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Language
English
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Description
The follow-up to Pinker's groundbreaking The Better Angels of Our Nature presents the big picture of human progress: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science. Far from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"By the acclaimed author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, a groundbreaking investigation into the causes of illness, a bracing critique of how our society breeds disease, and a pathway to health and healing. In this revolutionary book, renowned physician Gabor Maté eloquently dissects how in Western countries that pride themselves on their healthcare systems, chronic illness and general ill health are on the rise. Nearly 70 percent of Americans...
Author
Pub. Date
2021.
Language
English
Description
"Vaclav Smil's mission is to make facts matter. An environmental scientist, policy analyst, and a hugely prolific author, he is Bill Gates' go-to guy for making sense of our world. In Numbers Don't Lie, Smil answers questions such as: What's worse for the environment--your car or your phone? How much do the world's cows weigh (and what does it matter)? And what makes people happy?"--
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Author Birthdays - November
National Book Award for Nonfiction Winners
Pulitzer Prize Winners in Nonfiction
National Book Award for Nonfiction Winners
Pulitzer Prize Winners in Nonfiction
Description
A humanities professor describes the impact had by the translation of the last remaining manuscript of "On the Nature of Things" by Roman philosopher Lucretius, which fueled the Renaissance and inspired artists, great thinkers, and scientists.
Author
Publisher
Harper Perennial
Pub. Date
2007.
Language
English
Description
A fascinating portrait of the minds that have shaped the modern world. In an intriguing series of case studies, Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Brecht, Sartre, Edmund Wilson, Victor Gollancz, Lillian Hellman, Cyril Connolly, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Kenneth Tynan, and Noam Chomsky, among others, are revealed as intellectuals both brilliant and contradictory, magnetic and dangerous.
Author
Publisher
Hachette Books
Pub. Date
2022.
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Like the rest of us, Jason Gay never anticipated where we've found ourselves. Challenged by the pandemic, frightened by political and societal divisiveness, awash in a digital world that dramatically changes how we think and interact, and all wondering what kind of calamity could possibly happen next. With a series of topical and interconnected personal pieces, Gay does his best to have some fun with all of it, looking for the optimism and joy in...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"The New York Times bestselling author of The Rational Optimist and Genome returns with a fascinating, brilliant argument for evolution that definitively dispels a dangerous, widespread myth: that we can command and control our world.The Evolution of Everything is about bottom-up order and its enemy, the top-down twitch--the endless fascination human beings have for design rather than evolution, for direction rather than emergence. Drawing on anecdotes...
Author
Publisher
J. Wiley & Sons
Pub. Date
c2009
Language
English
Description
Conventional historical wisdom focuses on the sixties as the era of pivotal change that swept the nation, yet, as Fred Kaplan argues, it was 1959 that ushered in the wave of tremendous cultural, political, and scientific shifts that would play out in the turbulent decade that followed. During this vital, overlooked period in American history, pop culture exploded, court rulings unshackled prevously banned books, civil rights laws and protests broadened...
Author
Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pub. Date
c2010
Language
English
Description
Archaeologist and historian Ian Morris explains that Western dominance is largely the result of the effects of geography on the everyday efforts of ordinary people as they deal with crises of resources, disease, migration, and climate. As geography and human ingenuity continue to interact, however, the world over the next hundred years will subsequently change in astonishing ways, transforming Western rule in the process.
Author
Publisher
Princeton University Press
Pub. Date
[2015]
Language
English
Description
Examines "Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Charles Darwin, and Karl Marx--heirs of the Enlightenment who embodied its highest ideals about progress--and shows how their thoughts, over time and in the hands of their followers and opponents, transformed the very nature of our beliefs, institutions, economies, and politics"--Amazon.com.
Author
Publisher
Simon and Schuster
Pub. Date
1997.
Language
English
Description
The classic study of post-Cold War international relations, more relevant than ever in the post-9/11 world, with a new foreword by Zbigniew Brzezinski. Since its initial publication, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order has become a classic work of international relations and one of the most influential books ever written about foreign affairs. An insightful and powerful analysis of the forces driving global politics, it is as...
Author
Publisher
Basic Books
Pub. Date
2022.
Language
English
Description
"“This book will change your sense of how grand the sweep of human history could be, where you fit into it, and how much you could do to change it for the better. It's as simple, and as ambitious, as that.” —Ezra Klein An Oxford philosopher makes the case for “longtermism” — that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time. The fate of the world is in our hands. Humanity’s written history spans only...
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