Material World: A Global Family Portrait

The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics

The Second Creation is a dramatic--and human--chronicle of scientific investigators at the last frontier of knowledge. Robert Crease and Charles Mann take the reader on a fascinating journey in search of "unification" (a description of how matter behaves

Cimarronin: A Samurai in New Spain #1

A disgraced outcast samurai living in early seventeenth-century Spain, Kitazume is contemplating ritual suicide when a divine force (of a sort) intervenes: Luis, a mischievous Jesuit priest and Kitazume’s longtime friend. At Luis’s insistence, the sam

Before Columbus: The Americas of 1491

A companion book for young readers based on 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, the groundbreaking bestseller by Charles C. Mann.

Hungry Planet

On the banks of Mali's Niger River, Soumana Natomo and his family gather for a communal dinner of millet porridge with tamarind juice. In the USA, the Ronayne-Caven family enjoys corndogs-on-a-stick with a tossed green salad. This age-old practice of sitt

The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery

First published in 1976, this book is the first detailed examination of the history of British sea power since A.T. Mahan's classic The Influence of Sea Power on History, published in 1890. In analyzing the reasons for the rise and fall of Great Britain a

Preparing for the Twenty-First Century

Kennedy's groundbreaking book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers helped to reorder the current priorities of the United States. Now, he synthesizes extensive research on fields ranging from demography to robotics to draw a detailed, persuasive, and oft

Man Eating Bugs: The Art and Science of Eating Insects

The team behind the critically and popularly acclaimed anthropological photoessays MATERIAL WORLD and WOMEN IN THE MATERIAL WORLD make their debut on our list with this oddly tantalizing book about a subject that's creeping into prominence: insects as foo

The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations

“With all its defects, with all the failures that we can check up against it, the UN still represents man’s best-organized hope to substitute the conference table for the battlefield.”–Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961 The signing of the United Nations C

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000

THE WIDELY ACCLAIMED BESTSELLER THAT BOLDLY AND LUCIDLY PUTS OUR CURRENT ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL DILEMMAS INTO THE PERSPECTIVE OF WORLD HISTORY."A work of almost Toynbeean sweep... When a scholar as careful and learned as Mr. Kennedy is prompted by contemp