Celebrated for his brilliantly quirky insights into the physical world, Nobel laureate Richard Feynman also possessed an extraordinary talent for explaining difficult concepts to the general public. Here Feynman provides a classic and definitive introduction to QED (namely quantum electrodynamics...

The Oxford Translation of Aristotle was originally published in 12 volumes between 1912 and 1954. It is universally recognized as the standard English version of Aristotle. This revised edition contains the substance of the original Translation, slightly emended in light of recent scholarship; th...

For more than a decade, Ian Shaw and Paul Nicholson's Dictionary of Ancient Egypt has been the most informative and useful dictionary of ancient Egypt available, one that Library Journal called "a preeminent source" and "the essential choice." Now fully revised and updated, this new...

The Marranos were former Jews forced to convert to Christianity in Spain and Portugal, and their later descendents. Despite economic and some political advancement, these "Conversos" suffered social stigma and were persecuted by the Inquisition. In this unconventional history, Yirmiyahu Yovel tel...

In 1972, when James Lovelock first proposed the Gaia hypothesis--the idea that the Earth is a living organism that maintains conditions suitable for life--he was ridiculed by the scientific establishment. Today Lovelock's revolutionary insight, though still extremely controversial, is recognized ...

Today complex numbers have such widespread practical use--from electrical engineering to aeronautics--that few people would expect the story behind their derivation to be filled with adventure and enigma. In An Imaginary Tale, Paul Nahin tells the 2000-year-old history of one of mathematic...

Popper was born in 1902 to a Viennese family of Jewish origin. He taught in Austria until 1937, when he emigrated to New Zealand in anticipation of the Nazi annexation of Austria the following year, and he settled in England in 1949. Before the annexation, Popper had written mainly about the phil...

What we call American literature is quite often a shorthand, a simplified name for an extended tangle of relations." This is the argument of Through Other Continents, Wai Chee Dimock's sustained effort to read American literature as a subset of world literature.

Inspired by an unort...

Edwin Abbott's beloved mathematical adventure novel Flatland (1884) is being introduced to a whole new generation of readers and viewers through Flatland: The Movie, a dramatic computer-animated adaptation starring Martin Sheen, Kristen Bell, Michael York, Tony Hale, and Joe Estevez...

Writing in the June 1965 issue of theEconomic Journal, Harry G. Johnson begins with a sentence seemingly calibrated to the scale of the book he set himself to review: "The long-awaited monetary history of the United States by Friedman and Schwartz is in every sense of the term a monumental...

Against the backdrop of today's increasingly multicultural society, are America's elite colleges admitting and successfully educating a diverse student body? No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal pulls back the curtain on the selective college experience and takes a rigorous and comprehensive ...

Few issues are more central to our present predicaments than the relationship between economics and politics. After Adam Smith looks at how politics and political economy were articulated and altered in the century following the publication of Smith's Wealth of Nations. It considers...

Normal Accidents analyzes the social side of technological risk. Charles Perrow argues that the conventional engineering approach to ensuring safety--building in more warnings and safeguards--fails because systems complexity makes failures inevitable. He asserts that typical precautions, b...

In lucid and appealing prose, Polya reveals how the mathematical method of demonstrating a proof or finding an unknown can be of help in attacking any problem tha...

Scattered throughout the Talmud, the founding document of rabbinic Judaism in late antiquity, can be found quite a few references to Jesus--and they're not flattering. In this lucid, richly detailed, and accessible book, Peter Schäfer examines how the rabbis of the Talmud read, understood, and u...

Whether you are a politician caught carrying on with an intern or a minister photographed with a prostitute, discovery does not necessarily spell the end of your public career. Admit your sins carefully, using the essential elements of an evangelical confession identified by Susan Wise Bauer in <...

Mathematicians is a remarkable collection of ninety-two photographic portraits, featuring some of the most amazing mathematicians of our time. Acclaimed photographer Mariana Cook captures the exuberant and colorful personalities of these brilliant thinkers and the superb images are accompa...

In 2004, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was brutally murdered on a busy Amsterdam street. His killer was Mohammed Bouyeri, a twenty-six-year-old Dutch Moroccan offended by van Gogh's controversial film about Muslim suppression of women. The Dutch government had funded separate schools, housing pro...

In April 1956, a refitted oil tanker carried fifty-eight shipping containers from Newark to Houston. From that modest beginning, container shipping developed into a huge industry that made the boom in global trade possible. The Box tells the dramatic story of the container's creation, the ...

In the popular misconception fostered by blockbuster action movies and best-selling thrillers--not to mention conventional explanations by social scientists--violence is easy under certain conditions, like poverty, racial or ideological hatreds, or family pathologies. Randall Collins challenges t...

First published in 2000, Dipesh Chakrabarty's influential Provincializing Europe addresses the mythical figure of Europe that is often taken to be the original site of modernity in many histories of capitalist transition in non-Western countries. This imaginary Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty a...

In Erased, Omer Bartov uncovers the rapidly disappearing vestiges of the Jews of western Ukraine, who were rounded up and murdered by the Nazis during World War II with help from the local populace. What begins as a deeply personal chronicle of the Holocaust in his mother's hometown of Buc...

The greatest obstacle to sound economic policy is not entrenched special interests or rampant lobbying, but the popular misconceptions, irrational beliefs, and personal biases held by ordinary voters. This is economist Bryan Caplan's sobering assessment in this provocative and eye-opening book. C...

Must we fight terrorism with terror, match assassination with assassination, and torture with torture? Must we sacrifice civil liberty to protect public safety?

In the age of terrorism, the temptations of ruthlessness can be overwhelming. But we are pulled in the other direction too by the...

In this landmark book, first published in English in 1958, renowned scholar of religion Mircea Eliade lays the groundwork for a Western understanding of Yoga. Drawing on years of study and experience in India, Eliade provides a comprehensive survey of Yoga in theory and practice from its earliest...

This breathtakingly beautiful book brings readers nose-to-nose with all of the world's marine mammals-a comprehensive line-up of remarkable whales, dolphins, porpoises, seals, walruses, otters, polar bears, dugongs, and manatees.

A highly practical field guide, it combines state-of-the-art...

What happens to democracy and free speech if people use the Internet to listen and speak only to the like-minded? What is the benefit of the Internet's unlimited choices if citizens narrowly filter the information they receive? Cass Sunstein first asked these questions in 2001's Republic.com

The implementation of sound quantitative risk models is a vital concern for all financial institutions, and this trend has accelerated in recent years with regulatory processes such as Basel II. This book provides a comprehensive treatment of the theoretical concepts and modelling techniques of q...

For many students, calculus can be the most mystifying and frustrating course they will ever take. The Calculus Lifesaver provides students with the essential tools they need not only to learn calculus, but to excel at it.

All of the material in this user-friendly study guide has bee...

Every document in The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein appears in the language in which it was written, and this supplementary paperback volume presents the English translations of all non-English materials. This translation does not include notes or annotation of the documentary volume and is...

Sex, smoking, and social stratification are three very different social phenomena. And yet, argues sociologist Randall Collins, they and much else in our social lives are driven by a common force: interaction rituals. Interaction Ritual Chains is a major work of sociological theory that at...

This new paperback edition--introduced by ...

Selections from Classical Chinese: Historical Texts aims to instruct, inform, and inspire students of Chinese by presenting selected historical texts and their annotations. Taken from the seminal works known as the Four Histories, the fourteen included texts offer insights into the politic...

It is impossible to understand Palestine today without a careful reading of its distant and recent past. But until now there has been no single volume in English that tells the history of the events--from the Ottoman Empire to the mid-twentieth century--that shaped modern Palestine. The first boo...

With 234 superb color plates, and more than 950 color maps, Birds of East Asia makes it easy to identify all of the region's species. The first single-volume field guide for eastern Asia, the book covers major islands including Japan and Taiwan, as well as the Asian continent from Kamchatk...

The U.S. military is one of the largest and most complex organizations in the world. How it spends its money, chooses tactics, and allocates its resources have enormous implications for national defense and the economy. The Science of War is the only comprehensive textbook on how to analyz...

Byzantium. The name evokes grandeur and exoticism--gold, cunning, and complexity. In this unique book, Judith Herrin unveils the riches of a quite different civilization. Avoiding a standard chronological account of the Byzantine Empire's millennium--long history, she identifies the fundamental q...

Throughout history, rich and poor countries alike have been lending, borrowing, crashing--and recovering--their way through an extraordinary range of financial crises. Each time, the experts have chimed, "this time is different"--claiming that the old rules of valuation no longer apply and that t...

Popular understanding of Zen Buddhism typically involves a stereotyped image of isolated individuals in meditation, contemplating nothingness. This book presents the "other side of Zen," by examining the movement's explosive growth during the Tokugawa period (1600-1867) in Japan and by shedding l...

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire straddled three continents and encompassed extraordinary ethnic and cultural diversity among the estimated thirty million people living within its borders. It was perhaps the most cosmopolitan state in the world--and possibly the most vola...

How well integrated were Jews in the Mediterranean society controlled by ancient Rome? The Torah's laws seem to constitute a rejection of the reciprocity-based social dependency and emphasis on honor that were customary in the ancient Mediterranean world. But were Jews really a people apart, and ...

Most policymakers in the United States and Israel have it wrong: Hezbollah isn't a simple terrorist organization--nor is it likely to disappear any time soon. Following Israel's war against Hezbollah in the summer of 2006, the Shi'i group--a hybrid of militia, political party, and social services...

Charles Perrow is famous worldwide for his ideas about normal accidents, the notion that multiple and unexpected failures--catastrophes waiting to happen--are built into our society's complex systems. In The Next Catastrophe, he offers crucial insights into how to make us safer, proposing ...

Some probability problems are so difficult that they stump the smartest mathematicians. But even the hardest of these problems can often be solved with a computer and a Monte Carlo simulation, in which a random-number generator simulates a physical process, such as a million rolls of a pair of di...

The Calculus of Friendship is the story of an extraordinary connection between a teacher and a student, as chronicled through more than thirty years of letters between them. What makes their relationship unique is that it is based almost entirely on a shared love of calculus. For them, cal...

In 1909 the French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn launched a monumentally ambitious project: to produce a color photographic record of human life on Earth. An internationalist and pacifist, Kahn believed that he could use the new autochrome--the world's first portable, true-color photograp...

This is an essential companion to Daron Acemoglu's landmark textbook, Introduction to Modern Economic Growth. Designed for students, this manual contains solutions to selected exercises located throughout Acemoglu's text, helping students to maximize and reinforce their understanding of th...

There are more statues of Robert Burns in the United States than there are of any American poet. Scotland's favorite poet has been loved by generations of Americans--from Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman to Robert Frost, Maya Angelou, and Bob Dylan. Now this book makes Burns's greatest poetry mor...

When it first appeared in 1979, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature hit the philosophical world like a bombshell. In it, Richard Rorty argued that, beginning in the seventeenth century, philosophers developed an unhealthy obsession with the notion of representation: comparing the mind to a...

In a world supposedly governed by ruthless survival of the fittest, why do we see acts of goodness in both animals and humans? This problem plagued Charles Darwin in the 1850s as he developed his theory of evolution through natural selection. Indeed, Darwin worried that the goodness he observed i...

The economy is so powerful in determining the results of U.S. presidential elections that political scientists can predict winners and losers with amazing accuracy long before the campaigns start. But if it is true that "it's the economy, Stupid," why do incumbents in good economies sometimes los...

The future of the U.S. Supreme Court hangs in the balance like never before. Will conservatives or liberals succeed in remaking the court in their own image? In A Constitution of Many Minds, acclaimed law scholar Cass Sunstein proposes a bold new way of interpreting the Constitution, one t...

The vast and beautiful Indian subcontinent is home to an incredibly rich diversity of mammals, including mighty tigers, elephants, and rhinos, as well as primates, pandas, hyenas, and many more. Mammals of India is the most comprehensive and field-ready illustrated guide to Indian mammals availab...

By way of more than 2,000 years of architectural history, this richly illustrated book defines and shows all the major components of the art--from theory, plans, and models to structural elements such as columns, arches, and domes, to materials and decorative elements. With beautiful color photog...

For epidemiologists, evolutionary biologists, and health-care professionals, real-time and predictive modeling of infectious disease is of growing importance. This book provides a timely and comprehensive introduction to the modeling of infectious diseases in humans and animals, focusing on recen...

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world."--Margaret Mead

This quotation--found on posters and bumper stickers, and adopted as the motto for hundreds of organizations worldwide--speaks to the global influence and legacy of the American anthropo...

I...

From the Renaissance to today, the idea that the Roman Republic lasted more than 450 years--persisting unbroken from the late sixth century to the mid-first century BC--has profoundly shaped how Roman history is understood, how the ultimate failure of Roman republicanism is explained, and how rep...

Stanford University student and Cuban American tennis prodigy Ramon Fernandez is outraged when a nearby mega-store hikes its prices the night of an earthquake. He crosses paths with provost and economics professor Ruth Lieber when he plans a campus protest against the price-gouging retailer--whic...

Does the United States have the right to defend itself by striking first, or must it wait until an attack is in progress? Is the Bush Doctrine of aggressive preventive action a justified and legal recourse against threats posed by terrorists and rogue states? Tackling one of the most controversia...

The most revealing and interesting writings of American artist Thomas Eakins are the letters he sent to family and friends while he was a student in Paris between 1866 and 1870. This book presents all these letters in their entirety for the first time; in fact, this is the first edition of Eakins...

There are more statues of Robert Burns in the United States than there are of any American poet. Scotland's favorite poet has been loved by generations of Americans--from Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman to Robert Frost, Maya Angelou, and Bob Dylan. Now this book makes Burns's greatest poetry mor...

Law is integral to culture, and culture to law. Often considered a distinctive domain with strange rules and stranger language, law is actually part of a culture's way of expressing its sense of the order of things. In Law as Culture, Lawrence Rosen invites readers to consider how the fact...

Early Polemical Writings covers the young Kierkegaard's works from 1834 through 1838. His authorship begins, as it was destined to end, with polemic. Kierkegaard's first published article touches on the theme of women's emancipation, and the other articles from his student years deal with ...

This textbook offers the first unified treatment of wave propagation in electronic and electromagnetic systems and introduces readers to the essentials of the transfer matrix method, a powerful analytical tool that can be used to model and study an array of problems pertaining to wave propagation...

What is the best way to photograph a speeding bullet? Why does light move through glass in the least amount of time possible? How can lost hikers find their way out of a forest? What will rainbows look like in the future? Why do soap bubbles have a shape that gives them the least area?

By ...

Ten Hills Farm tells the powerful saga of five generations of slave owners in colonial New England. Settled in 1630 by John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Ten Hills Farm, a six-hundred-acre estate just north of Boston, passed from the Winthrops to the Ushers, to the Ro...

The impact of the humble American snapshot has been anything but humble. Any American who takes a snapshot contributes to a compelling and influential genre. Since 1888, when George Eastman introduced the Kodak camera and roll film, the snapshot has not only changed everyday American life and mem...

Particle or Wave is the first popular-level book to explain the origins and development of modern physical concepts about matter and the controversies surrounding them. The dichotomy between particle and wave reflects a dispute--whether the universe's most elementary building blocks are di...

Kierkegaard was driven to write The Book on Adler after news spread that a Danish pastor, Adolph P. Adler, claimed to have experienced a revelation in which Christ dictated a new doctrine. Like many others, Kierkegaard was intrigued by Adler--but for different reasons than most. Over the e...

Shell Shock Cinema explores how the classical German cinema of the Weimar Republic was haunted by the horrors of World War I and the trauma of Germany's humiliating defeat. In this exciting new book, Anton Kaes argues that masterworks such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, The ...

This concise, updated edition of the award-winning A Guide to the Birds of Southeast Asia (Princeton, 2000) is the most comprehensive, compact guide to this magnificent bird-rich region. It is a complete field and reference guide to the birds of Thailand, Peninsular Malaysia, Singapore, My...

After the end of World War II, the United States, by far the dominant economic and military power at that time, joined with the surviving capitalist democracies to create an unprecedented institutional framework. By the 1980s many contended that these institutions--the General Agreement on Tariff...

Volume Five of the definitive edition of Thomas Jefferson's papers from the end of his presidency until his death includes 592 documents from 1 May 1812 to 10 March 1813. America declares war on Great Britain on 18 June 1812. Jefferson counsels domestic reconciliation while suggesting that Americ...