Basic Books: 1466 books
The Shape of Inner Space
String Theory and the Geometry of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions
Language: English
Release Date: September 7, 2010
String theory says we live in a ten-dimensional universe, but that only four are accessible to our everyday senses. According to theorists, the missing six are curled up in bizarre structures known as Calabi-Yau manifolds. In The Shape of Inner Space, Shing-Tung Yau, the man who mathematically proved...
Cosmic Numbers
The Numbers That Define Our Universe
Language: English
Release Date: September 6, 2011
Our fascination with numbers begins when we are children and continues throughout our lives. We start counting our fingers and toes and end up balancing checkbooks and calculating risk. So powerful is the appeal of numbers that many people ascribe to them a mystical significance. Other numbers go...
Falling Upwards
Essays in Defense of the Imagination
Language: English
Release Date: April 27, 2009
Sex and the City, Saul Bellow, Eyes Wide Shut, Dante and the American self, Barbara Kingsolver, acting in Hollywood, Soviet painting in Soho, Angels in America, Jane Austen in the present, J.K. Rowling--nothing escapes Lee Siegel's incandescent eye. Siegel possesses an intellectual range and independent...
The Original Knickerbocker
The Life of Washington Irving
Language: English
Release Date: February 26, 2008
Washington Irving-author, ambassador, Manhattanite, and international celebrity-has largely slipped from America's memory, and yet, his creations are still very well known. With a historian's eye for scope and significance, Andrew Burstein returns Irving to the context of his native nineteenth century...
Jefferson's Secrets
Death and Desire at Monticello
Language: English
Release Date: March 21, 2006
When Thomas Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, he left behind a series of mysteries that have captured the imaginations of historical investigators for generations. In Jefferson's Secrets, Andrew Burstein draws on sources previous biographers have glossed over or missed entirely. Beginning with Jefferson's...
Utopia's Debris
Selected Essays
Language: English
Release Date: November 11, 2008
Gary Indiana is one of America's leading cultural critics-a public intellectual who has written key essays on every aspect of American culture. Utopia's Debris comprises selections of his very best work, revealing him to be an enormously acute, frequently scabrous, and always brilliant observer of...
The Vertigo Years
Europe, 1900-1914
Language: English
Release Date: October 21, 2008
Europe, 19001914: a world adrift, a pulsating era of creativity and contradictions. The major topics of the day: terrorism, globalization, immigration, consumerism, the collapse of moral values, and the rivalry of superpowers. The twentieth century was not born in the trenches of the Somme or Passchendaele-but...
Consider the Fork
A History of How We Cook and Eat
Language: English
Release Date: October 9, 2012
Award-winning food writer Bee Wilson's secret history of kitchens, showing how new technologies - from the fork to the microwave and beyond - have fundamentally shaped how and what we eat.
Since prehistory, humans have braved sharp knives, fire, and grindstones to transform raw ingredients...
A Dark Muse
A History of the Occult
Language: English
Release Date: September 9, 2009
The occult was a crucial influence on the Renaissance, and it obsessed the popular thinkers of the day. But with the Age of Reason, occultism was sidelined; only charlatans found any use for it. Occult ideas did not disappear, however, but rather went underground. It developed into a fruitful source...
How to See the World
An Introduction to Images, from Self-Portraits to Selfies, Maps to Movies, and More
Language: English
Release Date: April 12, 2016
Every two minutes, Americans alone take more photographs than were printed in the entire nineteenth century; every minute, people from around the world upload over 300 hours of video to YouTube; and in 2014, we took over one trillion photographs. From the funny memes that we send to our friends to...
by Tzu Sun
Language: English
Release Date: February 11, 1994
Language: English
Release Date: February 11, 1994
The definitive translation of Sun-tzu's timeless classic of military strategy, Art of War
Art of War is almost certainly the most famous study of strategy ever written and has had an extraordinary influence on the history of warfare. The principles Sun-tzu expounded were utilized brilliantly...
Inside the Jihad
My Life with Al Qaeda
Language: English
Release Date: March 9, 2007
Between 1994 and 2000, Omar Nasiri worked as a secret agent for Europe's top foreign intelligence services-including France's DGSE (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure), and Britain's MI5 and MI6. From the netherworld of Islamist cells in Belgium, to the training camps of Afghanistan,...
Messiah
The Composition and Afterlife of Handel's Masterpiece
Language: English
Release Date: October 24, 2017
From Handel's renowned biographer, the story of one of the most celebrated compositions of Western classical music, Handel's famous oratorio, Messiah
In the late summer of 1741, George Friderick Handel, composed an oratorio set to words from the King James Bible, rich in tuneful arias and magnificent...
by Richard Evans
Language: English
Release Date: August 4, 2008
Language: English
Release Date: August 4, 2008
In ruling against the controversial historian David Irving, whose libel suit against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt was tried in April 2000, the High Court in London labeled Irving a falsifier of history. No objective historian, declared the judge, would manipulate the documentary record...