Basic Books: 1466 books
by Robert Alter
Language: English
Release Date: September 6, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: September 6, 2011
Three decades ago, renowned literary expert Robert Alter radically expanded the horizons of biblical scholarship by recasting the Bible as not only a human creation but a work of literary art deserving studied criticism. In The Art of Biblical Poetry, his companion to the seminal The Art of Biblical...
by Claude Levi-strauss
Language: English
Release Date: August 5, 2008
Language: English
Release Date: August 5, 2008
The structural method,” first set forth in this epoch-making book, changed the very face of social anthropology. This reissue of a classic will reintroduce readers to Lévi-Strauss's understanding of man and society in terms of individuals-kinship, social organization, religion, mythology, and art.
Predators
Pedophiles, Rapists, And Other Sex Offenders
Language: English
Release Date: July 3, 2018
What motivates sexual abusers? Why are so few caught? Drawing on the stories of abusers, Anna C. Salter shows that sexual predators use sophisticated deception techniques and rely on misconceptions surrounding them to evade discovery. Arguing that even the most knowledgeable among us can be fooled,...
Kingdoms of Faith
A New History of Islamic Spain
Language: English
Release Date: May 1, 2018
A magisterial, myth-dispelling history of Islamic Spain spanning the millennium between the founding of Islam in the seventh century and the final expulsion of Spain's Muslims in the seventeenth
In Kingdoms of Faith, award-winning historian Brian A. Catlos rewrites the history of Islamic Spain...
The Problem Of The Soul
Two Visions Of Mind And How To Reconcile Them
Language: English
Release Date: August 5, 2008
Science has always created problems for traditional ways of seeing things, but now the very attributes that make us human--free will, the permanence of personal identity, the existence of the soul--are threatened by the science of the mind. If the mind is the brain, and therefore a physical object...
Words Like Loaded Pistols
Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama
Language: English
Release Date: April 26, 2016
An entertaining history of great oratory." -- New Yorker
In Words Like Loaded Pistols, Sam Leith traces the art of persuasion, beginning in ancient Syracuse and taking us on detours as varied and fascinating as Elizabethan England, Milton's Satanic realm, the Springfield of Abraham Lincoln...
by Colin Jones
Language: English
Release Date: November 20, 2018
Language: English
Release Date: November 20, 2018
The vivid story of the creation, renovation, and enduring legacy of the most famous building in France: the palace of Versailles
Nothing represents the glorious and fraught history of France quite like the Palace of Versailles. Made famous by the absolutist king Louis XIV, Versailles became...
by Michael Gross
Language: English
Release Date: January 4, 2008
Language: English
Release Date: January 4, 2008
Our lives are about to be changed by new technologies that operate on a scale too small to be seen by even the most powerful optical microscopes. Devices measured in nanometers-billionths of a meter-have set off a nanotechnology revolution. In Travels to the Nanoworld, Michael Gross takes us deep...
Blind Spot
The Secret History of American Counterterrorism
Language: English
Release Date: April 24, 2009
In this revelatory new account, national security expert Timothy Naftali relates the full story of America's decades-long attempt to fight terrorism. On September 11, 2001, a long history of failures and missteps came to a head, with tragic results. But, explains Naftali, it didn't have to be so....
by Betty Boyd Caroli
Language: English
Release Date: February 27, 2018
Language: English
Release Date: February 27, 2018
The Roosevelt name conjures up images of powerful Presidents and dashing men of high society. But few people know much about the extraordinary network of women that held the Roosevelt clan together through war, scandal, and disease. In The Roosevelt Women, Betty Boyd Caroli weaves together stories...
Bad Faith
When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine
Language: English
Release Date: March 10, 2015
In recent years, there have been major outbreaks of whooping cough among children in California, mumps in New York, and measles in Ohio's Amish country-despite the fact that these are all vaccine-preventable diseases. Although America is the most medically advanced place in the world, many people...
Seize the Daylight
The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time
Language: English
Release Date: April 28, 2009
Benjamin Franklin conceived of it. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle endorsed it. Winston Churchill campaigned for it. Kaiser Wilhelm first employed it. Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt went to war with it, and more recently the United States fought an energy crisis with it.
For several months every...
America's Forgotten Majority
Why The White Working Class Still Matters
Language: English
Release Date: January 4, 2008
A powerful look at the real America, dominated by America's "forgotten majority"-white working-class men and women who make up 55 percent of the voting population
The Perversion Of Knowledge
The True Story Of Soviet Science
Language: English
Release Date: September 9, 2009
During the Soviet years, Russian science was touted as one of the greatest successes of the regime. Russian science was considered to be equal, if not superior, to that of the wealthy western nations. The Perversion of Knowledge, a history of Soviet science that focuses on its control by the KGB and...