Social Science Power

This groundbreaking study is based on the author's systematic comparative analysis of the vast textile collections in Iceland, Greenland, Denmark, Scotland, and the Faroe Islands, materials that are largely unknown even to archaeologists and span 1,000 years. Through these garments and fragments, Hayeur Smith provides new insights into how the women of these island nations influenced international trade by producing cloth (vaðmál); how they shaped the development of national identities by creating clothing; and how they helped their communities survive climate change.

In Putinomics, Chris Miller examines the making of Russian economic policy since Vladimir Putin took power in 1999. Miller argues that Putin's economic strategy has functioned far more effectively than most Westerners realize. While acknowledging that part of Putin's successes - above all, quadrupling per capita GDP in just a decade and a half - can be attributed to cashing in on high oil prices, Miller details the government policies that have also been fundamental to Russia's growth.

Some books emerge from a lifetime of hard-won knowledge. Robert D. Kaplan has learned, from a career spent reporting on wars, revolutions, and international politics in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia, that the essence of geopolitics is tragedy. In The Tragic Mind, he employs the works of ancient Greek dramatists, Shakespeare, German philosophers, and the modern classics to explore the central subjects of international politics: order, disorder, rebellion, ambition, loyalty to family and state, violence, and the mistakes of power.

From kung-fu to tofu, tea to trade routes, sages to silk, China has influenced cuisine, commerce, military strategy, aesthetics, and philosophy across the world for thousands of years. Chinese history is nothing if not messy. Heroes are also villains; prosperity mingles with violence; cultural vibrancy coexists with censorship and repression. Modern China is seen variously as an economic powerhouse, an icon of urbanization, a propaganda state, and an aggressive superpower seeking world domination.

This book addresses the fraught relationship between women and aggression, one troubled by age-old patriarchal forces that disparage women's ambition, assertion, and voice.

In the aftermath of the First World War, the seeds of fascism were sown in Italy. While the country reeled in shock, a new movement emerged from the chaos: one that preached hatred for politicians and love for the fatherland; one that promised to build a ‘New Roman Empire’, and make Italy a great power again.

In a recent FiveThirtyEight poll, 60 percent of men surveyed said society puts pressure on men to behave in a way that is unhealthy or bad. Men account for 80 percent of suicides in the United States, and three in 10 American men have suffered from depression. Ed Adams and Ed Frauenheim say a big part of the problem is a model of masculinity that’s become outmoded, and even dangerous, to both men and women.

This audiobook explores the underlying unconscious forces that wear us down and cause illness. Dr. Janov explains in sophisticated yet understandable terms the cause and cures for many common maladies such as insomnia, high blood pressure, headaches, palpitations, nightmares, anxiety and depression. A culmination of 10 years of clinical research and writing, Why You Get Sick How You Get Well is the most advanced of any work in the field of psychotherapy in this century.

In this first collection of interviews since the bestselling 9-11: Was There an Alternative?, our foremost intellectual activist examines crucial questions of U.S. foreign policy. Timely, urgent, and powerfully elucidating, this important volume of previously unpublished interviews conducted by...

Through decades of direct experience of the People’s Republic combined with extraordinary access to hundreds of hitherto unseen documents in communist party archives, the author of The People’s Trilogy offers a riveting account of China’s rise from the disaster of the Cultural Revolution. He takes us inside the country's unprecedented four-decade economic transformation--from rural villages to industrial metropoles and elite party conclaves--that vaulted the nation from 126t ­largest economy in the world to second ­largest.

The Marvel of Martyrdom takes a broad perspective on self-sacrifice and martyrdom, bringing together religion, popular culture, history, psychology, and mythology. Stories of individuals both famous (Gandhi) and obscure (Rodrigo Rosenberg) intertwine with research on altruism, happiness, and radicalization to terrorism. The changing landscape of the book's setting - from The Roman Empire to 19th-century Russia to Nazi Germany to post-World War II India to present day Ukraine - makes the power of self-sacrifice and martyrdom come alive.

Border walls, school bathrooms, student loans, gun control, diversity, abortion, climate change—today, nothing seems out of reach for the president's pen. But after all the press releases, ceremonies, and speeches, shockingly little gets done. The American presidency promises to solve America's problems, but presidents' unilateral solutions are often weak, even empty. Kenneth Lowande argues this is no accident.

An evidence-based, social justice–minded exploration of modern parenting, from an award-winning science journalist and cofounder of SciMoms How can we raise happy, well-adjusted kids today amid so much injustice and uncertainty? This is the question at the heart of the progressive parent’s...

In 1929, Stalin plunged Soviet Russia into a coercive "revolution from above", a decade-long effort to amass military-industrial power for a new war. He forced 25 million peasant families into state-run collectives and transformed the Communist Party into a servile instrument. In 1939, he concluded the pact with Hitler that enabled him to grasp at Eastern Europe while Hitler made war in the West.

The United States has been the world's dominant power for more than a century. Now, many analysts believe that other countries are rising and the United States is in decline. Is the unipolar moment over? Is America finished as a superpower? In this book, Michael Beckley argues that the United States has unique advantages over other nations that, if used wisely, will allow it to remain the world's sole superpower throughout this century. We are not living in a transitional, post-Cold War era.

An investigative journalist exposes the many holes in today’s best-selling behavioral science and argues that the trendy, TED Talk-friendly psychological interventions that are so in vogue at the moment will never be enough to truly address social injustice and inequality.

In the last decades, America has gone to war as supposed defenders of democracy. The War on Terror was waged to protect the West from the dangers of Islamists. US soldiers are stationed in more than 800 locations across the world to act as the righteous arbiters of the rule of law. In this book, Andrew Cockburn brilliantly dissects the intentions behind Washington's martial appetites.

How to Have Willpower brings together two profound ancient meditations on how to overcome pressures that encourage us to act against our own best interests—Plutarch's essay On Dysopia or How to Resist Pressure and Prudentius's poetic allegory Psychomachia or How to Slay Your Demons. Challenging the idea that humans are helpless victims of vice, these works—introduced and presented in vivid, accessible new prose translations by Michael Fontaine—emphasize the power of personal choice and the possibility of personal growth, as they offer insights and practical advice about resisting temptation.

In Making Monsters, David Livingstone Smith offers a poignant meditation on the philosophical and psychological roots of dehumanization. Drawing on harrowing accounts of lynchings, Smith establishes what dehumanization is and what it isn't. When we dehumanize our enemy, we hold two incongruous beliefs at the same time: We believe our enemy is at once subhuman and fully human.

Are you interested in philosophy? Do the greatest thinkers from the past influence the way you think and act? Philosophers have been shaping the world for centuries. Their ideas have shaped the way we act as individuals and groups for as long as we can remember, and their deep thought processes have been marveled at and replicated by millions across the world.