Sociology Science

Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of carrying only opinions for which you have strong supporting facts. When asked simple questions about global trends - what percentage of the world's population live in poverty; why the world's population is increasing; how many girls finish school - we systematically get the answers wrong. In Factfulness, professor of international health and global TED phenomenon Hans Rosling, together with his two longtime collaborators, Anna and Ola, offers a radical new explanation of why this happens.

Best-selling author Mark Sloan is the creator of the popular blog Endalldisease, which delivers evidence-based health information and has helped tens of thousands of people get healthy. After losing his mother to cancer at age 12, Mark has committed his life to finding safer and more effective therapies for diseases of all kinds. Methylene Blue is your ultimate guide for understanding what disease is, what disease isn’t, and how to use methylene blue to dramatically enhance your health and quality of life.

"This engaging, conversational book begs to be read aloud, and who better than its author?... Tyson’s warmth and erudition make him a superb narrator of this excellent, thought-provoking book."- Library Journal "Like a spaceship traveling the stars, Tyson's voice flows smoothly as he delivers...

In this intimate biography of the Prince of Soul, David Ritz provides a candid look at a star and a friend. Ritz had been collaborating with Marvin Gaye on his story for several years before the singer's tragic death and had conducted a series of extraordinary interviews in which Gaye discussed his deepest secrets. What emerges is a full-scale portrait of a charming but tortured artist, a brilliant singer with a divided soul.

Spirit of India, by A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, is a book focused towards the connection of youth and nation. This book revolves around the aspirations, issues and dreams of the Indian youth in the contemporary India. As the time has changed over 60 decades of independence, the population of the youth has grown to require more and more education, growth in career, and overall development. In this time of personal ambitions, the spirit of one, India looks endangered to the author, as has been addressed in this book.

What is it like for a convicted murderer who has spent decades behind bars to suddenly find himself released into a world he barely recognizes? What is it like to start over from nothing? To answer these questions Sabine Heinlein followed the everyday lives and emotional struggles of Angel Ramos and his friends Bruce and Adam - three men convicted of some of society's most heinous crimes - as they return to the free world.

This is the incredible story of the Longwood Symphony Orchestra and the remarkable interplay between music and medicine. You may have read about the Longwood Symphony Orchestra (LSO) in the paper or heard them on your favorite radio station. But the LSO is not just any orchestra. It began in 1982 with a group of talented Boston-area physicians, medical students, and health-care professionals and has since flourished under the leadership of violinist Dr. Lisa Wong.

Since 2010, Toronto's headlines have been consumed by the outrageous personal foibles and government-slashing, anti-urbanist policies of Mayor Rob Ford. But the heated debate at City Hall has obscured a bigger, decade-long narrative of Toronto's ascendance as a mature global city. Some Great Idea traces how post-amalgamation, and under three very different mayors, Toronto managed to so quickly oscillate from one extreme to another, and how the city might proceed from here.

This reissue of Thomas Sowell’s classic study of decision making, which includes a preface by the author, updates his seminal work in the context of The Vision of the Anointed. Sowell, one of America’s most celebrated public intellectuals, describes in concrete detail how knowledge is shared and disseminated throughout modern society. He warns that society suffers from an ever-widening gap between firsthand knowledge and decision making—a gap that threatens not only our economic and political efficiency but our very freedom.

In this eloquent and persuasive book, Neil Postman examines the deep and broad effects of television culture on the manner in which we conduct our public affairs, and how "entertainment values" have corrupted the very way we think. As politics, news, religion, education, and commerce are given less and less expression in the form of the printed word, they are rapidly being reshaped to suit the requirements of television.

In this national best-seller, Robert Bly explores the idea of the missing father in contemporary society. He draws upon a cornucopia of legend and literature - as varied as the poetry of William Blake, Jungian psychology, and Sioux initiation rituals - to encourage men in their pursuit of the “inner warrior.”

For two thousand years, cadavers have been involved in science's boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. They've tested France's first guillotines, ridden the NASA Space Shuttle, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to test the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and helped solve the mystery of TWA Flight 800. For every new surgical procedure, from heart transplants to gender reassignment surgery, cadavers have been there alongside surgeons, making history in their quiet way.

Why do well-intentioned plans for improving the human condition go tragically awry? Author James C. Scott analyzes failed cases of large-scale authoritarian plans in a variety of fields. Centrally managed social plans misfire, Scott argues, when they impose schematic visions that do violence to complex interdependencies that are not - and cannot - be fully understood. Further, the success of designs for social organization depends upon the recognition that local, practical knowledge is as important as formal, epistemic knowledge.

At 28, Stephanie Land's dreams of attending a university and becoming a writer quickly dissolved when a summer fling turned into an unplanned pregnancy. Before long, she found herself a single mother, scraping by as a housekeeper to make ends meet. Maid is an emotionally raw, masterful account of Stephanie's years spent in service to upper-middle-class America as a "nameless ghost" who quietly shared in her clients' triumphs, tragedies, and deepest secrets.

In the 1980s, Phil Bellfy pondered the question: Why does Sault, Ontario, appear to be so prosperous, while the "Sault" on the American side has fallen into such a deplorable state? Could the answer be that the "American side" was little more than a "resource colony"--or to use the academic jargon of "Conflict and Change" Sociology--an "Internal Colony."

In The Black Shoals Tiffany Lethabo King uses the shoal - an offshore geologic formation that is neither land nor sea - as metaphor, mode of critique, and methodology to theorize the encounter between Black studies and Native studies. King conceptualizes the shoal as a space where Black and Native literary traditions, politics, theory, critique, and art meet in productive, shifting, and contentious ways.

Thomas Piketty’s best-selling Capital in the Twenty-First Century galvanized global debate about inequality. In this audacious follow-up, Piketty challenges us to revolutionize how we think about politics, ideology, and history. He exposes the ideas that have sustained inequality for the past millennium, reveals why the shallow politics of right and left are failing us today, and outlines the structure of a fairer economic system.

In a time when communal rituals and cultural ceremonies fail, longtime scholar, storyteller, and ceremonialist Stephen Jenkinson asks what it means to lose cultural inheritance. In examining matrimony and its ritual twin, patrimony, Matrimony contemplates culture-making, building and preserving cultural memory, and the ache of living in a world bereft of meaning and connection. There is a real and palpable consequence to turning away from public ceremony—and not just for the celebrants.

This comprehensive audio textbook has 17 chapters covering the beginnings of sociology as an academic research discipline, culture and media, sociological research, socialization across the life course, social structure and social interaction, groups and organizations, deviance and crime, and social class and social stratification, global stratification, race and ethnicity, gender and sex, sexuality, family, religion, education and healthcare, politics, the economy, and population and society.

Insight into the lives of people who work on the edge. Jobs That Could Kill You is a fascinating collection of candid and intimate conversations with 42 men and women who describe in gripping detail how physical risk is a familiar companion in their working lives, and how they deal with it.