Every book recommended on the Odd Lots Discord

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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

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

"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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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

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

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

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“[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

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

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

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

'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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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

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

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

‘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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 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

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

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

"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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published in 1975, The Machiavellian Moment remains a landmark of historical and political thought Celebrated historian J.G.A Pocock looks at the consequences for modern historical and social consciousness arising from the ideal of the classical republic revived by Machiavelli and other thinkers of Renaissance Italy

This “elegant and engaging” biography dramatically reinterprets the life and reign of the sixteenth-century Holy Roman Emperor: “a masterpiece” (Susannah Lipscomb, Financial Times) The life of Emperor Charles V (1500–1558), ruler of Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, and much of Italy and Central and South America, has long intrigued biographers But capturing the nature of this elusive man has proven notoriously difficult—especially given his relentless travel, tight control of his own image, and the complexity of governing the world’s first transatlantic empire

The acclaimed historian demonstrates a link between climate change and social unrest across the globe during the mid-17th century Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides, government collapses—the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were unprecedented in both frequency and severity The effects of what historians call the "General Crisis" extended from England to Japan and from the Russian Empire to sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas

Alexis Madrigal reveals how understanding Oakland explains the modern world In The Pacific Circuit, the award-winning journalist Alexis Madrigal sculpts an intricate tableau of the city of Oakland that is at once a groundbreaking big-idea book, a deeply researched work of social and political history, and an intimate portrait of an essential American city that has been at the crossroads of the defining themes of the twenty-first century Oakland’s stories encompass everything from Silicon Valley’s prominence and the ramifications of a compulsively digital future to the underestimated costs of technological innovation on local communities—all personified in this changing landscape for the city’s lifelong inhabitants

Consider Phlebas is a space opera of stunning power and awesome imagination, from a modern master of science fiction The war raged across the galaxy Billions had died, billions more were doomed Moons, planets, the very stars themselves, faced destruction, cold-blooded, brutal, and worse, random

A thrilling, inventive, playful, and unorthodox detective and caper novel, the latest work by a French master. “Fans of Jean-Patrick Manchette's deadpan irony will appreciate Command Performance, Echenoz's vibrant, playful homage to the hard-boiled genre, which plays like The Big Lebowski on the Seine.” —Publishers Weekly Gerard Fulmard is a loser A disgraced former flight attendant, he attempts the métier of private detective, with spectacularly disastrous results, then begins working for an obscure political groupuscule beset by an outsized share of infighting and backroom maneuvering

The winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics upend the most common assumptions about how economics works in this gripping and disruptive portrait of how poor people actually live Why do the poor borrow to save Why do they miss out on free life-saving immunizations, but pay for unnecessary drugs In Poor Economics, Abhijit V

A virtuosic mashup of Philip K Dick and Raymond Chandler by way of Marvel—the story of a detective investigating the murder of a Titan, one of society’s most powerful, medically-enhanced elites. • “Cross-genre brilliance from the superbly talented Nick Harkaway.” —William Gibson, New York Times best-selling author of Agency "An exemplar of its genre, Titanium Noir twists and turns between excellent fun and deep melancholy." —The New York Times Book Review Cal Sounder is a detective working for the police on certain very sensitive cases

FINALIST FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD Named a notable book of 2019 by the New York Times Book Review, Chicago Tribune, Time, and The Guardian As featured by The Daily Show, NPR, PBS, CBC, Time, VIBE, Entertainment Weekly, Well-Read Black Girl, and Chris Hayes, "incisive, witty, and provocative essays" (Publishers Weekly) by one of the "most bracing thinkers on race, gender, and capitalism of our time" (Rebecca Traister) “Thick is sure to become a classic.” —The New York Times Book Review In eight highly praised treatises on beauty, media, money, and more, Tressie McMillan Cottom—award-winning professor and acclaimed author of Lower Ed—is unapologetically "thick": deemed "thick where I should have been thin, more where I should have been less," McMillan Cottom refuses to shy away from blending the personal with the political, from bringing her full self and voice to the fore of her analytical work Thick "transforms narrative moments into analyses of whiteness, black misogyny, and status-signaling as means of survival for black women" (Los Angeles Review of Books) with "writing that is as deft as it is amusing" (Darnell L

Extraordinary."-CHRIS MILLER, author of Chip War "Incredible."-ANNIE JACOBSEN, author of Nuclear War, via X From John Lechner, "an amazingly bold reporter" (Adam Hochschild), the shocking inside story of how the Wagner Group made private military companies inextricable from Russia's anti-Western foreign strategy In 2014, a well-trained, mysterious band of mercenaries arrived in Ukraine, part of Russia's first attempt to claim the country as its own

We are well aware of the rise of the 1% as the rapid growth of economic inequality has put the majority of the world’s wealth in the pockets of fewer and fewer One much-discussed solution to this imbalance is to significantly increase the rate at which we tax the wealthy But with an enormous amount of the world’s wealth hidden in tax havens—in countries like Switzerland, Luxembourg, and the Cayman Islands—this wealth cannot be fully accounted for and taxed fairly

How America's high standard of living came to be and why future growth is under threat In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, motor vehicles, air travel, and television transformed households and workplaces But has that era of unprecedented growth come to an end

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A suspenseful behind-the-scenes look at the dysfunction that contributed to one of the worst tragedies in modern aviation: the 2018 and 2019 crashes of the Boeing 737 MAX An "authoritative, gripping and finely detailed narrative that charts the decline of one of the great American companies" (New York Times Book Review), from the award-winning reporter for Bloomberg Boeing is a century-old titan of industry

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A brilliant evocation of one of the greatest presidents in American history by the two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, bestselling historian, and author of Our First Civil War "It may well be the best general biography of Franklin Roosevelt we will see for many years to come.” —The Christian Science Monitor Drawing on archival material, public speeches, correspondence and accounts by those closest to Roosevelt early in his career and during his presidency, H W

Since the Cold War, outer space has become of strategic importance for nations looking to seize the ultimate high ground World powers establishing a presence there must consider, among other things, how they will conduct warfare in orbit Leaders must dispense with "Buck Rogers" notions about operations in space and realize that policies there will have serious ramifications for geopolitics

***A NEXT BIG IDEA CLUB MUST-READ BOOK OF NOVEMBER 2024*** "A wild success." — Publishers Weekly "A surefire hit." —Library Journal STARRED review "A brilliant star turn." —Andrew O’Hagan A riotous and revealing story of Hollywood’s most spectacular flops and how they ended careers, bankrupted studios and changed film history. "Failure fascinates, for all the reasons that success is a drag…” From grand follies to misunderstood masterpieces, disastrous sequels to catastrophic literary adaptations, Box Office Poison tells a hugely entertaining alternative history of Hollywood, through a century of its most notable flops What can these films tell us about the Hollywood system, the public’s appetite–or lack of it–and the circumstances that saw such flops actually made

*WINNER OF THE 2021 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE* *ONE OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2021* Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction Shortlisted for the 2022 DUBLIN Literary Award "Astonishingly good." —Lily Meyer, NPR "So incantatory and visceral I don’t think I’ll ever forget it." —Ali Smith, The Guardian | Best Books of 2020 One of The Wall Street Journal's 11 best books of the fall | One of The A.V Club's fifteen best books of 2020 |A Sunday Times best book of the year Selected by students across France to win the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, David Diop’s English-language, historical fiction debut At Night All Blood is Black is a “powerful, hypnotic, and dark novel” (Livres Hebdo) of terror and transformation in the trenches of the First World War

The internationally bestselling author of The Anarchy returns with a sparkling, soaring history of ideas, tracing South Asia's under-recognized role in producing the world as we know it For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilization, creating around it a vast empire of ideas Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and mythology blazed a trail across the world, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific

Contemporary China is seen as a place of widespread commodification and consumerism, while the preceeding Maoist Cultural Revolution is typically understood as a time when goods were scarce and the state criticized what little consumption was possible Indeed, with the exception of the likeness and words of Mao Zedong, both the media and material culture of the Cultural Revolution are often characterized as a void out of which the postsocialist world of commodity consumption miraculously sprang fully formed

From Laila Lalami-the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist and a maestra of literary fiction; (NPR)-comes a riveting and utterly original novel about one woman's fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime

A 2024 US AIR FORCE LEADERSHIP LIBRARY BOOK NATIONAL INDIE EXCELLENCE AWARDS WINNER — TECHNOLOGY As the world rolls out transformational 5G services, it has become increasingly clear that China may be able to disrupt—or even access—the wireless networks that carry our medical, financial, and even military communications This insider story from a telecommunications veteran uncovers how we got into this mess—and how to change the outcome In Wireless Wars: China's Dangerous Domination of 5G and How We're Fighting Back, author Jon Pelson explains how America invented cellular technology, taught China how to make the gear, and then handed them the market

“ExxonMobil has met its match in Coll, an elegant writer and dogged reporter . . . extraordinary . . . monumental.” —The Washington Post “Fascinating . . Private Empire is a book meticulously prepared as if for trial . . . a compelling and elucidatory work.” —Bloomberg From the Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author of Ghost Wars and The Achilles Trap, an extraordinary exposé of Big Oil Includes a profile of current Secretary of State and former chairman and chief executive of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson In this, the first hard-hitting examination of ExxonMobil—the largest and most powerful private corporation in the United States—Steve Coll reveals the true extent of its power

A panoramic history of the Muslim world from the age of the Prophet Muḥammad to the birth of the modern era This book describes and explains the major events, personalities, conflicts, and convergences that have shaped the history of the Muslim world The body of the book takes readers from the origins of Islam to the eve of the nineteenth century, and an epilogue continues the story to the present day Michael Cook thus provides a broad history of a civilization remarkable for both its unity and diversity

The untold story of the mysterious company that shook the world 'Groundbreaking' Dan Wang 'Essential reading' Chris Miller, author of Chip War On the coast of southern China, an eccentric entrepreneur spent three decades steadily building an obscure telecom company into one of the world's most powerful technological empires with hardly anyone noticing This all changed in December 2018, when the detention of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei Technologies' female scion, sparked an international hostage standoff, poured fuel on the U.S.-China trade war, and suddenly thrust the mysterious company into the international spotlight

It's easier than ever to share ideas, yet some of the most interesting ideas are burrowing deeper underground, circulating quietly among group chats, texts, and whisper networks While memes - self-replicating bits of culture - thrive in an attention-driven economy, other ideas are becoming strangely harder to find Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading explores this paradox, uncovering the hidden forces that determine what we remember, what we forget, and why some ideas - no matter how compelling - resist going viral

A groundbreaking history of fengshui's roles in public life and law during China's last imperial dynasty Today the term fengshui, which literally means "wind and water," is recognized around the world Yet few know exactly what it means, let alone its fascinating history In Laws of the Land, Tristan Brown tells the story of the important roles--especially legal ones--played by fengshui in Chinese society during China's last imperial dynasty, the Manchu Qing (1644-1912)

A groundbreaking book by one of the most important thinkers of our time shows how technology is warping our social lives and our inner ones Technology has become the architect of our intimacies Online, we fall prey to the illusion of companionship, gathering thousands of Twitter and Facebook friends, and confusing tweets and wall posts with authentic communication But this relentless connection leads to a deep solitude

Out of a liberal, capitalist, genuinely global power of a unique kind, there arose from the 1940s a distinct British nation This nation was committed to internal change, making it much more like the great continental powers From the 1970s it became bound up both with the European Union and with foreign capital in new ways

It is a curious and relatively little-known fact that for two decades—from the end of World War II until the late 1960s—existentialism’s most fertile ground outside of Europe was in the Middle East, and Jean-Paul Sartre was the Arab intelligentsia’s uncontested champion In the Arab world, neither before nor since has another Western intellectual been so widely translated, debated, and celebrated By closely following the remarkable career of Arab existentialism, Yoav Di-Capua reconstructs the cosmopolitan milieu of the generation that tried to articulate a political and philosophical vision for an egalitarian postcolonial world

Gambling Man is the biography of one of the world’s least known but most consequential investors Japan’s Masayoshi Son has made and lost several fortunes, investing or controlling assets worth $1 trillion in the past two decades through his media-tech giant, SoftBank He bankrolled Alibaba, China’s internet colossus, before the world had heard about it; plotted with Steve Jobs to turn the iPhone into a wonder product; and financed hundreds of tech start-ups, fuelling the biggest boom Silicon Valley has ever seen

#1 New York Times Bestseller “Careless People is darkly funny and genuinely shocking...Not only does [Sarah Wynn-Williams] have the storytelling chops to unspool a gripping narrative; she also delivers the goods." -Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times “When one of the world’s most powerful media companies tries to snuff out a book — amid other alarming attacks on free speech in America like this — it’s time to pull out all the stops.” –Ron Charles, The Washington Post An explosive memoir charting one woman’s career at the heart of one of the most influential companies on the planet, Careless People gives you a front-row seat to Facebook, the decisions that have shaped world events in recent decades, and the people who made them From trips on private jets and encounters with world leaders to shocking accounts of misogyny and double standards behind the scenes, this searing memoir exposes both the personal and the political fallout when unfettered power and a rotten company culture take hold

From the author of the award-winning The Master Switch, who coined the term "net neutrality”—a revelatory, ambitious and urgent account of how the capture and re-sale of human attention became the defining industry of our time. "Dazzling." —Financial Times Ours is often called an information economy, but at a moment when access to information is virtually unlimited, our attention has become the ultimate commodity In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of efforts to harvest our attention

‘Fiercely intelligent, very funny and unlike anything else I’ve ever read’ MARK HADDON 'Original...witty...playful...a wonderfully funny book' JAMES WOOD 'A triumph – a genuinely new story, a genuinely new form' A S BYATT Eleven-year-old Ludo is in search of a father Raised singlehandedly by his mother Sibylla, Ludo’s been reading Greek, Arabic, Japanese and a little Hebrew since the age of four; but reading Homer in the original whilst riding the Circle Line on the London Underground isn’t enough to satisfy the boy’s boundless curiosity

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR A WASHINGTON POST TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD AND THE MARK TWAIN AMERICAN VOICE IN LITERATURE AWARD A sweeping novel about a single house in the woods of New England, told through the lives of those who inhabit it across the centuries—“a time-spanning, genre-blurring work of storytelling magic” (The Washington Post) from the Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Piano Tuner and The Winter Soldier. “With the expansiveness and immersive feeling of two-time Booker Prize nominee David Mitchell’s fiction (Cloud Atlas), the wicked creepiness of Edgar Allan Poe, and Mason’s bone-deep knowledge of and appreciation for the natural world that’s on par with that of Thoreau, North Woods fires on all cylinders.”—San Francisco Chronicle New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time, The Boston Globe, NPR, Chicago Public Library, The Star Tribune, The Economist, The Christian Science Monitor, Real Simple, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Bookreporter When two young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to growing apples

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR A WASHINGTON POST TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD AND THE MARK TWAIN AMERICAN VOICE IN LITERATURE AWARD A sweeping novel about a single house in the woods of New England, told through the lives of those who inhabit it across the centuries—“a time-spanning, genre-blurring work of storytelling magic” (The Washington Post) from the Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Piano Tuner and The Winter Soldier. “With the expansiveness and immersive feeling of two-time Booker Prize nominee David Mitchell’s fiction (Cloud Atlas), the wicked creepiness of Edgar Allan Poe, and Mason’s bone-deep knowledge of and appreciation for the natural world that’s on par with that of Thoreau, North Woods fires on all cylinders.”—San Francisco Chronicle New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time, The Boston Globe, NPR, Chicago Public Library, The Star Tribune, The Economist, The Christian Science Monitor, Real Simple, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Bookreporter When two young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to growing apples

Ever since the French Revolution, Madame de Pompadour's comment, "Après moi, le déluge" (after me, the deluge), has looked like a callous if accurate prophecy of the political cataclysms that began in 1789 But decades before the Bastille fell, French writers had used the phrase to describe a different kind of selfish recklessness--not toward the flood of revolution but, rather, toward the flood of public debt In Before the Deluge, Michael Sonenscher examines these fears and the responses to them, and the result is nothing less than a new way of thinking about the intellectual origins of the French Revolution

A Financial Times Best Science Book of 2023 “[A] profound, sparkling global ocean voyage.” —Andrew Robinson, Nature A scientist’s exploration of the "ocean engine"—the physics behind the ocean’s systems—and why it matters All of Earth’s oceans, from the equator to the poles, are a single engine powered by sunlight, driving huge flows of energy, water, life, and raw materials In The Blue Machine, physicist and oceanographer Helen Czerski illustrates the mechanisms behind this defining feature of our planet, voyaging from the depths of the ocean floor to tropical coral reefs, estuaries that feed into shallow coastal seas, and Arctic ice floes

Threat Multiplier takes us onto the battlefield and inside the Pentagon to show how the US military is confronting the biggest security risk in global history: climate change More than thirty years ago, when Sherri Goodman became the Pentagon’s first Chief Environmental Officer, no one would have imagined this role for our armed forces Indeed, for much of the twentieth century, the Department of Defense (DOD) was better known for containing the Soviet nuclear threat than protecting the environment

A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year: “Tells the history of American trade policy . . . [A] grand narrative [that] also debunks trade-policy myths.” —Economist Should the United States be open to commerce with other countries, or should it protect domestic industries from foreign competition This question has been the source of bitter political conflict throughout American history Such conflict was inevitable, James Madison argued in the Federalist Papers, because trade policy involves clashing economic interests

An unsparing investigation into Spotify’s origins and influence on music, weaving unprecedented reporting with incisive cultural criticism, illuminating how streaming is reshaping music for listeners and artists alike Drawing on over one hundred interviews with industry insiders, former Spotify employees, and musicians, Mood Machine takes us to the inner workings of today’s highly consolidated record business, showing what has changed as music has become increasingly playlisted, personalized, and autoplayed

The cassette tape was revolutionary Cheap, portable, and reusable, this small plastic rectangle changed music history Make your own tapes Trade them with friends Tape over the ones you don’t like The cassette tape upended pop culture, creating movements and uniting communities

Wind energy is often portrayed as a panacea for the environmental and political ills brought on by an overreliance on fossil fuels, but this characterization may ignore the impact wind farms have on the regions that host them Power Struggles investigates the uneven allocation of risks and benefits in the relationship between the regions that produce this energy and those that consume it Jaume Franquesa considers Spain, a country where wind now constitutes the main source of energy production

Walter J Ong’s classic work provides a fascinating insight into the social effects of oral, written, printed and electronic technologies, and their impact on philosophical, theological, scientific and literary thought This thirtieth anniversary edition – coinciding with Ong’s centenary year – reproduces his best-known and most influential book in full and brings it up to date with two new exploratory essays by cultural writer and critic John Hartley

A cabal of tech-billionaires is colluding with once-idealistic journalists to create an entirely new media landscape Owned is the story of the underreported and growing collusion between new wealth and new journalism In recent years, right-wing billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and David Sacks have turned to media as their next investment and source of influence

A detailed, one-stop guide for experienced options traders Positional Option Trading: An Advanced Guide is a rigorous, professional-level guide on sophisticated techniques from professional trader and quantitative analyst Euan Sinclair The author has over two decades of high-level option trading experience He has written this book specifically for professional options traders who have outgrown more basic trading techniques and are searching for in-depth information suitable for advanced trading

An instant Sunday Times bestseller and soon to be a major motion picture! 'Astonishing Compelling Powerful' - Delia Owens, bestselling author of Where the Crawdads Sing 'Stuns with sacrifice Uplifts with heroism' - Bonnie Garmus, bestselling author of Lessons in Chemistry 'Powerful' - Matt Haig, bestselling author of The Midnight Library From the worldwide bestselling author of The Four Winds, The Nightingale and Firefly Lane (a Number One series on Netflix), The Women is a story of devastating loss and epic love

Winner of the SHEAR Book Prize Honorable Mention, Avery O Craven Award “Few books have captured the lived experience of slavery as powerfully.” —Ari Kelman, Times Literary Supplement “[One] of the most impressive works of American history in many years.” —The Nation “An important, arguably seminal, book...Always trenchant and learned.” —Wall Street Journal A landmark history, by the author of National Book Critics Circle Award finalist The Broken Heart of America, that shows how slavery fueled Southern capitalism

Winner of the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, China Miéville's astonishing Embassytown is an intelligent and immersive exploration of language in an alien world Embassytown: a city of contradictions on the outskirts of the universe Avice is an immerser, a traveller on the immer, the sea of space and time below the everyday, now returned to her birth planet

The groundbreaking novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral that originally propelled its author to literary stardom: told in a continuous monologue from patient to psychoanalyst, this masterpiece draws us into the turbulent mind of one lust-ridden young Jewish bachelor named Alexander Portnoy One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years “Deliciously funny . . . absurd and exuberant, wild and uproarious . . . a brilliantly vivid reading experience”—The New York Times Book Review “Touching as well as hilariously lewd . .

Why did Thomas Jefferson write that he would be happy if all dogs went extinct What economic opportunity did attorney John Lord Hayes envision for the newly emancipated during Reconstruction What American workers were mocked by Theodore Roosevelt as “morose, melancholy men” What problems with revenue collection did Congressman James Beauchamp Clark mention when proposing an income tax

The first thorough account of a formative and little understood chapter in Chinese history Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian chronicle how an impoverished and terrorized China experienced radical political changes in the long 1970s and how ordinary people broke free from the beliefs that had shaped their lives during Mao’s Cultural Revolution These changes, and the unprecedented and sustained economic growth that followed, transformed China and the world

While John McPhee was working on his previous book, Rising from the Plains, he happened to walk by the engineering building at the University of Wyoming, where words etched in limestone said: "Strive on--the control of Nature is won, not given." In the morning sunlight, that central phrase--"the control of nature"--seemed to sparkle with unintended ambiguity Bilateral, symmetrical, it could with equal speed travel in opposite directions

An intimate and revelatory account of two generations of students in China’s heartland, by an author who has observed the country’s tumultuous changes over the past quarter century More than two decades after teaching English during the early part of China’s economic boom, an experience chronicled in his book River Town, Peter Hessler returned to Sichuan Province to instruct students from the next generation At the same time, Hessler and his wife enrolled their twin daughters in a local state-run elementary school, where they were the only Westerners

Named one of NPR's Best Books of 2021 From the author of Annihilation, a brilliant speculative thriller of dark conspiracy, endangered species, and the possible end of all things Security consultant “Jane Smith” receives an envelope with a key to a storage unit that holds a taxidermied hummingbird and clues leading her to a taxidermied salamander Silvina, the dead woman who left the note, is a reputed ecoterrorist and the daughter of an Argentine industrialist

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • A NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION • A stunning account of a colossal wildfire and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind from the award-winning, best-selling author of The Tiger and The Golden Spruce • Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, TIME, NPR, Slate, and Smithsonian “Grips like a philosophical thriller, warns like a beacon, and shocks to the core." —Robert Macfarlane, bestselling author of Underland “Riveting, spellbinding, astounding on every page.” —David Wallace-Wells, #1 bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon

The Strugatsky brothers' poignant and introspective novel of first contact that inspired the classic film Stalker Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those strange misfits who are compelled by some unknown force to venture illegally into the Zone and, in spite of the extreme danger, collect the mysterious artefacts that the alien visitors left scattered around His life is dominated by the Zone and the thriving black market in the alien products Even the nature of his daughter has been determined by the Zone

This book examines the urban fabric of contemporary Tokyo as a valuable demonstration of permeable, inclusive, and adaptive urban patterns that required neither extensive master planning nor corporate urbanism to develop These urban patterns are emergent: that is, they are the combined result of numerous modifications and appropriations of space by small agents interacting within a broader socio-economic ecosystem Together, they create a degree of urban intensity and liveliness that is the envy of the world's cities

A detailed account of British intelligence operations in Cold War East Germany, revealing Soviet and East German military secrets from 1946 to 1990 The German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, was the frontline in the Cold War, packed with hundreds of thousands of Soviet and East German troops armed with the latest Warsaw Pact equipment, lined up along the 1,400 km Inner German Border

The inside story, told with “insight, perspective, and stellar reporting,” of how an unassuming civil servant created trillions of dollars from thin air, combatted a public health crisis, and saved the American economy from a second Great Depression (Alan S Blinder, former Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve) By February 2020, the U.S. economic expansion had become the longest on record

A NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOK OF 2024 A NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY TOP TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR "Enrigue’s genius lies in his ability to bring readers close to its tangled knot of priests, mercenaries, warriors and princesses while adding a pinch of biting humor." --Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Los Angeles Times “Riotously entertaining.. A triumph of solemnity-busting erudition and mischievous invention that will delight and titillate.” --Financial Times From the visionary author of Sudden Death, a hallucinatory, revelatory colonial revenge story

An incisive account of Erdoğan’s Turkey – showing how its troubling transformation may be short-lived Since coming to power in 2002 Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has overseen a radical transformation of Turkey Once a pillar of the Western alliance, the country has embarked on a militaristic foreign policy, intervening in regional flashpoints from Nagorno-Karabakh to Libya And its democracy, sustained by the aspiration to join the European Union, has given way to one-man rule

A new and original history of the forces that shaped the twentieth and twenty-first centuries We thought we knew the story of the twentieth century For many in the West, after the two world conflicts and the long cold war, the verdict was clear: democratic values had prevailed over dictatorship But if the twentieth century meant the triumph of liberalism, as many intellectuals proclaimed, why have the era’s darker impulses—ethnic nationalism, racist violence, and populist authoritarianism—revived

On a freezing January afternoon in 1992, Deng Xiaoping, China's former paramount leader and now a revered elder statesman, set off on a month long trip around China's south in defence of the reforms he had set in motion to open up China's economy and transform the country into the political and economic powerhouse we know today In this book Jonathan Chatwin pursues the story of Deng's legendary "Southern Tour" and examines its legacies in the country today

'Provocative and detailed .. Excellent' The Telegraph 'Shocking and meticulous' Danny Dorling 'An eye-opening revelation ... a must-read' Joel Bakan THE TELEGRAPH BEST BOOKS OF 2024 British politicians love to vaunt the benefits of the UK's supposed 'special relationship' with the US But are we really America's economic partner – or its colony

Located in Manchuria (Northeast China), the geopolitical borderland between China, Russia, and Japan, among others, Anshan Iron and Steel Works (Angang) was Mao-era China's most important industrial enterprise The history of Angang from 1915 to 2000 reveals the hybrid nature of China's accelerated industrialization, shaped by transnational interactions, domestic factors, and local dynamics Utilizing archives in Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and English, Koji Hirata provides the first comprehensive history of this enterprise before, during, and after the Mao era (1949-1976)

The first comprehensive history of the Turkish economy The population and economy of the area within the present-day borders of Turkey has consistently been among the largest in the developing world, yet there has been no authoritative economic history of Turkey until now In Uneven Centuries, Şevket Pamuk examines the economic growth and human development of Turkey over the past two hundred years Taking a comparative global perspective, Pamuk investigates Turkey’s economic history through four periods: the open economy during the nineteenth-century Ottoman era, the transition from empire to nation-state that spanned the two world wars and the Great Depression, the continued protectionism and import-substituting industrialization after World War II, and the neoliberal policies and the opening of the economy after 1980

How herbaria illuminate the past and future of plant science Collections of preserved plant specimens, known as herbaria, have existed for nearly five centuries These pressed and labeled plants have been essential resources for scientists, allowing them to describe and differentiate species and to document and research plant changes and biodiversity over time—including changes related to climate Maura C

“Monumental.” —The New York Times Book Review Pulitzer Prize-finalist Stephen Kotkin has written the definitive biography of Joseph Stalin, from collectivization and the Great Terror to the conflict with Hitler's Germany that is the signal event of modern world history In 1929, Joseph Stalin, having already achieved dictatorial power over the vast Soviet Empire, formally ordered the systematic conversion of the world’s largest peasant economy into “socialist modernity,” otherwise known as collectivization, regardless of the cost What it cost, and what Stalin ruthlessly enacted, transformed the country and its ruler in profound and enduring ways

How Chinese characters triumphed over the QWERTY keyboard and laid the foundation for China's information technology successes today Chinese writing is character based, the one major world script that is neither alphabetic nor syllabic Through the years, the Chinese written language encountered presumed alphabetic universalism in the form of Morse Code, Braille, stenography, Linotype, punch cards, word processing, and other systems developed with the Latin alphabet in mind

A sweeping new history of the changing meaning of work in the United States, from Horatio Alger to Instagram influencers How Americans think about work changed profoundly over the course of the twentieth century Thrift and persistence came to seem old-fashioned Successful workers were increasingly expected to show initiative and enthusiasm for change—not just to do their jobs reliably but to create new opportunities for themselves and for others

How modern data-driven government originated in the creation and use of administrative archives in the British Empire Over the span of two hundred years, Great Britain established, governed, lost, and reconstructed an empire that embraced three continents and two oceanic worlds The British ruled this empire by correlating incoming information about the conduct of subjects and aliens in imperial spaces with norms of good governance developed in London

A thorough investigation of the current combination of austerity and extravagance that characterizes government spending and central bank monetary policy At the close of the 1970s, government treasuries and central banks took a vow of perpetual self-restraint To this day, fiscal authorities fret over soaring public debt burdens, while central bankers wring their hands at the slightest sign of rising wages As the brief reprieve of coronavirus spending made clear, no departure from government austerity will be tolerated without a corresponding act of penance

"For a very long time, silver was money, but in the late nineteenth century, much of the world adopted some variant of the gold standard China, however, remained the most populous country still using silver, although the country had no unified national currency; there was not one standard, but many: silver coins circulated alongside chunks of silver and every transaction became an "encounter of wits." This book focuses on how officials, policymakers, bankers, merchants, academics, and journalists in China and around the world answered a simple question: how should China change its monetary system

Domesticating Empire is the first contextually-oriented monograph on Egyptian imagery in Roman households Caitlín Barrett draws on case studies from Flavian Pompeii to investigate the close association between representations of Egypt and a particular type of Roman household space: the domestic garden Through paintings and mosaics portraying the Nile, canals that turned the garden itself into a miniature "Nilescape," and statuary depicting Egyptian themes, many gardens in Pompeii offered ancient visitors evocations of a Roman vision of Egypt

Present-day political discourse swings between two contrary positions on the issue of Muslims Hindutva politics categorizes Muslims as a monolithic religious group to substantiate Hindu homogeneity The liberals, on the other hand, claim to protect Muslims as a religious minority to defend Indian democracy (if not secularism!)

A gripping history that spans law, international affairs, and top-secret technology to unmask the tension between intellectual property rights and national security At the beginning of the twentieth century, two British inventors, Arthur Pollen and Harold Isherwood, became fascinated by a major military question: how to aim the big guns of battleships These warships—of enormous geopolitical import before the advent of intercontinental missiles or drones—had to shoot in poor light and choppy seas at distant moving targets, conditions that impeded accurate gunfire

The fascinating, untold story of how the Chinese language overcame unparalleled challenges and revolutionized the world of computing A standard QWERTY keyboard has a few dozen keys How can Chinese—a language with tens of thousands of characters and no alphabet—be input on such a device In The Chinese Computer, Thomas S

“Mervyn King may well have written the most important book to come out of the financial crisis Agree or disagree, King’s visionary ideas deserve the attention of everyone from economics students to heads of state.” —Lawrence H Summers Something is wrong with our banking system We all sense that, but Mervyn King knows it firsthand; his ten years at the helm of the Bank of England, including at the height of the financial crisis, revealed profound truths about the mechanisms of our capitalist society

New York Times Bestseller A New York Times Notable Book Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Foreign Affairs, and Kirkus Reviews Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award (Nonfiction) Shortlisted for the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (History) A San Francisco Chronicle Holiday Gift Guide Selection A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection A sweeping, "magisterial" history of the Roman Empire from one of our foremost classicists shows why Rome remains "relevant to people many centuries later" (Atlantic) In SPQR, an instant classic, Mary Beard narrates the history of Rome "with passion and without technical jargon" and demonstrates how "a slightly shabby Iron Age village" rose to become the "undisputed hegemon of the Mediterranean" (Wall Street Journal)

A journey through the otherworldly science behind Christopher Nolan’s award-winning film, Interstellar, from executive producer and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Kip Thorne Interstellar, from acclaimed filmmaker Christopher Nolan, takes us on a fantastic voyage far beyond our solar system Yet in The Science of Interstellar, Kip Thorne, the Nobel prize-winning physicist who assisted Nolan on the scientific aspects of Interstellar, shows us that the movie’s jaw-dropping events and stunning, never-before-attempted visuals are grounded in real science

The fascinating story of science in pursuit of the ghostly, ubiquitous subatomic particle—the neutrino Isaac Asimov is said to have observed of the neutrino: “The only reason scientists suggested its existence was their need to make calculations come out even And yet the nothing-particle was not a nothing at all.” In fact, as one of the most enigmatic and most populous particles in the universe—about 100 trillion are flying through you every second—the neutrino may hold the clues to some of our deepest cosmic mysteries

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ‘Sean Carroll has achieved something I thought impossible: a bridge between popular science and the mathematical universe of working physicists Magnificent!’ Brian Clegg, author of Ten Days in Physics that Shook the World Immense, strange and infinite, the world of modern physics often feels impenetrable to the undiscerning eye – a jumble of muons, gluons and quarks, impossible to explain without several degrees and a research position at CERN

The Industrial Revolution meets the quantum-technology revolution A steampunk adventure guide to how mind-blowing quantum physics is transforming our understanding of information and energy Victorian era steam engines and particle physics may seem worlds (as well as centuries) apart, yet a new branch of science, quantum thermodynamics, reenvisions the scientific underpinnings of the Industrial Revolution through the lens of today's roaring quantum information revolution

A fascinating history of the profitable paradox of the American outdoor experience: visiting nature first requires shopping No escape to nature is complete without a trip to an outdoor recreational store or a browse through online offerings This is the irony of the American outdoor experience: visiting wild spaces supposedly untouched by capitalism first requires shopping With consumers spending billions of dollars on clothing and equipment each year as they seek out nature, the American outdoor sector grew over the past 150 years from a small collection of outfitters to an industry contributing more than 2 percent of the nation's economic output

A New York Times and USA Today Bestseller Winner: 2018 Hugo Award for Best Novella Winner: 2018 Nebula Award for Best Novella Winner: 2018 Alex Award Winner: 2018 Locus Award One of the Verge's Best Books of 2017 A murderous android discovers itself in All Systems Red, a tense science fiction adventure by Martha Wells that interrogates the roots of consciousness through Artificial Intelligence. "As a heartless killing machine, I was a complete failure." In a corporate-dominated spacefaring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company Exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids, for their own safety

“Few people can communicate how the economy actually works better than Kyla Scanlon.”—Morgan Housel, author of The Psychology of Money An illustrated guide to the mad math and terrible terminology of economics, from one of the internet’s favorite financial educators Is our national debt really a threat What is a “mild” recession, exactly If you’re worried about your bank account balance, job security, or mortgage rate, what data should you be keeping tabs on

Is philosophy obsolete Are the ancient questions still relevant in the age of cosmology and neuroscience, not to mention crowd-sourcing and cable news The acclaimed philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein provides a dazzlingly original plunge into the drama of philosophy, revealing its hidden role in today’s debates on religion, morality, politics, and science

A few numbers came to define Chinese politics, until they did not count what mattered and what they counted did not measure up Seeking Truth argues that the Chinese government adopted a system of limited, quantified vision in order to survive the disasters unleashed by Mao Zedong's ideological leadership, explains how that system worked, and analyzes how problems accumulated in its blind spots leading Xi Jinping to take the regime into a neopolitical turn

A behind-the-scenes look at how democrats lost their way In the generation after World War II, voters around the world routinely split along economic lines, delivering reliable working-class majorities to parties on the left Today, coalitions are increasingly determined by education rather than by income, driving educated professionals to the left and pushing blue-collar voters to the right In Left Adrift historian Timothy Shenk provides a new perspective on this extraordinary shift by taking readers inside a debate that unfolded in a tiny circle of elite political strategists over how leftwing parties could win again

How creditors came to wield unprecedented power over heavily indebted countries—and the dangers this poses to democracy The European debt crisis has rekindled long-standing debates about the power of finance and the fraught relationship between capitalism and democracy in a globalized world Why Not Default? unravels a striking puzzle at the heart of these debates—why, despite frequent crises and the immense costs of repayment, do so many heavily indebted countries continue to service their international debts

A woman seduces her landlord to extort the family farm Gamblers recruit a wily prostitute to get a rich young man back in the game Silver counterfeiters wreak havoc for traveling merchants A wealthy widow is drugged and robbed by a lodger posing as a well-to-do student

This is an age of deception Con men ply the roadways Bogus alchemists pretend to turn one piece of silver into three Devious nuns entice young women into adultery Sorcerers use charmed talismans for mind control and murder

The Evolution of a New Industry traces the emergence and growth of the Israeli hi-tech sector to provide a new understanding of industry evolution In the case of Israel, the authors reveal how the hi-tech sector built an entrepreneurial culture with a capacity to disseminate intergenerational knowledge of how to found new ventures, as well as an intricate network of support for new firms Following the evolution of this industry from embryonic to mature, Israel Drori, Shmuel Ellis, and Zur Shapira develop a genealogical approach that relies on looking at the sector in the way that one might consider a family tree

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST An epic, riveting history of New York City on the edge of disaster—and an anatomy of the austerity politics that continue to shape the world today When the news broke in 1975 that New York City was on the brink of fiscal collapse, few believed it was possible How could the country’s largest metropolis fail How could the capital of the financial world go bankrupt

Despite the destabilizing potential of governing of a vast territory and a large multicultural population, the centralized government of the People's Republic of China has held together for decades, resisting efforts at local autonomy By analyzing Beijing's strategies for maintaining control even in the reformist post-Mao era, Centrifugal Empire reveals the unique thinking behind China's approach to local governance, its historical roots, and its deflection of divergent interests

In The Latecomer's Rise, Muyang Chen reveals the nature and impact of a rapidly growing form of international lending: Chinese development finance Over the past few decades, China has become the world's largest provider of bilateral development finance Through its two national policy banks, the China Development Bank (CDB) and the Export-Import Bank of China (China Exim), it has funded infrastructure and industrial projects in numerous emerging markets and developing countries

An authoritative account of Xi Jinping's worldview and how it drives Chinese behaviour both domestically and on the world stage In his new book, On Xi Jinping, former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd provides an authoritative account of the ideological worldview driving Chinese behaviour both domestically and on the world stage--that of President Xi Jinping, who now hold near-total control over the Chinese Communist Party and is now, in effect, president-for-life

2020 Gourmand Award in Spirits Gold Medal winner in the Independent Book Publishers Awards China is one of the world's leading producers and consumers of liquor, with alcohol infusing all aspects of its culture, from religion and literature to business and warfare Yet to the outside world, China's most famous spirit, baijiu, remains a mystery This is about to change, as baijiu is now being served in cocktail bars beyond its borders

Winner of the Hugo Award In A Psalm for the Wild-Built, bestselling Becky Chambers's delightful new Monk and Robot series, gives us hope for the future It's been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; centuries since they wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again; centuries since they faded into myth and urban legend

Economic theory may be speculative, but its impact is powerful and real Since the 1970s, it has been closely associated with a sweeping change around the world--the "market turn." This is what Avner Offer and Gabriel Soderberg call the rise of market liberalism, a movement that, seeking to replace social democracy, holds up buying and selling as the norm for human relations and society Our confidence in markets comes from economics, and our confidence in economics is underpinned by the Nobel Prize in Economics, which was first awarded in 1969

“A startling glimpse into the meatpacking industry’s abuse of undocumented and incarcerated workers.” —The New York Times Book Review Winner of the J Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, an explosive exposé of the toxic labor practices at the largest meatpacking company in America and the immigrant workers who had the courage to fight back On June 27, 2011, a deadly chemical accident took place inside the Tyson Foods chicken processing plant in Springdale, Arkansas, where the company is headquartered

A magnificent new biography that revolutionizes our understanding of Stalin and his world It has the quality of myth: a poor cobbler’s son, a seminarian from an oppressed outer province of the Russian empire, reinvents himself as a top leader in a band of revolutionary zealots When the band seizes control of the country in the aftermath of total world war, the former seminarian ruthlessly dominates the new regime until he stands as absolute ruler of a vast and terrible state apparatus, with dominion over Eurasia

Two eminent political scientists show that America's great conflicts, from the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror, were fought not for ideals, or even geopolitical strategy, but for the individual gain of the presidents who waged them It's striking how many of the presidents Americans venerate-Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin D Roosevelt, and John F

"In the 1960s, the Soviet Union found itself unexpectedly challenged from within by a cohort of dissidents who eventually achieved global fame Their struggle for the rule of law and human rights made them instant heroes in the West, where they appeared as democracy's surrogate soldiers behind the iron curtain But, as historian Benjamin Nathans argues, theirs was a homegrown phenomenon; activists built the anti-totalitarian movement on fundamental concepts from within the communist pantheon

The astonishing life of the modest New Jersey businessman who anonymously gave away 10 billion dollars and inspired the "giving while living" movement In this bestselling book, Conor O'Clery reveals the inspiring life story of Chuck Feeney, known as the "James Bond of philanthropy." Feeney was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, to a blue-collar Irish-American family during the Depression

A provocative, original, and richly entertaining group biography of the Jewish immigrants who were the moving forces behind the creation of America's motion picture industry The names Harry Cohn, William Fox, Carl Laemmle, Louis B Mayer, Jack and Harry Warner, and Adolph Zucker are giants in the history of contemporary Hollywood, outsiders who dared to invent their own vision of the American Dream

Shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize • Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize From the internationally best-selling writer, a masterful account of the epic revolution that sparked the decolonization of the modern world On a sunny Friday morning in August 1945, a handful of people raised a homemade cotton flag and, on behalf of 68 million compatriots, announced the birth of a new nation With the fourth largest population in the world, inhabiting islands that span an eighth of the globe, Indonesia became the first country to rid itself of colonial rule after World War II

“An extraordinary story of bravery and insanity on the high seas. . . One of the most gripping sea stories I have ever read.” — Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm In the tradition of Into Thin Air and The Perfect Storm, comes a breathtaking oceanic adventure about an obsessive desire to test the limits of human endurance In 1968 nine sailors set off on the most daring race ever held and never before completed: to single-handedly circumnavigate the globe nonstop

From the Yangtze to the Yellow River, China is traversed by great waterways, which have defined its politics and ways of life for centuries Water has been so integral to China’s culture, economy, and growth and development that it provides a window on the whole sweep of Chinese history In The Water Kingdom, renowned writer Philip Ball opens that window to offer an epic and powerful new way of thinking about Chinese civilization

From a MacArthur "Genius," a bold new perspective on the history of Asia, highlighting the long quest to tame its waters Asia's history has been shaped by her waters In Unruly Waters, historian Sunil Amrith reimagines Asia's history through the stories of its rains, rivers, coasts, and seas -- and of the weather-watchers and engineers, mapmakers and farmers who have sought to control them Looking out from India, he shows how dreams and fears of water shaped visions of political independence and economic development, provoked efforts to reshape nature through dams and pumps, and unleashed powerful tensions within and between nations

A sociologist and former fashion model takes readers inside the elite global party circuit of "models and bottles" to reveal how beautiful young women are used to boost the status of men Million-dollar birthday parties, megayachts on the French Riviera, and $40,000 bottles of champagne In today's New Gilded Age, the world's moneyed classes have taken conspicuous consumption to new extremes In Very Important People, sociologist, author, and former fashion model Ashley Mears takes readers inside the exclusive global nightclub and party circuit—from New York City and the Hamptons to Miami and Saint-Tropez—to reveal the intricate economy of beauty, status, and money that lies behind these spectacular displays of wealth and leisure

From a New York Times bestselling author and investigative journalist comes The Social Network for the video game industry, a riveting examination of Blizzard Entertainment's rise and shocking downfall For video game fans, the name Blizzard Entertainment was once synonymous with perfection The renowned company behind classics like Diablo and World of Warcraft was known to celebrate the joy of gaming over all else

A remarkable look at how the growth, technology, and politics of high-frequency trading have altered global financial markets In today’s financial markets, trading floors on which brokers buy and sell shares face-to-face have increasingly been replaced by lightning-fast electronic systems that use algorithms to execute astounding volumes of transactions Trading at the Speed of Light tells the story of this epic transformation Donald MacKenzie shows how in the 1990s, in what were then the disreputable margins of the US financial system, a new approach to trading—automated high-frequency trading or HFT—began and then spread throughout the world

This book is the first comprehensive account of the rules and practices─the microstructure─of the Dojima Security Exchange (DSE), the world’s first futures market Despite worldwide interest in the DSE and its relevance to modern financial markets, it is only briefly touched upon as the earliest example of a futures market in most of the existing literature in English Until the publication of this book, there has been no comprehensive account in English of the rules and practices of the DSE

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice A spirited new history of Chinese food told through an account of the remarkable life of Fu Pei-mei, the woman who brought Chinese cooking to the world In 1949, a young Chinese housewife arrived in Taiwan and transformed herself from a novice to a natural in the kitchen She launched a career as a cookbook author and television cooking instructor that would last four decades

Indoctrinating the Youth examines how the Guomindang (GMD or Nationalists) sought to maintain control of middle-school students and cultivate their political loyalty over the trajectory of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Chinese Civil War, and postwar Taiwan During the Sino-Japanese War the Nationalists managed middle-school refugee students by merging schools, publishing and distributing updated textbooks, and assisting students as they migrated to the interior with their principals and teachers

This impeccably researched and “adventure-packed” (The Washington Post) account of the obsessive quest by Christopher Columbus’s son to create the greatest library in the world is “the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters” (NPR) and offers a vivid picture of Europe on the verge of becoming modern At the peak of the Age of Exploration, Hernando Colón sailed with his father Christopher Columbus on his final voyage to the New World, a journey that ended in disaster, bloody mutiny, and shipwreck

The myth of light and progress has blinded us In our electric world, we are everywhere surrounded by effortlessly glowing lights that simply exist, as they should, seemingly clear and comforting proof that human genius means the present will always be better than the past, and the future better still At best, this is half the story

A surprising history unfolded in New Deal– and World War II–era New York City under Mayor Fiorello La Guardia Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, members of the NYPD had worked to enforce partisan political power rather than focus on crime That changed when La Guardia took office in 1934 and shifted the city's priorities toward liberal reform

Space has become increasingly crowded since the turn of the century, as a growing number of countries, companies, and even private citizens have begun operating satellites and become spacefarers Crowded Orbits offers readers a valuable primer on space policy from an international perspective, examining technology, diplomacy, commerce, science, and military applications This second edition is thoroughly updated to cover events of the decade following the book’s original publication in 2014, when the pace of the competition to exploit space has accelerated dramatically

Billionaire Wilderness offers an unprecedented look inside the world of the ultra-wealthy and their relationship to the natural world, showing how the ultra-rich use nature to resolve key predicaments in their lives Justin Farrell immerses himself in Teton County, Wyoming--both the richest county in the United States and the county with the nation's highest level of income inequality--to investigate interconnected questions about money, nature, and community in the twenty-first century

Inside the epic quest to find life on the water-rich moons at the outer reaches of the solar system Where is the best place to find life beyond Earth We often look to Mars as the most promising site in our solar system, but recent scientific missions have revealed that some of the most habitable real estate may actually lie farther away Beneath the frozen crusts of several of the small, ice-covered moons of Jupiter and Saturn lurk vast oceans that may have existed for as long as Earth, and together may contain more than fifty times its total volume of liquid water

A lively account of the dinosaur’s role in Gilded Age America, examining the connection between business, paleontology, and museums Although dinosaur fossils were first found in England, a series of dramatic discoveries during the late 1800s turned North America into a world center for vertebrate paleontology At the same time, the United States emerged as the world’s largest industrial economy, and creatures like Tyrannosaurus, Brontosaurus, and Triceratops became emblems of American capitalism

A wondrous story of scientific endeavor—probing the great ice sheets of Antarctica From the moment explorers set foot on the ice of Antarctica in the early nineteenth century, they desired to learn what lay beneath David J Drewry provides an insider’s account of the ambitious and often hazardous radar mapping expeditions that he and fellow glaciologists undertook during the height of the Cold War, when concerns about global climate change were first emerging and scientists were finally able to peer into the Antarctic ice and take its measure

How the American government has long used financial credit programs to create economic opportunities Federal housing finance policy and mortgage-backed securities have gained widespread attention in recent years because of the 2008 financial crisis, but issues of government credit have been part of American life since the nation’s founding From the 1780s, when a watershed national land credit policy was established, to the postwar foundations of our current housing finance system, American Bonds examines the evolution of securitization and federal credit programs

Electrifying Indonesia tells the story of the entanglement of politics and technology during Indonesia's rapid post-World War II development As a central part of its nation-building project, the Indonesian state sought to supply electricity to the entire country, bringing transformative socioeconomic benefits across its heterogeneous territories and populations While this project was driven by nationalistic impulses, it was also motivated by a genuine interest in social justice

Brings a borderlands perspective to the history of China From the eighth to thirteenth centuries along China’s rugged southern periphery, trade in tribute articles and an interregional horse market thrived These ties dramatically affected imperial China’s relations with the emerging kingdoms in its borderlands Local chiefs before the tenth century had considered the control of such contacts an important aspect of their political authority

The Oscar-shortlisted documentary Command and Control, directed by Robert Kenner, finds its origins in Eric Schlosser's book and continues to explore the little-known history of the management and safety concerns of America's nuclear aresenal. “A devastatingly lucid and detailed new history of nuclear weapons in the U.S Fascinating.” —Lev Grossman, TIME Magazine “Perilous and gripping . . Schlosser skillfully weaves together an engrossing account of both the science and the politics of nuclear weapons safety.” —San Francisco Chronicle A myth-shattering exposé of America’s nuclear weapons Famed investigative journalist Eric Schlosser digs deep to uncover secrets about the management of America’s nuclear arsenal

Harvard’s acclaimed geologist “charts Earth’s history in accessible style” (AP) “A sublime chronicle of our planet." –Booklist, STARRED review How well do you know the ground beneath your feet Odds are, where you’re standing was once cooking under a roiling sea of lava, crushed by a towering sheet of ice, rocked by a nearby meteor strike, or perhaps choked by poison gases, drowned beneath ocean, perched atop a mountain range, or roamed by fearsome monsters

An eye-opening portrait of global capitalism spanning 150 years, told through the history of the Tata corporation Nearly a century old, the grand façade of Bombay House is hard to miss in the historic business district of Mumbai This is the iconic global headquarters of the Tata Group, a multinational corporation that produces everything from salt to software

Danger Sound Klaxon! reveals the untold story of the Klaxon automobile horn, one of the first great electrical consumer technologies of the twentieth century Although its metallic shriek at first shocked pedestrians, savvy advertising strategies convinced consumers across the United States and western Europe to adopt the shrill Klaxon horn as the safest signaling technology available in the 1910s The widespread use of Klaxons in the trenches of World War I, however, transformed how veterans heard this car horn, and its traumatic association with gas attacks ultimately doomed this once ubiquitous consumer technology

A Cultural History of Shopping was a Library Journal Best in Reference selection for 2022 In the modern consumer age that emerged after the First World War, shopping became a ubiquitous cultural practice Despite its apparent universality, the historicity and contingency of shopping should not be ignored: its meaning was always inextricably linked to the political, material and economic contexts within which it took place

This brilliantly concise history of the Pacific Ocean nevertheless succeeds in examining both the indigenous presence on ocean's islands and Western control or influence over the its islands and shores There is a particular focus on the period from the 1530s to 1890 with its greater Western coastal and oceanic presence in the Pacific, beginning with the Spanish takeover of the coasts of modern Central America, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, and continuing with the Spaniards in the Philippines

The emergence of the international oil corporation as a political actor in the twentieth century, seen in BP's infrastructure and information arrangements in Iran In the early twentieth century, international oil corporations emerged as a new kind of political actor The development of the world oil industry, argues Katayoun Shafiee, was one of the era's largest political projects of techno-economic development

"With more than 120,000 Japanese restaurants around the world, Japanese cuisine has become truly global Through the transnational culinary mobilities of migrant entrepreneurs, workers, ideas and capital, Japanese cuisine spread and adapted to international tastes But this expansion is also entangled in culinary politics, ranging from authenticity claims and status competition among restaurateurs and consumers to societal racism, immigration policies, and soft power politics that have shaped the transmission and transformation of Japanese cuisine

Americans eat more processed foods than anyone else in the world We also spend more on military research These two seemingly unrelated facts are inextricably linked If you ever wondered how ready-to-eat foods infiltrated your kitchen, you’ll love this entertaining romp through the secret military history of practically everything you buy at the supermarket

The 1950s saw Lim Chong Eu taking an increasingly central role in Malayan politics, moving from the exhilarating preparation for independence to him losing political influence by the end of the decade The following decade saw him trying to revive his political fortunes, and finally succeeding at the ballot box in 1969 Becoming the Chief Minister of Penang State--retreating from national politics, as it were--provided him with the platform from which he would excel as nation builder and political leader

The INSTANT New York Times bestseller Instant Los Angeles Times bestseller “In Nuclear War: A Scenario, Annie Jacobsen gives us a vivid picture of what could happen if our nuclear guardians fail…Terrifying.”—Wall Street Journal There is only one scenario other than an asteroid strike that could end the world as we know it in a matter of hours: nuclear war And one of the triggers for that war would be a nuclear missile inbound toward the United States

This book, a bestseller in China with over a million copies sold, depicts the role played by the Chinese government in China‘s economic development It explains how the Chinese government has gradually established and improved market mechanisms while promoting economic growth

How Bulgaria transformed the computer industry behind the Iron Curtain—and the consequences of that transformation for a society that dreamt of a brighter future Bulgaria in 1963 was a communist country led by a centralized party trying to navigate a multinational Cold War The state needed money, and it sought prestige

In Liberalism Disavowed, Beng Huat Chua examines the rejection of Western-style liberalism in Singapore since the nation’s expulsion from Malaysia and formal independence as a republic in 1965 The People’s Action Party, which has ruled Singapore since 1959, has forged an independent non-Western ideology that is evident in various government policies that Chua analyzes, among them multiracialism, public housing, and widespread social distributions to the citizenry

This Element details how elites provide policy concessions when they face credible threats of revolution Specifically, the authors discuss how the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent formation of Comintern enhanced elites' perceptions of revolutionary threat by affecting the capacity and motivation of labor movements as well as the elites' interpretation of information signals These developments incentivized elites to provide policy concessions to urban workers, notably reduced working hours and expanded social transfer programs

In this groundbreaking book, renowned global economist David McWilliams unlocks the mysteries and the awesome power of money: what it is, how it works, and why it matters The story of money is the story of our desires, our genius, and our downfalls Money is power—and power beguiles Nothing we’ve invented as a species has defined our own evolution so thoroughly and changed the direction of our planet’s history so dramatically

Forty years after his death, Mao remains a totemic, if divisive, figure in contemporary China Though he retains an immense symbolic importance within China's national mythology, the rise of a capitalist economy has seen the ruling class become increasingly ambivalent towards him And while he continues to be a highly visible and contentious presence in Chinese public life, Mao's enduring influence has been little understood in the West

For decades, the small, quiet town of Hamlet, North Carolina, thrived thanks to the railroad But by the 1970s, it had become a postindustrial backwater, a magnet for businesses in search of cheap labor and almost no oversight Imperial Food Products was one of those businesses The company set up shop in Hamlet in the 1980s

The period between 1867 and 1914 remains the greatest watershed in human history since the emergence of settled agricultural societies: the time when an expansive civilization based on synergy of fuels, science, and technical innovation was born At its beginnings in the 1870s were dynamite, the telephone, photographic film, and the first light bulbs Its peak decade - the astonishing 1880s - brought electricity - generating plants, electric motors, steam turbines, the gramophone, cars, aluminum production, air-filled rubber tires, and prestressed concrete

THE *INSTANT* NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER USA TODAY BESTSELLER An exhilarating, thoughtful, and beautifully written memoir by musician, songwriter, and lead singer-lyricist of Grammy award-winning metal band, System Of A Down, Serj Tankian Serj Tankian will be the first to admit that his band, System Of A Down, was “unlikely a chart-topper as had ever existed in modern music history: a band of Armenian-Americans playing a practically unclassifiable clash of wildly aggressive metal riffs, unconventional tempo-twisting rhythms, and Armenian folk melodies, with me alternately growling, screaming, and crooning lyrics that could pivot from avant-garde silliness to raging socio-political rants in the space of a single line.” After all, as Serj concedes, “it’s not easy listening.” Even so, there’s no doubt that System’s music had struck a chord with millions of listeners across the globe ever since they burst on the scene in the mid-1990s

From a pioneer in the field of complexity science and chaos theory, a plan for solving the world's most pressing problems "Farmer convincingly argues that by using big data and today's more powerful computers, we can build more realistic models and simulations of the global economy. . . Farmer's vision will undoubtedly be significant in how economics evolves."--Tej Parikh, Financial Times, "Best New Books on Economics" "Both a manifesto for a revolution in economics and a memoir of an unusual career."--Ed Ballard, Wall Street Journal We live in an age of increasing complexity--an era of accelerating technology and global interconnection that holds more promise, and more peril, than any other time in human history

“This—THIS—is the cutting edge of science fiction.” —Richard K Morgan, author of Altered Carbon How do you stage a mutiny when you're only awake one day in a million How do you conspire when your tiny handful of potential allies changes with each job shift How do you engage an enemy that never sleeps, that sees through your eyes and hears through your ears, and relentlessly, honestly, only wants what's best for you

How and why China has pursued information-age weapons to gain leverage against its adversaries How can states use military force to achieve their political aims without triggering a catastrophic nuclear war Among the states facing this dilemma of fighting limited wars, only China has given information-age weapons such a prominent role While other countries have preferred the traditional options of threatening to use nuclear weapons or fielding capabilities for decisive conventional military victories, China has instead chosen to rely on offensive cyber operations, counterspace capabilities, and precision conventional missiles to coerce its adversaries

The classic guide to quantitative investing—expanded and updated for today’s increasingly complex markets From Bruce Jacobs and Ken Levy—two pioneers of quantitative equity management—the go-to guide to stock selection has been substantially updated to help you build portfolios in today’s transformed investing landscape A powerful combination of in-depth research and expert insights gained from decades of experience, Equity Management, Second Edition includes 24 new peer-reviewed articles that help leveraged long-short investors and leverage-averse investors navigate today’s complex and unpredictable markets

From the leading authorities in their field—the newest, most effective tools for avoiding common pitfalls while maximizing profits through active portfolio management Whether you’re a portfolio manager, financial adviser, or investing novice, this important follow-up to the classic guide to active portfolio management delivers everything you need to beat the market at every turn Advances in Active Portfolio Management gets you fully up to date on the issues, trends, and challenges in the world of active management—and shows how to apply advances in the Grinold and Kahn’s legendary approach to meet current challenges

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 Sequels, reboots, franchises, and songs that remake old songs—does it feel like everything new in popular culture is just derivative of something old

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...

A Nobel laureate reveals the often surprising rules that govern a vast array of activities -- both mundane and life-changing -- in which money may play little or no role If you've ever sought a job or hired someone, applied to college or guided your child into a good kindergarten, asked someone out on a date or been asked out, you've participated in a kind of market Most of the study of economics deals with commodity markets, where the price of a good connects sellers and buyers

1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER It was never supposed to be this close And of course she was supposed to win How Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election to Donald Trump is the riveting story of a sure thing gone off the rails For every Comey revelation or hindsight acknowledgment about the electorate, no explanation of defeat can begin with anything other than the core problem of Hillary's campaign--the candidate herself

How bankers created the modern consumer credit economy and destroyed financial stability in the process American households are awash in expensive credit card debt But where did all this debt come from In this history of the rise of postwar American finance, Sean H Vanatta shows how bankers created our credit card economy and, with it, the indebted nation we know today

An exploration of how China's Belt and Road Initiative seeks to reshape international order and how it has catalyzed a new era of infrastructural geopolitics Over the past decade China has put infrastructural and urban development at the heart of a strategy aimed at nothing less than the transformation of international order The Belt and Road Initiative, which seeks to revitalize and reconnect the ancient Silk Roads that linked much of the world before the rise of the West, is an attempt to place China at the center of this new international order, one shaped by Chinese power, norms, and values

Chinese workers helped build the modern world They labored on New World plantations, worked in South African mines, and toiled through the construction of the Panama Canal, among many other projects While most investigations of Chinese workers focus on migrant labor, Chinese Workers of the World explores Chinese labor under colonial regimes within China thorough examination of the Yunnan-Indochina Railway, constructed between 1898–1910

Atomic Steppe tells the untold true story of how the obscure country of Kazakhstan said no to the most powerful weapons in human history With the fall of the Soviet Union, the marginalized Central Asian republic suddenly found itself with the world's fourth largest nuclear arsenal on its territory Would it give up these fire-ready weapons—or try to become a Central Asian North Korea

How animal conservation became a defense against cultural erasure China today positions itself as a model of state-led environmentalism On the country’s arid rangelands, grassland conservation policies have targeted pastoralists and their animals, blamed for causing desertification State environmentalism—in the form of grazing bans, enclosure, and resettlement—has transformed the lives of many ethnic minority herders in China’s western borderlands

When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off Soviet power used a variety of tools--from education to propaganda to terror—to turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality Yet even with its monopoly on ideology and power, the Soviet Communist Party never succeeded in overcoming religion and creating an atheist society

Hungarian-born George Soros is unquestionably one of the world's most powerful and profitable investors Dubbed "The Man Who Moves Markets," Soros is an investment wizard, speculator extraordinaire and magnanimous philanthropist This book chronicles Soros' life - how his family evaded capture by the Nazis, and how Soros used his business acumen to become a billionaire

Victor Sebestyen's riveting biography of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin—the first major biography in English in nearly two decades—is not only a political examination of one of the most important historical figures of the twentieth century but also a fascinating portrait of Lenin the man Brought up in comfort and with a passion for hunting and fishing, chess, and the English classics, Lenin was radicalized after the execution of his brother in 1887 Sebestyen traces the story from Lenin's early years to his long exile in Europe and return to Petrograd in 1917 to lead the first Communist revolution in history

After Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) is the man most associated with communism and its influence and reach around the world Lenin was the leader of the communist Bolshevik party during the October 1917 revolution in Russia, and he subsequently headed the Soviet state until 1924, bringing stability to the region and establishing a socialist economic and political system In Lenin, Lars T

One of the great works of modern historical writing, the classic account of the ideas, people, and politics that led to the Bolshevik Revolution Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station is intellectual history on a grand scale, full of romance, idealism, intrigue, and conspiracy, that traces the revolutionary ideas that shaped the modern world from the French Revolution up through Lenin's arrival at Finland Station in St. Petersburg in 1917 Fueled by Wilson's own passionate engagement with the ideas and politics at play, it is a lively and vivid, sweeping account of a singular idea—that it is possible to construct a society based on justice, equality, and freedom—gaining the power to change history

The absurdly brilliant far-future satire from “the Borges of scientific culture” (Time) The year is 3149, and a vast paper destroying blight—papyralysis—has obliterated much of the planet’s written history Fortunately, these rare memoirs, preserved for centuries in a volcanic rock, record the strange life of a man trapped in a hermetically sealed underground community . .

They come to Amberleaf Fair -- toymakers, storytellers, conjurers, and adventurers They bring song and dance, gifts of love, and tales of far places But in the midst of celebration, the high wizard Talmar is stricken with what appears to be the Choking Glory, his brother Torin the toymaker has been rejected by his lady love, and a fabulous necklace from across the sea has been stolen -- and Torin is the chief suspect

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024 Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction Shortlisted for the Ursula K Le Guin Prize for Fiction A singular new novel from Betty Trask Prize-winner Samantha Harvey, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and life on our planet through the eyes of six astronauts circling the earth in 24 hours "Ravishingly beautiful." — Joshua Ferris, New York Times A slender novel of epic power, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space

In the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, the Western powers were anxious to prevent the spread of Bolshevism across Europe Lenin and Trotsky were equally anxious that the Communist vision they were busy introducing in Russia should do just that But neither side knew anything about the other The revolution and Russia’s withdrawal from the First World War had ensured a diplomatic exodus from Moscow and the usual routes to vital information had been closed off

"The most important book to read about the AI boom" (Wired): The "gripping" (New Yorker) true story of the first time machines came for human jobs—and how the Luddite uprising explains the power, threat, and toll of big tech and AI today Named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker, Wired, and the Financial Times • A Next Big Idea Book Club "Must-Read" The most urgent story in modern tech begins not in Silicon Valley but two hundred years ago in rural England, when workers known as the Luddites rose up rather than starve at the hands of factory owners who were using automated machines to erase their livelihoods The Luddites organized guerrilla raids to smash those machines—on punishment of death—and won the support of Lord Byron, enraged the Prince Regent, and inspired the birth of science fiction