Anthropology Science

Join Aaron Mahnke, the host of the popular podcast Lore, as he explores some dreadful places and the history that haunts them. Mahnke takes us to Colorado and the palatial Stanley Hotel, where wealthy guests enjoyed views of the Rocky Mountains at the turn of the 20th century - and where, decades later, a restless author would awaken from a nightmare, inspired to write one of the most revered horror novels of all time. Mahnke also crosses land and sea to visit frightful sites with their own echoes of dark deeds, horrible tragedies, and shocking evil still resounding.

The second book in a three-volume collection, The World of Lore: Wicked Mortals tells the incredible true stories of some of the mortals who achieved notoriety in history and folklore through horrible means. Monsters of this sort - serial killers, desperate criminals, and socially mobile people with a much darker double life - are, in fact, quite real.

The Little Ice Age tells the story of the turbulent, unpredictable, and often very cold years of modern European history, how climate altered historical events, and what they mean in the context of today’s global warming.

Acclaimed author M.A.C. Farrant has been hailed as “a brave iconoclast” by Publishers Weekly and is well known for her pithy wit and maverick sensibilities. Broken into three sections, The Strange Truth About Us is a fusion of fragmented prose, probing questions and caustic satire. The result is both a meditation on absence and a commentary on the human penchant for complacency.

Even today there remain tribes in the far reaches of the Amazon rainforest that have avoided contact with modern civilization. In this gripping first-person account of adventure and survival, author Scott Wallace chronicles an expedition into the Amazon's uncharted depths, discovering the rainforest's secrets while moving ever closer to a possible encounter with one such tribe—the mysterious flecheiros, or "People of the Arrow."

From the number-one New York Times best-selling author of Primates of Park Avenue, a bold, timely reconsideration of female infidelity that will upend everything you thought you knew about women and sex. In Untrue, feminist author and cultural critic Wednesday Martin takes us on a bold, fascinating journey to reveal the unexpected evolutionary legacy and social realities that drive female faithlessness, while laying bare our motivations to contain women who step out.

When an unexpected medical crisis sends Naomi Wolf on a deeply personal journey to tease out the intersections between sexuality and creativity, she discovers, much to her own astonishment, an increasing body of scientific evidence that suggests that the vagina is not merely flesh, but an intrinsic component of the female brain - and thus has a fundamental connection to female consciousness itself.

While today’s business world is dominated by technology and data analysis, award-winning financial journalist and anthropology PhD Gillian Tett advocates thinking like an anthropologist to better understand consumer behavior, markets, and organizations to address some of society’s most urgent challenges.

There is no one better qualified than Jared Diamond - renowned expert in the fields of physiology and evolutionary biology and award-winning author - to explain the evolutionary forces that operated on our ancestors to make us sexually different. With wit and a wealth of fascinating examples, he explains how our sexuality has been as crucial as our large brains and upright posture in our rise to human status.

More than 12,000 years ago, in one of the greatest triumphs of prehistory, humans colonized North America, a continent that was then truly a new world. Just when and how they did so has been one of the most perplexing and controversial questions in archaeology.

Why is the genome of a salamander 40 times larger than that of a human? Why does the avocado tree produce a million flowers and only a hundred fruits? Why, in short, is there so much waste in nature? In this lively and wide-ranging meditation on the curious accidents and unexpected detours on the path of life, Daniel Milo argues that we ask these questions because we’ve embraced a faulty conception of how evolution - and human society - really works.

Just in the last three years a flood of new scientific findings, driven by revelations discovered in the human genome, has provided compelling new answers to many long-standing mysteries about our most ancient ancestors, the people who first evolved in Africa and then went on to colonize the whole world. Nicholas Wade weaves this host of news-making findings together for the first time into an intriguing new history of the human story before the dawn of civilization.

Eliot Stein has traveled the globe in search of remarkable people who are preserving some of our most extraordinary cultural rites. In Custodians of Wonder, Stein introduces listeners to a man saving the secret ingredient in Japan's 700-year-old original soy sauce recipe. In Italy, he learns how to make the world's rarest pasta from one of the only women alive who knows how to make it. And in India, he discovers a family rumored to make a mysterious metal mirror believed to reveal your truest self.

The Birth and Death of Meaning uses the disciplines of psychology, anthropology, sociology, and psychiatry to explain what makes people act the way they do.

In 1963 Colin Fletcher became the first man to walk the length of Grand canyon, below the Rim. It began with a dream, when he and a friend detoured from a cross-country trip to take a hurried look at the great natural wonder. Standing on the Rim, surrounded by the profound and almost mystical silence, Fletcher knew that something had happened to the way he looked at things. He also knew that the Canyon, with its depths and distances, cliffs, buttes, and hanging terraces, beckoned to him, calling him on a journey that would challenge both his body and his mind.

Noticing society's creeping descent into infantilisation is one thing, however understanding the roots and causes of the phenomenon is not quite so easy. But in this topical and vitally important new work, cultural theorist and academic, Dr Keith Hayward, exposes the deep social, psychological and political dangers of a world characterised by denuded adult autonomy.

James Scott taught us what's wrong with seeing like a state. Now, in his most accessible and personal book to date, the acclaimed social scientist makes the case for seeing like an anarchist. Inspired by the core anarchist faith in the possibilities of voluntary cooperation without hierarchy, Two Cheers for Anarchism is an engaging, high-spirited, and often very funny defense of an anarchist way of seeing - one that provides a unique and powerful perspective on everything from everyday social and political interactions to mass protests and revolutions.

Celebrated historian and cultural critic Ronald Sanders offers a compelling and ideology-shattering history of racial prejudice and myth as shaped by political, religious, and economic forces from the 14th Century to the present day. Written with clear-eyed vigor, Sanders draws on a broad history of art, psychology, politics, and religion to inform his striking and soundly reasoned assertions.

From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity’s creation and evolution - a number one international best seller - that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be “human”.

As the bestselling author of Is There Life After Death? and Cheating the Ferryman, Anthony Peake has studied the phenomena surrounding what happens when we die. In Near-Death Experiences, he takes a look at a phenomenon that has garnered great attention from both academics and scientists who study the workings of the brain and the physiological events that are associated with this seemingly inexplicable state.