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"A trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution-from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of "the state," political violence, and social inequality-and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike--either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told,...
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"A magisterial effort packed with insight and written with clarity and enthusiasm. It's also the deal of the year--the equivalent of a year's college course by an engaging, brilliant professor, all for the price of a book." --
Who Hasn't Gazed upon the abandoned temples of Angkor Wat or the jungle-choked cities of the Maya and wondered, could the same fate happen to us? In this riveting book, Jared Diamond--whose Guns, Germs, and Steel revolutionized...
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"With a new introduction by Anthony Arnove, this edition of the classic national bestseller chronicles American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official narrative taught in schools--with its emphasis on great men in high places-- to focus on the street, the home, and the workplace. Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People's History of the United States is the only volume to tell America's story from...
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"Most of us give little thought to the back of the book-it's just where you go to look things up. But as Dennis Duncan reveals in this delightful and witty history, hiding in plain sight is an unlikely realm of ambition and obsession, sparring and politicking, pleasure and play. In the pages of the index, we might find Butchers, to be avoided, or Cows that sh-te Fire, or even catch Calvin in his chamber with a Nonne. Here, for the first time, is the...
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"In his international bestsellers Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, Jared Diamond transformed our understanding of what makes civilizations rise and fall. Now, in his third book in this monumental trilogy, he reveals how successful nations recover from crises while adopting selective changes -- a coping mechanism more commonly associated with individuals recovering from personal crises. Diamond compares how six countries have survived recent upheavals...
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Examines "the lives of contemporary archaeologists as they sweat under the sun for clues to the puzzle of our past. Johnson digs and drinks alongside archaeologists, chases them through the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and even Machu Picchu, and excavates their lives. Her subjects share stories we rarely read in history books, about slaves and Ice Age hunters, ordinary soldiers of the American Revolution, children of the first century, Chinese woman...
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"A history of the Flat Earth movement and a look at the recent boom in conspiratorial thinking in America"--
Since 2015 there has been a spectacular boom in a centuries-old delusion: that the earth is flat. Weill draws a direct line from today's conspiratorial moment, brimming not just with Flat Earthers but also anti-vaxxers and QAnon followers, back to the early days of Flat Earth theory in the 1830s. When faced with a complicated world out of...
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"The car has shaped the modern era more profoundly than any other human invention. Its manufacture introduced mass-production to the world, bringing with it tarmac, suburbs, and car culture. In this comprehensive world history of the most important transport innovation of the modern age, historian Dr. Steven Parissien examines the impact, development, and significance of the automobile over its turbulent and colorful 130-year history. He tells the...
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"In the spirit of 'A short history of nearly everything, ' an energetic and wide-ranging book of discovery and discoverers, of exploitation and celebration, and of superstition and science, all in search of the ways the chemical elements are woven into our culture, history, and language"-- Provided by publisher.
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"From the masters of storytelling-meets-science and co-authors of Quackery, Patient Zero tells the long and fascinating history of disease outbreaks-how they start, how they spread, the science that lets us understand them, and how we race to destroy them before they destroy us. Written in the authors' lively and accessible style, chapters include page-turning medical stories about a particular disease or virus-smallpox, Bubonic plague, polio, HIV-that...
13) The years
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"Available in English for the first time, the latest astonishing, bestselling, and award-winning book by Annie Ernaux. The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present -- even projections into the future -- photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect,...
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The author, a behavioral economist, challenges our preconceptions about dishonesty and urge us to take an honest look at ourselves. We all cheat, whether it is copying a paper in the classroom, or white lies on our expense accounts. Does the chance of getting caught affect how likely we are to cheat? How do companies pave the way for dishonesty? Does collaboration make us more honest or less so? Does religion improve our honesty? Here the author explores...
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This book offers a novel approach to food writing, presenting a history of eating habits and mores through the lens of the technologies we use to prepare, serve, and consume food. It tells the history of food through its tools across different eras and continents to present a fully rounded account of humans' evolving relationship to kitchen technology. From the birth of the fork in Italy as it discovered pasta, to culture wars over spoons in Restoration...
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A vivid snapshot of America's journey from Victorian-era propriety to 20th-century modernity. Step into the perfumed parlors of the Everleigh Club, the most famous brothel in American history--and the catalyst for a culture war that rocked the nation. Operating in Chicago at the dawn of the 20th century, the Club welcomed moguls and actors, senators and athletes, foreign dignitaries and literary icons into a stately double mansion, and the Everleigh...
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"In this vibrant, high-spirited history, medievalist Eleanor Janega turns to the Middle Ages to unfurl its suppositions about women and reveal what's shifted over time--and what hasn't. Enshrined medieval thinkers, almost always male, subscribed to classical Greek and Roman philosophy and Christian theology for their concepts of the sexes, deriding women as oversexed sinners, inherently lustful, insatiable, and weak. In contrast, drawing on accounts...
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The first history of the American hiking community and its contributions to the nations vast network of trails. In the mid-nineteenth century, urban walking clubs emerged in the United States. A little more than a century later, tens of millions of Americans were hiking on trails blazed in every region of the country. This ground-breaking book is the first full account of the unique history of the American hiking community and its rich, nationwide...
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"Invited to speak at gatherings with scientists and policymakers, with archbishops, Indigenous activists and students, Dougald Hine, storyteller and social thinker, has spent most of his life talking to people about climate change. And then one afternoon in the second year of the pandemic, he realized he had nothing left to say. Why would someone who cares so deeply about ecological change want to stop talking about it now? At Work in the Ruins is...