Basic Books: 1466 books
by Neil McKenna
Language: English
Release Date: March 5, 2009
Language: English
Release Date: March 5, 2009
In The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, Neil McKenna provides stunning new insight into the tumultuous sexual and psychological worlds of this brilliant and tormented figure. McKenna charts Wilde's astonishing odyssey through London's sexual underworld, and provides explosive new evidence of the political...
A Sovereign People
The Crises of the 1790s and the Birth of American Nationalism
Language: English
Release Date: May 2, 2017
The momentous story of how George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams navigated the crises of the 1790s and in the process bound the states into a unified nation
Today the United States is the dominant power in world affairs, and that status seems assured. Yet in the decade following...
by Richard Brookhiser
Language: English
Release Date: September 27, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: September 27, 2011
A vivid portrait of the "Father of the Constitution"
James Madison led one of the most influential and prolific lives in American history, and his story--although all too often overshadowed by his more celebrated contemporaries--is integral to that of the nation. Madison helped to shape our...
Founders' Son
A Life of Abraham Lincoln
Language: English
Release Date: October 14, 2014
Abraham Lincoln grew up in the long shadow of the Founding Fathers. Seeking an intellectual and emotional replacement for his own taciturn father, Lincoln turned to the great men of the founding-Washington, Paine, Jefferson-and their great documents-the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution-for...
by Marybeth Hamilton
Language: English
Release Date: June 30, 2009
Language: English
Release Date: June 30, 2009
In this extraordinary reconstruction of the origins of the blues, historian Marybeth Hamilton demonstrates that the story as we know it is largely a myth. Following the trail of characters like Howard Odum, who combed Mississippi's back roads with a cylinder phonograph to record vagrants, John and...
Fracture
Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938
Language: English
Release Date: April 14, 2015
When the Great War ended in 1918, the West was broken. Religious faith, patriotism, and the belief in human progress had all been called into question by the mass carnage experienced by both sides. Shell shocked and traumatized, the West faced a world it no longer recognized: the old order had collapsed,...
The Cure for Catastrophe
How We Can Stop Manufacturing Natural Disasters
Language: English
Release Date: September 6, 2016
We can't stop natural disasters but we can stop them being disastrous. One of the world's foremost risk experts tells us how.
Year after year, floods wreck people's homes and livelihoods, earthquakes tear communities apart, and tornadoes uproot whole towns. Natural disasters cause destruction...
Mindless
Why Smarter Machines are Making Dumber Humans
Language: English
Release Date: February 11, 2014
We live in the age of Computer Business Systems (CBSs)-the highly complex, computer-intensive management programs on which large organizations increasingly rely. In Mindless, Simon Head argues that these systems have come to trump human expertise, dictating the goals and strategies of a wide array...
Drawing the Map of Life
Inside the Human Genome Project
Language: English
Release Date: July 31, 2012
Drawing the Map of Life is the dramatic story of the Human Genome Project from its origins, through the race to order the 3 billion subunits of DNA, to the surprises emerging as scientists seek to exploit the molecule of heredity. It's the first account to deal in depth with the intellectual roots...
The 10,000 Year Explosion
How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution
Language: English
Release Date: January 27, 2009
Resistance to malaria. Blue eyes. Lactose tolerance. What do all of these traits have in common? Every one of them has emerged in the last 10,000 years.
Scientists have long believed that the “great leap forward” that occurred some 40,000 to 50,000 years ago in Europe marked end of significant...
Regenesis
How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves
Language: English
Release Date: April 8, 2014
A Harvard biologist and master inventor explores how new biotechnologies will enable us to bring species back from the dead, unlock vast supplies of renewable energy, and extend human life.
In Regenesis, George Church and science writer Ed Regis explore the possibilities of the emerging field...
The Truth Will Set You Free
Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self
Language: English
Release Date: March 21, 2007
More than twenty years ago, a little-known Swiss psychoanalyst wrote a book that changed the way many people viewed themselves and their world. In simple but powerful prose, the deeply moving Drama of the Gifted Child showed how parents unconsciously form and deform the emotional lives of their children....
The Upside of Down
Why the Rise of the Rest is Good for the West
Language: English
Release Date: January 7, 2014
America is in decline, and the rise of the East suggests a bleak future for the world's only superpower so goes the conventional wisdom. But what if the traditional measures of national status are no longer as important as they once were? What if America's well-being was assessed according to entirely...
by Gary Indiana
Language: English
Release Date: February 9, 2010
Language: English
Release Date: February 9, 2010
In the summer of 1962, Andy Warhol unveiled 32 Soup Cans in his first solo exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles-and sent the art world reeling. The responses ran from incredulity to outrage; the poet Taylor Mead described the exhibition as a brilliant slap in the face to America.” The...