Basic Books: 1466 books
The Invisible Kingdom
From the Tips of Our Fingers to the Tops of Our Trash, Inside the Curious World of Microbes
Language: English
Release Date: August 4, 2009
With the wit of Bill Bryson and the spirit of Natalie Angier, Idan Ben- Barak takes us on a fantastic voyage into the infinitesimal world of microbiology. In The Invisible Kingdom, he introduces us to the amazing lives and workings of genes, proteins, bacteria, and viruses, and the ways in which they...
Louder Than Words
The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning
Language: English
Release Date: October 30, 2012
Whether it’s brusque, convincing, fraught with emotion, or dripping with innuendo, language is fundamentally a tool for conveying meaning—a uniquely human magic trick in which you vibrate your vocal cords to make your innermost thoughts pop up in someone else’s mind. You can use it to talk about...
Searching For Memory
The Brain, The Mind, And The Past
Language: English
Release Date: August 4, 2008
Memory. There may be nothing more important to human beings than our ability to enshrine experience and recall it. While philosophers and poets have elevated memory to an almost mystical level, psychologists have struggled to demystify it. Now, according to Daniel Schacter, one of the most distinguished...
We Have the Technology
How Biohackers, Foodies, Physicians, and Scientists Are Transforming Human Perception, One Sense at a Time
Language: English
Release Date: December 8, 2015
An award-winning journalist investigates how scientists and citizens around the world are re-tooling our senses-and what their discoveries are teaching us about the nature and future of human perception
How do we know what's real? That's not a trick question: sensory science is increasingly...
by Lawrence M. Krauss
Language: English
Release Date: August 2, 2007
Language: English
Release Date: August 2, 2007
How does the Star Trek universe stack up against the real universe?
What warps when you're traveling at warp speed? What is the difference between a wormhole and a black hole? Are time loops really possible, and can I kill my grandmother before I am born? Anyone who has ever wondered "could...
The Transparent Society
Will Technology Force Us To Choose Between Privacy And Freedom?
Language: English
Release Date: May 7, 1999
In New York and Baltimore, police cameras scan public areas twenty-four hours a day. Huge commercial databases track you finances and sell that information to anyone willing to pay. Host sites on the World Wide Web record every page you view, and smart” toll roads know where you drive. Every day,...
Interop
The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems
Language: English
Release Date: June 5, 2012
In Interop, technology experts John Palfrey and Urs Gasser explore the immense importance of interoperability-the standardization and integration of technology-and show how this simple principle will hold the key to our success in the coming decades and beyond.
The practice of standardization...
Words and Rules
The Ingredients Of Language
Language: English
Release Date: July 14, 2015
"If you are not already a Steven Pinker addict, this book will make you one." --Jared Diamond
In Words and Rules, Steven Pinker explores profound mysteries of language by picking a deceptively simple phenomenon--regular and irregular verbs--and examining it from every angle. With humor and...
The Birth Of A Mother
How The Motherhood Experience Changes You Forever
Language: English
Release Date: December 3, 1998
As you prepare to become a mother, you face an experience unlike any other in your life. Having a baby will redirect your preferences and pleasures and, most likely, will realign some of your values.As you undergo this unique psychological transformation, you will be guided by new hopes, fears, and...
The Way We Never Were
American Families and the Nostalgia Trap
Language: English
Release Date: March 29, 2016
The definitive edition of the classic, myth-shattering history of the American family
Leave It to Beaver was not a documentary, a man's home has never been his castle, the "male breadwinner marriage" is the least traditional family in history, and rape and sexual assault were far higher in...
Unstrange Minds
Remapping the World of Autism
Language: English
Release Date: July 31, 2008
A father's inspiring portrait of his daughter informs this classic reassessment of the "epidemic" of autism.
When Isabel Grinker was diagnosed with autism in 1994, it occurred in only about 3 of every 10,000 children. Within ten years, rates had skyrocketed. Some scientists reported...
The Depths
The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic
Language: English
Release Date: February 11, 2014
Nearly every depressed person is assured by doctors, well-meaning friends and family, the media, and ubiquitous advertisements that the underlying problem is a chemical imbalance. Such a simple defect should be fixable, yet despite all of the resources that have been devoted to finding a pharmacological...
The Batterer
A Psychological Profile
Language: English
Release Date: August 5, 2008
What kind of man deliberately hurts the woman he loves? Drawing on his pathbreaking studies of more than seven hundred abusive men, as well as therapy with hundreds more, Dutton paints a dramatic and surprising portrait of the man who assaults his intimate partner.
A Strange Stirring
The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s
Language: English
Release Date: January 4, 2011
In 1963, Betty Friedan unleashed a storm of controversy with her bestselling book, The Feminine Mystique. Hundreds of women wrote to her to say that the book had transformed, even saved, their lives. Nearly half a century later, many women still recall where they were when they first read it.
In...