Raghuram Rajan was one of the few economists who warned of the global financial crisis before it hit. Now, as the world struggles to recover, it's tempting to blame what happened on just a few...
Machiavelli praised his military genius. European royalty sought out his secret elixir against poison. His life inspired Mozart's first opera, while for centuries poets and playwrights recited...
"Afghanistan" traces the historic struggles and the changing nature of political authority in this volatile region of the world, from the Mughal Empire in the sixteenth century to the...
Nikola Tesla was a major contributor to the electrical revolution that transformed daily life at the turn of the twentieth century. His inventions, patents, and theoretical work formed the basis of...
How a simple equation reshaped mathematics Leonhard Euler's polyhedron formula describes the structure of many objects--from soccer balls and gemstones to Buckminster Fuller's buildings and...
Most of us know there is a payoff to looking good, and in the quest for beauty we spend countless hours and billions of dollars on personal grooming, cosmetics, and plastic surgery. But how much...
Why an awareness of Earth's temporal rhythms is critical to our planetary survival Few of us have any conception of the enormous timescales of our planet's long history, and this narrow...
When confronted with an ethical dilemma, most of us like to think we would stand up for our principles. But we are not as ethical as we think we are. In "Blind Spots", leading business...
Written by one of the twentieth century's leading textile artists, this splendidly illustrated book is a luminous meditation on the art of weaving, its history, its tools and techniques, and...
"It takes an entire lifetime to learn how to die," wrote the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca (c. 4 BC-65 AD). He counseled readers to "study death always," and took his own advice,...
The Muqaddimah, often translated as "Introduction" or "Prolegomenon," is the most important Islamic history of the premodern world. Written by the great fourteenth-century Arab...
Joseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume "Dostoevsky" is widely recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language - and one of the greatest literary biographies of the...
The first major English-language biography of Francisco Goya y Lucientes, considered the last of Spain's old masters and the first artist of the modern eraThe art of Francisco Goya (1746-1828)...
We make up our minds about others after seeing their faces for a fraction of a second--and these snap judgments predict all kinds of important decisions. For example, politicians who simply look...
The enigmatic sixteenth-century Swiss physician and natural philosopher Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, called Paracelsus, is known for the almost superhuman energy with...
A handsome annotated edition of Einstein's celebrated book on relativity After completing the final version of his general theory of relativity in November 1915, Albert Einstein wrote...
An illustrated mini-encyclopedia of fungal lore, from John Cage and Terrence McKenna to mushroom sex and fairy rings Fungipedia presents a delightful A-Z treasury of mushroom lore. With more than...
A brief introduction to gravity through Einstein's general theory of relativity Of the four fundamental forces of nature, gravity might be the least understood and yet the one with which we are...
For 150 million years, the skies didn't belong to birds--they belonged to the pterosaurs. These flying reptiles, which include the pterodactyls, shared the world with the nonavian dinosaurs...
This essential guide to doing social research in this fast-evolving digital age explains how the digital revolution is transforming the way social scientists observe behavior, ask questions, run...
How looking beautiful has become a moral imperative in today's worldThe demand to be beautiful is increasingly important in today's visual and virtual culture. Rightly or wrongly, being...
In this authoritative and accessible book, one of the world's most renowned historians provides a concise and comprehensive history of capitalism within a global perspective from its medieval...
Maimonides was the greatest Jewish philosopher and legal scholar of the medieval period, a towering figure who has had a profound and lasting influence on Jewish law, philosophy, and religious...
In today's unpredictable and chaotic world, we look to science to provide certainty and answers--and often blame it when things go wrong. The Blind Spot reveals why our faith in scientific...