Showing results by publisher "Basic Books" in All Categories

“Are you sure?” Whether in a court room, a doctor’s office, a gameshow’s hot seat, or a student’s desk, we are always trying to answer that question. Should we accept eyewitness testimony or a physician’s diagnosis? Do we really want to risk it all on a final question? And what should we be studying in order to do as well as possible on a test? In short, how do we know what we and others know - or as importantly, don’t know? As cognitive neuroscientist Stephen Fleming shows in Know Thyself, we do this with metacognition.

Each generation of therapists can boast of only a few writers like Deborah Luepnitz, whose sympathy and wit shine in her fine, luminous prose. In Schopenhauer's Porcupines, she recounts five true stories from her practice, stories of patients who range from the super-rich to the destitute, who grapple with panic attacks, psychosomatic illness, marital despair, and sexual recklessness. Intimate, original, and triumphantly funny, Schopenhauer's Porcupines goes further than any other book in illuminating "how talking helps".

Conventional wisdom holds that Africans are only a recent presence in Europe. But in African Europeans, renowned historian Olivette Otele debunks this and uncovers a long history of Europeans of African descent. From the third century, when the Egyptian Saint Maurice became the leader of a Roman legion, all the way up to the present, Otele explores encounters between those defined as "Africans" and those called "Europeans."

Our universe has been growing for nearly 14 billion years. But almost everything about it, from the elements that forged stars, planets, and lifeforms, to the fundamental forces of physics, can be traced back to what happened in just the first three minutes of its existence. In this book, Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg describes in wonderful detail what happened in these first three minutes.

The Crimea, the Boer War, the Somme, Tobruk, Pearl Harbor, the Bay of Pigs: these are just some of the milestones in a century of military incompetence, of costly mishaps and tragic blunders. Are these simple accidents—as the "bloody fool" theory has it—or are they inevitable? The psychologist Norman F. Dixon argues that there is a pattern to inept generalship, and locates this pattern within the very act of creating armies in the first place, which in his view produces a levelling down of human capability that encourages the mediocre and limits the gifted.

The New York Times best-selling "skeptical environmentalist" argues that panic over climate change is causing more harm than good.

More than 2,000 years ago, the Greek city-states, led by Athens and Sparta, laid the foundation for much of modern science, the arts, politics, and law. But the influence of the Greeks did not end with the rise and fall of this classical civilization. As historian Roderick Beaton illustrates, over three millennia Greek speakers produced a series of civilizations that were rooted in southeastern Europe but again and again ranged widely across the globe.

From a New York Times best-selling historian comes the story of how the alphabet ordered our world. A Place for Everything is the first-ever history of alphabetization, from the Library of Alexandria to Wikipedia. The story of alphabetical order has been shaped by some of history's most compelling characters, such as industrious and enthusiastic early adopter Samuel Pepys and dedicated alphabet champion Denis Diderot. But though even George Washington was a proponent, many others stuck to older forms of classification.

In this modern classic, Annette Simmons reminds us that the oldest tool of influence is also the most powerful. Fully revised and updated to account for new technology and social media, along with two new chapters on the role of stories in the development of civilization and how to adjust your story to your specific goal, Simmons showcases over 100 examples of effective storytelling drawn from the front lines of business and government, as well as myths, fables, and parables from around the world.

Author Yuval Levin explores the roots of the left/right political divide in America by examining the views of the men who best represented each side at its origin: Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. Striving to forge a new political path in the tumultuous age of the American and French revolutions, these two ideological titans sparred over moral and philosophical questions about the nature of political life and the best approach to social change: radical and swift, or gradual and incremental. The division they articulated continues to shape our political life today.

Thanks to increases in life expectancy, we can now expect to live for a long time. Most of us would welcome an extra day in the week, so why do so many of us view the prospect of additional years with fear and skepticism? The reason is simple: society is not currently structured to support long lives. Rather than thinking in terms of the needs of a rising number of older people, we must instead support the young and middle-aged to prepare differently for the longer futures they can expect.

Written by two expert authors who have won secured millions of dollars in government and foundation grants, The Only Grant-Writing Book You'll Ever Need is the classic book on grant seeking, providing a comprehensive, step-by-step guide for government, nonprofit, and individual grant seekers. Drawing on decades of experience in grant writing and professional development, Ellen Karsh and Arlen Sue Fox demystify the process of securing grants while offering indispensable advice from funders and recipients.

Americans have long been skeptical of corporations, and that skepticism has only grown more intense in recent years. Meanwhile, corporations continue to amass wealth and power at a dizzying rate, recklessly pursuing profit while leaving society to sort out the costs. In For Profit, law professor William Magnuson argues that the story of the corporation didn’t have to come to this. Throughout history, he finds, corporations have been purpose-built to benefit the societies that surrounded them.

The #MeToo movement brought worldwide attention to sexual violence, but while the media focused on the fates of a few notorious predators who were put on trial, we heard far less about the outcomes of those trials for the survivors of their abuse. The conventional retributive process fails to serve most survivors; it was never designed for them. Renowned trauma expert Judith L. Herman argues that the first step toward a better form of justice is simply to ask survivors what would make things as right as possible for them.

Drawn from never-before-seen eyewitness accounts of the Damascus Events, eminent Middle East historian Eugene Rogan tells the story of how a peaceful multicultural city came to be engulfed in slaughter. He traces how rising tensions between Muslim and Christian communities led some to regard extermination as a reasonable solution. Rogan also narrates the wake of this disaster, and how the Ottoman government moved quickly to retake control of the city, end the violence, and reintegrate Christians into the community.

The Achaemenid Persian kings ruled over the largest empire of antiquity, stretching from Libya to the steppes of Asia and from Ethiopia to Pakistan. In Persians, historian Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones tells the epic story of this dynasty and the world it ruled. Drawing on Iranian inscriptions, cuneiform tablets, art, and archaeology, he shows how the Achaemenid Persian Empire was the world’s first superpower—one built, despite its imperial ambition, on cooperation and tolerance. This is the definitive history of the Achaemenid dynasty and its legacies in modern-day Iran.

For Americans, World War II began in December of 1941, with the bombing of Pearl Harbor; but for Poland, the war began on September 1, 1939, when Hitler's soldiers invaded, followed later that month by Stalin's Red Army. The conflict that followed saw the debut of many of the features that would come to define the later war-blitzkrieg, the targeting of civilians, ethnic cleansing, and indiscriminate aerial bombing-yet it is routinely overlooked by historians.

Famed across the known world, jealously guarded by private collectors, built up over centuries, destroyed in a single day, ornamented with gold leaf and frescoes, or filled with bean bags and children’s drawings - the history of the library is rich, varied, and stuffed full of incident.

Books tell all kinds of stories—romances, tragedies, comedies—but if we learn to read the signs correctly, they can tell us the story of their own making too. The Book-Makers offers a new way into the story of Western culture’s most important object, the book, through dynamic portraits of eighteen individuals who helped to define it.

Venus and Aphrodite brings together ancient art, mythology, and archaeological revelations to tell the story of human desire. From Mesopotamia to modern-day London, from Botticelli to Beyoncé, Hughes explains why this immortal goddess continues to entrance us today - and how we trivialize her power at our peril.