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The chapter on the bachelor, “We Like our Apartment: The Playboy Indoors” offers readers a fun way into the book. Much of it deals with the way in which Playboy...
As a graduate student at the University of Cincinnati, I recall walking around the city’s downtown at the time and thinking how much of the central city around me –...
For those whose eyes are caught by the book’s cover, I would urge them to read the preface (2 pages) and “Last Thoughts” (5 pages). Those few pages will tell...
I was a graduate student at Rice University in Houston Texas when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated overhead as it was returning to Earth. I watched communities in and around...
The story of survivors of the Jewish Holocaust is widely known. The story of surviving victims of Stalin’s 25-year terror is virtually unknown in the West—and even in Russia itself....
A reader approaching my book from a “close-up” perspective would be best served by reading the introduction and conclusion.In the opening pages I lay out the broad themes of the...
My own involvement with chimpanzees came about fortuitously. In the late 1980s, I was conducting my doctoral research in Bangladesh on a previously little-known monkey called the capped langur. I...
I wrote the Age of Addition to explain why addiction has become so widespread, conspicuous, and varied. When I entered the field in the 1970s, as a doctoral student studying...
To gain a sense of the immediacy of coverage, turn to page 53 to begin a sample of the panicky reporting when the sniper was on the loose.These pages detail...
We are fond of dogs. Although it would be a bit of a stretch to say that we are also fond of economics, we certainly appreciate its usefulness in understanding...
During the Afghanistan War, the second Gulf War and the subsequent occupation, t-shirts, bumper stickers, and politicians reminded us, “Freedom is not Free.” This phrase, engraved on the Korean War...
In my first job as a lawyer, I represented several people who had spent years behind bars but were exonerated by DNA tests, including people who had falsely confessed, like...
Wounded Knee is the story of the 1890 massacre in South Dakota that left more than 250 Sioux and 25 soldiers dead.The book explains the history of the relationship between...
This book looks at some of the technologies, infrastructure, and habits of mind that underpin American consumer society. It makes connections between our buying habits and the kinds of spaces...
If a browsing reader picked up a copy of the book, I would hope that the Introduction entitled “The Thousand-Person Pit” would hook him or her. An account of an...
On page 116 I pose the question: How is the historic end of the Soviet Union to be explained? This is a question discussed in most American high schools and...
A section of Chapter 8 on the ascendancy of Reagan to the presidency is titled “It’s the Ideology, Stupid.” President Reagan is a central character in the book, because he...
When the Endangered Species Act was passed, in 1973, traditional economics, which looked to self-interest and endless growth as the predominant drivers of the economy, was pretty much the only...
If a reader picked up Discomfort Food at a bookstore—enticed, I hope, by the suggestive cover—I would be so pleased if they looked through the introduction “Beginnings,” where I establish...
How I came to write the book was that I was asked about 10 years ago to give a lecture about real women who masqueraded as men and who took...
I hope that readers will begin with my introduction, which lays out the basic terms of my argument. However, casual readers might prefer to start with one of the chapters...
Your browsing reader might want to start with Chapter 4, which is a case study of a consumer research organization founded in the Nazi years.The Society for Consumer Research (GfK)...
Despite what TV dramas may suggest, the American trial has become an endangered species. In 2002, less than 2 percent of civil cases ended at trial, down from 12 percent...
The part of the research for The Food Axis that I found most intriguing and unfamiliar came from women’s records of homesteading on the frontier.When households traveled from settled parts...
Not Exactly Lying stands apart from the flood of recent writing on the phenomena of misinformation, disinformation, and journalistic deception. Donald Trump did not, as he claimed, invent the term...
Apart from the Amazon graph depicted in the previous section, I would love a browsing reader to encounter the photograph on page 10 of the book showing workers perched on...
The book is about secession in America. There is a growing interest in secession, or what some refer to as a national divorce between Red and Blue America. There is...
The book arcs from the waning of Victorianism to the collapse of Communism and the rise of European Islam. Throughout, it investigates the shifting fortunes of prostitution and marriage, of...
Good Vibrations is written so that readers can open it anywhere and immediately find something that speaks to them. You can simply turn to a chapter that connects with what...
Because my approach was agnostically empirical, the book ended up packed with information not previously known or associated with universities.Here are a few examples.I addressed a question that has been...
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