Basic Books imprint: 1165 books
What I Found in a Thousand Towns
A Traveling Musicians Guide to Rebuilding Americas Communities-One Coffee Shop, Dog Run, and Open-Mike Night at a Time
Language: English
Release Date: September 5, 2017
A beloved folk singer presents an impassioned account of the fall and rise of the small American towns she cherishes
Dubbed by the New Yorker as "one of America's very best singer-songwriters," Dar Williams has made her career not in stadiums, but touring America's small towns. She...
by A.N. Wilson
Language: English
Release Date: March 27, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: March 27, 2012
er's unlikely rise to power and his uncanny ability to manipulate his fellow man resulted in the deaths of millions of Europeans and a horrific world war, yet despite his colossal role in world history, he remains mythologized and, as a result, misunderstood. In Hitler, A.N. Wilson limns this mysterious...
Creating Minds
An Anatomy of Creativity as Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, G
Language: English
Release Date: December 6, 2011
Howard Gardner changed the way we think about intelligence. In his classic work Frames of Mind, he undermined the common notion that intelligence is a single capacity that every human being possesses to a greater or lesser extent. Now building on the framework he developed for understanding intelligence,...
How to Create the Perfect Wife
Britain's Most Ineligible Bachelor and his Enlightened Quest to Train the Ideal Mate
Language: English
Release Date: April 9, 2013
Thomas Day, an 18th-century British writer and radical, knew exactly the sort of woman he wanted to marry. Pure and virginal like an English country maid yet tough and hardy like a Spartan heroine, she would live with him in an isolated cottage, completely subservient to his whims. But after being...
The Great Cat Massacre
And Other Episodes in French Cultural History
Language: English
Release Date: May 12, 2009
The landmark history of France and French culture in the eighteenth-century, a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
When the apprentices of a Paris printing shop in the 1730s held a series of mock trials and then hanged all the cats they could lay their hands on, why did they find it...
China
A History
Language: English
Release Date: October 6, 2009
An authoritative account of five thousand years of Chinese history
Many nations define themselves in terms of territory or people; China defines itself in terms of history. Taking into account the country's unrivaled, voluminous tradition of history writing, John Keay has composed a vital and...
The Last 100 Days
FDR at War and at Peace
Language: English
Release Date: December 12, 2017
A revealing portrait of the end of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's life and presidency, shedding new light on how he made his momentous final policy decisions
The first hundred days of FDR's presidency are justly famous, often viewed as a period of political action without equal in American history....
Heyday
The 1850s and the Dawn of the Global Age
Language: English
Release Date: April 26, 2016
A global history of the 1850s, the turbulent decade that marked the peak of the Victorian era, the birth of modernity, and the beginning of the first global age
by Joan Hoff, Marian Yates
Language: English
Release Date: January 6, 2008
Language: English
Release Date: January 6, 2008
In 1895 twenty-six-year-old Bridget Cleary disappeared from her cottage in rural County Tipperary and remained missing for several days. At last her body was discovered, bent, broken, and badly burned in a shallow grave. Within a few days, her unimaginable story came to light: for almost a week before...
by Andre Gerolymatos
Language: English
Release Date: August 5, 2008
Language: English
Release Date: August 5, 2008
In this riveting new history of the Balkan peoples, André Gerolymatos explores how ancient events engendered cultural myths that evolved over time, gaining strength in the collective consciousnesses of Orthodox Christians and Muslims alike. In colorful detail, we meet the key figures that instigated...
Voyeur Nation
Media, Privacy, And Peering In Modern Culture
Language: English
Release Date: April 21, 2009
From 24-hour-a-day "girl cam" sites on the World Wide Web to trash-talk television shows like "Jerry Springer" and reality television programs like "Cops," we've become a world of voyeurs. We like to watch others as their intimate moments, private facts, secrets, and...
The Citizen's Constitution
An Annotated Guide
Language: English
Release Date: April 5, 2011
Pocket versions of the Constitution of the United States of America abound, as do multi-volume commentaries, scholarly histories of its writing, and political posturings of various clauses. But what if you want a delightfully quick, witty, and readable reference that, in one compact volume, places...
It's Even Worse Than It Looks
How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism
Language: English
Release Date: April 5, 2016
Hyperpartisanship is as old as American democracy. But now, acrimony is not confined to a moment; it's a permanent state of affairs and has seeped into every part of the political process. Identifying the overriding problems that have led Congress-and the United States-to the brink of institutional...
Liberty's Blueprint
How Madison and Hamilton Wrote the Federalist Papers, Defined the Constitution, and Made Democracy S
Language: English
Release Date: June 30, 2009
Aside from the Constitution itself, there is no more important document in American politics and law than the Federalist Papers—the series of pamphlets written by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison to explain the meaning of the proposed Constitution to the American people and persuade them of...