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Exemplary Things investigates the history of a Japanese cultural keyword, meibutsu, and the pervasive influence it has had in shaping consumption practices in Japan. It's a term that has no exact anglophone equivalent. Japanese commodity culture developed in the 15th century, and in Exemplary Things, I show how...

Exemplary Things - The wide angle

Steven Nadler

The opening of chapter one introduces the reader to Leibniz as he arrives in Paris, ostensibly on a secret mission to establish world peace – or at least to persuade...

The Best of All Possible Worlds - A close-up

Jerry P. King

Mathematics in Ten Lessons is intended for an audience of humanists, where humanist is interpreted in the wide sense to mean anyone in the humanities. But, because of the way...

Mathematics in 10 Lessons - A close-up

Antoni Kapcia

I would recommend a prospective reader to start with the final chapter, on Fidel. The rest of the book tends to ignore him. Deliberately. I have always resisted the tendency...

Cuba in Revolution - A close-up

Dan Immergluck

Historical breadth will hopefully make Foreclosed particularly useful beyond the near term. But the timing of the book is not coincidental. I have a proximate objective of using lessons from...

Foreclosed - A close-up

John Calvert

In 1954, Egypt’s new revolutionary regime arrested Sayyid Qutb and hundreds of other Egyptian Islamist following a Muslim Brother’s assassination attempt on President Nasser. Qutb had joined the Muslim Brotherhood,...

Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism - A close-up

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen

Psychopathy Unmasked is a book about “psychopaths.” But it’s not your ordinary run-of-the-mill account that repeats the well-worn story of violent people naturally disposed to wreak havoc in our society.Instead,...

Psychopathy Unmasked - In a nutshell

Michael J. Ryan

I had always been struck by beauties in animals, whether that be the extravagantly colored fish in my childhood aquarium, the long-tailed ornamental pigeons we raised as teenagers, or the...

A Taste for the Beautiful - The wide angle

James Simpson

I hope browsing readers will feel the palpable connections between the revolutionary period of the Reformation and our own times. The Introduction and Conclusion would be the places to get...

Permanent Revolution - A close-up

Elaine Forman Crane

What also ties the chapters together and makes a coherent narrative of six disparate stories is the widespread knowledge of and reliance on legal principles that had stood the test...

Witches, Wife Beaters, and Whores - The wide angle

Scott Peeples

The book is illustrated with original photographs of “Poe places” by Michelle Van Parys; it also contains a number of archival images, including contemporary maps of the cities where Poe...

The Man of the Crowd - A close-up

Larry Wolff

The Singing Turk explores the huge cultural phenomenon of European operas about Turks, flourishing especially during the eighteenth century, in the European age of Enlightenment. Though most people interested in...

The Singing Turk - In a nutshell

Kirk Savage

Washington, D.C. may be the most studied national capital in the world. There are dozens of guidebooks to Washington’s monuments and countless specialized studies of individual projects, landscape plans, and...

Monument Wars - The wide angle

Sylvia Lavin

This book is about image-architecture and the surprising apperceptive shifts that take place when today’s culture of ephemeral images and the stolid material traditions of architecture choose to embrace.Could you...

Kissing Architecture - In a nutshell

Mark Swislocki

Culinary Nostalgia focuses on Shanghai and identifies the importance of regional food culture at pivotal moments in the city’s history. Taking foodways as a window onto urban change, the book...

Culinary Nostalgia - In a nutshell

Toby Talbot

In the section On Location, I recount the opening of the New Yorker Book Store with Pete Martin and Austen Laber. Pete was the co-founder, with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, of the...

The New Yorker Theater and Other Scenes from a Life at the Movies - A close-up

Samuel Moyn

The Last Utopia assesses how deeply rooted in history the notion of “international human rights” is.I have long been fascinated by this question since human rights—together with the advocacy and...

The Last Utopia - In a nutshell

Abraham F. Lowenthal

Global California discusses what Californians can do to identify and promote their own interests in a rapidly changing world. It takes up such thorny issues as globalization, trade, infrastructure, immigration,...

Global California - The wide angle

Jennifer Scanlon

Rorotoko’s readers may find Helen Gurley Brown’s attempts to “queer up” her publications interesting. As time went on, Brown learned that equating sex with heterosexuality sold magazines and paid her...

Bad Girls Go Everywhere - A close-up

Pamela Robertson Wojcik

Unhomed examines America’s ambivalent and shifting attitude toward placelessness through marginalized figures of mobility in film. The book examines films that show characters as unhomed and placeless, mobile rather than...

Unhomed - In a nutshell

Andrea Komlosy

Work takes on different meanings depending on the historical and regional context. During Greek and Roman antiquity, any kind of work was disdained, while the ideal human condition was praxis...

Work - The wide angle

Rachel Herz

The general rubric under which the concepts of this book are laid out is evolutionary biology. The core positions are about how and why the emotion of disgust aids in...

That’s Disgusting - The wide angle

Caleb Everett

Readers will see that from the outset of the book, I try to convey the ways in which numbers are filtered into our lives in pervasive and often undetected ways....

Numbers and the Making of Us - A close-up

Paul N. Edwards

The first decade of the 21st century has been the hottest on record. And NASA recently registered 2010 as the hottest year since instrumental observations began. On the planetary scale,...

A Vast Machine - In a nutshell

David T. Courtwright

Not everyone is happy with all the talk of expanding addiction. It bothers clinicians who fear stigmatization, libertarians who smell an excuse for indiscipline, social scientists who fear neuroscientific reductionism...

The Age of Addiction - A close-up

Greg L. Warchol

To explore blind people’s experiences of reading in nineteenth-century Britain and America and to better understand sighted people’s reception of the advent of raised-print books, I draw on a wide...

Exploiting the Wilderness - The wide angle

Ann Fabian

When I began working on The Skull Collectors, human remains seemed to be causing trouble everywhere. In the 1990s, new states in Eastern Europe unburied and sorted out the Soviet...

The Skull Collectors - The wide angle

Jesse LeCavalier

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...

The Rule of Logistics - The wide angle

Robert Bartlett

Most countries in medieval Europe were monarchies, ruled by a royal or imperial family, a dynasty, so politics at the top level was shaped by the births, marriages, and deaths...

Blood Royal - In a nutshell

Russell W. Rumberger

This book addresses one of the greatest challenges facing the US educational system: high school dropouts. The problem has been labeled by some, including President Obama, as a national crisis.The...

Dropping Out - In a nutshell

Michael Leja

Pictures of all kinds in all media are so omnipresent, so naturalized in our 21st-century lives that a world without them is hard to imagine. Yet the picture-saturated culture we...

A Flood of Pictures - In a nutshell

Ethan Tussey

People check their mobile phones over 80 times every day, and while that frequency may alarm us as we survey a crowd of people hunched over their phones, it is...

The Procrastination Economy - In a nutshell

Jennifer Delton

Historians and political scientists have long used NAM to represent “big business” or “industry.” In part, this was because NAM claimed to be the voice of organized industry and also...

The Industrialists - The wide angle

Mary P. Ryan

The volatility and possibility of recent gender history makes Chapter Seven especially interesting to general readers. “Where Does Sex Divide: Feminism, Sexuality and the Structures of Gender since 1960” starts...

Mysteries of Sex - A close-up

Roger Ekirch

The prologue of Birthright is the portion to which I devoted the most energy. If it does not capture the reader’s imagination, chances are that the rest of the book...

Birthright - A close-up

Shaj Mathew

The book asks not where the Global South is—a fair question in its own right—but when it is. After the colonial era, many postcolonial writers felt an acute sense of belatedness. They considered the “true present” to be somewhere else—namely, in Europe...

The Dialectic of Cosmopolitan Time - In a nutshell

Mary E. Stuckey

There is a strong belief in the media and among scholars that the best way to lead is by focusing clearly and consistently on one idea at a time. That...

Jimmy Carter, Human Rights, and the National Agenda - In a nutshell

Kathryn Allamong Jacob

Lamentations that special interests, spending obscene amounts of money, strangle the voice of “the people”? More lobbyists than Corinthian columns in the halls of Congress? These sound familiar today in...

King of the Lobby - The wide angle

Richard Toye

My interest in barricades was sparked by earlier research on the Parisian insurrections of February and June 1848. Like so many other aspects of French revolutionary history, the construction of...

Winston Churchill - The wide angle

Samuel Moyn

I originally got started on this topic as a young idealist then as a neophyte teacher. While in law school, I interned in the United States government, out of the...

The Last Utopia - The wide angle

Edward Berenson

I hope browsers will look at the book’s prologue, since I open the story by describing an excursion to the Statue of Liberty, my first trip there since my 6<sup...

The Statue of Liberty - A close-up

Robin Feldman

From a broad, theoretical perspective, intellectual property is underpinned by the philosophy of utilitarianism. At the risk of wildly oversimplifying moral philosophy, utilitarianism considers the ‘utility,’ that is, the total...

AI Versus IP - The wide angle

Lynn Keller

The concept of the “self-conscious Anthropocene,” introduced in the book’s title, is one of the book’s innovations and points to its larger significance. The term Anthropocene was introduced in 2000...

Recomposing Ecopoetics - The wide angle

Michael A. Ryan

This is my first single-authored monograph and, as such, is a direct outgrowth of the dissertation that I defended from the University of Minnesota’s Department of History in 2005. In...

A Kingdom of Stargazers - The wide angle

Thomas M. Nichols

I wrote Eve of Destruction hoping to get people to understand that the previous era of warfare—one in which there were at least some rules about when and why states...

Eve of Destruction - In a nutshell

Jerry Z. Muller

Based on the real-life experiences of its creators, David Simon and Ed Burns, the HBO series “The Wire,” is regarded by some as among the greatest cultural documents of our...

The Tyranny of Metrics - A close-up

John Tully

Our questions here are not terribly practical ones in the United States. No one really advocates for regulating art or music as such. True, Nazi Germany did suppress “degenerate” art...

The Devil’s Milk - The wide angle

Shirley Anne Warshaw

The Co-Presidency of Bush and Cheney explores the extraordinary depth of Cheney’s influence in the Bush administration – and how Cheney built that influence.Cheney’s role was so pervasive in policy...

The Co-Presidency of Bush and Cheney - In a nutshell

Michelle Baddeley

Copycats and Contrarians has some chapters that will appeal to economists and experimental scientists, others that will appeal more to those interested in sociology, social psychology, and politics. The chapter...

Copycats and Contrarians - A close-up

Katherine Verdery

One potential audience for On Tarzan is the American Studies classroom. Undergraduate scholars might enjoy the early discussion of the “juvenile” nature of the Tarzan narratives, the post-Darwin idea of...