30s, to his return as theater commander in World War II, when the Nationalist government faced attack from both Japanese invaders and Communist insurgents Peopled by warlords, ambassadors, and missionaries, this classic biography of the cantankerous but level-headed “Vinegar Joe” sparkles with Tuchman’s genius for animating the people who shaped history Praise for Stilwell and the American Experience in China “Tuchman’s best book . . . so large in scope, so crammed with information, so clear in exposition, so assured in tone that one is tempted to say it is not a book but an education.”—The New Yorker “The most interesting and informative book on U.S.–China relations . . . a brilliant, lucid and authentic account.”—The Nation “A fantastic and complex story finely told.”—The New York Times Book Review

"The hidden history of one of the world's greatest inventors, a man who disrupted the status quo and then disappeared into thin air on the eve of World War I--this book answers the hundred-year-old mystery of what really became of Rudolf Diesel September 29, 1913: the steamship Dresden is halfway between Belgium and England On board is one of the most famous men in the world, Rudolf Diesel, whose new internal combustion engine is on the verge of revolutionizing global industry forever

But Diesel never arrives at his destination He vanishes during the night and headlines around the world wonder if it was an accident, suicide, or murder

After rising from an impoverished European childhood, Diesel had become a multi-millionaire with his powerful engine that does not require expensive petroleum-based fuel In doing so, he became not only an international celebrity but also the enemy of two extremely powerful men: Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and John D Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil and the richest man in the world

The Kaiser wanted the engine to power a fleet of submarines that would finally allow him to challenge Great Britain's Royal Navy But Diesel had intended for his engine to be used for the betterment of mankind and kept the technology out of the hands of the British or any other nation For John D Rockefeller, the engine was nothing less than an existential threat to his vast and lucrative oil empire

As electric lighting began to replace kerosene lamps, Rockefeller's bottom line depended on the world's growing thirst for gasoline to power its automobiles and industries At the outset of this new age of electricity and oil, Europe stood on the precipice of war Rudolf Diesel grew increasingly concerned about Germany's rising nationalism and military spending

The inventor was on his way to London to establish a new company that would help Britain improve its failing submarine program when he disappeared Now, New York Times bestselling author Douglas Brunt reopens the case and provides an astonishing new conclusion about Diesel's fate" --

In The New Nobility, two courageous Russian investigative journalists open up the closed and murky world of the Russian Federal Security Service While Vladimir Putin has been president and prime minister of Russia, the Kremlin has deployed the security services to intimidate the political opposition, reassert the power of the state, and carry out assassinations overseas At the same time, its agents and spies were put beyond public accountability and blessed with the prestige, benefits, and legitimacy lost since the Soviet collapse

The security services have played a central -- and often mysterious -- role at key turning points in Russia during these tumultuous years: from the Moscow apartment house bombings and theater siege, to the war in Chechnya and the Beslan massacre The security services are not all-powerful; they have made clumsy and sometimes catastrophic blunders But what is clear is that after the chaotic 1990s, when they were sidelined, they have made a remarkable return to power, abetted by their most famous alumnus, Putin.

Description: In 2018, a U.S Supreme Court ruling permitted states to legalize sports gambling To date, 38 have done so The nation is already facing a sports gambling crisis, one that will worsen in the coming years

A central argument of Losing Big is that this burgeoning crisis is a product of public policy and could have been avoided if states had taken a more deliberate, careful approach to gambling legalization Roughly one in five American adults has placed a bet on a sporting event in the last 12 months For some, gambling remains a harmless pastime, but for many, particularly for young adults, it can be ruinous

Three percent of American adults qualify as moderate-risk or problem gamblers and in some states that number has reached twenty percent Rates of problem gambling are disproportionately high among men, African Americans, Latinos, and lower-income individuals One fifth of Americans aged 18-24 qualify as high risk for a gambling problem.

This new handbook takes the broadest possible view of typography, defining it as 'design for reading' It considers all kinds of reading matter and visual communication systems; digital, environmental, printed, and produced by hand By offering a rich collection of texts that are genuinely international in authorship and in scope, it seeks to rebalance the Western bias of so many books on the subject

It gives space to new voices and emerging standpoints about the global nature of design, the needs of particular communities of readers, and about the need for inclusivity and historical understanding in design practice and research Thirty-seven chapters by forty-three contributors show the interdisciplinary range of research in typography today, exemplifying the relationship between history, theory, and practice that is at the heart of the discipline

They feature over 500 illustrations, mostly in colour, and full bibliographic references Topics include: Typography and sociolinguistics Frameworks for considering scripts and multilingual documents Historical and contemporary Arabic-script typographic practice Designing fonts for marginalized communities in Asia, Africa, and North America The earliest movable type in China in the tenth century Understanding Japanese and Korean typography Approaches to legibility Western influence on the typography of indigenous writing systems Political and technological factors that shape typography Experimental and commercial publishing contexts The type design industry today Typography in the environment

Gradually since 2003, Turkey's autocratic leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sought to make Turkey a great power -- in the tradition of past Turkish leaders from the late Ottoman sultans to Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey Here the leading authority Soner Cagaptay, author of The New Sultan -- the first biography of President Erdogan -- provides a masterful overview of the power politics in the Middle East and Turkey's place in it Erdogan has picked an unorthodox model in the context of recent Turkish history, attempting to cast his country as a stand-alone Middle Eastern power

In doing so Turkey has broken ranks with its traditional Western allies, including the United States and has embraced an imperial-style foreign policy which has aimed to restore Turkey's Ottoman-era reach into the Arabian Middle East and the Balkans Today, in addition to a domestic crackdown on dissent and journalistic freedoms, driven by Erdogan's style of governance, Turkey faces a hostile world Ankara has nearly no friends left in the Middle East, and it faces a threat from resurgent historic adversaries: Russia and Iran

Furthermore, Turkey cannot rely on the unconditional support of its traditional Western allies Can Erdogan deliver Turkey back to safety What are the risks that lie ahead for him, and his country How can Turkey truly become a great power, fulfilling a dream shared by many Turks, the sultans, Ataturk, and Erdogan himself?

Yang Jisheng’s The World Turned Upside Down is the definitive history of the Cultural Revolution, in withering and heartbreaking detail As a major political event and a crucial turning point in the history of the People’s Republic of China, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) marked the zenith as well as the nadir of Mao Zedong’s ultra-leftist politics Reacting in part to the Soviet Union’s "revisionism" that he regarded as a threat to the future of socialism, Mao mobilized the masses in a battle against what he called "bourgeois" forces within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)

This ten-year-long class struggle on a massive scale devastated traditional Chinese culture as well as the nation’s economy Following his groundbreaking and award-winning history of the Great Famine, Tombstone, Yang Jisheng here presents the only history of the Cultural Revolution by an independent scholar based in mainland China, and makes a crucial contribution to understanding those years' lasting influence today The World Turned Upside Down puts every political incident, major and minor, of those ten years under extraordinary and withering scrutiny, and arrives in English at a moment when contemporary Chinese governance is leaning once more toward a highly centralized power structure and Mao-style cult of personality.

China's leader, Xi Jinping, is one of the most powerful individuals in the world—and one of the least understood Much can be learned, however, about both Xi Jinping and the nature of the party he leads from the memory and legacy of his father, the revolutionary Xi Zhongxun (1913–2002) The elder Xi served the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for more than seven decades

He worked at the right hand of prominent leaders Zhou Enlai and Hu Yaobang He helped build the Communist base area that saved Mao Zedong in 1935, and he initiated the Special Economic Zones that launched China into the reform era after Mao's death He led the Party's United Front efforts toward Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Taiwanese

And though in 1989 he initially sought to avoid violence, he ultimately supported the Party's crackdown on the Tiananmen protesters The Party's Interests Come First is the first biography of Xi Zhongxun written in English This biography is at once a sweeping story of the Chinese revolution and the first several decades of the People's Republic of China and a deeply personal story about making sense of one's own identity within a larger political context

Drawing on an array of new documents, interviews, diaries, and periodicals, Joseph Torigian vividly tells the life story of Xi Zhongxun, a man who spent his entire life struggling to balance his own feelings with the Party's demands Through the eyes of Xi Jinping's father, Torigian reveals the extraordinary organizational, ideological, and coercive power of the CCP—and the terrible cost in human suffering that comes with it.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • “A magisterial overview of a thousand years of Native American history” (The New York Review of Books), from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE, THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE, AND THE MARK LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally And, as award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans did arrive, no civilization came to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well armed

A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size Then, following a period of climate change and instability, numerous smaller nations emerged, moving away from rather than toward urbanization From this urban past, egalitarian government structures, diplomacy, and complex economies spread across North America

So, when Europeans showed up in the sixteenth century, they encountered societies they did not understand—those having developed differently from their own—and whose power they often underestimated For centuries afterward, Indigenous people maintained an upper hand and used Europeans in pursuit of their own interests In Native Nations, we see how Mohawks closely controlled trade with the Dutch—and influenced global markets—and how Quapaws manipulated French colonists

Power dynamics shifted after the American Revolution, but Indigenous people continued to command much of the continent’s land and resources Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa forged new alliances and encouraged a controversial new definition of Native identity to attempt to wall off U.S. ambitions The Cherokees created institutions to assert their sovereignty on the global stage, and the Kiowas used their power in the west to regulate the passage of white settlers across their territory In this important addition to the growing tradition of North American history centered on Indigenous nations, Kathleen DuVal shows how the definitions of power and means of exerting it shifted over time, but the sovereignty and influence of Native peoples remained a constant—and will continue far into the future. “An essential American history”—The Wall Street Journal

How the world’s largest e-commerce market highlights a digital path to development How do states build vital institutions for market development Too often, governments confront technical or political barriers to providing the rule of law, contract enforcement, and loan access In From Click to Boom, Lizhi Liu examines a digital solution: governments strategically outsourcing tasks of institutional development and enforcement to digital platforms—a process she calls “institutional outsourcing.” China’s e-commerce boom showcases this digital path to development

In merely two decades, China built from scratch a two-trillion-dollar e-commerce market, with 800 million users, seventy million jobs, and nearly fifty percent of global online retail sales Contrary to conventional wisdom, Liu argues, this market boom occurred because of weak government institutions, not despite them Gaps in government institutions compelled e-commerce platforms to build powerful private institutions for contract enforcement, fraud detection, and dispute resolution

For a surprisingly long period, the authoritarian government acquiesced, endorsed, and even partnered with this private institutional building despite its disruptive nature Drawing on a plethora of interviews, original surveys, proprietary data, and a field experiment, Liu shows that the resulting e-commerce boom had far-reaching effects on China Institutional outsourcing nonetheless harbors its own challenges

With inadequate regulation, platforms may abuse market power, while excessive regulation stifles institutional innovation China’s regulatory oscillations toward platforms—from laissez-faire to crackdown and back to support—underscore the struggle to strike the right balance.

From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Greg Grandin comes the stunning, never before told story of the quixotic attempt to recreate small-town America in the heart of the Amazon In 1927, Henry Ford, the richest man in the world, bought a tract of land twice the size of Delaware in the Brazilian Amazon His intention was to grow rubber, but the project rapidly evolved into a more ambitious bid to export America itself, along with its golf courses, ice-cream shops, bandstands, indoor plumbing, and Model Ts rolling down broad streets

Fordlandia, as the settlement was called, quickly became the site of an epic clash On one side was the car magnate, lean, austere, the man who reduced industrial production to its simplest motions; on the other, the Amazon, lush, extravagant, the most complex ecological system on the planet Ford's early success in imposing time clocks and square dances on the jungle soon collapsed, as indigenous workers, rejecting his midwestern Puritanism, turned the place into a ribald tropical boomtown

Fordlandia's eventual demise as a rubber plantation foreshadowed the practices that today are laying waste to the rain forest More than a parable of one man's arrogant attempt to force his will on the natural world, Fordlandia depicts a desperate quest to salvage the bygone America that the Ford factory system did much to dispatch As Greg Grandin shows in this gripping and mordantly observed history, Ford's great delusion was not that the Amazon could be tamed but that the forces of capitalism, once released, might yet be contained Fordlandia is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.

Mandarin Chinese is the most widely spoken language in the world today In China, a country with a vast array of regional and local vernaculars, how was this “common language” forged How did people learn to speak Mandarin And what does a focus on speech instead of script reveal about Chinese language and history

This book traces the surprising social history of China’s spoken standard, from its creation as the national language of the early Republic in 1913 to its journey into postwar Taiwan to its reconfiguration as the common language of the People’s Republic after 1949 Janet Y Chen examines the process of linguistic change from multiple perspectives, emphasizing the experiences of ordinary people

After the fall of the Qing dynasty, a chorus of influential elites promoted the goal of a strong China speaking in one unified voice Chen explores how this vision fared in practice, showing the complexities of transforming an ideological aspiration into spoken reality She tracks linguistic change in schools, rural areas, and urban life against the backdrop of war and revolution

The Sounds of Mandarin draws on a novel aural archive of early twentieth-century sound technology, including phonograph recordings, films, and radio broadcasts Following the uneven trajectory of standard speech, this book sheds new light on the histories of language, nationalism, and identity in China and Taiwan.

A fascinating story of writing across cultures and time While other ancient nonalphabetic scripts--Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Mayan hieroglyphs--are long extinct, Chinese characters, invented over three thousand years ago, are today used by well over a billion people to write Chinese and Japanese In medieval East Asia, the written Classical Chinese language knit the region together in a common intellectual enterprise that encompassed religion, philosophy, historiography, political theory, art, and literature

Literacy in Classical Chinese set the stage for the adaptation of Chinese characters into ways of writing non-Chinese languages like Vietnamese and Korean, which differ dramatically from Chinese in vocabularies and grammatical structures Because of its unique status in the modern world, myths and misunderstandings about Chinese characters abound Where does this writing system, so different in form and function from alphabetic writing, come from

How does it really work How did it come to be used to write non-Chinese languages And why has it proven so resilient By exploring the spread and adaptation of the script across two millennia and thousands of miles, Chinese Characters across Asia addresses these questions and provides insights into human cognition and culture Written in an approachable style and meant for readers with no prior knowledge of Chinese script or Asian languages, it presents a fascinating story that challenges assumptions about speech and writing.

The turmoil of global commodities markets amidst conflict.

Global Trade in the Premodern World offers an authoritative and expansive history of exchange and interaction across Eurasia from the prehistoric origins of trade to the integration of large parts of this world-system by the fifteenth century CE The book tackles questions that are critical to our understanding of premodern globalization How did global trade in the premodern world take shape

Who did the trading and what motivated them Which commodities were traded and how did different goods influence how trading networks functioned How did geography change how and where people carried goods How did states and communities seek to control the practice of commerce

And finally, what was the impact of trade on political structures and in the relationship between different states, empires, and communities Drawing on the fruits of research in history, anthropology, and archaeology, as well as primary sources produced by authors from Africa, Asia, and Europe, Global Trade in the Premodern World is a book of remarkable scope written engagingly and accessibly with scholars, students, and non-specialists in mind.

In a Bad State provides the first comprehensive history and theory of how the federal government has addressed subnational debt crises Tracing the long history of public budgeting at the state and local level, David Schleicher argues that federal officials face a "trilemma" when a state or city nears default But whether they demand state austerity, permit state defaults, or provide bailouts-and all have been tried-federal officials can only achieve two out of three goals, at best Authoritative and accessible, this book is a guide to understanding the pressing problems that local, state, and federal officials currently face and the policy options they possess for responding.

In The Power of Systems, Eglė Rindzevičiūtė introduces readers to one of the best-kept secrets of the Cold War: the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), an international think tank established by the US and USSR to advance scientific collaboration From 1972 until the late 1980s, IIASA was one of the very few permanent platforms where policy scientists from both sides of the Cold War could work together to articulate and solve world problems

A rare zone of freedom, communication, and negotiation East-West scientists co-produced computer simulations of the long-term world future, using global modeling to explore the possible effects of climate change and nuclear winter Their concern with global issues also became a vehicle for transformation inside the Soviet Union The Power of Systems explores how computer modeling, cybernetics, and the systems approach challenged Soviet governance by undermining the linear notions of control on which Soviet governance was based and creating new objects and techniques of government.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more Industrial Islamism analyzes the relationship, since the end of the Cold War, between the rise of political Islamism in Muslim-majority countries and the rise of a new global "middle class" of industrial entrepreneurs

Challenging common assumptions, Utku Balaban questions the idea that political Islamism represents the antithesis of Western modernity and industrialization On the contrary: the more enthusiastically a Muslim-majority country industrializes, the more "Islamized" its politics becomes

The book focuses on Turkey, historically the most industrialized Muslim-majority country in the world, with the most successful Islamist movement and a relatively competitive electoral system It provides a fine-grained historical and ethnographic analysis at the local level of urban-industrial control over workers in sweatshops and working-class neighborhoods by this new global middle class, whom Balaban calls the faubourgeoisie As the central actor behind Turkey's post-Cold War industrialization, the faubourgeoisie allies with the Islamist movement to control its workers and significantly influence national politics.

A riveting, firsthand investigation of China's seismic progress, its human costs, and what it means for America.

Politics of the State Grid Corporation of China -- Electricity -- From the ministry to a corporation -- Overseeing SGCC: the contested regimes of central agencies -- State Grid Corporation of China -- SGCC in action: as a policy entrepreneur -- SGCC in action: as technology innovator -- SGCC in action: internationalisation

The Roman empire tends to be seen as a whole whereas the early middle ages tends to be seen as a collection of regional histories, roughly corresponding to the land-areas of modern nation states As a result, early medieval history is much more fragmented, and there have been few convincing syntheses of socio-economic change in the post-Roman world since the 1930s In recent decades, the rise of early medieval archaeology has also transformed our source-base, but this has not been adequately integrated into analyses of documentary history in almost any country

In Framing the Early Middle Ages Chris Wickham combines documentary and archaeological evidence to create a comparative history of the period 400-800 His analysis embraces each of the regions of the late Roman and immediately post-Roman world, from Denmark to Egypt

The book concentrates on classic socio-economic themes, state finance, the wealth and identity of the aristocracy, estate management, peasant society, rural settlement, cities, and exchange These give only a partial picture of the period, but they frame and explain other developments Earlier syntheses have taken the development of a single region as 'typical', with divergent developments presented as exceptions This book takes all different developments as typical, and aims to construct a synthesis based on a better understanding of difference and the reasons for it.

The Roman empire tends to be seen as a whole whereas the early middle ages tends to be seen as a collection of regional histories, roughly corresponding to the land-areas of modern nation states As a result, early medieval history is much more fragmented, and there have been few convincing syntheses of socio-economic change in the post-Roman world since the 1930s In recent decades, the rise of early medieval archaeology has also transformed our source-base, but this has not been adequately integrated into analyses of documentary history in almost any country

In Framing the Early Middle Ages Chris Wickham combines documentary and archaeological evidence to create a comparative history of the period 400-800 His analysis embraces each of the regions of the late Roman and immediately post-Roman world, from Denmark to Egypt

The book concentrates on classic socio-economic themes, state finance, the wealth and identity of the aristocracy, estate management, peasant society, rural settlement, cities, and exchange These give only a partial picture of the period, but they frame and explain other developments Earlier syntheses have taken the development of a single region as 'typical', with divergent developments presented as exceptions This book takes all different developments as typical, and aims to construct a synthesis based on a better understanding of difference and the reasons for it.

Available in its complete form for the first time since its original publication.

Winner of the James Beard Award for Literary Writing "Engrossing...hard to put down." — The New York Times Book Review “Frostbite is a perfectly executed cold fusion of science, history, and literary verve . . . as a fellow nonfiction writer, I bow down This is how it's done.” — Mary Roach, author of Fuzz and Stiff An engaging and far-reaching exploration of refrigeration, tracing its evolution from scientific mystery to globe-spanning infrastructure, and an essential investigation into how it has remade our entire relationship with food—for better and for worse How often do we open the fridge or peer into the freezer with the expectation that we’ll find something fresh and ready to eat

It’s an everyday act—but just a century ago, eating food that had been refrigerated was cause for both fear and excitement The introduction of artificial refrigeration overturned millennia of dietary history, launching a new chapter in human nutrition We could now overcome not just rot, but seasonality and geography

Tomatoes in January Avocados in Shanghai All possible In Frostbite, New Yorker contributor and cohost of the award-winning podcast Gastropod Nicola Twilley takes readers on a tour of the cold chain from farm to fridge, visiting off-the-beaten-path landmarks such as Missouri’s subterranean cheese caves, the banana-ripening rooms of New York City, and the vast refrigerated tanks that store the nation’s orange juice reserves

Today, nearly three-quarters of everything on the average American plate is processed, shipped, stored, and sold under refrigeration It’s impossible to make sense of our food system without understanding the all-but-invisible network of thermal control that underpins it Twilley’s eye-opening book is the first to reveal the transformative impact refrigeration has had on our health and our guts; our farms, tables, kitchens, and cities; global economics and politics; and even our environment

In the developed world, we’ve reaped the benefits of refrigeration for more than a century, but the costs are catching up with us We’ve eroded our connection to our food and redefined what “fresh” means More important, refrigeration is one of the leading contributors to climate change As the developing world races to build a US-style cold chain, Twilley asks: Can we reduce our dependence on refrigeration

Should we A deeply researched and reported, original, and entertaining dive into the most important invention in the history of food and drink, Frostbite makes the case for a recalibration of our relationship with the fridge—and how our future might depend on it.

Winner of the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction A SUNDAY TIMES & NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The spectacular new novel from the bestselling author of JONATHAN STRANGE & MR NORRELL, 'one of our greatest living authors' NEW YORK MAGAZINE __________________________________ Piranesi lives in the House Perhaps he always has In his notebooks, day after day, he makes a clear and careful record of its wonders: the labyrinth of halls, the thousands upon thousands of statues, the tides that thunder up staircases, the clouds that move in slow procession through the upper halls

On Tuesdays and Fridays Piranesi sees his friend, the Other At other times he brings tributes of food to the Dead But mostly, he is alone Messages begin to appear, scratched out in chalk on the pavements

There is someone new in the House But who are they and what do they want Are they a friend or do they bring destruction and madness as the Other claims Lost texts must be found; secrets must be uncovered

The world that Piranesi thought he knew is becoming strange and dangerous The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite. __________________________________ 'What a world Susanna Clarke conjures into being .. Piranesi is an exquisite puzzle-box' DAVID MITCHELL 'It subverts expectations throughout ..

Utterly otherworldly' GUARDIAN 'Piranesi astonished me It is a miraculous and luminous feat of storytelling' MADELINE MILLER 'Brilliantly singular' SUNDAY TIMES 'A gorgeous, spellbinding mystery .. This book is a treasure, washed up upon a forgotten shore, waiting to be discovered' ERIN MORGENSTERN 'Head-spinning .. Fully imagined and richly evoked' TELEGRAPH **Pre-order now** **The 20th anniversary edition of the fantasy classic Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell – with an exquisite new package and an exclusive introduction by V E Schwab** **Buy The Wood at Midwinter – a beautifully illustrated Christmas story from the queen of fantasy**

This perspective allows a unique view of the development of an industrial society not just from the ground up but from the hearth up.

“A surprise best-seller which, apparently, has the power to turn even the most feeble of us into axe-wielding lumberjacks.” —Independent The latest Scandinavian publishing phenomenon is not a Stieg Larsson-like thriller; it’s a book about chopping, stacking, and burning wood that has sold more than 200,000 copies in Norway and Sweden and has been a fixture on the bestseller lists there for more than a year Norwegian Wood provides useful advice on the rustic hows and whys of taking care of your heating needs, but it’s also a thoughtful attempt to understand man’s age-old predilection for stacking wood and passion for open fires

An intriguing window into the exoticism of Scandinavian culture, the book also features enough inherently interesting facts and anecdotes and inspired prose to make it universally appealing The U.S. edition is a fully updated version of the Norwegian original, and includes an appendix of U.S.-based resources and contacts. “A how-to guide as well as a celebration of wood—its scent, its variability, and the way it can connect modern life to simpler times . . You don’t need to have a wood-burning stove or fireplace to be captivated by the craft and lore surrounding a Stone Age method of creating heat.” —The Boston Globe “The book has spread like wildfire.” —Daily Mail “A how-to book with poetry at its heart.” —The Times Literary Supplement

Nazi Germany's quest for raw materials.

From the author of New York Times bestseller The New New Deal, a groundbreaking piece of reportage from the trenches of the next climate war: the fight to fix our food system Humanity has cleared a land mass the size of Asia plus Europe to grow food, and our food system generates a third of our carbon emissions By 2050, we’re going to need a lot more calories to fill nearly 10 billion bellies, but we can’t feed the world without frying it if we keep tearing down an acre of rainforest every six seconds

We are eating the earth, and the greatest challenge facing our species will be to slow our relentless expansion of farmland into nature Even if we quit fossil fuels, we’ll keep hurtling towards climate chaos if we don’t solve our food and land problems In this rollicking, shocking narrative, Grunwald shows how the world, after decades of ignoring the climate problem at the center of our plates, has pivoted to making it worse, embracing solutions that sound sustainable but could make it even harder to grow more food with less land

But he also tells the stories of the dynamic scientists and entrepreneurs pursuing real solutions, from a jungle-tough miracle crop called pongamia to genetically-edited cattle embryos, from Impossible Whoppers to a non-polluting pesticide that uses the technology behind the COVID vaccines to constipate beetles to death It’s an often infuriating saga of lobbyists, politicians, and even the scientific establishment making terrible choices for humanity, but it’s also a hopeful account of the people figuring out what needs to be done—and trying to do it

Michael Grunwald, bestselling author of The Swamp and The New New Deal, builds his narrative around a brilliant, relentless, unforgettable food and land expert named Tim Searchinger He chronicles Searchinger’s uphill battles against bad science and bad politics, both driven by the overwhelming influence of agricultural interests And he illuminates a path that could save our planetary home for ourselves and future generations—through better policy, technology, and behavior, as well as a new land ethic recognizing that every acre matters.

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "Deftly written, Chokepoints is a compelling and dramatic narrative about the new shape of geopolitics." — Daniel Yergin, The Wall Street Journal “Remarkable...One of the most important books on economic warfare ever written.” — Paul Kennedy, author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers The epic story of how America turned the world economy into a weapon, upending decades of globalization to take on a new authoritarian axis—Russia, China, and Iran It used to be that ravaging another country’s economy required blockading its ports and laying siege to its cities

Now all it takes is a statement posted online by the U.S. government In Chokepoints, Edward Fishman, a former top State Department sanctions official, takes us deep into the back rooms of power to reveal the untold history of the last two decades of U.S. foreign policy, in which America renounced the gospel of globalization and waged a new kind of economic war As Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Ayatollah Khamenei wreaked havoc on the world stage, mavericks within the U.S. government built a fearsome new arsenal of economic weapons, exploiting America’s dominance in global finance and technology

Successive U.S. presidents have relied on these unconventional weapons to address the most pressing national-security threats, for good and for ill Chokepoints provides a thrilling account of one of the most critical geopolitical developments of our time, demystifying the complex strategies the U.S. government uses to harness the power of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Big Oil against America’s enemies At the center of the narrative is an eclectic group of policy innovators: the diplomats, lawyers, and financial whizzes who’ve masterminded America’s escalating economic wars against Russia, China, and Iran

Economic warfare has become the primary way the United States confronts international crises and counters rivals Sometimes it has achieved spectacular success; other times, bitter failure The result we live with today is a new world order: an economic arms race among great powers and a fracturing global economy Chokepoints is the definitive account of how America pioneered this new, hard-hitting style of economic war—and how it’s changing the world.

One of the truly original books of the decade, and written as a single, hypnotic, propulsive, physically irresistible sentence, Mathias Enard's Zone is an Iliad for our time, an extraordinary and panoramic view of violent conflict and its consequences in the twentieth century and beyond.

A leading journalist and public intellectual explains the long, disturbing history behind the American Right’s embrace of foreign dictators, from Kaiser Wilhelm and Mussolini to Putin and Orban Why do Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, and much of the far Right so explicitly admire the murderous and incompetent Russian dictator Vladimir Putin Why is Ron DeSantis drawing from Victor Orbán’s illiberal politics for his own policies as governor of Florida—a single American state that has more than twice the population of Orbán’s entire nation, Hungary

In America Last, Jacob Heilbrunn, a highly respected observer of the American Right, demonstrates that the infatuation of American conservatives with foreign dictators—though a striking and seemingly inexplicable fact of our current moment—is not a new phenomenon It dates to the First World War, when some conservatives, enthralled with Kaiser Wilhelm II, openly rooted for him to defeat the forces of democracy In the 1920s and 1930s, this affinity became even more pronounced as Hitler and Mussolini attracted a variety of American admirers

Throughout the Cold War, the Right evinced a fondness for autocrats such as Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet, while some conservatives wrote apologias for the Third Reich and for apartheid South Africa The habit of mind is not really about foreign policy, however As Heilbrunn argues, the Right is drawn to what it perceives as the impressive strength of foreign dictators, precisely because it sees them as models of how to fight against liberalism and progressivism domestically

America Last is a guide for the perplexed, identifying and tracing a persuasion—or what one might call the “illiberal imagination”—that has animated conservative politics for a century now Since the 1940s, the Right has railed against communist fellow travelers in America Heilbrunn finally corrects the record, showing that dictator worship is an unignorable tradition within modern American conservatism—and what it means for us today.

The Basques are Europe's oldest people, their origins a mystery, their language related to no other on Earth, and even though few in population and from a remote and rugged corner of Spain and France, they have had a profound impact on the world Whilst inward-looking, preserving their ancient language and customs, the Basques also struck out for new horizons, pioneers of whaling and cod fishing, leading the way in exploration of the Americas and Asia, were among the first capitalists and later led Southern Europe's industrial revolution Mark Kurlansky, the author of the acclaimed Cod, blends human stories with economic, political, literary and culinary history to paint a fascinating picture of an intriguing people.

The Making of New World Slavery argues that independent commerce, geared to burgeoning consumer markets, was the driving force behind the rise of plantation slavery The baroque state sought-successfully-to feed upon this commerce and-with markedly less success-to regulate slavery and racial relations To illustrate this thesis, Blackburn examines the deployment of slaves in the colonial possessions of the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the English and the French

Plantation slavery is shown to have emerged from the impulses of civil society, not from the strategies of individual states Robin Blackburn argues that the organization of slave plantations placed the West on a destructive path to modernity and that greatly preferable alternatives were both proposed and rejected Finally, he shows that the surge of Atlantic trade, predicated on the murderous toil of the plantations, made a decisive contribution to both the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the West.

Social historian and TV presenter Ruth Goodman tells the story of how the development of the coal-fired domestic range fundamentally changed not just our domestic comforts, but our world.

Examines the transformation of vernacular knowledge during a pivotal period of modern Chinese history, 1894 to 1954 In The Politics of Common Reading, Joan Judge examines an era of modern Chinese history, ranging from 1894 to 1954, which she terms "the long Republic." During this era, she explains, editors and compilers accommodated the needs of common readers by secularizing and standardizing texts relating to health, technology, and agriculture, including handbooks and recipe collections

Based on detailed research, she argues that these texts were quietly revolutionary in liberating common readers from state structures that sought to transform them while offering them practical knowledge, technical know-how, and tools for self-improvement Judge examines an understudied corpus of 500 how-to texts alongside government documents, archival materials, newspapers and periodicals, fiction and other media She brings to life the way these books were published and circulated through a national network, urban and rural bookstalls, and mail order channels

She examines how these collections were compiled, reassembled, and repurposed, and how they experimented with visual strategies to help readers process and memorize new information She focuses on the kind of vernacular knowledge these publications promulgated across a series of domains--opium addiction, electricity, cholera infection, and horticulture Finally, she devises composites of individual knowers so that we can better know them: details of the crises they faced, the remedies they tried, and the texts they might have consulted She ultimately argues that the acts of conciliation these readers engaged in shaped the broader epistemic terrain from which historical change was actualized in China's century of revolution.

The untold story of climate migration-the personal stories of those experiencing displacement, the portraits of communities being torn apart by disaster, and the implications for all of us as we confront a changing future"--

This book chronicles the earliest histories of familiar tropical Asian crops in the ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean, from rice and cotton to citruses and cucumbers Drawing on archaeological materials and textual sources in over seven ancient languages, The Tropical Turn unravels the breathtaking anthropogenic peregrinations of these familiar crops from their homelands in tropical and subtropical Asia to the Middle East and the Mediterranean, showing the significant impact South Asia had on the ecologies, dietary habits, and cultural identities of peoples across the ancient world In the process, Sureshkumar Muthukumaran offers a fresh narrative history of human connectivity across Afro-Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the late centuries BCE.

Demystifies the role of the Chinese state in its development of S&T and innovation using the theory of political economy.

A vivid look at China’s shifting place in the global political economy of technology production How did China’s mass manufacturing and “copycat” production become transformed, in the global tech imagination, from something holding the nation back to one of its key assets Prototype Nation offers a rich transnational analysis of how the promise of democratized innovation and entrepreneurial life has shaped China’s governance and global image With historical precision and ethnographic detail, Silvia Lindtner reveals how a growing distrust in Western models of progress and development, including Silicon Valley and the tech industry after the financial crisis of 2007–8, shaped the rise of the global maker movement and the vision of China as a “new frontier” of innovation

Lindtner’s investigations draw on more than a decade of research in experimental work spaces—makerspaces, coworking spaces, innovation hubs, hackathons, and startup weekends—in China, the United States, Africa, Europe, Taiwan, and Singapore, as well as in key sites of technology investment and industrial production—tech incubators, corporate offices, and factories She examines how the ideals of the maker movement, to intervene in social and economic structures, served the technopolitical project of prototyping a “new” optimistic, assertive, and global China

In doing so, Lindtner demonstrates that entrepreneurial living influences governance, education, policy, investment, and urban redesign in ways that normalize the persistence of sexism, racism, colonialism, and labor exploitation Prototype Nation shows that by attending to the bodies and sites that nurture entrepreneurial life, technology can be extricated from the seemingly endless cycle of promise and violence Cover image: Courtesy of Cao Fei, Vitamin Creative Space and Sprüth Magers

In Innovate to Dominate, Tai Ming Cheung offers insight into why, how, and whether China will overtake the United States to become the world's preeminent technological and security power This examination of the means and ends of China's quest for techno-security supremacy is required reading for anyone looking for clues as to the long-term direction of the global order The techno-security domain, Cheung argues, is where national security, innovation, and economic development converge, and it has become the center of power and prosperity in the twenty-first century

China's paramount leader Xi Jinping recognizes that effectively harnessing the complex interactions among security, innovation, and development is essential in enabling China to compete for global dominance Cheung offers a richly detailed account of how China is building a potent techno-security state In Innovate to Dominate he takes readers from the strategic vision guiding this transformation to the nuts-and-bolts of policy implementation

The state-led top-down mobilizational model that China is pursuing has been a winning formula so far, but the sternest test is ahead as China begins to compete head-to-head with the United States and aims to surpass its archrival by mid-century if not sooner Innovate to Dominate is a timely and analytically rigorous examination of the key strategies guiding China's transformation of its capabilities in the national, technological, military, and security spheres and how this is taking place

Cheung authoritatively addresses the burning questions being asked in capitals around the world: Can China become the dominant global techno-security power And if so, when?

Looks at the rollout of one of the largest infrastructure programs in human history to show how local governments play a complex role China's high-speed railway network is one of the largest infrastructure programs in human history Despite global media coverage, we know very little about the political process that led the government to invest in the railway program and the reasons for the striking regional and temporal variation in such investments

In Localized Bargaining, Xiao Ma offers a novel theory of intergovernmental bargaining that explains the unfolding of China's unprecedented high-speed railway program Drawing on a wealth of in-depth interviews, original data sets, and surveys with local officials, Ma details how the bottom-up bargaining efforts by territorial authorities--whom the central bureaucracies rely on to implement various infrastructure projects--shaped the allocation of investment in the railway system Demonstrating how localities of different types invoke institutional and extra-institutional sources of bargaining power in their competition for railway stations, Ma sheds new light on how the nation's massive bureaucracy actually functions.

Before markets opened in 1978, China was an impoverished planned economy governed by a Maoist bureaucracy In just three decades it evolved into the world's second-largest economy and is today guided by highly entrepreneurial bureaucrats In How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, Yuen Yuen Ang explains this astonishing metamorphosis

Rather than insist that either strong institutions of good governance foster markets or that growth enables good governance, Ang lays out a new, dynamic framework for understanding development broadly Successful development, she contends, is a coevolutionary process in which markets and governments mutually adapt By mapping this coevolution, Ang reveals a startling conclusion: poor and weak countries can escape the poverty trap by first harnessing weak institutions—features that defy norms of good governance—to build markets

Further, she stresses that adaptive processes, though essential for development, do not automatically occur Highlighting three universal roadblocks to adaptation, Ang identifies how Chinese reformers crafted enabling conditions for effective improvisation How China Escaped the Poverty Trap offers the most complete synthesis to date of the numerous interacting forces that have shaped China’s dramatic makeover and the problems it faces today

Looking beyond China, Ang also traces the coevolutionary sequence of development in late medieval Europe, antebellum United States, and contemporary Nigeria, and finds surprising parallels among these otherwise disparate cases Indispensable to all who care about development, this groundbreaking book challenges the convention of linear thinking and points to an alternative path out of poverty traps.

A noted Chinese economist examines the mechanisms behind China's economic reforms, arguing that universal principles and specific implementations are equally important As China has transformed itself from a centrally planned economy to a market economy, economists have tried to understand and interpret the success of Chinese reform As the Chinese economist Yingyi Qian explains, there are two schools of thought on Chinese reform: the “School of Universal Principles,” which ascribes China's successful reform to the workings of the free market, and the “School of Chinese Characteristics,” which holds that China's reform is successful precisely because it did not follow the economics of the market but instead relied on the government

In this book, Qian offers a third perspective, taking certain elements from each school of thought but emphasizing not why reform worked but how it did Economics is a science, but economic reform is applied science and engineering To a practitioner, it is more useful to find a feasible reform path than the theoretically best way

The key to understanding how reform has worked in China, Qian argues, is to consider the way reform designs respond to initial historical conditions and contemporary constraints Qian examines the role of “transitional institutions”—not “best practice institutions” but “incentive-compatible institutions”—in Chinese reform; the dual-track approach to market liberalization; the ownership of firms, viewed both theoretically and empirically; government decentralization, offering and testing hypotheses about its link to local economic development; and the specific historical conditions of China's regional-based central planning.

An eye-opening deep dive into the sources and consequences of how China has financed it’s rise to global economic prominence In The Red Dream: The Chinese Communist Party and the Financial Deterioration of China, veteran finance executive Carl Walter uses his unique experience in Chinese finance to deepen his exploration of how the Chinese Communist Party finances its obsession with GDP growth and social control Overwhelmingly debt-fueled, the party’s financial strategy has driven an unsustainable growth in banking and state enterprise assets

Inevitably the party’s own financial health is being severely weakened and China’s future over the next decades put in doubt You’ll also find: A discussion of the financial power of local governments and the Ponzi scheme created by their sale of land use rights How China’s entry into the World Trade Organization gave rise to today’s China How the party and China’s regulators enable banks to present outstanding performance metrics An exploration of the party’s financial assets and liabilities since 1979 Examples of financial crisis management and related costs incurred by China and the US A look at Japan’s experience as a potential guide for China future development An essential read for anyone interested in international economics, geopolitics, and finance, The Read Dream will also earn a place in the hands of finance professionals, bankers, policymakers, corporate strategists, and investors.

A comprehensive, in-depth, and authoritative guide to China's financial system The Chinese economy is one of the most important in the world, and its success is driven in large part by its financial system Though closely scrutinized, this system is poorly understood and vastly different than those in the West The Handbook of China’s Financial System will serve as a standard reference guide and invaluable resource to the workings of this critical institution

The handbook looks in depth at the central aspects of the system, including banking, bonds, the stock market, asset management, the pension system, and financial technology Each chapter is written by leading experts in the field, and the contributors represent a unique mix of scholars and policymakers, many with firsthand knowledge of setting and carrying out Chinese financial policy The first authoritative volume on China’s financial system, this handbook sheds new light on how it developed, how it works, and the prospects and direction of significant reforms to come Contributors include Franklin Allen, Marlene Amstad, Kaiji Chen, Tuo Deng, Hanming Fang, Jin Feng, Tingting Ge, Kai Guo, Zhiguo He, Yiping Huang, Zhaojun Huang, Ningxin Jiang, Wenxi Jiang, Chang Liu, Jun Ma, Yanliang Mao, Fan Qi, Jun Qian, Chenyu Shan, Guofeng Sun, Xuan Tian, Chu Wang, Cong Wang, Tao Wang, Wei Xiong, Yi Xiong, Tao Zha, Bohui Zhang, Tianyu Zhang, Zhiwei Zhang, Ye Zhao, and Julie Lei Zhu.

The success or failure of China's development will impact not only its own citizens but also those of the world China is widely recognized as a global actor on the world stage and no global challenge can be resolved without its participation It is important to understand how the country is ruled and what its policy priorities are

Can China move to a more market-based economy, while controlling environmental degradation Can it integrate hundreds of millions of new migrants into the urban landscape The tensions between communist and capitalist identities continue to divide society as China searches for a path to modernization In this revised fifth edition and essential guide to the subject, Tony Saich delivers a thorough introduction to all aspects of politics and governance in post-Mao China, taking full account of the changes of the 20th Party Congress and the 13th National People's Congress as well as the situation in Hong Kong and current debates in Chinese society.

From a New York Times media correspondent, a dishy history of the Condé Nast magazine empire, home of Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and more, focusing on its glitzy heyday from the 1980s through the 2000s For decades, Condé Nast and its glittering magazines defined how to live the good life in America The brilliant, complicated, striving characters behind Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, GQ, Architectural Digest, and many other titles manufactured a vision of luxury and sophistication that shaped consumer habits, cultural trends, intellectual attitudes, and political beliefs the world over

Condé’s billionaire owner Si Newhouse and his stable of star editors, photographers, and writers were the gatekeepers who decided what and who mattered, and they offered those opinions to tens of millions of readers every month They were the ultimate influencers—before social media changed everything The magazines crowned celebrities by the dozens, patronized creative talent much as the Medicis had underwritten Renaissance artists, and supercharged opulent events like the Vanity Fair Oscar Party and the Met Gala, which came to rival any fete that Louis XIV ever hosted at Versailles

The book is full of fresh behind-the-scenes reporting about a plethora of boldface names and sets out to explain how Condé Nast established itself as a de facto American aristocracy, anointing an elite and dictating the culture they presided over The colorful story of Condé Nast at its zenith and the profound way it influenced how Americans aspired to look, eat, decorate, date, marry, and even think, has never been examined deeply Empire of the Elite is the first book-length history of an empire whose publications refashioned American notions of prestige, whose editors became celebrities themselves, and whose diminution offers a cautionary tale of class, hubris, and technological change, even as its aesthetic and ethos remain influential to this day.

Originally published: New York, NY: BasicBooks, c1992.

Globalization is the lead story of the new century, but its roots reach back nearly one hundred years, to major corporations' quest for stable, inexpensive, and pliant sources of labor Before the largest companies moved beyond national boundaries, they crossed state lines, abandoning the industrial centers of the Eastern Seaboard for impoverished rural communities in the Midwest and South In their wake they left the decaying urban landscapes and unemployment rates that became hallmarks of late twentieth-century America

This is the story that Jefferson Cowie, in "a stunningly important work of historical imagination and rediscovery" (Nelson Lichtenstein), tells through the lens of a single American corporation, RCA Capital Moves takes us through the interconnected histories of Camden, New Jersey; Bloomington, Indiana; Memphis, Tennessee; and Juárez, Mexico--four cities radically transformed by America's leading manufacturer of records and radio sets In a sweeping narrative of economic upheaval and class conflict, Cowie weaves together the rich detail of local history with the national--and ultimately international--story of economic and social change.

An Instant New York Times Bestseller “Excellent and deeply reported.” —Tim Wu, The New York Times “Startling and intensely researched . . . an essential account of how OpenAI and ChatGPT came to be and the catastrophic places they will likely take us.” —Vulture “Hao’s reporting inside OpenAI is exceptional, and she’s persuasive in her argument that the public should focus less on A.I.’s putative ‘sentience’ and more on its implications for labor and the environment.” —Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New Yorker From a brilliant longtime AI insider with intimate access to the world of Sam Altman's OpenAI from the beginning, an eye-opening account of arguably the most fateful tech arms race in history, reshaping the planet in real time, from the cockpit of the company that is driving the frenzy When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces

What could go wrong Over time, Hao began to wrestle ever more deeply with that question Increasingly, she realized that the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that its vision of success requires an almost unprecedented amount of resources: the “compute” power of high-end chips and the processing capacity to create massive large language models, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans “cleaning up” that data for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South, and a truly alarming spike in the usage of energy and water underlying it all

The truth is that we have entered a new and ominous age of empire: only a small handful of globally scaled companies can even enter the field of play At the head of the pack with its ChatGPT breakthrough, how would OpenAI resist such temptations Spoiler alert: it didn’t Armed with Microsoft’s billions, OpenAI is setting a breakneck pace, chased by a small group of the most valuable companies in human history—toward what end, not even they can define

All this time, Hao has maintained her deep sourcing within the company and the industry, and so she was in intimate contact with the story that shocked the entire tech industry—Altman’s sudden firing and triumphant return The behind-the-scenes story of what happened, told here in full for the first time, is revelatory of who the people controlling this technology really are But this isn’t just the story of a single company, however fascinating it is

The g forces pressing down on the people of OpenAI are deforming the judgment of everyone else too—as such forces do Naked power finds the ideology to cloak itself; no one thinks they’re the bad guy But in the meantime, as Hao shows through intrepid reporting on the ground around the world, the enormous wheels of extraction grind on

By drawing on the viewpoints of Silicon Valley engineers, Kenyan data laborers, and Chilean water activists, Hao presents the fullest picture of AI and its impact we’ve seen to date, alongside a trenchant analysis of where things are headed An astonishing eyewitness view from both up in the command capsule of the new economy and down where the real suffering happens, Empire of AI pierces the veil of the industry defining our era.

A compelling treatise on the relationship between power and enclosure Fortress Power presents a genealogy of fortification as a material and political technology intent on obstruction, tracing its implementation across battlefields, borders, and urban environments Drawing on the influential work of philosophers Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, Derek S Denman places the fortress alongside the archetypes of the prison and the camp, citing them as paradigmatic of how space is transformed into a tool of domination and control

Focusing on the defensive architecture of bastion fortresses, urban design, and border landscapes, Fortress Power charts the rise of a form of governance grounded in hostility, extending the scope of its subject from a piece of military construction to a much broader political concept Detailing how power manifests in everything from city centers to international boundaries, the book analyzes the logic of fortification as it moves through various contexts in the advancement of surveillance, exploitation, warfare, and political authority

Through a unique blend of architecture and design studies, political theory, international relations, geography, and migration studies, Denman outlines the disquieting legacy of the fortress to highlight its role in the formation of modern government and the enactment of violence In an era marked by the increasing prevalence of authoritarian power and conflicting geopolitical boundaries, he presents an insightful investigation of the weaponization of the built environment.

In just thirteen brief, accessible chapters, this engaging little book takes "absolute beginners" from the most basic questions about the language (e.g., what does a classical Chinese character look like?) to reading and understanding selections from classical Chinese philosophical texts and Tang dynasty poetry. "An outstanding introduction to reading classical Chinese Van Norden does a wonderful job of clearly explaining the basics of classical Chinese, and he carefully takes the reader through beautifully chosen examples from the textual tradition An invaluable work." —Michael Puett, Harvard University

Brook Ziporyn's carefully crafted, richly annotated translation of the complete writings of Zhuangzi—including a lucid Introduction, a Glossary of Essential Terms, and a Bibliography—provides readers with an engaging and provocative deep dive into this magical work.

A “TOUR DE FORCE OF NARRATIVE NONFICTION” (WSJ) WITH OVER ONE YEAR ON THE NYT BEST SELLER LIST From the author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth The powerful narrative reveals the deeper meaning of the events on The Wager, showing that it was not only the captain and crew who ended up on trial, but the very idea of empire A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, TIME, Smithsonian, NPR, Vulture “Riveting...Reads like a thriller, tackling a multilayered history—and imperialism—with gusto.” —Time On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil

Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell They were survivors of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as “the prize of all the oceans,” it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia

The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas They were greeted as heroes But then ... six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile

This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes – they were mutineers The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness

As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth The stakes were life-and-death—for whomever the court found guilty could hang The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers

Grann’s recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O’Brian, his portrayal of the castaways’ desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller As always with Grann’s work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.

A military study of the 2020 war between Armenia and Azerbaijan—the first war in history won primarily by unmanned systems Fought over the course of forty-four days, the Second Nagorno-Karabakh war resulted in a decisive military victory for Azerbaijan Armenia lost even though they controlled the high ground in a mountainous region that favored traditional defense

In 7 Seconds to Die, military consultant and historian John Antal examines the decisive factors of the war and their implications for the future of armed conflict The fact that Azerbaijan won the war is not extraordinary, considering the correlation of forces arrayed against Armenia What is exceptional is that this was the first modern war primarily decided by unmanned weapons The Turkish-made BAYRAKTAR TB2 Unmanned Air Combat Vehicle (UCAV) and the Israeli-made HAROP Loitering Munition (LM) dominated the fighting and provided Azerbaijan with a war-winning advantage.

From the author of Axis and Vortex, the first Hugo Award-winning novel in the environmental apocalyptic Spin Trilogy.. One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his back yard and watched the stars go out They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier

He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout It would shape their lives The effect is worldwide The sun is now a featureless disk--a heat source, rather than an astronomical object

The moon is gone, but tides remain Not only have the world's artificial satellites fallen out of orbit, their recovered remains are pitted and aged, as though they'd been in space far longer than their known lifespans As Tyler, Jason, and Diane grow up, space probe reveals a bizarre truth: The barrier is artificial, generated by huge alien artifacts

Time is passing faster outside the barrier than inside--more than a hundred million years per day on Earth At this rate, the death throes of the sun are only about forty years in our future Jason, now a promising young scientist, devotes his life to working against this slow-moving apocalypse Diane throws herself into hedonism, marrying a sinister cult leader who's forged a new religion out of the fears of the masses

Earth sends terraforming machines to Mars to let the onrush of time do its work, turning the planet green Next they send humans...and immediately get back an emissary with thousands of years of stories to tell about the settling of Mars Then Earth's probes reveal that an identical barrier has appeared around Mars

Jason, desperate, seeds near space with self-replicating machines that will scatter copies of themselves outward from the sun--and report back on what they find Life on Earth is about to get much, much stranger At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

An overwhelming, outstanding novel...!"--Irish Times

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more Islamic Shangri-La transports readers to the heart of the Himalayas as it traces the rise of the Tibetan Muslim community from the 17th century to the present

Radically altering popular interpretations that have portrayed Tibet as isolated and monolithically Buddhist, David Atwill's vibrant account demonstrates how truly cosmopolitan Tibetan society was by highlighting the hybrid influences and internal diversity of Tibet In its exploration of the Tibetan Muslim experience, this book presents an unparalleled perspective of Tibet's standing during the rise of post–World War II Asia.

When Red Guards arrived in Tibet in 1966, intent on creating a classless society, they unleashed a decade of revolutionary violence, political rallies, and factional warfare marked by the ransacking of temples, the destruction of religious artifacts, the burning of books, and the public humiliation of Tibet's remaining lamas and scholars Within Tibet, discussion of those events has long been banned, and no visual records of this history were known to have survived

In Forbidden Memory the leading Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser presents three hundred previously unseen photographs taken by her father, then an officer in the People's Liberation Army, that show for the first time the frenzy and violence of the Cultural Revolution in Tibet Found only after his death, Woeser's annotations and reflections on the photographs, edited and introduced by the Tibet historian Robert Barnett, are based on scores of interviews she conducted privately in Tibet with survivors

Her book explores the motives and thinking of those who participated in the extraordinary rituals of public degradation and destruction that took place, carried out by Tibetans as much as Chinese on the former leaders of their culture Heartbreaking and revelatory, Forbidden Memory offers a personal, literary discussion of the nature of memory, violence, and responsibility, while giving insight into the condition of a people whose violently truncated history they are still unable to discuss today Access the glossary.

Conflicting Memories is a study of how the Tibetan encounter with the Chinese state during the Maoist era has been recalled and reimagined by Chinese and Tibetan authors and artists since the late 1970s Written by a team of historians, anthropologists, and scholars of religion, literature and culture, it examines official histories, biographies, memoirs, and films as well as oral testimonies, fiction, and writings by Buddhist adepts

The book includes translated extracts from key interviews, speeches, literature, and filmscripts Conflicting Memories explores what these revised versions of the past chose as their focus, which types of people produced them, and what aims they pursued in the production of new, post-Mao descriptions of Tibet under Chinese socialism Contributors include: Robert Barnett, Benno Weiner, Françoise Robin, Bianca Horlemann, Alice Travers, Alex Raymond, Chung Tsering, Dáša Pejchar Mortensen, Charlene Makley, Xénia de Heering, Nicole Willock, M

Maria Turek, Geoffrey Barstow, Gedun Rabsal, Heather Stoddard, Organ Nyima. "Conflicting Memories is a truly marvellous book It has assembled critical readings of Tibetan memories of their fateful encounters with the Chinese Communists who came uninvited as their ‘liberators’ and ‘friends’ Supplemented with excerpts from key Tibetan writings or oral reminiscences, the volume brings forth hitherto unheard of Tibetan voices

Yet, these were not hidden voices, but often commissioned by Chinese authorities or in dialogue with them, each trying to juggle the promissory pronouncements and an unsavoury reality Taken together, the contrapuntal reading of these memories masterfully showcases Tibetan people’s resourcefulness in dealing with a regime that often redefines its relations with Tibet while always aiming for total ownership." - URADYN E BULAG, author of Collaborative Nationalism: The Politics of Friendship on China's Mongolian Frontier "Conflicting Memories offers an invaluable collection aiding us to think through the complex and much contested ramifications of Tibet's incorporation into Maoist China

The mix of analytical articles by some of the best scholars now working in the area and original documents translated from the writings of astute Tibetan observers is particularly welcome The volume will be required reading for all serious students of contemporary Tibet." - MATTHEW KAPSTEIN, author of The Tibetans "This remarkable book offers unequalled access to the Tibetan experience of Communist nation-building By examining how the Maoist encounter has been remembered and misremembered across many media—under the influence of ever-changing political conditions—the authors communicate both the trauma of those years and the persisting difficulty of coming to terms with it, for Chinese as well as Tibetans

The chapters, enhanced by numerous first-hand accounts and illustrations, represent the best scholarship of this field Strongly recommended for readers interested in the history of the People’s Republic and its ethnic minorities." - DONALD S SUTTON, co-author of Contesting the Yellow Dragon: Ethnicity, Religion and the State in the Sino-Tibetan Borderland (with XIAOFEI KANG) "This groundbreaking work sheds unprecedented light on the various processes of historical rewriting about Tibet since the death of Mao The multivocal composition of the book offers rich and diverse accounts of a set of key events and epochal moments that attest to the numerous obstacles in retelling the Maoist past and the experience of sufferi...

The status of Tibet is one of the most controversial and complex issues in the history of modern China In To the End of Revolution, Xiaoyuan Liu draws on unprecedented access to the archives of the Chinese Communist Party to offer a groundbreaking account of Beijing’s evolving Tibet policy during the critical first decade of the People’s Republic Liu details Beijing’s overarching strategy toward Tibet, the last frontier for the Communist revolution to reach

He analyzes how China’s new leaders drew on Qing and Nationalist legacies as they attempted to resolve a problem inherited from their predecessors Despite acknowledging that religion, ethnicity, and geography made Tibet distinct, Beijing nevertheless forged ahead, zealously implementing socialist revolution while vigilantly guarding against real and perceived enemies Seeking to wait out local opposition before choosing to ruthlessly crush Tibetan resistance in the late 1950s, Beijing eventually incorporated Tibet into its sociopolitical system

The international and domestic ramifications, however, are felt to this day Liu offers new insight into the Chinese Communist Party’s relations with the Dalai Lama, ethnic revolts across the vast Tibetan plateau, and the suppression of the Lhasa Rebellion in 1959 Placing Beijing’s approach to Tibet in the contexts of the Communist Party’s treatment of ethnic minorities and China’s broader domestic and foreign policies in the early Cold War, To the End of Revolution is the most detailed account to date of Chinese thinking and acting on Tibet during the 1950s.

The Qing empire and the Dalai Lama-led Geluk School of Tibetan Buddhism came into contact in the eighteenth century Their interconnections would shape regional politics and the geopolitical history of Inner Asia for centuries to come In Common Ground, Lan Wu analyzes how Tibetan Buddhists and the Qing imperial rulers interacted and negotiated as both sought strategies to expand their influence in eighteenth-century Inner Asia

In so doing, she recasts the Qing empire, seeing it not as a monolithic project of imperial administration but as a series of encounters among different communities Wu examines a series of interconnected sites in the Qing empire where the influence of Tibetan Buddhism played a key role, tracing the movement of objects, flows of peoples, and circulation of ideas in the space between China and Tibet She identifies a transregional Tibetan Buddhist knowledge network, which provided institutional, pragmatic, and intellectual common ground for both polities

Wu draws out the voices of lesser-known Tibetan Buddhists, whose writings and experiences evince an alternative Buddhist space beyond the state She highlights interactions between Mongols and Tibetans within the Qing empire, exploring the creation of a Buddhist Inner Asia Wu argues that Tibetan Buddhism occupied a central—but little understood—role in the Qing vision of empire Revealing the interdependency of two expanding powers, Common Ground sheds new light on the entangled histories of political, social, and cultural ties between Tibet and China.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more The Monastery Rules discusses the position of the monasteries in pre-1950s Tibetan Buddhist societies and how that position was informed by the far-reaching relationship of monastic Buddhism with Tibetan society, economy, law, and culture

Jansen focuses her study on monastic guidelines, or bca’ yig The first study of its kind to examine the genre in detail, the book contains an exploration of its parallels in other Buddhist cultures, its connection to the Vinaya, and its value as socio-historical source-material The guidelines are witness to certain socio-economic changes, while also containing rules that aim to change the monastery in order to preserve it Jansen argues that the monastic institutions’ influence on society was maintained not merely due to prevailing power-relations, but also because of certain deep-rooted Buddhist beliefs.

In The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier, Benno Weiner provides the first in-depth study of an ethnic minority region during the first decade of the People's Republic of China: the Amdo region in the Sino-Tibetan borderland Employing previously inaccessible local archives as well as other rare primary sources, he demonstrates that the Communist Party's goal in 1950s Amdo was not just state-building but also nation-building Such an objective required the construction of narratives and policies capable of convincing Tibetans of their membership in a wider political community

As Weiner shows, however, early efforts to gradually and organically transform a vast multiethnic empire into a singular nation-state lost out to a revolutionary impatience, demanding more immediate paths to national integration and socialist transformation This led in 1958 to communization, then to large-scale rebellion and its brutal pacification Rather than joining voluntarily, Amdo was integrated through the widespread, often indiscriminate use of violence, a violence that lingers in the living memory of Amdo Tibetans and others.

A National Bestseller “Scorching, seductive . . A superb and disturbing vivisection of our darkest urges.” —Los Angeles Times “This is about as highbrow as true crime gets.” —Vulture “Fraser has outdone herself, and just about everyone else in the true-crime genre, with Murderland.” —Esquire From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Prairie Fires comes a terrifying true-crime history of serial killers in the Pacific Northwest and beyond—a gripping investigation of how a new strain of psychopath emerged out of a toxic landscape of deadly industrial violence Caroline Fraser grew up in the shadow of Ted Bundy, the most notorious serial murderer of women in American history, surrounded by his hunting grounds and mountain body dumps, in the brooding landscape of the Pacific Northwest

But in the 1970s and ’80s, Bundy was just one perpetrator amid an uncanny explosion of serial rape and murder across the region Why so many Why so weirdly and nightmarishly gruesome Why the senseless rise and then sudden fall of an epidemic of serial killing

As Murderland indelibly maps the lives and careers of Bundy and his infamous peers in mayhem—the Green River Killer, the I-5 Killer, the Night Stalker, the Hillside Strangler, even Charles Manson—Fraser’s Northwestern death trip begins to uncover a deeper mystery and an overlapping pattern of environmental destruction At ground zero in Ted Bundy’s Tacoma stood one of the most poisonous lead, copper, and arsenic smelters in the world, but it was hardly unique in the West

As Fraser’s investigation inexorably proceeds, evidence mounts that the plumes of these smelters not only sickened and blighted millions of lives but also warped young minds, including some who grew up to become serial killers A propulsive nonfiction thriller, Murderland transcends true-crime voyeurism and noir mythology, taking readers on a profound quest into the dark heart of the real American berserk.

From the Booker Prize winning author of Amsterdam, a brilliant new novel On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house Watching her is Robbie Turner, son of the Tallis’s cleaning lady, whose education has been subsidized by Cecilia’s and Briony’s father, and who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge

By day's end, their lives will be changed – irrevocably Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not imagined at its start And Briony will have witnessed mysteries, seen an unspeakable word, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone… Brilliant and utterly enthralling in its depiction of love and war and class and childhood and England, An Atonement is a profound – and profoundly moving – exploration of shame and forgiveness, of atonement and of the possibility of absolution.

In 1995, the People’s Republic of China resurrected a Qing-era law mandating that the reincarnations of prominent Tibetan Buddhist monks be identified by drawing lots from a golden urn The Chinese Communist Party hoped to limit the ability of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile to independently identify reincarnations In so doing, they elevated a long-forgotten ceremony into a controversial symbol of Chinese sovereignty in Tibet

In Forging the Golden Urn, Max Oidtmann ventures into the polyglot world of the Qing empire in search of the origins of the golden urn tradition He seeks to understand the relationship between the Qing state and its most powerful partner in Inner Asia—the Geluk school of Tibetan Buddhism Why did the Qianlong emperor invent the golden urn lottery in 1792

What ability did the Qing state have to alter Tibetan religious and political traditions What did this law mean to Qing rulers, their advisors, and Tibetan Buddhists Working with both the Manchu-language archives of the empire’s colonial bureaucracy and the chronicles of Tibetan elites, Oidtmann traces how a Chinese bureaucratic technology—a lottery for assigning administrative posts—was exported to the Tibetan and Mongolian regions of the Qing empire and transformed into a ritual for identifying and authenticating reincarnations Forging the Golden Urn sheds new light on how the empire’s frontier officers grappled with matters of sovereignty, faith, and law and reveals the role that Tibetan elites played in the production of new religious traditions in the context of Qing rule.

The Cold War ended long ago, but the language of science and freedom continues to shape public debates over the relationship between science and politics in the United States Scientists like to proclaim that science knows no borders Scientific researchers follow the evidence where it leads, their conclusions free of prejudice or ideology

But is that really the case In Freedom's Laboratory, Audra J Wolfe shows how these ideas were tested to their limits in the high-stakes propaganda battles of the Cold War Wolfe examines the role that scientists, in concert with administrators and policymakers, played in American cultural diplomacy after World War II

During this period, the engines of US propaganda promoted a vision of science that highlighted empiricism, objectivity, a commitment to pure research, and internationalism Working (both overtly and covertly, wittingly and unwittingly) with governmental and private organizations, scientists attempted to decide what, exactly, they meant when they referred to "scientific freedom" or the "US ideology." More frequently, however, they defined American science merely as the opposite of Communist science

Uncovering many startling episodes of the close relationship between the US government and private scientific groups, Freedom's Laboratory is the first work to explore science's link to US propaganda and psychological warfare campaigns during the Cold War Closing in the present day with a discussion of the 2017 March for Science and the prospects for science and science diplomacy in the Trump era, the book demonstrates the continued hold of Cold War thinking on ideas about science and politics in the United States.

In this masterfully written and brilliantly informed work, Dr. Rhorne, the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech, leads readers through an elegant, always human, tapestry of interlocking themes, answering the great question: what principles control our universe and why do physicists think they know what they know Features an introduction by Stephen Hawking.

Nicolas Tackett explores the emergence of a new worldview and sense of Chinese identity during the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127).

A provocative account showing that "China"--and its 5,000 years of unified history--is a national myth, created only a century ago with a political agenda that persists to this day

How the King James Bible has influenced the style of the American novel from Melville to Cormac McCarthy The simple yet grand language of the King James Bible has pervaded American culture from the beginning—and its powerful eloquence continues to be felt even today In this book, acclaimed biblical translator and literary critic Robert Alter traces some of the fascinating ways that American novelists—from Melville, Hemingway, and Faulkner to Bellow, Marilynne Robinson, and Cormac McCarthy—have drawn on the rich stylistic resources of the canonical English Bible to fashion their own strongly resonant styles and distinctive visions of reality

Showing the radically different manners in which the words, idioms, syntax, and cadences of this Bible are woven into Moby-Dick, Absalom, Absalom!, The Sun Also Rises, Seize the Day, Gilead, and The Road, Alter reveals the wide variety of stylistic and imaginative possibilities that American novelists have found in Scripture At the same time, Alter demonstrates the importance of looking closely at the style of literary works, making the case that style is not merely an aesthetic phenomenon but is the very medium through which writers conceive their worlds.

A groundbreaking work of history and reportage that unveils the stranger-than-fiction world of multilevel marketing: a massive money-making scam and radical political conspiracy that has remade American society Companies like Amway, Mary Kay, and Herbalife advertise the world’s greatest opportunity: the chance to be your own boss via an enigmatic business model called multilevel marketing, or MLM They offer a world of pink Cadillacs, white-columned mansions, tropical vacations, and—most precious of all—financial freedom

If, that is, you’re willing to shell out for expensive products and recruit everyone you know to buy them, and if they recruit everyone they know, too, thus creating the “multiple levels” of MLM Overwhelming evidence suggests that most people lose money in multilevel marketing, and that many MLM companies are pyramid schemes Yet the industry’s origins, tied to right-wing ideologues like Ronald Reagan, have escaped public scrutiny

MLM has slithered in the wake of every economic crisis of the last century, from the Depression to the pandemic, ensnaring laid-off workers, stay-at-home moms, and teachers—anyone who has been left behind by rising inequality In Little Bosses Everywhere, journalist Bridget Read tells the gripping story of multilevel marketing in full for the first time, winding from sunny postwar California, where a failed salesman started a vitamin business, through the devoutly religious suburbs of Michigan, where the industry built its political influence, to stadium-size conventions where today’s top sellers preach to die-hard recruits

MLM has enriched powerful people, like the DeVos and Van Andel families, Warren Buffett, and President Donald Trump, all while eroding public institutions and the social safety net, then profiting from the chaos Along the way, Read delves into the stories of those devastated by the majority-female industry: a veteran in Florida searching for healing; a young mom in Texas struggling to feed her children; a waitress scraping by in Brooklyn A wild trip down an endless rabbit hole of greed and exploitation, Little Bosses Everywhere exposes multilevel marketing as American capitalism’s stealthiest PR campaign, a cunning grift that has shaped nearly everything about how we live, and whose ultimate target is democracy itself.

The first comparative study of estimative intelligence and strategic surprise in a European context, complementing and testing insights from previous studies centred on the United States

A history of modern South Asia told through five partitions that reshaped it As recently as 1928, a vast swathe of Asia--India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait--were bound together under a single imperial banner, an entity known officially as the 'Indian Empire', or more simply as the Raj It was the British Empire's crown jewel, a vast dominion stretching from the Red Sea to the jungles of Southeast Asia, home to a quarter of the world's population and encompassing the largest Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Zoroastrian communities on the planet

Its people used the Indian rupee, were issued passports stamped 'Indian Empire', and were guarded by armies garrisoned forts from the Bab el-Mandab to the Himalayas And then, in the space of just fifty years, the Indian Empire shattered Five partitions tore it apart, carving out new nations, redrawing maps, and leaving behind a legacy of war, exile and division

Shattered Lands, for the first time, presents the whole story of how the Indian Empire was unmade How a single, sprawling dominion became twelve modern nations How maps were redrawn in boardrooms and on battlefields, by politicians in London and revolutionaries in Delhi, by kings in remote palaces and soldiers in trenches

Its legacies include civil wars in Burma and Sri Lanka, ongoing insurgencies in Kashmir, Baluchistan, Northeast India, and the Rohingya genocide It is a history of ambition and betrayal, of forgotten wars and unlikely alliances, of borders carved with ink and fire And, above all, it is the story of how the map of modern Asia was made

Sam Dalrymple's stunning narrative is based on deep archival research, previously untranslated private memoirs, and interviews in English, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Konyak, Arabic and Burmese From portraits of the key political players to accounts of those swept up in these wars and mass migrations, Shattered Lands is vivid, compelling, thought-provoking history at its best.

Americans often complain about the operation of their government, but scholars have never developed a complete picture of people's preferred type of government In this provocative and timely book, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, employing an original national survey and focus groups, report the governmental procedures Americans desire Contrary to the prevailing view that people want greater involvement in politics, most citizens do not care about most policies and therefore are content to turn over decision-making authority to someone else

People's wish for the political system is that decision makers be empathetic and, especially, non-self-interested, not that they be responsive and accountable to the people's largely nonexistent policy preferences or, even worse, that the people be obligated to participate directly in decision making Hibbing and Theiss-Morse conclude by cautioning communitarians, direct democrats, social capitalists, deliberation theorists, and all those who think that greater citizen involvement is the solution to society's problems.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Nonfiction Finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize and the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize Embracing Defeat is John W Dower's brilliant examination of Japan in the immediate, shattering aftermath of World War II

Drawing on a vast range of Japanese sources and illustrated with dozens of astonishing documentary photographs, Embracing Defeat is the fullest and most important history of the more than six years of American occupation, which affected every level of Japanese society, often in ways neither side could anticipate Dower, whom Stephen E Ambrose has called "America's foremost historian of the Second World War in the Pacific," gives us the rich and turbulent interplay between West and East, the victor and the vanquished, in a way never before attempted, from top-level manipulations concerning the fate of Emperor Hirohito to the hopes and fears of men and women in every walk of life Already regarded as the benchmark in its field, Embracing Defeat is a work of colossal scholarship and history of the very first order.

“Riveting and intimate It is hard to imagine a more humanizing portrait of the American labor movement A remarkable debut.” —Francisco Cantú, New York Times bestselling author of The Line Becomes a River On the Line takes readers inside a bold five-year campaign to bring a union to the dangerous industrial laundry factories of Phoenix, Arizona

Workers here wash hospital, hotel, and restaurant linens and face harsh conditions: routine exposure to biohazardous waste, injuries from surgical tools left in hospital sheets, and burns from overheated machinery Broken U.S. labor law makes it nearly impossible for them to fight back The drive to unionize is led by two women: author Daisy Pitkin, a young labor organizer, who addresses this exhilarating narrative to Alma Gomez García, a second-shift immigrant worker, who risks her livelihood to join the struggle and convinces her fellow workers to take a stand

Forged in the flames of a grueling legal battle and the company’s vicious anti-union crusade, including the retaliatory firing of Alma, the relationships that grow between Daisy, Alma, and the rest of the factory workers show how a union, at its best, can reach beyond the workplace and form a solidarity so powerful that it can transcend friendship and transform communities But when political strife divides the union, and her friendship with Alma along with it, Daisy must reflect on her own position of privilege and the complicated nature of union hierarchies and top-down organizing

Daisy Pitkin looks back to uncover the forgotten roles immigrant women have played in the U.S. labor movement and points the way forward As we experience one of the largest labor upheavals in decades, On the Line shows how difficult it is to bring about social change, and why we can’t afford to stop trying.

With the collapse of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance in 1991, the Eastern European nations of the former socialist bloc had to figure out their newly capitalist future Capitalism, they found, was not a single set of political-economic relations Rather, they each had to decide what sort of capitalist nation to become

In Capitalist Diversity on Europe's Periphery, Dorothee Bohle and Béla Geskovits trace the form that capitalism took in each country, the assets and liabilities left behind by socialism, the transformational strategies embraced by political and technocratic elites, and the influence of transnational actors and institutions They also evaluate the impact of three regional shocks: the recession of the early 1990s, the rolling global financial crisis that started in July 1997, and the political shocks that attended EU enlargement in 2004.Bohle and Greskovits show that the postsocialist states have established three basic variants of capitalist political economy: neoliberal, embedded neoliberal, and neocorporatist

The Baltic states followed a neoliberal prescription: low controls on capital, open markets, reduced provisions for social welfare The larger states of central and eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary, and the Czech and Slovak republics) have used foreign investment to stimulate export industries but retained social welfare regimes and substantial government power to enforce industrial policy Slovenia has proved to be an outlier, successfully mixing competitive industries and neocorporatist social inclusion

Bohle and Greskovits also describe the political contention over such arrangements in Romania, Bulgaria, and Croatia A highly original and theoretically sophisticated typology of capitalism in postsocialist Europe, this book is unique in the breadth and depth of its conceptually coherent and empirically rich comparative analysis.

This book, a third edition, has been significantly expanded and updated It revisits the process of institutional change: its characteristics, determinants and implications for economic performance New chapters address the significance of Post-Communist transition, the differences and importance of initial conditions in institutional building, and, social norms, values, and happiness

Other chapters have been expanded to include, for example, a focus on the Washington consensus, commentary on the 2008 financial crisis, state capacity and corruption, and new findings on redistribution and inequality With specific focus on Central Europe, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, this revised edition examines the process of development, and its interdependence with institutions.

Sanctions have enormous consequences Especially when imposed by a country with the economic influence of the United States, sanctions induce clear shockwaves in both the economy and political culture of the targeted state, and in the everyday lives of citizens But do economic sanctions induce the behavioral changes intended

Do sanctions work in the way they should To answer these questions, the authors of How Sanctions Work highlight Iran, the most sanctioned country in the world Comprehensive sanctions are meant to induce uprisings or pressures to change the behavior of the ruling establishment, or to weaken its hold on power

But, after four decades, the case of Iran shows the opposite to be true: sanctions strengthened the Iranian state, impoverished its population, increased state repression, and escalated Iran's military posture toward the U.S. and its allies in the region Instead of offering an 'alternative to war,' sanctions have become a cause of war Consequently, How Sanctions Work reveals how necessary it is to understand how sanctions really work.

From his birth into the lowest stratum of the samurai class to his assassination by right-wing militarists, Takahashi Korekiyo (1854-1936) lived through tumultuous times that shaped the course of modern Japan This biography underscores the profound influence of the charismatic finance minister on the political and economic development of Japan.

A globe-trotting work of relentless investigative reporting, this is the first major book to expose the catastrophic reality of the multi-billion-dollar global garbage trade Dumps and landfills around the world are overflowing Disputes about what to do with the millions of tons of garbage generated every day have given rise to waste wars waged almost everywhere you look

Some are border skirmishes Others hustle trash across thousands of miles and multiple oceans But no matter the scale, one thing is true about almost all of them: few people have any idea they're happening Journalist Alexander Clapp spent two years roaming five continents to report deep inside the world of Javanese recycling gangsters, cruise ship dismantlers in the Aegean, Tanzanian plastic pickers, whistle-blowing environmentalists throughout the jungles of Guatemala, and a community of Ghanaian boys who burn Western cellphones and televisions for cents an hour, to tell readers what he has figured out: While some trash gets tossed onto roadsides or buried underground, much of it actually lives a secret hot potato second life, getting shipped, sold, re-sold, or smuggled from one country to another, often with devastating consequences for the poorest nations of the world

Waste Wars is a jaw-dropping exposé of how and why, for the last forty years, our garbage — the stuff we deem so worthless we think nothing of throwing it away — has spawned a massive, globe-spanning, multi-billion-dollar economy, one that offloads our consumption footprints onto distant continents, pristine landscapes, and unsuspecting populations If the handling of our trash reveals deeper truths about our Western society, what does the globalized business of garbage say about our world today And what does it say about us?

‘Absolutely riveting’ Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads ‘Disturbing and enlightening’ Chris Miller, author of Chip War ‘Hugely important’ Rana Foroohar, author of Makers and Takers ‘A once-in-a-generation read’ Robert D Kaplan, author of Waste Land As Trump wages a tariff war with China, seeking to boost domestic electronics manufacturing, this book offers an unparalleled insight into why his strategy is embarrassingly naïve Apple isn’t just a brand; it’s the world’s most valuable company and creator of the 21st century’s defining product

The iPhone has revolutionized the way we live, work and connect But Apple is now a victim of its own success, caught in the middle of a new Cold War between two superpowers On the brink of bankruptcy in 1996, Apple adopted an outsourcing strategy By 2003 it was lured to China by the promise of affordable, ubiquitous labour

As the iPod and iPhone transformed Apple’s fortunes, their sophisticated production played a seminal role in financing, training, supervising and supplying Chinese manufacturers – skills Beijing is now weaponizing against the West Investigative journalist Patrick McGee draws on 200 interviews with former Apple executives and engineers to reveal how Cupertino’s choice to anchor its supply chain in China has increasingly made it vulnerable to the regime’s whims Both an insider’s historical account and a cautionary tale, Apple in China is the first history of Apple to go beyond the biographies of its top executives and set the iPhone’s global domination within an increasingly fraught geopolitical context.

How, despite thirty years of effort, Soviet attempts to build a national computer network were undone by socialists who seemed to behave like capitalists Between 1959 and 1989, Soviet scientists and officials made numerous attempts to network their nation—to construct a nationwide computer network None of these attempts succeeded, and the enterprise had been abandoned by the time the Soviet Union fell apart

Meanwhile, ARPANET, the American precursor to the Internet, went online in 1969 Why did the Soviet network, with top-level scientists and patriotic incentives, fail while the American network succeeded In How Not to Network a Nation, Benjamin Peters reverses the usual cold war dualities and argues that the American ARPANET took shape thanks to well-managed state subsidies and collaborative research environments and the Soviet network projects stumbled because of unregulated competition among self-interested institutions, bureaucrats, and others

The capitalists behaved like socialists while the socialists behaved like capitalists After examining the midcentury rise of cybernetics, the science of self-governing systems, and the emergence in the Soviet Union of economic cybernetics, Peters complicates this uneasy role reversal while chronicling the various Soviet attempts to build a “unified information network.” Drawing on previously unknown archival and historical materials, he focuses on the final, and most ambitious of these projects, the All-State Automated System of Management (OGAS), and its principal promoter, Viktor M

Glushkov Peters describes the rise and fall of OGAS—its theoretical and practical reach, its vision of a national economy managed by network, the bureaucratic obstacles it encountered, and the institutional stalemate that killed it Finally, he considers the implications of the Soviet experience for today's networked world.

In Molecular Red, McKenzie Wark creates philosophical tools for the Anthropocene, our new planetary epoch, in which human and natural forces are so entwined that the future of one determines that of the other Wark explores the implications of Anthropocene through the story of two empires, the Soviet and then the American The fall of the former prefigures that of the latter

From the ruins of these mighty histories, Wark salvages ideas to help us picture what kind of worlds collective labor might yet build From the Russian revolution, Wark unearths the work of Alexander Bogdanov—Lenin’s rival—as well as the great Proletkult writer and engineer Andrey Platonov The Soviet experiment emerges from the past as an allegory for the new organizational challenges of our time

From deep within the Californian military-entertainment complex, Wark retrieves Donna Haraway’s cyborg critique and science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s Martian utopia as powerful resources for rethinking and remaking the world that climate change has wrought Molecular Red proposes an alternative realism, where hope is found in what remains and endures.

A transatlantic history of the Euromissiles from the arms race's early origins to the final days of the Cold War, in which NATO takes center stage For the Western allies, the successive decisions to field, deploy, and destroy the Euromissiles all involved high-stakes gambles--a stark reminder of just how fragile the Atlantic Alliance was"--

A splendid book by authors who long ago detected Germany's fragility – and aimed at readers who take no pleasure in the sight of its precipitous decline' Yanis Varoufakis 'The best polemic yet ... the authors prosecute their case with vigour and a terrific eye for detail' Oliver Moody, The Times Book of the Week The compelling story of Germany's decline – where it all went wrong and how it could bounce back For many years, the post-war recovery of Germany was an inspirational story

All of Europe looked on with admiration and envy as the nation rebuilt and set standards for the rest to follow Companies such as Mercedes-Benz, Siemens and Bayer rose to become global titans, while the country's political leaders earned respect around the world – even their football teams were the best Such was its success that when the Berlin Wall fell, it appeared to reunify almost seamlessly

Where Germany led, the rest followed But, even at its zenith, there were signs of trouble, with a worrying lack of national identity at its heart So, when events started to turn against Germany, the whole edifice began to crumble As political and business leaders benefited from the status quo, they couldn't see the problems heading their way

Volkswagen's emissions fraud tainted its industrial reputation; abandoning nuclear power left the country at the mercy of Russia for its energy needs; and a growing divide between rich and poor stoked international tensions that opened the door to the rise of the far-right AfD party Journalists Chris Reiter and Will Wilkes have been reporting for years on the problems the country faces Germany is not alone in this, but it is singularly ill-equipped to deal with them Broken Republik is an essential read for anyone who wants to understand Germany's slide towards the brink.

This comprehensive account of the meteoric rise of The Simpsons combines incisive pop culture criticism and interviews with the show’s creative team that take readers inside the making of an American phenomenon during its most influential decade, the 1990s The Simpsons is an American institution But its status as an occasionally sharp yet ultimately safe sitcom that's still going after 33 years on the air undercuts its revolutionary origins

The early years of the animated series didn't just impact Hollywood, they changed popular culture It was a show that altered the way we talked around the watercooler, in school hallways, and on the campaign trail, by bridging generations with its comedic sensibility and prescient cultural commentary In Stupid TV, Be More Funny, writer Alan Siegel reveals how the first decade of the show laid the groundwork for the series' true influence

He explores how the show's rise from 1990 to 1998 intertwined with the supposedly ascendent post-Cold War America, turning Fox into the juggernaut we know today, simultaneously shaking its head at America's culture wars while finding itself in the middle of them By packing the book with anecdotes from icons like Conan O’Brien and Yeardley Smith, Siegel alaso provides readers with an unparalleled look inside the making of the show Through interviews with the show's legendary staff and whip-smart analysis, Siegel charts how The Simpsons developed its singular sensibility throughout the ‘90s, one that was at once groundbreakingly subversive for a primetime cartoon and shocking wholesome The result is a definitive history of The Simpsons' most essential decade.

How technological advances and colonial fears inspired utopian geoengineering projects during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries From the 1870s to the mid-twentieth century, European explorers, climatologists, colonial officials, and planners were avidly interested in large-scale projects that might actively alter the climate Uncovering this history, Desert Edens looks at how arid environments and an increasing anxiety about climate in the colonial world shaped this upsurge in ideas about climate engineering

From notions about the transformation of deserts into forests to Nazi plans to influence the climates of war-torn areas, Philipp Lehmann puts the early climate change debate in its environmental, intellectual, and political context, and considers the ways this legacy reverberates in the present climate crisis Lehmann examines some of the most ambitious climate-engineering projects to emerge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Confronted with the Sahara in the 1870s, the French developed concepts for a flooding project that would lead to the creation of a man-made Sahara Sea

In the 1920s, German architect Herman Sörgel proposed damming the Mediterranean in order to geoengineer an Afro-European continent called “Atlantropa,” which would fit the needs of European settlers Nazi designs were formulated to counteract the desertification of Eastern Europe and Central Asia Despite ideological and technical differences, these projects all incorporated and developed climate change theories and vocabulary

They also combined expressions of an extreme environmental pessimism with a powerful technological optimism that continue to shape the contemporary moment Focusing on the intellectual roots, intended effects, and impact of early measures to modify the climate, Desert Edens investigates how the technological imagination can be inspired by pressing fears about the environment and civilization.

A pioneering history that transforms our understanding of the colonial era and China's place in it China has conventionally been considered a land empire whose lack of maritime and colonial reach contributed to its economic decline after the mid-eighteenth century Distant Shores challenges this view, showing that the economic expansion of southeastern Chinese rivaled the colonial ambitions of Europeans overseas In a story that dawns with the Industrial Revolution and culminates in the Great Depression, Melissa Macauley explains how sojourners from an ungovernable corner of China emerged among the commercial masters of the South China Sea

She focuses on Chaozhou, a region in the great maritime province of Guangdong, whose people shared a repertoire of ritual, cultural, and economic practices Macauley traces how Chaozhouese at home and abroad reaped many of the benefits of an overseas colonial system without establishing formal governing authority Their power was sustained instead through a mosaic of familial, fraternal, and commercial relationships spread across the ports of Bangkok, Singapore, Saigon, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Swatow

The picture that emerges is not one of Chinese divergence from European modernity but rather of a convergence in colonial sites that were critical to modern development and accelerating levels of capital accumulation A magisterial work of scholarship, Distant Shores reveals how the transoceanic migration of Chaozhouese laborers and merchants across a far-flung maritime world linked the Chinese homeland to an ever-expanding frontier of settlement and economic extraction.

How climate change ushered in the collapse of one of history’s mighty empires In 1644, after close to three centuries of relative stability and prosperity, the Ming dynasty collapsed Many historians attribute its demise to the Manchu invasion of China, but the truth is far more profound The Price of Collapse provides an entirely new approach to the economic and social history of China, exploring how global climate crisis spelled the end of Ming rule

The mid-seventeenth century witnessed the deadliest phase of the Little Ice Age, when temperatures and rainfall plunged and world economies buckled Timothy Brook draws on the history of grain prices to paint a gripping portrait of the final tumultuous years of a once-great dynasty He explores how global trade networks that increasingly moved silver into China may have affected prices and describes the daily struggle to survive amid grain shortages and famine

By the early 1640s, as the subjects of the Ming found themselves caught in a deadly combination of cold and drought that defied all attempts to stave off disaster, the Ming price regime collapsed, and with it the Ming political regime A masterful work of scholarship, The Price of Collapse reconstructs the experience of ordinary people under the immense pressure of unaffordable prices as their country slid from prosperity to calamity and shows how the market mediated the relationship between an empire and the climate that turned against it.

This book traces the emergence of mass production and Fordism, its accompanying ideology, first in the United States and then in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union"--

A richly illustrated guide to lichens and their biology Existing at the margins of life, lichens are the result of symbiotic relationships between fungi and photosynthesizing partners in the form of algae or cyanobacteria Comprising more than twenty thousand species, lichens are pioneers in diverse ecosystems, colonizing virtually any surface and growing at almost any altitude Found in rainforests, polar regions, deserts, and your backyard, lichens embody a paradox of toughness and sensitivity, surviving trips to space yet endangered by even the slightest environmental changes from industrial pollution here on Earth

Lichens grow everywhere, but only on their own terms: no one has ever fully assembled a lichen in the lab from its component parts The Lives of Lichens explores all facets of these peculiar organisms, blending stunning macrophotography and graphics with in-depth coverage of profiled species to provide an unforgettable tour of the marvelous world of lichens Features a wealth of color illustrations Covers symbiosis, biology, architecture, evolution, taxonomy, and much more Provides an up-close look at lichens in their ecosystems Discusses human relationships with lichens Essential reading for nature lovers everywhere

A biologist’s firsthand account of the hunt for life beneath earth’s surface—and how new discoveries are challenging our most basic assumptions about the nature of life on Earth Life thrives in the deepest, darkest recesses of Earth’s crust—from methane seeps in the ocean floor to the highest reaches of Arctic permafrost—and it is unlike anything seen on the surface Intraterrestrials shares what scientists are learning about these strange types of microbial life—and how research expeditions to some of the most extreme locales on the planet are broadening our understanding of what life is and how its earliest forms may have evolved

Drawing on her experiences and those of her fellow scientists working in challenging and often dangerous conditions, Karen Lloyd takes readers on an adventure from the bottom of the ocean through the jungles of Central America to the high-altitude volcanoes of the Andes Only discovered in recent decades, “intraterrestrials”—subsurface beings that are truly alien—are demonstrating how life can exist in boiling water, pure acid, and bleach They enable us to peer back to the very dawn of life on Earth, disclosing deep branches on the tree of life that push the limits of what we thought possible

Some can “breathe” rocks or even electrons Others may live for hundreds of thousands of years or longer All of them are living in ways that are totally foreign to us surface dwellers Blending captivating storytelling with the latest science, Intraterrestrials reveals what microbes in Earth’s deep subsurface biosphere can tell us about the prospects for finding life on other planets—and the future of life on our own.

Named 2025's Most Anticipated Release by Toronto Star • Literary Hub • Esquire • The Washington Post • Esquire One of Electric Literature's '48 Books by Women of Color to Read in 2025' The sublime, long-awaited, major new novel from the beloved author of the GG Award-winning, Booker Prize-shortlisted bestseller Do Not Say We Have Nothing In "The Sea," a sprawling, mysterious building-complex that endlessly receives migrants from everywhere and seems to exist somewhere outside of normal space and time, adolescent Lina cares for her ailing father

Having landed at The Sea with only what could be carried by hand, Lina grows up with nothing but a trio of books to read—three volumes in a series about the lives of famous "voyagers" of the past Soon, however, she discovers three eccentric neighbours in the building who have stories of their own to share These neighbours are Bento (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Baruch Spinoza), a Jewish scholar in seventeenth-century Amsterdam who was excommunicated for his radical thought; Blucher (whose life mirrors Hannah Arendt), a philosopher whose academic promise in 1930s Germany became a quest to survive Nazi persecution; and Jupiter (or shades of Du Fu), a poet of Tang Dynasty China whose brilliance went unrecognised by the state, and whose dependence on fickle patrons barely sustained him while lesser artists thrived

As she grows up in the building, Lina spends many hours listening to the fascinating tales of these friends But it is only when she is finally told her father’s account of how the two of them came to reside in The Sea that she truly understands the unbearable cost of betrayal in her own life And the combined force of these stories soon sets her on her own path into the unknown future

An adventurous, voyaging novel in which time occupies space uniquely, The Book of Records holds a mirror to the idea of fate in history, interrogates questions of legacy, explores how the political factors of a collective moment may determine an individual's future, and beautifully shows the infinite joys of art and intellectual endeavour This is the great novelist Madeleine Thien at her most remarkable, exciting, engrossing, and enriching.

A Harper's Bazaar "Best Book Coming Out This Spring" Pick • One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025 • One of The Millions's Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2025 A fast-moving, heartbreaking collection of short fiction from "the American writer with the funniest, wisest grasp on how we fool ourselves" (Chicago Tribune) The word atavism, coined by a botanist and popularized by a criminologist, refers to the resurfacing of a primitive evolutionary trait or urge in a modern being

This inventive collection from Lydia Millet offers overlapping tales of urges ranging from rage to jealousy to yearning—a fluent triumph of storytelling, rich in ideas and emotions both petty and grand The titular atavists include an underachieving, bewildered young bartender; a middle-aged mother convinced her gentle son-in-law is fixated on geriatric porn; a bodybuilder with an incel’s fantasy life; an arrogant academic accused of plagiarism; and an empty-nester dad determined to host refugees in a tiny house in his backyard

As they pick away at the splitting seams in American culture, Millet’s characters shimmer with the sense of powerlessness we share in an era of mass overwhelm A beautician in a waxing salon faces a sudden resurgence of grief in the midst of a bikini Brazilian; a couple sets up a camera to find out who’s been slipping homophobic letters into their mailbox; a jilted urban planner stalks a man she met on a dating app In its rich warp and weft of humiliations and human error, Atavists returns to the trenchant, playful social commentary that made A Children’s Bible a runaway hit In these stories sharp observations of middle-class mores and sanctimony give way to moments of raw exposure and longing: Atavists performs an uncanny fictional magic, full of revelation but also hilarious, unpretentious, and warm.

When European missionaries first arrived in India in the sixteenth century, they entered a world both fascinating and bewildering Hinduism, as they saw it, was a pagan mess: the worship of devils and monsters by a people who burned women alive, performed outlandish rites and fed children to crocodiles But soon it became clear that Hindu ‘idolatry’ was far more complex than white men’s stereotypes allowed, and Hindus had little desire to convert

But then, European power began to grow in India, and under colonial rule, missionaries assumed a forbidding appearance During the British Raj, Western frames of thinking gained ascendancy and Hindus felt pressed to reimagine their religion This was both to fortify it against Christian attacks and to resist foreign rule

It is this encounter which has, in good measure, inspired modern Hinduism’s present shape Indeed, Hindus subverted some of the missionaries’ own tools and strategies in the process, triggering the birth of Hindu nationalism, now so dominant in the country In Gods, Guns and Missionaries, Manu S Pillai takes us through these remarkable dynamics

With an arresting cast of characters—maharajahs, poets, gun-wielding revolutionaries, politicians, polemicists, philosophers and clergymen—this book is ambitious in its scope and provocative in its position Lucid and exhaustive, it is, at once, a political history, a review of Hindu culture and a study of the social forces that prepared the ground for Hindu nationalism Turning away from simplistic ideas on religious evolution and European imperialism, the past as it appears here is more complicated—and infinitely richer—than popular narratives allow.

The never-before-told story of the epic battle of wills between Andrew Mellon and Winston Churchill, as they debated the repayment of the enormous sums loaned by America to Great Britain during World War I Andrew Mellon, one of the most accomplished businessmen of his era, is almost unknown today To this shy, diffident (but brilliant) man fell the daunting task of collecting the war debts from European governments still devastated by World War I and struggling to recover economically

Dealing with the U.S Congress and the heads of foreign governments on the world stage became one of the great adventures of his life Winston Churchill is one of the best-known figures in history Mellon vs

Churchill presents Churchill through a different lens, focusing on his service as Chancellor of the Exchequer when Great Britain was the largest debtor to the United States That he became the most vocal critic of American foreign policy during that time is a scarcely told chapter of economic history—and his long and contentious debate with Mellon has seldom been explored Yet, during the five years that Churchill served as Chancellor of the Exchequer (1924-1929), Mellon was his counterpart at the United States Treasury, and their debate and fierce differences of opinion about the handling of what Churchill called “the monstrous war debts” made frequent headlines on both sides of the Atlantic

No mention of any of their five meetings are included in the official biographies of either man Now these confrontations are brought to vivid life in Mellon vs Churchill, as are many other vignettes from their very public, but largely forgotten, rivalry Mellon vs Churchill brings the reader inside the adventurous lives of these two great public figures—men who were not afraid to take huge risks to pursue their grand ambitions.

When Stalin came to power, making music in Russia became dangerous Composers now had to create work that served the socialist state, and all artistic production was scrutinized for potential subversion In The Sound of Utopia, Michel Krielaars vividly depicts Soviet musicians and composers struggling to create art in a climate of risk, suspicion and fear

Some successfully toed the ideological line, diluting their work in the process; others ended up facing the Gulag or even death While some, like Sergei Prokofiev, achieved lasting fame, others were consigned to oblivion, their work still hard to find As Krielaars traces the twists and turns of these artists' fortunes, he paints a fascinating and disturbing portrait of the absurdity of Soviet musical life - and of the people who crafted sublime melodies under the darkest circumstances.

A masterful new biography of North Korea's despotic founding father and his enduring impact on his country today.

In An Engine, Not a Camera, Donald MacKenzie argues that the emergence of modern economic theories of finance affected financial markets in fundamental ways These new, Nobel Prize-winning theories, based on elegant mathematical models of markets, were not simply external analyses but intrinsic parts of economic processes Paraphrasing Milton Friedman, MacKenzie says that economic models are an engine of inquiry rather than a camera to reproduce empirical facts

More than that, the emergence of an authoritative theory of financial markets altered those markets fundamentally For example, in 1970, there was almost no trading in financial derivatives such as "futures." By June of 2004, derivatives contracts totaling $273 trillion were outstanding worldwide MacKenzie suggests that this growth could never have happened without the development of theories that gave derivatives legitimacy and explained their complexities

MacKenzie examines the role played by finance theory in the two most serious crises to hit the world's financial markets in recent years: the stock market crash of 1987 and the market turmoil that engulfed the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998 He also looks at finance theory that is somewhat beyond the mainstream—chaos theorist Benoit Mandelbrot's model of "wild" randomness MacKenzie's pioneering work in the social studies of finance will interest anyone who wants to understand how America's financial markets have grown into their current form.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • On April 4, 1968, James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel The nation was shocked, enraged, and saddened As chaos erupted across the country and mourners gathered at King's funeral, investigators launched a sixty-five day search for King’s assassin that would lead them across two continents—from the author of Blood and Thunder and Ghost Soldiers

With a blistering, cross-cutting narrative that draws on a wealth of dramatic unpublished documents, Hampton Sides, bestselling author of Ghost Soldiers, delivers a non-fiction thriller in the tradition of William Manchester's The Death of a President and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood With Hellhound On His Trail, Sides shines a light on the largest manhunt in American history and brings it to life for all to see With a New Afterword

no.39: Redlich, Fritz De praeda militari Looting and booty, 1500-1815. (1956)

The Routledge Handbook of Maritime Trade around Europe 1300-1600 explores the links between maritime trading networks around Europe, from the Mediterranean and the Atlantic to the North and Baltic Seas Maritime trade routes connected diverse geographical and cultural spheres, contributing to a more integrated Europe in both cultural and material terms This volume explores networks' economic functions alongside their intercultural exchanges, contacts and practical arrangements in ports on the European coasts

The collection takes as its central question how shippers and merchants were able to connect regional and interregional trade circuits around and beyond Europe in the late medieval period It is divided into four parts, with chapters in Part I looking across broad themes such as ships and sailing routes, maritime law, financial linkages and linguistic exchanges In the following parts - divided into the Mediterranean, the Baltic Sea, and the Atlantic and North Seas - contributors present case studies addressing themes including conflict resolution, relations between different types of main ports and their hinterland, the local institutional arrangements supporting maritime trade, and the advantages and challenges of locations around the continent

The volume concludes with a summary that points to the extraterritorial character of trading systems during this fascinating period of expansion Drawing together an international team of contributors, The Routledge Handbook of Maritime Trade around Europe is a vital contribution to the study of maritime history and the history of trade It is essential reading for students and scholars in these fields.

The conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War has long been understood in a global context, but Jeremy Friedman’s Shadow Cold War delves deeper into the era to examine the competition between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China for the leadership of the world revolution When a world of newly independent states emerged from decolonization desperately poor and politically disorganized, Moscow and Beijing turned their focus to attracting these new entities, setting the stage for Sino-Soviet competition

Based on archival research from ten countries, including new materials from Russia and China, many no longer accessible to researchers, this book examines how China sought to mobilize Asia, Africa, and Latin America to seize the revolutionary mantle from the Soviet Union The Soviet Union adapted to win it back, transforming the nature of socialist revolution in the process This groundbreaking book is the first to explore the significance of this second Cold War that China and the Soviet Union fought in the shadow of the capitalist-communist clash.

In April 1956, a refitted oil tanker carried fifty-eight shipping containers from Newark to Houston From that modest beginning, container shipping developed into a huge industry that reshaped manufacturing But the container didn't just happen

Its adoption required huge sums of money, years of high-stakes bargaining, and delicate negotiation on standards Now with a new chapter, The Box tells the dramatic story of how the drive and imagination of an iconoclastic entrepreneur turned containerization from an impractical idea into a phenomenon that transformed economic geography, slashed transportation costs, and made the boom in global trade possible. -- from back cover.

A timely work of singular reportage and a damning indictment of the private equity industry told through the stories of four American workers whose lives and communities were upended by the ruinous effects of private equity takeovers Private equity runs our country, yet few Americans have any idea how ingrained it is in their lives Private equity controls our hospitals, daycare centers, supermarket chains, voting machine manufacturers, local newspapers, nursing home operators, fertility clinics, and prisons

The industry even manages highways, municipal water systems, fire departments, emergency medical services, and owns a growing swath of commercial and residential real estate Private equity executives, meanwhile, are not only among the wealthiest people in American society, but have grown to become modern-day barons with outsized influence on our politics and legislation CEOs of firms like Blackstone, Carlyle, KKR, and Apollo are rewarded with seats in the Senate and on the boards of the country’s most august institutions; meanwhile, entire communities are hollowed out as a result of their buyouts

Workers lose their jobs Communities lose their institutions Only private equity wins Acclaimed journalist Megan Greenwell’s Bad Company unearths the hidden story of private equity by examining the lives of four American workers that were devastated as private equity upended their employers and communities: a Toys R Us floor supervisor, a rural doctor, a local newspaper journalist, and an affordable housing organizer

Taken together, their individual experiences also pull back the curtain on a much larger project: how private equity reshaped the American economy to serve its own interests, creating a new class of billionaires while stripping ordinary people of their livelihoods, their health care, their homes, and their sense of security In the tradition of deeply human reportage like Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, Megan Greenwell pulls back the curtain on shadowy multibillion dollar private equity firms, telling a larger story about how private equity is reshaping the economy, disrupting communities, and hollowing out the very idea of the American dream itself Timely and masterfully told, Bad Company is a forceful rebuke of America’s most consequential, yet least understood economic forces.

Since time immemorial, Native peoples’ understandings of space and territory have defined the landscape of the Tennessee Country—the region drained by the Tennessee, Cumberland, and Mississippi rivers and their tributaries Marking Native Borders challenges the narrative of inevitable U.S. expansion by exploring how Cherokees and Chickasaws used these notions of space and territory in new and different ways to counter the encroachment of white settlers and land speculators in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries

When settlers began to trudge over the Appalachian Mountains, intent on making new homes on Native land, Cherokees and Chickasaws fortified their territories by creating clear borders around their nations They further defended their permanent, inherent right to these bordered spaces by combining Indigenous ideas of communal land use with aspects of European property law The Cherokees and Chickasaws, however, did not always agree on how to maintain control of their lands, and Lucas P

Kelley’s comparison of their differing strategies provides a nuanced, more accurate picture of Native peoples’ lived experiences in this turbulent time and place He also describes how white settlers and speculators, in turn, revised their own strategies for expansion in response to the Cherokees’ and Chickasaws’ success in defending their national lands

The story of the early Tennessee Country is one of competing geographies, contested sovereignties, and disputed boundaries among Chickasaws, Cherokees, settlers, and land speculators It is a history of conflict and contestation that influenced Native sovereignty and shaped the construction of an American empire As this book suggests, it is an ongoing story, as Native peoples’ notions of space and territory continue to impact the Tennessee Country today.

• Choice 1988 Outstanding Academic Book • Named one of the Best Business Books of 1988 by USA TodayA veteran reporter of American labor analyzes the spectacular and tragic collapse of the steel industry in the 1980s John Hoerr's account of these events stretches from the industrywide barganing failures of 1982 to the crippling work stoppage at USX (U.S Steel) in 1986-87

He interviewed scores of steelworkers, company managers at all levels, and union officials, and was present at many of the crucial events he describes Using historical flashbacks to the origins of the steel industry, particularly in the Monongahela Valley of southwestern Pennsylvania, he shows how an obsolete and adversarial relationship between management and labor made it impossible for the industry to adapt to shattering changes in the global economy.

A literary classic that wasn't recognized for its merits until decades after its publication, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick tells the tale of a whaling ship and its crew, who are carried progressively further out to sea by the fiery Captain Ahab Obsessed with killing the massive whale, which had previously bitten off Ahab's leg, the seasoned seafarer steers his ship to confront the creature, while the rest of the shipmates, including the young narrator, Ishmael, and the harpoon expert, Queequeg, must contend with their increasingly dire journey The book invariably lands on any short list of the greatest American novels.

She was the golden beast, an unconscious force, the very scent of her could bring the world to ruin.' Nana, daughter of a drunk and a laundress, is the Helen of Troy of Paris A sexually magnetic high-class prostitute and actress, she becomes a celebrity, rapidly conquering society, ruining all men who fall under her spell-especially Count Muffat, Chamberlain to the Empress Nana herself meets a terrible fate, consumed by her own dissipation and extravagance, just as the disastrous war with Prussia is declared

Nana is the ninth instalment in the twenty volume Rougon-Macquart series The novel opens in 1867, the year of the World Fair, when Paris, thronged by a cosmopolitan élite, was la Ville Lumière, the glittering setting-and object-of Zola's scathing denunciation of society's hypocrisy and moral corruption Nana comes to symbolize the Second Empire regime itself in all its excesses; but in the final chapters, the narrator seems to suggest that the coming disaster is not so much a result of the corruption of the Empire, as of rampant female sexuality.

Considered by André Gide to be one of the ten greatest novels in the French language, Émile Zola's Germinal is a brutal depiction of the poverty of a mining community in northern France Étienne Lantier, an unemployed railway worker, is a clever but uneducated young man with a dangerous temper Compelled to take a back-breakin job at Le Voreux mine when he cannot get other work, he discovers that his fellow miners are ill, hungry and in debt, unable to feed and clothe their families

When conditions in the mining community deteriorate even further, Lantier finds himself leading a strike that could mean starvation or salvation for all The thirteenth novel in Zola's great Rougon-Macquart sequence, Germinal expresses outrage at the exploitation of the many by the few, but also shows humanity's capacity for compassion and hope Translated with an introduction by Roger Pearson in Penguin Classics If you enjoyed Germinal, you might like Zola's Thérèse Raquin, also available in Penguin Classics.

"Lizzie Wade is an exceptional journalist and a master storyteller She reminds us that survival always has been, and still is, possible, and that our world always has been, and still is, a choice." –Ed Yong, author of An Immense World “This book upended my understanding of the ancient world Wade renders our deep past in vivid prose, showing us that times of great rupture also bring great possibilities for new ways of living, if we let them

Apocalypse is the best kind of history book: vibrant and vital.” —Zoë Schlanger, author of The Light Eaters A richly imagined new view on the great human tradition of apocalypse, from the rise of Homo sapiens to the climate instability of our present, that defies conventional wisdom and long-held stories about our deep past to reveal how cataclysmic events are not irrevocable endings, but transformations A drought lasts for decades, a disease rips through a city, a civilization collapses

When we finally uncover the ruins, we ask: What happened The good news is, we’ve been here before History is long, and people have already confronted just about every apocalypse we’re facing today But these days, archaeologists are getting better at seeing stories of survival, transformation, and even progress hidden within those histories of collapse and destruction

Perhaps, we begin to see, apocalypses do not destroy worlds, but create them anew Apocalypse offers a new way of understanding human history, reframing it as a series of crises and cataclysms that we survived, moments of choice in an evolution of humanity that has never been predetermined or even linear Here Lizzie Wade asks us to reckon with our long-held narratives of these events, from the end of Old Kingdom Egypt, the collapse of the Classic Maya, to the Black Death, and shows us how people lived through and beyond them—and even considered what a new world could look like in their wake

The more we learn about apocalypses past, the more hope we have that we will survive our own It won’t be pleasant It won’t be fair The world will be different on the other side, and our cultures and communities—perhaps even our species—will be different too.

An argument that contagion is the most significant risk facing the financial system and that Dodd¬Frank has reduced the government's ability to respond effectively The Dodd–Frank Act of 2010 was intended to reform financial policies in order to prevent another massive crisis such as the financial meltdown of 2008 Dodd–Frank is largely premised on the diagnosis that connectedness was the major problem in that crisis—that is, that financial institutions were overexposed to one another, resulting in a possible chain reaction of failures

In this book, Hal Scott argues that it is not connectedness but contagion that is the most significant element of systemic risk facing the financial system Contagion is an indiscriminate run by short-term creditors of financial institutions that can render otherwise solvent institutions insolvent It poses a serious risk because, as Scott explains, our financial system still depends on approximately $7.4 to $8.2 trillion of runnable and uninsured short-term liabilities, 60 percent of which are held by nonbanks

Scott argues that efforts by the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, and the Treasury to stop the contagion that exploded after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers lessened the economic damage And yet Congress, spurred by the public's aversion to bailouts, has dramatically weakened the power of the government to respond to contagion, including limitations on the Fed's powers as a lender of last resort Offering uniquely detailed forensic analyses of the Lehman Brothers and AIG failures, and suggesting alternative regulatory approaches, Scott makes the case that we need to restore and strengthen our weapons for fighting contagion.

The British historian and author of Into India delivers “a history that is intelligent, incisive, and eminently readable” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) Fully revised with forty thousand new words that take the reader up to present-day India, John Keay’s India: A History spans five millennia in a sweeping narrative that tells the story of the peoples of the subcontinent, from their ancient beginnings in the valley of the Indus to the events in the region today

In charting the evolution of the rich tapestry of cultures, religions, and peoples that comprise the modern nations of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, Keay weaves together insights from a variety of scholarly fields to create a rich historical narrative Wide-ranging and authoritative, India: A History is a compelling epic portrait of one of the world’s oldest and most richly diverse civilizations. “Keay’s panoramic vision and multidisciplinary approach serves the function of all great historical writing It illuminates the present.” —Thrity Umrigar, The Boston Globe

An empirical investigation of financial crises during the last 800 years.

The Mongols are universally known as conquerors, but they were more than that: influential thinkers, politicians, engineers, and merchants Challenging the view that nomads are peripheral to history, The Horde reveals the complex empire the Mongols built and traces its enduring imprint on politics and society in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

Before reading The Panic of 1907, the year 1907 seemed like a long time ago and a different world The authors, however, bring this story alive in a fast-moving book, and the reader sees how events of that time are very relevant for today's financial world In spite of all of our advances, including a stronger monetary system and modern tools for managing risk, Bruner and Carr help us understand that we are not immune to a future crisis." —Dwight B

Crane, Baker Foundation Professor, Harvard Business School "Bruner and Carr provide a thorough, masterly, and highly readable account of the 1907 crisis and its management by the great private banker J P Morgan Congress heeded the lessons of 1907, launching the Federal Reserve System in 1913 to prevent banking panics and foster financial stability

We still have financial problems But because of 1907 and Morgan, a century later we have a respected central bank as well as greater confidence in our money and our banks than our great-grandparents had in theirs." —Richard Sylla, Henry Kaufman Professor of the History of Financial Institutions and Markets, and Professor of Economics, Stern School of Business, New York University "A fascinating portrayal of the events and personalities of the crisis and panic of 1907

Lessons learned and parallels to the present have great relevance Crises and panics are as much a part of our future as our past." —John Strangfeld, Vice Chairman, Prudential Financial "Who would have thought that a hundred years after the Panic of 1907 so much remained to be written about it Bruner and Carr break significant new ground because they are willing to do the heavy lifting of combing through massive archival material to identify and weave together important facts Their book will be of interest not only to banking theorists and financial historians, but also to business school and economics students, for its rare ability to teach so clearly why and how a panic unfolds." —Charles Calomiris, Henry Kaufman Professor of Financial Institutions, Columbia University, Graduate School of Business

A media history of simulation that contextualizes our digital heritage and the history of computing In Computing Legacies, Peter Krapp explores a media history of simulation to excavate three salient aspects of digital culture Firstly, he profiles simulation as cultural technique, enabling symbolic work and foregrounding hypothetical literacy

Secondly, he positions simulation as crucial for the preservation of cultural memory, where modeling, emulation, and serious play are constitutive in how we relate to our mediated history And lastly, despite suggestions that we may already live in a simulation, he interrogates how simulation can serve as critique of the computer age In tracing our digital heritage, Computing Legacies elucidates inflection points where quantitative data becomes tractable for qualitative evaluations: modeling epidemics for scientific study or entertainment, emulating older devices, turning numerical calculations into music, conducting espionage in virtual worlds, and gamifying higher education Simulation, this book demonstrates, is pivotal not only to high-tech research and to archives, museums, and the preservation of digital culture but also to our understanding of what it is to live and work under the technical conditions of computing.

A deep examination of how new, legalistic norms affected the trajectory of global HIV care and altered the practice of medicine HIV emerged in the world at a time when medicine and healthcare were undergoing two major transformations: globalization and a turn toward legally inflected, rule-based ways of doing things It accelerated both trends

While pestilence and disease are generally considered the domain of biological sciences and medicine, social arrangements—and law in particular—are also crucial Drawing on years of research in HIV clinics in the United States, Thailand, South Africa, and Uganda, Governing the Global Clinic examines how growing norms of legalized accountability have altered the work of healthcare systems and how the effects of legalization vary across different national contexts

A key feature of legalism is universalistic language, but, in practice, rules are usually imported from richer countries (especially the United States) to poorer ones that have less adequate infrastructure and fewer resources with which to implement them Challenging readers to reconsider the impulse to use law to organize and govern social life, Governing the Global Clinic poses difficult questions: When do rules solve problems, and when do they create new problems

When do rules become decoupled from ethics, and when do they lead to deeper moral commitments When do rules reduce inequality And when do they reflect, reproduce, and even amplify inequality?

Enter the mysterious world of sixteenth-century science, where astronomers and alchemists shared laboratories In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus declared the earth revolved around the Sun, overturning centuries of scholastic presumption A new age was coming into view – one guided by observation, technology and logic

But omens and elixirs did not disappear from the sixteenth-century laboratory Charms and potions could still be found nestled between glistening brass instruments and leather-bound tomes The line between the natural and supernatural remained porous, yet to be defined From the icy Danish observatory of Tycho Brahe, to the smoky, sulphur-stained workshop of John Dee, Violet Moller tours the intellectual heart of early European science Exploring its rich, multidisciplinary culture, Inside the Stargazer’s Palace reveals a dazzling forgotten world, where all knowledge, no matter how arcane, could be pursued in good faith.

In Inadvertent Expansion, Nicholas D Anderson investigates a surprisingly common yet overlooked phenomenon in the history of great power politics: territorial expansion that was neither intended nor initially authorized by state leaders Territorial expansion is typically understood as a centrally driven and often strategic activity

But as Anderson shows, nearly a quarter of great power coercive territorial acquisitions since the nineteenth century have in fact been instances of what he calls "inadvertent expansion." A two-step process, inadvertent expansion first involves agents on the periphery of a state or empire acquiring territory without the authorization or knowledge of higher-ups Leaders in the capital must then decide whether to accept or reject the already-acquired territory

Through cases ranging from those of the United States in Florida and Texas to Japan in Manchuria and Germany in East Africa, Anderson shows that inadvertent expansion is rooted in a principal-agent problem When leaders in the capital fail to exert or have limited control over their agents on the periphery, unauthorized efforts to take territory are more likely to occur Yet it is only when the geopolitical risks associated with keeping the acquired territory are perceived to be low that leaders are more likely to accept such expansion Accentuating the influence of small, seemingly insignificant actors over the foreign policy behavior of powerful states, Inadvertent Expansion offers new insights into how the boundaries of states and empires came to be and captures timeless dynamics between state leaders and their peripheral agents.

From the winner of the 2017 John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer, Ada Palmer's 2017 Compton Crook Award-winning political science fiction, Too Like the Lightning, ventures into a human future of extraordinary originality Mycroft Canner is a convict For his crimes he is required, as is the custom of the 25th century, to wander the world being as useful as he can to all he meets

Carlyle Foster is a sensayer--a spiritual counselor in a world that has outlawed the public practice of religion, but which also knows that the inner lives of humans cannot be wished away The world into which Mycroft and Carlyle have been born is as strange to our 21st-century eyes as ours would be to a native of the 1500s It is a hard-won utopia built on technologically-generated abundance, and also on complex and mandatory systems of labelling all public writing and speech

What seem to us normal gender distinctions are now distinctly taboo in most social situations And most of the world's population is affiliated with globe-girdling clans of the like-minded, whose endless economic and cultural competition is carefully managed by central planners of inestimable subtlety To us it seems like a mad combination of heaven and hell

To them, it seems like normal life And in this world, Mycroft and Carlyle have stumbled on the wild card that may destablize the system: the boy Bridger, who can effortlessly make his wishes come true Who can, it would seem, bring inanimate objects to life.. Terra Ignota 1

Too Like the Lightning 2 Seven Surrenders 3 The Will to Battle At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

An eye-opening, terrifying history of this notorious and widely influential mercenary group This book exposes the history and the future of the Wagner Group, Russia’s notorious and secretive mercenary army, revealing details of their operations never documented before

Using extensive leaks, first-hand accounts, and the byzantine paper trail left in the group’s wake, Jack Margolin traces the Wagner Group from its roots as a battlefield rumor to a private military enterprise tens of thousands–strong that eventually comes to threaten Putin himself He follows individual commanders and foot soldiers within the group as they fight in Ukraine, Syria, and Africa, sometimes alongside fellow military contractors from the United Kingdom and the United States

He shows Wagner mercenaries committing atrocities, plundering oil, diamonds, and gold, and changing the course of conflicts from Europe to Africa in the name of the Kremlin’s strategic aims In documenting the Wagner Group’s story up to the dramatic demise of its chief director, Evgeniy Prigozhin, Margolin demonstrates that Wagner was not an aberration, but a manifestation of the new geopolitical order of global capital, global crime, and of the entrepreneurs that thrive in it.

“Keep your government hands off my Medicare!” Such comments spotlight a central question animating Suzanne Mettler’s provocative and timely book: why are many Americans unaware of government social benefits and so hostile to them in principle, even though they receive them The Obama administration has been roundly criticized for its inability to convey how much it has accomplished for ordinary citizens Mettler argues that this difficulty is not merely a failure of communication; rather it is endemic to the formidable presence of the “submerged state.” In recent decades, federal policymakers have increasingly shunned the outright disbursing of benefits to individuals and families and favored instead less visible and more indirect incentives and subsidies, from tax breaks to payments for services to private companies

These submerged policies, Mettler shows, obscure the role of government and exaggerate that of the market As a result, citizens are unaware not only of the benefits they receive, but of the massive advantages given to powerful interests, such as insurance companies and the financial industry Neither do they realize that the policies of the submerged state shower their largest benefits on the most affluent Americans, exacerbating inequality

Mettler analyzes three Obama reforms—student aid, tax relief, and health care—to reveal the submerged state and its consequences, demonstrating how structurally difficult it is to enact policy reforms and even to obtain public recognition for achieving them She concludes with recommendations for reform to help make hidden policies more visible and governance more comprehensible to all Americans The sad truth is that many American citizens do not know how major social programs work—or even whether they benefit from them Suzanne Mettler’s important new book will bring government policies back to the surface and encourage citizens to reclaim their voice in the political process.

Plato's frontal attack on poetry has always been a problem for sympathetic students, who have often minimized or avoided it Beginning with the premise that the attack must be taken seriously, Eric Havelock shows that Plato's hostility is explained by the continued domination of the poetic tradition in contemporary Greek thought The reason for the dominance of this tradition was technological

In a nonliterate culture, stored experience necessary to cultural stability had to be preserved as poetry in order to be memorized Plato attacks poets, particularly Homer, as the sole source of Greek moral and technical instruction-Mr. Havelock shows how the Iliad acted as an oral encyclopedia Under the label of mimesis, Plato condemns the poetic process of emotional identification and the necessity of presenting content as a series of specific images in a continued narrative

The second part of the book discusses the Platonic Forms as an aspect of an increasingly rational culture Literate Greece demanded, instead of poetic discourse, a vocabulary and a sentence structure both abstract and explicit in which experience could be described normatively and analytically: in short a language of ethics and science.

Named One of the Year's Best Books by VULTURE • THE NEW REPUBLIC • DAZED • WIRED • BLOOMBERG • ESQUIRE • SALON • THE NEXT BIG IDEA CLUB The history of Silicon Valley, from railroads to microchips, is an “extraordinary” story of disruption and destruction, told for the first time in this comprehensive, jaw-dropping narrative (Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The End of the Myth) Palo Alto’s weather is temperate, its people are educated and enterprising, its corporations are spiritually and materially ambitious and demonstrably world-changing

Palo Alto is also a haunted toxic waste dump built on stolen Indian burial grounds, and an integral part of the capitalist world system In PALO ALTO, the first comprehensive, global history of Silicon Valley, Malcolm Harris examines how and why Northern California evolved in the particular, consequential way it did, tracing the ideologies, technologies, and policies that have been engineered there over the course of 150 years of Anglo settler colonialism, from IQ tests to the "tragedy of the commons," racial genetics, and "broken windows" theory

The Internet and computers, too It's a story about how a small American suburb became a powerful engine for economic growth and war, and how it came to lead the world into a surprisingly disastrous 21st century PALO ALTO is an urgent and visionary history of the way we live now, one that ends with a clear-eyed, radical proposition for how we might begin to change course.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • AN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium These fundamental materials have created empires, razed civilizations, and fed our ingenuity and greed for thousands of years Without them, our modern world would not exist, and the battle to control them will determine our future. • Finalist for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award The fiber-optic cables that weave the World Wide Web, the copper veins of our electric grids, the silicon chips and lithium batteries that power our phones and cars: though it can feel like we now live in a weightless world of information—what Ed Conway calls “the ethereal world”—our twenty-first-century lives are still very much rooted in the material

In fact, we dug more stuff out of the earth in 2017 than in all of human history before 1950 For every ton of fossil fuels, we extract six tons of other materials, from sand to stone to wood to metal And in Material World, Conway embarks on an epic journey across continents, cultures, and epochs to reveal the underpinnings of modern life on Earth—traveling from the sweltering depths of the deepest mine in Europe to spotless silicon chip factories in Taiwan to the eerie green pools where lithium originates

Material World is a celebration of the humans and the human networks, the miraculous processes and the little-known companies, that combine to turn raw materials into things of wonder This is the story of human civilization from an entirely new perspective: the ground up.

WINNER OF THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE 2019 SHORLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE 2019 'A landmark work giving a global panorama of Mao's ideology filled with historic events and enlivened by striking characters' Jonathan Fenby, author of The Penguin History of China 'Wonderful' Andrew Marr, New Statesman Since the 1980s, China seems to have abandoned the utopian turmoil of Mao's revolution in favour of authoritarian capitalism But Mao and his ideas remain central to the People's Republic

With disagreements between China and the West on the rise, the need to understand the political legacy of Mao is urgent and growing A crucial motor of the Cold War: Maoism shaped the course of the Vietnam War and brought to power the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia; it aided anti-colonial resistance movements in Africa; it inspired terrorism in Germany and Italy, and wars and insurgencies in Peru, India and Nepal, some of which are still with us today Starting with the birth of Mao's revolution in northwest China in the 1930s and concluding with its violent afterlives in South Asia and resurgence in the People's Republic today, Julia Lovell re-evaluates Maoism as both a Chinese and an international force, linking its evolution in China with its global legacy.

From the early twentieth century, a big part of the world - the arid/semiarid tropics - began extracting, storing, and recycling vast quantities of water to sustain population growth and economic development The idea was not a new one in this geography It was an intrinsic part of ancient culture, statecraft, and technology

Most ancient projects, however, were local and small in scale The capability of water extraction on a scale large enough to transform whole regions and create new cities improved in the early twentieth century, giving rise to a sharp break in the long-term population and economic growth pattern from the mid-twentieth century Ironically, the geography of the arid tropics made transforming landscapes in this way expensive, damaging for the environment, and disputatious The book describes this troubled history of economic emergence, building on a definition of tropicality"-- Provided by publisher.

Philosopher, theologian, critic, sociologist, political activist -- Simone Weil was among the foremost thinkers of our time Best known in this country for her theological writing, Weil wrote on a great variety of subjects ranging from classical philosophy and poetry, to modern labor, to the language of political discourse The present anthology offers a generous collection of her work, including essays never before translated into English and many that have long been out of print It amply confirms Elizabeth Hardwick's words that Simone Weil was "one of the most brilliant and original minds of twentieth-century France" and "a woman of transcendent intellectual gifts and the widest learning." A longtime Weil scholar, Sian Miles has selected essays representative of the wide sweep of Weil's work and provides a superb introduction that places Weil's work in context of her life and times.

Independent Africa explores Africa's political economy in the first two full decades of independence through the joint projects of nation-building, economic development, and international relations Drawing on the political careers of four heads of states: Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Ahmed Sékou Touré of Guinea, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Julius Kambarage Nyerere of Tanzania, Independent Africa engages four major themes: what does it mean to construct an African nation-state and what should an African nation-state look like; how does one grow a tropical economy emerging from European colonialism; how to explore an indigenous model of economic development, a "third way," in the context of a Cold War that had divided the world into two camps; and how to leverage internal resources and external opportunities to diversify agricultural economies and industrialize Combining aspects of history, economics, and political science, Independent Africa examines the important connections between the first generation of African leaders, and the shared ideas that informed their endeavors at nation-building and worldmaking.

Revealing the central yet intentionally obliterated role of Africa in the creation of modernity, Born in Blackness vitally reframes our understanding of world history Traditional accounts of the making of the modern world afford a place of primacy to European history Some credit the fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the maritime connection it established between West and East; others the accidental unearthing of the “New World.” Still others point to the development of the scientific method, or the spread of Judeo-Christian beliefs; and so on, ad infinitum

The history of Africa, by contrast, has long been relegated to the remote outskirts of our global story What if, instead, we put Africa and Africans at the very center of our thinking about the origins of modernity In a sweeping narrative spanning more than six centuries, Howard W French does just that, for Born in Blackness vitally reframes the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe’s dehumanizing engagement with the “dark” continent

In fact, French reveals, the first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not—as we are so often told, even today—Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge a trade in gold with legendarily rich Black societies sequestered away in the heart of West Africa Creating a historical narrative that begins with the commencement of commercial relations between Portugal and Africa in the fifteenth century and ends with the onset of World War II, Born in Blackness interweaves precise historical detail with poignant, personal reportage

In so doing, it dramatically retrieves the lives of major African historical figures, from the unimaginably rich medieval emperors who traded with the Near East and beyond, to the Kongo sovereigns who heroically battled seventeenth-century European powers, to the ex-slaves who liberated Haitians from bondage and profoundly altered the course of American history While French cogently demonstrates the centrality of Africa to the rise of the modern world, Born in Blackness becomes, at the same time, a far more significant narrative, one that reveals a long-concealed history of trivialization and, more often, elision in depictions of African history throughout the last five hundred years

As French shows, the achievements of sovereign African nations and their now-far-flung peoples have time and again been etiolated and deliberately erased from modern history As the West ascended, their stories—siloed and piecemeal—were swept into secluded corners, thus setting the stage for the hagiographic “rise of the West” theories that have endured to this day. “Capacious and compelling” (Laurent Dubois), Born in Blackness is epic history on the grand scale In the lofty tradition of bold, revisionist narratives, it reframes the story of gold and tobacco, sugar and cotton—and of the greatest “commodity” of them all, the twelve million people who were brought in chains from Africa to the “New World,” whose reclaimed lives shed a harsh light on our present world.

A New York Times Notable Book Chinese immigrants of the recent past and unfolding twenty-first century are in search of the African dream So explains indefatigable traveler Howard W French, prize-winning investigative journalist and former New York Times bureau chief in Africa and China, in the definitive account of this seismic geopolitical development

China’s burgeoning presence in Africa is already shaping, and reshaping, the future of millions of people From Liberia to Senegal to Mozambique, in creaky trucks and by back roads, French introduces us to the characters who make up China’s dogged emigrant population: entrepreneurs singlehandedly reshaping African infrastructure, and less-lucky migrants barely scraping by but still convinced of Africa’s opportunities French’s acute observations offer illuminating insight into the most pressing unknowns of modern Sino-African relations: Why China is making these cultural and economic incursions into the continent; what Africa’s role is in this equation; and what the ramifications for both parties and their people—and the watching world—will be in the foreseeable future One of the Best Books of the Year at • The Economist • The Guardian • Foreign Affairs

Thoroughly sharp and honest treatment of a brutal conflict.The Algerian War (1954-1962) was a savage colonial war, killing an estimated one million Muslim Algerians and expelling the same number of European settlers from their homes It was to cause the fall of six French prime minsters and the collapse of the Fourth Repbulic It came close to bringing down de Gaulle and - twice - to plunging France into civil war.The story told here contains heroism and tragedy, and poses issues of enduring relevance beyond the confines of either geography or time Horne writes with the extreme intelligence and perspicacity that are his trademarks.

This book relates the extraordinary adventures of Colonel F.M Bailey, the famous British undercover agent Long accused by Moscow as a master-spy orchestrating the destruction of Bolshevism in Central Asia, Bailey tells a tale that is at once spellbinding, thrilling, and even darkly humorous In Mission to Tashkent Bailey relates in compelling detail the perilous game of cat-and-mouse that he played with Cheka--the dreaded Bolshevik secret police--for sixteen remarkable months

At one point, using a false identity, he actually joined the ranks of the rival intelligence force, which unsuspectingly sent him to Bokhara with orders to arrest himself Told with almost breathtaking understatement, and now reprinted for the first time since the British Foreign Office first cleared it for publication in 1946, Bailey's narrative will excite and intrigue anyone who loves real-life adventure, or simply a good spy story.

The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A spellbinding work of history that reads like a Cold War spy thriller—about the U.S.-sanctioned plot to assassinate the democratically elected leader of the newly independent Congo A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, The Economist, Financial Times “This is one of the best books I have read in years . . . gripping, full of colorful characters, and strange plot twists.” —Fareed Zakaria, CNN host It was supposed to be a moment of great optimism, a cause for jubilation The Congo was at last being set free from Belgium—one of seventeen countries to gain independence in 1960 from ruling European powers

At the helm as prime minister was charismatic nationalist Patrice Lumumba Just days after the handover, however, the Congo’s new army mutinied, Belgian forces intervened, and Lumumba turned to the United Nations for help in saving his newborn nation from what the press was already calling “the Congo crisis.” Dag Hammarskjöld, the tidy Swede serving as UN secretary-general, quickly arranged the organization’s biggest peacekeeping mission in history

But chaos was still spreading Frustrated with the fecklessness of the UN and spurned by the United States, Lumumba then approached the Soviets for help—an appeal that set off alarm bells at the CIA To forestall the spread of Communism in Africa, the CIA sent word to its station chief in the Congo, Larry Devlin: Lumumba had to go

Within a year, everything would unravel The CIA plot to murder Lumumba would fizzle out, but he would be deposed in a CIA-backed coup, transferred to enemy territory in a CIA-approved operation, and shot dead by Congolese assassins Hammarskjöld, too, would die, in a mysterious plane crash en route to negotiate a cease-fire with the Congo’s rebellious southeast

And a young, ambitious military officer named Joseph Mobutu, who had once sworn fealty to Lumumba, would seize power with U.S. help and misrule the country for more than three decades For the Congolese people, the events of 1960–61 represented the opening chapter of a long horror story For the U.S. government, however, they provided a playbook for future interventions.

Larry Devlin arrived as the new chief of station for the CIA in the Congo five days after the country had declared its independence, the army had mutinied, and governmental authority had collapsed As he crossed the Congo River in an almost empty ferry boat, all he could see were lines of people trying to travel the other way -- out of the Congo Within his first two weeks he found himself on the wrong end of a revolver as militiamen played Russian-roulette, Congo style, with him

During his first year, the charismatic and reckless political leader, Patrice Lumumba, was murdered and Devlin was widely thought to have been entrusted with (he was) and to have carried out (he didn't) the assassination Then he saved the life of Joseph Desire Mobutu, who carried out the military coup that presaged his own rise to political power Devlin found himself at the heart of Africa, fighting for the future of perhaps the most strategically influential country on the continent, its borders shared with eight other nations

He met every significant political figure, from presidents to mercenaries, as he took the Cold War to one of the world's hottest zones This is a classic political memoir from a master spy who lived in wildly dramatic times.

Why violence in the Congo has continued despite decades of international intervention Well into its third decade, the military conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been dubbed a “forever war”—a perpetual cycle of war, civil unrest, and local feuds over power and identity Millions have died in one of the worst humanitarian calamities of our time The War That Doesn’t Say Its Name investigates the most recent phase of this conflict, asking why the peace deal of 2003—accompanied by the largest United Nations peacekeeping mission in the world and tens of billions in international aid—has failed to stop the violence

Jason Stearns argues that the fighting has become an end in itself, carried forward in substantial part through the apathy and complicity of local and international actors Stearns shows that regardless of the suffering, there has emerged a narrow military bourgeoisie of commanders and politicians for whom the conflict is a source of survival, dignity, and profit Foreign donors provide food and urgent health care for millions, preventing the Congolese state from collapsing, but this involvement has not yielded transformational change

Stearns gives a detailed historical account of this period, focusing on the main players—Congolese and Rwandan states and the main armed groups He extrapolates from these dynamics to other conflicts across Africa and presents a theory of conflict that highlights the interests of the belligerents and the social structures from which they arise Exploring how violence in the Congo has become preoccupied with its own reproduction, The War That Doesn't Say Its Name sheds light on why certain military feuds persist without resolution.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492—from “a remarkably engaging writer” (The New York Times Book Review) Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them

The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city Mexican cultures created corn in a specialized breeding process that it has been called man’s first feat of genetic engineering Indeed, Indians were not living lightly on the land but were landscaping and manipulating their world in ways that we are only now beginning to understand Challenging and surprising, this a transformative new look at a rich and fascinating world we only thought we knew.

A provocative exploration about the architecture of power, the forces that stifle us from getting things done, and how we can restore confidence in democratically elected government America was once a country that did big things—we built the world’s greatest rail network, a vast electrical grid, interstate highways, abundant housing, the Social Security system, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and more But today, even while facing a host of pressing challenges—a housing shortage, a climate crisis, a dilapidated infrastructure—we feel stuck, unable to move the needle

Why America is today the victim of a vetocracy that allows nearly anyone to stifle progress While conservatives deserve some blame, progressives have overlooked an unlikely culprit: their own fears of “The Establishment.” A half-century ago, progressivism’s designs on getting stuff done were eclipsed by a desire to box in government

Reformers put speaking truth to power ahead of exercising that power for good The ensuing gridlock has pummeled faith in public institutions of all sorts, stifled the movement’s ability to deliver on its promises, and, most perversely, opened the door for MAGA-style populism A century ago, Americans were similarly frustrated—and progressivism pointed the way out

The same can happen again Marc J Dunkelman vividly illustrates what progressives must do if they are going to break through today’s paralysis and restore, once again, confidence in democratically elected government To get there, reformers will need to acknowledge where they’ve gone wrong Progressivism’s success moving forward hinges on the movement’s willingness to rediscover its roots.

Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy remains one of the greatest works of social theory written this century When it first appeared the New English Weekly predicted that for the next five to ten years it will cetainly remain a work with which no one who professes any degree of information on sociology or economics can afford to be unacquainted.' Fifty years on, this prediction seems a little understated Why has the work endured so well

Schumpeter's contention that the seeds of capitalism's decline were internal, and his equal and opposite hostility to centralist socialism have perplexed, engaged and infuriated readers since the book's publication By refusing to become an advocate for either position Schumpeter was able both to make his own great and original contribution and to clear the way for a more balanced consideration of the most important social movements of his and our time.

An original and empirically grounded analysis of the Gulf monarchies and their role in shaping the political economy of the Middle East.

Until recently, Germany appeared to be a paragon of economic and political success Angela Merkel was widely seen as the true 'leader of the free world', and Germany's export-driven economic model seemed to deliver prosperity But recent events – from Germany's dependence on Russian gas to its car industry's delays in the race to electric – have undermined this view

In Kaput, Wolfgang Münchau argues that the weaknesses of Germany's economy have, in fact, been brewing for decades The neo-mercantilist policies of the German state, driven by close connections between the country's industrial and political elite, have left Germany technologically behind over-reliant on authoritarian Russia and China – and with little sign of being able to adapt to the digital realities of the 21st century It is an essential read for anyone interested in the future of Europe's biggest economy.

Until recently, Germany appeared to be a paragon of economic and political success Angela Merkel was widely seen as the true 'leader of the free world', and Germany's export-driven economic model seemed to deliver prosperity But recent events – from Germany's dependence on Russian gas to its car industry's delays in the race to electric – have undermined this view

In Kaput, Wolfgang Münchau argues that the weaknesses of Germany's economy have, in fact, been brewing for decades The neo-mercantilist policies of the German state, driven by close connections between the country's industrial and political elite, have left Germany technologically behind over-reliant on authoritarian Russia and China – and with little sign of being able to adapt to the digital realities of the 21st century It is an essential read for anyone interested in the future of Europe's biggest economy.

How did we get to where we are John Cassidy shows that the roots of our most recent financial failure lie not with individuals, but with an idea - the idea that markets are inherently rational He gives us the big picture behind the financial headlines, tracing the rise and fall of free market ideology from Adam Smith to Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan

Full of wit, sense and, above all, a deeper understanding, How Markets Fail argues for the end of 'utopian' economics, and the beginning of a pragmatic, reality-based way of thinking A very good history of economic thought Economist How Markets Fail offers a brilliant intellectual framework . . . fine work New York Times An essential, grittily intellectual, yet compelling guide to the financial debacle of 2009 Geordie Greig, Evening Standard A powerful argument . .

Cassidy makes a compelling case that a return to hands-off economics would be a disaster BusinessWeek This book is a well constructed, thoughtful and cogent account of how capitalism evolved to its current form Telegraph Books of the Year recommendation John Cassidy ... describe[s] that mix of insight and madness that brought the world's system to its knees FT, Book of the Year recommendation Anyone who enjoys a good read can safely embark on this tour with Cassidy as their guide . . Like his colleague Malcolm Gladwell [at the New Yorker], Cassidy is able to lead us with beguiling lucidity through unfamiliar territory New Statesman John Cassidy has covered economics and finance at The New Yorker magazine since 1995, writing on topics ranging from Alan Greenspan to the Iraqi oil industry and English journalism

He is also now a Contributing Editor at Portfolio where he writes the monthly Economics column Two of his articles have been nominated for National Magazine Awards: an essay on Karl Marx, which appeared in October, 1997, and an account of the death of the British weapons scientist David Kelly, which was published in December, 2003 He has previously written for Sunday Times in as well as the New York Post, where he edited the Business section and then served as the deputy editor

In 2002, Cassidy published his first book, Dot.Con He lives in New York.

On his way into Parliament on 2 February 1990 FW de Klerk turned to his wife Marike and said, referring to his forthcoming speech: 'South Africa will never be the same again after this.' Did white South Africa crack, or did its leadership yield sufficiently and just in time to avert a revolution The transformation has been called a miracle, belying gloomy predictions of race war in which the white minority went into a laager and fought to the last drop of blood

Why did it happen Professor Welsh views the topic against the backdrop of a long history of conflict spanning apartheid's rise and demise, and the liberation movement's suppression and subsequent resurrection His view is that the movement away from apartheid to majority rule would have taken far longer and been much bloodier were it not for the changes undergone by Afrikaner nationalism itself

There were turning points, such as the Soweto uprising of 1976, but few believed that the transition from white domination to inclusive democracy would occur as soon - and as relatively peacefully - as it did In effect, however, a multitude of different factors led the ANC and the National Party to see that neither side could win the conflict on its own terms Utterly dissimilar in background, culture, beliefs and political style, Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk were an unlikely pair of liberators But both soon recognised that they were dependent on each other to steer the transformation process through to its conclusion.

The legendary space opera that kicked off the ground-breaking, universe-spanning series Nine hundred thousand years ago, something wiped out the Amarantin For the human colonists now settling their homeworld, their predecessors are of little interest, even after the discovery of a long-hidden, almost perfect Amarantin city

For brilliant and ruthless scientist Dan Sylveste, the long-dead race are more than a merely intellectual curiosity - and he will stop at nothing to get at the truth of their demise But the Amarantin were wiped out for a reason, and the danger is closer and greater than even Sylveste can imagine.. REVELATION SPACE: a huge, magnificent space opera that ranges across the known and unknown universe ... towards the most terrifying of destinations

Readers are hooked on Revelation Space: 'An amazing blend of space opera, hard SF, and gothic horror that reads like a cross between Frank Herbert's "Dune" and Ridley Scott's film "Alien"' Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 'Marvellous hard space opera.' Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 'Revelation Space series is one of my favouritest favourites . . Reynolds held me in thrall with his vision' Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 'a gritty, desolate, and unforgiving universe in which humanity finds itself in imminent danger of extinction . .

I highly recommend it to all adult fans of space opera, cyberpunk, and horror genres' Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 'A darn good, solid, well executed work of hard sci-fi . . I really appreciate that Revelation Space ends in a satisfying and self-contained way' Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 'Awesome characters, awesome setting, awesome ideas, awesome awesome awesome . . .' Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell.. Two months of silence, while a world held its breath Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam

Whatever's out there isn't talking to us It's talking to some distant star, perhaps Or perhaps to something closer, something en route So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met

You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths

And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Protected by vast mountains and seas, the Indian subcontinent might seem a nearly complete and self-contained world with its own religions, philosophies, and social systems And yet this ancient land and its varied societies experienced prolonged and intense interaction with the peoples and cultures of East and Southeast Asia, Europe, Africa, and especially Central Asia and the Iranian plateau Richard M

Eaton tells this extraordinary story with relish and originality, as he traces the rise of Persianate culture, a many-faceted transregional world connected by ever-widening networks across much of Asia Introduced to India in the eleventh century by dynasties based in eastern Afghanistan, this culture would become progressively indigenized in the time of the great Mughals (sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries) Eaton brilliantly elaborates the complex encounter between India's Sanskrit culture—an equally rich and transregional complex that continued to flourish and grow throughout this period—and Persian culture, which helped shape the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughal Empire, and a host of regional states This long-term process of cultural interaction is profoundly reflected in the languages, literatures, cuisines, attires, religions, styles of rulership and warfare, science, art, music, and architecture—and more—of South Asia.