Higher Worlds

Distinguished British historian Geoffrey Parker spent 15 years writing this ambitious history of the tumultuous 17th century, when nations were in the grip of what was known as the General Crisis. First published in 2013, Global Crisis reveals that freak weather was a key reason why the people of the 1600s lurched between droughts, famines, and countless wars.

Originally written as 13 individual books around 397 CE, Augustine of Hippo's Confessions is one of the most referenced works in the Western literary tradition. Augustine lived from 354-430 CE, and the work is in part an autobiography. But it also tells us much about the period in which he lived. The first nine books draw a compelling narrative of the first 43 years of Augustine's life, which were spent in North Africa and Italy. In the 10th book, Augustine uses these experiences as a meditation on the nature of memory.

On the Genealogy of Morality was written in 1887 when Friedrich Nietzsche was at the height of his powers as a philosopher and master of German prose writing. Here, he criticizes the idea that there is just one conception of moral goodness, dissecting the contemporary practice of morality and looking at it from a historical viewpoint. Rather than following a metaphysical or religious approach, Nietzsche adopts a naturalistic framework, which is grounded in history and natural science, to understand our concepts of good and evil in the Christianized Western world.

Born in 1933, Philip Zimbardo is a renowned and controversial American social psychologist who is fascinated by why people can sometimes behave in awful ways. Some psychologists believe people who commit cruelty are innately evil. Zimbardo disagrees. In his 2007 book, The Lucifer Effect, he argued that it is the power of situations around us that can cause otherwise good people to commit "evil", citing many historical examples to illustrate his point.

In the 1960s, British historian Jonathan Riley-Smith first began studying the knightly orders of the Middle Ages that formed after the First Crusade. By the late 1970s, he had begun writing books from a "revisionist" point of view, challenging the common belief that the Crusades were motivated by fanaticism, and were designed to plunder the Holy Lands. To an extent, Riley-Smith's 1986 book The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading overturned this previously held view.

First available in 1689, John Locke's Two Treatises of Government is considered one of the most important works ever written on the foundations of government. Published anonymously, it argues against the popular idea at the time that monarchs have a God-given right to rule. Instead Locke proposes that sovereignty - supreme authority - ultimately resides with the people.

One of the most influential books on economics ever written, Thomas Robert Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population remains one of the most controversial too. This 1798 work inspired naturalists Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace to develop the theory of natural selection. But it has also sparked criticism - Karl Marx famously called Malthus a "lackey of the bourgeoisie." Yet this hasn't stopped leading present-day environmentalists from taking up Malthus's ideas.

Albert Hourani's 1991 work, A History of the Arab Peoples, is unsurpassed as an overview of Arab history, from the rise of Islam to the late 20th century. Going far beyond the political history that had generally characterized previous examinations, Hourani integrates a wide range of scholarship to provide a deep analysis of social, cultural, and economic structures. His interest in the everyday lives of Arab people and his desire to understand what united - rather than divided - many different nationalities gives listeners a new and vital perspective on the region.

Note: This is a summary and analysis of Mao's Great Famine and not the original book. Historian Frank Dikötter used a brief window of political openness before the 2008 Beijing Olympics in China to get inside official archives and gather evidence of the terrible toll the Great Chinese Famine took on ordinary people. He also discovered how Communist leaders caused, and then covered up, the catastrophe. Dikötter shows the disaster was much worse than previously thought, with a death toll of at least 45 million.

British-born American political activist Thomas Paine wrote Rights of Man in 1791 in response to Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution. Burke was wary of tearing down old institutions of government. But Paine argued that revolution is acceptable - in fact, necessary - when government ignores the rights of its people. Not surprisingly, Rights of Man proved very popular in the newly liberated United States, selling over 100,000 copies.

J. A. (John) Hobson's 1902 book, Imperialism: A Study, presents an original and controversial interpretation of the forces that motivated Britain to conquer foreign lands in the 18th century. Hobson advances the idea that ultrawealthy financiers consciously worked to manipulate political leaders, all so they could invest money and sell goods in the outposts of a country's empire.

The title of Norwegian-born historian Odd Arne Westad's 2005 work - The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times - offers a window into his thesis. Between the end of World War II and the early 1990s, both the Soviet Union and the United States "intervened" (or "offered aid and support to") developing nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In Westad's view, these interventions were more important than events in Europe, where most studies of the Cold War focus.

Defining liberty as freedom from interference by state power or popular moral opinion, Mill justifies the individual's right to this liberty by focusing on the role self-development plays in human well-being. His vision of individual rights extends to include freedom of thought and emotion and the freedom to act together with others. Society should protect the development of individuality to aid both social progress and innovation.

Iranian American writer and scholar Hamid Dabashi wrote Iran: A People Interrupted amid the political fallout following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York - his adopted city - in 2001. As US President George W. Bush declared a "war on terror" and named Iran as part of an "axis of evil" that supported terrorism, Dabashi offered an insider's insight into the Iranian psyche.

Having witnessed some negative effects of democratic revolutions in his native France, Tocqueville visited America in 1831 to see what a functioning republic looked like. His main concerns were that democracy could make people too dependent on the state and that minority voices might not be heard - a problem he termed "the Tyranny of the Majority". By examining America thoroughly, Tocqueville hoped to show how a democratic system could avoid these pitfalls.

What is history? In his 2001 book In Defence of History, British historian Richard J. Evans debates the very nature of the subject. Certain thinkers known as postmodernists consider history to be not very far removed from a work of fiction, something based on a scholar's own interpretation of the past. Evans, however, argues that historians do not have free reign. Rather, they are constrained and enabled by the nature of the surviving evidence.

In the century before the Black Death swept across the developed world, economic relations flourished between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Before European Hegemony looks at this period. Without any dominant power, the world's economy revolved around eight interlocking sub-systems, with the major world cities and towns playing a crucial role in the system as a whole. But as economic activity spread across borders, so did the Black Death.

In his 1807 work Phenomenology of Spirit, G. W. F. Hegel introduced the world to his philosophical system. His most influential work - and the culmination of the German Idealist movement begun in the late 18th century as a response to the works of Immanuel Kant - the book remains one of the undisputed classics of Western thought.

The thought of traveling abroad and starting a new life in a country that offers more promising career prospects is one that crosses many minds around the world. We, at Radviser, know this and this is exactly why we’ve dedicated our lives to helping people get accepted into the universities of their dreams and land their dream jobs thereafter.

In his 1996 book The Clash Of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, American political scientist Samuel Huntington sets out his vision of the post-Cold War world. While the era from 1945 to 1989 was shaped by ideological conflict (communism vs. capitalism), Huntington predicts a future of cultural conflict.