Basic Books: 1466 books
Why Is Sex Fun?
The Evolution of Human Sexuality
Language: English
Release Date: September 25, 1998
From the New York Times bestselling author of Upheaval, a fun and wide-ranging exploration of why human sexuality is so different from other animals', and how it made us who we are
To us humans, the sex lives of animals seem weird. But it's our own sex lives that are truly bizarre. We are the...
by Cass R. Sunstein
Language: English
Release Date: April 28, 2009
Language: English
Release Date: April 28, 2009
Praised as a must-have primer during the Roberts and Alito hearings, Radicals in Robes offers a rigorous yet accessible analysis of what's at stake in the judiciary choices made during these warring days of the Warren/Rehnquist legacy. Radicals in Robes pulls away the veil of rhetoric from a dangerous...
Roman Pilgrimage
The Station Churches
Language: English
Release Date: October 29, 2013
A preeminent scholar of Catholicism transports readers to Rome for the traditional station churches pilgrimage, offering a vivid and informative guide to the Eternal City and the Lenten season.
The annual Lenten pilgrimage to dozens of Rome's most striking churches is a sacred tradition dating...
The Amorous Heart
An Unconventional History of Love
Language: English
Release Date: January 9, 2018
An eminent scholar unearths the captivating history of the two-lobed heart symbol from scripture and tapestry to T-shirts and text messages, shedding light on how we have expressed love since antiquity
The symmetrical, exuberant heart is everywhere: it gives shape to candy, pendants, the frothy...
The Biological Mind
How Brain, Body, and Environment Collaborate to Make Us Who We Are
Language: English
Release Date: March 13, 2018
A pioneering neuroscientist argues that we are more than our brains
To many, the brain is the seat of personal identity and autonomy. But the way we talk about the brain is often rooted more in mystical conceptions of the soul than in scientific fact. This blinds us to the physical realities...
Bourgeois Utopias
The Rise And Fall Of Suburbia
Language: English
Release Date: August 1, 2008
A noted urban historian traces the story of the suburb from its origins in nineteenth-century London to its twentieth-century demise in decentralized cities like Los Angeles.
The Life of Super-Earths
How the Hunt for Alien Worlds and Artificial Cells Will Revolutionize Life on Our Planet
Language: English
Release Date: January 24, 2012
In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus fomented a revolution when he debunked the geocentric view of the universe, proving instead that our planet wasn’t central to the universe. Almost five hundred years later, the revolution he set in motion is nearly complete. Just as earth is not the center of things,...
Lucky Planet
Why Earth is Exceptional-and What That Means for Life in the Universe
Language: English
Release Date: April 8, 2014
Why Earth’s life-friendly climate makes it exceptional-and what that means for the likelihood of finding intelligent extraterrestrial life
We have long fantasized about finding life on planets other than our own. Yet even as we become aware of the vast expanses beyond our solar system, it...
by Adrian Goldsworthy
Language: English
Release Date: May 7, 2019
Language: English
Release Date: May 7, 2019
From an award-winning historian of ancient Rome, a concise and comprehensive history of the fighting forces that created the Roman Empire
Roman warfare was relentless in its pursuit of victory. A ruthless approach to combat played a major part in Rome's history, creating an empire that eventually...
Cannae
Hannibal's Greatest Victory
Language: English
Release Date: May 21, 2019
From an award-winning historian of ancient Rome, the definitive history of Rome's most devastating defeat
August 2, 216 BC was one of history's bloodiest single days of fighting. On a narrow plain near the Southern Italian town of Cannae, despite outnumbering their opponents almost two to one,...
The Lightness of Being
Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces
Language: English
Release Date: March 25, 2009
A Nobel-prize winning physicist takes on the essential question: what are we made of?
Our understanding of nature's deepest reality has changed radically, but almost without our noticing, over the past twenty-five years. Transcending the clash of older ideas about matter and space, acclaimed...
The Happiness of Pursuit
What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life
Language: English
Release Date: January 31, 2012
When fishing for happiness, catch and release. Remember these seven words-they are the keys to being happy. So says Shimon Edelman, an expert on psychology and the mind.
In The Happiness of Pursuit, Edelman offers a fundamental understanding of pleasure and joy via the brain. Using the concept...
Probably Approximately Correct
Nature's Algorithms for Learning and Prospering in a Complex World
Language: English
Release Date: June 4, 2013
We have effective theories for very few things. Gravity is one, electromagnetism another. But for most things—whether as mundane as finding a mate or as major as managing an economy—our theories are lousy or nonexistent. Fortunately, we don't need them, any more than a fish needs a theory of water...
One Renegade Cell
How Cancer Begins
Language: English
Release Date: August 4, 2008
Cancer research has reached a major turning point, and no one is better qualified to explain the past two deacades' dramatic leaps forward in understanding this disease than world-renowned molecular biologist Robert Weinberg, director of the Oncology Research Laboratory at the Whitehead Institute...