Basic Books: 1466 books
Rampage
The Social Roots of School Shootings
Language: English
Release Date: August 1, 2008
A distinguished sociologist reveals the warning signs of a school shooter--and why we so often miss them
Parkland. Sandy Hook. Columbine. The list of school shootings gets longer by the day, and it often seems like no school is safe. Over the last decades, school shootings have decimated communities...
Rogue Nation
American Unilateralism And The Failure Of Good Intentions
Language: English
Release Date: August 4, 2008
America's democratic ideals have long been the hope of the world, but our allies increasingly see us as abandoning those ideals. It's not hard to understand why. In the months before 9/11, the United States walked away from a number of international treaties including the Kyoto Accord. After the attack,...
Bound to Lead
The Changing Nature of American Power
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2016
Is America still Number 1? A leading scholar of international politics and former State Department official takes issue with Paul Kennedy and others and clearly demonstrates that the United States is still the dominant world power, with no challenger in sight. But analogies about decline only divert...
The Future of Everything
The Science of Prediction
Language: English
Release Date: February 26, 2008
For centuries, scientists have strived to predict the future. But to what extent have they succeeded? Can past events-Hurricane Katrina, the Internet stock bubble, the SARS outbreak-help us understand what will happen next? Will scientists ever really be able to forecast catastrophes, or will we always...
Europe
The Struggle for Supremacy, from 1453 to the Present
Language: English
Release Date: April 30, 2013
If there is a fundamental truth of geopolitics, it is this: whoever controls the core of Europe can control the entire continent, and whoever controls all of Europe can dominate the world. Over the past five centuries, a rotating cast of kings and conquerors, presidents and dictators have set their...
Political Animals
How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics
Language: English
Release Date: January 5, 2016
Can a football game affect the outcome of an election? What about shark attacks? Or a drought? In a rational world the answer, of course, would be no. But as bestselling historian Rick Shenkman shows in Political Animals, our world is anything but rational. This isn't because we aren't smart. Instead,...
Faces at the Bottom of the Well
The Permanence of Racism
Language: English
Release Date: October 30, 2018
The classic work on American racism and the struggle for racial justice
In Faces at the Bottom of the Well, civil rights activist and legal scholar Derrick Bell uses allegory and historical example to argue that racism is an integral and permanent part of American society. African American...
The Fields Of Athenry
A Journey Through Ireland
Language: English
Release Date: November 10, 2008
In The Fields of Athenry, James Charles Roy leads us through the Irish past and present by way of his own personal struggles and misadventures in renovating Moyode Castle, an old tower house that he purchased more than thirty years ago. While he pieces together its four-hundred-year-old past, the...
Wild Nights
How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World
Language: English
Release Date: March 7, 2017
Why the modern world forgot how to sleep
Why is sleep frustrating for so many people? Why do we spend so much time and money managing and medicating it, and training ourselves and our children to do it correctly? In Wild Nights, Benjamin Reiss finds answers in sleep's hidden history--one that...
Learning From the Octopus
How Secrets from Nature Can Help Us Fight Terrorist Attacks, Natural Disasters, and Disease
Language: English
Release Date: March 27, 2012
Despite the billions of dollars we’ve poured into foreign wars, homeland security, and disaster response, we are fundamentally no better prepared for the next terrorist attack or unprecedented flood than we were in 2001. Our response to catastrophe remains unchanged: add another step to airport...
The Crime of Reason
And the Closing of the Scientific Mind
Language: English
Release Date: September 23, 2008
We all agree that the free flow of ideas is essential to creativity. And we like to believe that in our modern, technological world, information is more freely available and flows faster than ever before. But according to Nobel Laureate Robert Laughlin, acquiring information is becoming a danger or...
by John Dunn
Language: English
Release Date: January 6, 2008
Language: English
Release Date: January 6, 2008
John Dunn is the founding father of the Cambridge school, which introduced an approach to political theory that emphasizes the importance of historical context in the formation and interpretation of arguments and ideas. The Cunning of Unreason makes a powerful case for the application of the Cambridge...
That Mad Ache
A Novel
Language: English
Release Date: May 12, 2009
That Mad Ache, set in high-society Paris in the mid-1960’s, recounts the emotional battle unleashed in the heart of Lucile, a sensitive but rootless young woman who finds herself caught between her carefree, tranquil love for 50-year-old Charles, a gentle, reflective, and well-off businessman, and...
The Perfect Bet
How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling
Language: English
Release Date: February 23, 2016
"An elegant and amusing account.... Anyone planning to enter a casino or place an online bet would be advised to keep this book handy." --Wall Street Journal
For the past 500 years, gamblers-led by mathematicians and scientists-have been trying to figure out how to pull the rug out from under...