Sociology

Assume nothing, question everything. This is the message at the heart of Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner's rule-breaking, iconoclastic book about crack dealers, cheating teachers and bizarre baby names that turned everyone's view of the world upside-down....

From the New York Times best-selling author of The Black Swan, a bold new work that challenges many of our long-held beliefs about risk and reward, politics and religion....

Who are we Indians? Where did we come from? To tell us the story of our ancestry, journalist Tony Joseph goes 65,000 years into the past–when a band of Homo sapiens first made their way from Africa into the Indian subcontinent. These were the First Indians....

At the age of 36, on the verge of completing a decade's training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer....

This audiobook contains all 3 volumes of Capital, as well as Marx and Engel's most renowned work, The Communist Manifesto....

A deeply moving and insightful collection of personal essays from number-one best-selling author John Green, adapted from his critically acclaimed podcast....

In The Road to Character, David Brooks, best-selling author of The Social Animal and New York Times columnist, explains why selflessness leads to greater success….

In the work that established him as the most important French thinker since Sartre, Michel Foucault offers startling evidence that man—man as a subject of scientific knowledge—is at best a recent invention, the result of a fundamental mutation in our culture.

Campbell outlines the Hero's Journey, a universal motif of adventure and transformation that runs through virtually all of the world's mythic traditions....

How can an art expert differentiate between a fake and an original piece of art within seconds? How can a marriage analyst know within minutes whether the couple will stay together or not? Some ideas like this and much more gain a true resolution in Blink....

A riveting exploration of the most difficult and important part of what doctors do, by Yale School of Medicine physician Dr. Lisa Sanders, author of the monthly New York Times Magazine column "Diagnosis", the inspiration for the hit Fox TV series House, M.D....

The leading Harvard professor shows how we can all become better at conversation – and why this will help us all thrive.

With unequaled insight and brio, David Brooks, the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bobos in Paradise, has long explored and explained the way we live....

Working women today are better educated and more well-qualified than ever before. Yet men still predominate in the corporate world....

Die Wise teaches the skills of dying, skills that have to be learned in the course of living deeply and well....

Written after his wife's tragic death, A Grief Observed is C.S. Lewis's honest reflection on the fundamental issues of life, death, and faith in the midst of loss....

Our society worships at the fountain of youth, but are we missing out on an extraordinary stage in life? Find out....

Introduction to Sociology 3e aligns to the topics and objectives of many introductory sociology courses. It is arranged in a manner that provides foundational sociological theories and contexts, then progresses through various aspects of human and societal interactions.

Why do well-intentioned plans for improving the human condition go tragically awry? Author James C. Scott analyzes failed cases of large-scale authoritarian plans in a variety of fields....

Ten percent of people whose hearts stop and then restart report near-death experiences. When Dr Bruce Greyson's patients started describing events that he simply could not dismiss, he began to investigate....

Virtually all human societies were once organized tribally, yet over time most developed new political institutions which included a central state....

My Big TOE: Awakening, written by a nuclear physicist in the language of contemporary culture, unifies science and philosophy, physics and metaphysics, mind and matter....

Dan Buettner has traveled the world to meet the planet’s longest-lived people, and learned nine powerful yet simple lessons that could put you on the path to longer life....

The controversial American economist and social critic Thorstein Veblen here appropriates Darwin's theory of evolution to analyze the modern industrial system....

Workers across all demographics, industries, and socioeconomic levels report exhaustion, burnout, and the wish for more meaningful lives.

Form Follows Fever is the first in-depth account of the turbulent early years of settlement and growth of colonial Hong Kong across the 1840s. During this period, the island gained a terrible reputation as a diseased and deadly location. Malaria, then perceived as a mysterious vapour or miasma, intermittently carried off settlers by the hundreds. Various attempts to arrest its effects acted as a catalyst, reconfiguring both the city’s physical and political landscape, though not necessarily for the better.

Selling Social Justice investigates the rise and spread of contemporary antiracist ideology and shows how the rich came to embrace this particular form of justice. In this provocative account, Jennifer C. Pan explores why, in a twenty-first-century economy of increasing scarcity, antiracism is the wrong frame for understanding and fighting inequality.

In 1890s America Thorstein Veblen attacked a careless acceptance of prevailing social structures, identifying ancient roots for ‘pecuniary culture’ and ‘conspicuous consumption’–realities that promoted materialism and squashed fulfilment. In The Theory of the Leisure Class the worthy Engineer, creating essential products for all, is pitted against the predatory Businessman, exempt from grubby industrial toil and focussed on useless profits.

Today, the majority of the peoples of the planet live in nation-states, based upon the idea, if never the reality, of a single people, a single culture, a single rule of law, and a single source of sovereign authority. But will they continue to do so in the future? None of the major challenges that confront humanity today—from climate change to disease, from terrorism to mass migration—can be handled effectively by single nation-states, no matter how powerful.

We all know the importance of mothers. They are typically as paramount in the wild as they are in human relationships. But what about fathers? In most mammals, fathers have little to no involvement in raising their offspring—and sometimes even kill the offspring sired by other fathers. How, then, can we explain modern fathers having the capacity to be highly engaged parents? In Father Nature, James Rilling explores how humans have evolved to endow modern fathers with this potential and considers why this capacity evolved in humans.