Sociology Anthropology Science

More Damned Lies and Statistics encourages all of us to think in a more sophisticated and skeptical manner about how statistics are used to promote causes, create fear, and advance particular points of view. Best identifies different sorts of numbers that shape how we think about public issues: missing numbers are relevant but overlooked; confusing numbers bewilder when they should inform; scary numbers play to our fears about the present and the future.

The Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much of the aquifer beyond repair. The imminent depletion of the Ogallala and other aquifers around the world is a defining planetary crisis of our times. Running Out offers a uniquely personal account of aquifer depletion and the deeper layers through which it gains meaning and force.

Pathologies of Power uses harrowing stories of life - and death - in extreme situations to interrogate our understanding of human rights. Paul Farmer argues that promoting the social and economic rights of the world's poor is the most important human rights struggle of our times. With passionate eyewitness accounts from the prisons of Russia and the beleaguered villages of Haiti and Chiapas, this book links the lived experiences of individual victims to a broader analysis of structural violence.

A work of immersive journalism steeped in a distinctively American social history and sparked by a personal quest, The Unsettlers traces the search for the simple life through the stories of new pioneers and what inspired each of them to look for - or create - a better existence. Captivating and clear-eyed, it dares us to imagine what a sustainable, ethical, authentic future might actually look like.

The idea that religion has undergone a radical change since the Christian Reformation—from totalitarian and socially repressive to private and relatively benign—is a familiar part of the story of secularization. It is often invoked to explain and justify the liberal politics and world view of modernity. And it leads to the view that "politicized religions" threaten both reason and liberty. Asad's essays explore and question all these assumptions.

Tom Wolfe, whose legend began in journalism, takes us on an eye-opening journey that is sure to arouse widespread debate. The Kingdom of Speech is a captivating, paradigm-shifting argument that speech - not evolution - is responsible for humanity's complex societies and achievements.

Born out of a desire to know and understand the mysteries of this material, the spiritual and practical applications of clay in both its micro and macro histories, Clay: A Human History is a book of wonder and insight, a hybrid of archaeology, history and lived experience as an amateur potter.

From a 2017 Pulitzer-winning newspaperman, an unsentimental ode to America's heartland as seen in small-town Iowa—a story of reinvention and resilience, environmental and economic struggle, and surprising diversity and hope.

Enter a grave new world of fascination and delight as award-winning journalist Peter Ross uncovers the stories and glories of Britain's best graveyards. Who are London's outcast dead and why is David Bowie their guardian angel? How did a thousand skulls come to be stacked beneath a church in Kent? Why is the music hall star who sang "I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside" buried on a hillside in Glasgow far from the sound of the silvery sea?

This volume will revise the way we look at the modern populations of Latin America and North America by providing a totally new view of the history of Native-American and African-American peoples throughout the hemisphere. Africans and Native Americans explores key issues relating to the evolution of racial terminology and European colonialists' perceptions of color, analyzing the development of color classification systems and the specific evolution of key terms such as black, mulatto, and mestizo, which no longer carry their original meanings.

A "piercing, unsentimental" (New Yorker) history that boldly challenges the idea of a rural American crisis.

More than half a century since Roswell, UFOs have been making headlines again. On December 17, 2017, the New York Times ran a front-page story about a Pentagon program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The article hinted, and its sources clearly said in subsequent interviews, that some of the ships in question couldn't be linked to any country. The implication was that they might be linked to other solar systems. The UFO community - those who had been thinking about, seeing, and analyzing UFOs for years - was surprisingly skeptical of the revelation.

La femme est-elle l'avenir de l'homme ? Au présent, elle a du mal à se faire entendre sans élever la voix... Qu'en était-il dans le passé ? Paléoanthropologue, Pascal Picq enquête ici sur la femme des origines. Dans ce livre audio, il ne se contente pas de présenter ce que l'on sait des rapports entre hommes et femmes dans les premières sociétés humaines, il entend placer l'histoire et la préhistoire humaines dans la perspective de l'évolution.

During the early twentieth century, the American government’s standing expectation was that Native Americans should be adopting Western customs. In the face of that prospect, anthropologist and musicologist Frances Densmore sought to preserve Native American culture—particularly as it was expressed through music. In her extensive writings on Native American lifestyles, music, and history, Densmore opened a window onto American experiences that had been obscured by stereotypes, and encouraged a better appreciation of the varied traditions of tribes nationwide.

In this paradigm-shattering book, biologist Mark W. Moffett draws on findings in psychology, sociology, and anthropology to explain the social adaptations that bind societies. He explores how the tension between identity and anonymity defines how societies develop, function, and fail. Surpassing Guns, Germs, and Steel and Sapiens, The Human Swarm reveals how mankind created sprawling civilizations of unrivaled complexity - and what it will take to sustain them.

Mit 2020 Das Jahr, das die Welt veränderte legt Eric Klinenberg eine schonungslose ethnologische und soziologische Analyse vor, die eine Frage stellt: Wer hat überlebt, wer ist gestorben, und warum? Ein Muss für alle Leser:innen von Ethnographien und Sachbüchern, die nicht nur eine Pandemie, sondern auch eine veränderte Welt verstehen wollen.

The Bengalis are the third largest ethno-linguistic group in the world, after the Han Chinese and the Arabs. A quarter of a billion strong and growing, the community has produced three Nobel laureates, world-class scientists, legendary political leaders, iconic movie stars and directors and an unending stream of writers, philosophers, painters, poets and musicians of the first rank. But, bald facts aside, just who are the Bengalis? What is the community all about? In order to find the answers, the author delves deep into the culture, literature, history and social mores of the Bengalis.

Il nostro mondo è fondato sul lavoro. Non solo esso garantisce la produzione e il consumo di beni e servizi più o meno essenziali, non solo è parte fondante della retorica politica, non solo occupa buona parte del nostro tempo. No. Il lavoro ci definisce come esseri umani, circoscrive le nostre aspirazioni e i nostri sogni, definisce le nostre abitudini, i nostri valori, il nostro benessere (o malessere) fisico e mentale. Ma non è sempre stato così, anzi, James Suzman dimostra che i nostri antenati cacciatori-raccoglitori lavoravano molto meno di noi.

Das erste Sachhörbuch des Bestsellerautors: die Menschheitsgeschichte von Tastaturen über Hotdogs bis zur Schönheit des Sonnenuntergangs in der Review. John Green verbindet sein eigenes Leben mit den großen Fragen der Menschheit: Was hat ein Teddybär mit Macht und Ohnmacht zu tun oder das Googeln mit unserer Endlichkeit? Mit seinem Blick für Seltsames, Wichtiges und Überraschendes bewertet John Green die menschengemachte Gegenwart auf einer Skala von 1 bis 5. Das Anthropozän ist das aktuelle Erdzeitalter, in dem wir den Planeten grundlegend verändern.

This book explores the hidden world of pharmaceutical testing on healthy volunteers. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in clinics across the country and 268 interviews with participants and staff, it illustrates how decisions to take part in such studies are often influenced by poverty and lack of employment opportunities. It shows that healthy participants are typically recruited from African American and Latino/a communities, and that they are often serial participants, who obtain a significant portion of their income from these trials.