The fascinating untold story of how the ancients imagined robots and other forms of artificial life--and even invented real automated machines The first robot to walk the earth was a bronze giant...
How does life work$277 How does nature produce the right numbers of zebras and lions on the African savanna, or fish in the ocean$278 How do our bodies produce the right numbers of cells in our...
Art today is defined aby its relationship to money as never before. Prices have been driven to unprecedented heights, conventional boundaries within the art world have collapsed, and artists think...
In 2009, Harper's Magazine sent war-crimes expert Lawrence Douglas to Munich to cover the last chapter of the lengthiest case ever to arise from the Holocaust: the trial of eighty-nine-year-old...
From the first centuries of Islam to well into the Middle Ages, Jews and Christians produced hundreds of manuscripts containing portions of the Bible in Arabic. Until recently, however, these...
In "It's About Time", N. David Mermin asserts that relativity ought to be an important part of everyone's education - after all, it is largely about time, a subject with which all...
The ancient practice of alchemy thrived in Europe until the seventeenth century. CG Jung first turned to alchemy for personal illumination in coping with trauma. This book brings together a...
How to overcome barriers to the long-term investments that are essential for solving the world's biggest problems There has never been a greater need for long-term investments to tackle the...
Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) was a Dutch humanist, scholar, and social critic, and one of the most important figures of the Renaissance. The Praise of Folly is perhaps his best-known work....
How a new breed of dictators holds power by manipulating information and faking democracy Hitler, Stalin, and Mao ruled through violence, fear, and ideology. But in recent decades a new breed of...
Many historical processes exhibit recurrent patterns of change. Century-long periods of population expansion come before long periods of stagnation and decline; the dynamics of prices mirror...
Shortlisted for the 2009 }Financial Times/ Goldman Sachs Business Book Of The Year{ award, and ahead of the eventual winner in the online poll, this incisive book explores the role of human...
A major new look at the work of one of America's foremost self-taught artistsBill Traylor (ca. 1853-1949) came to art-making on his own and found his creative voice without guidance; today he...
How much of our fate is tied to the status of our parents and grandparents? How much does it influence our children? More than we wish to believe. While it has been argued that rigid class...
This is the first modern-style photographic field guide to the birds of Chile, an increasingly popular destination with birders and naturalists. Compact and easy to carry, pack, and use, Birds of...
The most comprehensive single-volume photographic guide to Europe’s birds ever produced―from the authors of the acclaimed Britain’s Birds Covering more than 900 species, and illustrated with 4,700...
In war, do mass and materiel matter most? Will states with the largest, best equipped, information-technology-rich militaries invariably win? The prevailing answer today among both scholars and...
This is the first full-scale biography of Leonhard Euler (1707-83), one of the greatest mathematicians and theoretical physicists of all time. In this comprehensive and authoritative account,...
Pack your cutlass and blunderbuss - it's time to go a-pirating! "The Invisible Hook" takes readers inside the wily world of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century pirates. With...
When it was first published in 1947, The Age of Anxiety--W. H. Auden's last, longest, and most ambitious book-length poem--immediately struck a powerful chord, capturing the imagination of the...
This book is a comprehensive study of cooperation among the advanced capitalist countries. Can cooperation persist without the dominance of a single power, such as the United States after World War...
A superb new edition of Epictetus's famed handbook on Stoicism--translated aby one of the world's leading authorities on Stoic philosophyBorn a slave, the Roman Stoic philosopher Epictetus...