Basic Books: 1466 books
Abraham
The First Historical Biography
Language: English
Release Date: March 25, 2009
The world's three largest faiths all find a common root in one man: Abraham. Breaking new ground, David Rosenberg portrays Abraham as a man whose whole life, and therefore his legacy, is informed by the Sumerian culture that produced him. Abraham is a brilliant literary excavation of the ancient cultures from which our modern world has grown.
A Land on Fire
The Environmental Consequences of the Southeast Asian Boom
Language: English
Release Date: March 31, 2008
The future of Earth's environment will be decided in Asia, home to 60 percent of the world's population and some of the world's fastest-growing economies. As an award-winning investigative journalist based in Bankok, James Fahn spent a decade grappling with the challenges facing the region's mega-cities,...
America's Great Game
The CIA's Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East
Language: English
Release Date: December 3, 2013
The Central Intelligence Agency's reputation in the Middle East today has been marred by waterboarding and drone strikes, yet in its earliest years the agency was actually the region's staunchest western ally. In America's Great Game, celebrated intelligence historian Hugh Wilford reveals how three...
Double Crossed
The Missionaries Who Spied for the United States During the Second World War
Language: English
Release Date: September 24, 2019
The untold story of the Christian missionaries who played a crucial role in the allied victory in World War II
What makes a good missionary makes a good spy. Or so thought "Wild" Bill Donovan when he secretly recruited a team of religious activists for the Office of Strategic Services....
A Nation Forged by Crisis
A New American History
Language: English
Release Date: October 16, 2018
A concise new history of the United States revealing that crises--not unlike those of the present day--have determined our nation's course from the start
In A Nation Forged by Crisis, historian Jay Sexton contends that our national narrative is not one of halting yet inevitable progress, but...
Left at the Altar
How the Democrats Lost the Catholics and How the Catholics Can Save the Democrats
Language: English
Release Date: July 1, 2008
In 1960, Democrats and Catholics united to elect John F. Kennedy, America's first Catholic president. As we approach the 2008 presidential election, the Democratic party is struggling to secure Catholic votes. For most of the twentieth-century, however, the Catholic vote was solidly Democratic. In...
The Math Gene
How Mathematical Thinking Evolved And Why Numbers Are Like Gossip
Language: English
Release Date: May 17, 2001
Why is math so hard? And why, despite this difficulty, are some people so good at it? If there's some inborn capacity for mathematical thinking-which there must be, otherwise no one could do it -why can't we all do it well? Keith Devlin has answers to all these difficult questions, and in giving them...
The Math Instinct
Why You're a Mathematical Genius (Along with Lobsters, Birds, Cats, and Dogs)
Language: English
Release Date: April 29, 2009
There are two kinds of math: the hard kind and the easy kind. The easy kind, practiced by ants, shrimp, Welsh Corgis - and us - is innate. But what innate calculating skills do we humans have? Leaving aside built-in mathematics, such as the visual system, ordinary people do just fine when faced with...
Worlds Of Experience
Interweaving Philosophical And Clinical Dimensions In Psychoanalysis
Language: English
Release Date: August 6, 2008
The intersubjective perspective regards all psychological processes as emanating from personal interrelatedness. First presented by Robert D. Stolorow in his classic work Faces in a Cloud (1978), it is one of the most powerful concepts to be introduced into the post-Freudian era. In Worlds of Experience,...
Life's Ratchet
How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos
Language: English
Release Date: October 30, 2012
The cells in our bodies consist of molecules, made up of the same carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen atoms found in air and rocks. But molecules, such as water and sugar, are not alive. So how do our cells—assemblies of otherwise “dead” molecules—come to life, and together constitute a living being?
In...
by Michael Gross
Language: English
Release Date: January 3, 2008
Language: English
Release Date: January 3, 2008
Can life exist in the Antarctic ice, in the deep subsurface, in dilute sulfuric acid, in hot springs-even on Mars? What degree of high or low temperature, pressure, or salt concentration can living cells tolerate? In recent years, scientists have discovered many single-cell creatures that exist in-in...
Myths Of Gender
Biological Theories About Women And Men, Revised Edition
Language: English
Release Date: August 4, 2008
By carefully examining the biological, genetic, evolutionary, and psychological evidence, a noted biologist finds a shocking lack of substance behind ideas about biologically based sex differences. Features a new chapter and afterward on recent biological breakthroughs.
by John Bowlby
Language: English
Release Date: August 1, 2008
Language: English
Release Date: August 1, 2008
This first volume of John Bowlby's Attachment and Loss series examines the nature of the child's ties to the mother. Beginning with a discussion of instinctive behavior, its causation, functioning, and ontogeny, Bowlby proceeds to a theoretical formulation of attachment behavior-how it develops, how...
How Brains Think
Evolving Intelligence, Then And Now
Language: English
Release Date: November 25, 2014
If you're good at finding the one right answer to life's multiple-choice questions, you're ”smart.” But ”intelligence” is what you need when contemplating the leftovers in the refrigerator, trying to figure out what might go with them; or if you're trying to speak a sentence that you've never...