Catalog Search Results
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Description
"One of the most stunning achievements of moral philosophy is something we take for granted: moral universalism, or the idea that every human has equal moral worth. In What We Owe the Future, Oxford philosopher William MacAskill demands that we go a step further, arguing that people not only have equal moral worth no matter where or how they live, but also no matter when they live. This idea has implications beyond the obvious (climate change) - including...
Author
Description
#1 New York Times Bestseller
One of The Wall Street Journal's 10 Books to Read Now
Shortlisted for the OWL Business Book Award and Longlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business
Author
Description
Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In the follow-up to cognitive scientist Steven Pinker's groundbreaking The Better Angels of Our Nature, he urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data. In seventy-five graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the...
Author
Pub. Date
2019.
Description
Thirty years ago Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about climate change. Now he broadens the warning: the entire human game, he suggests, has begun to play itself out. Bill McKibben's groundbreaking book The End of Nature -- issued in dozens of languages and long regarded as a classic -- was the first book to alert us to global warming. But the danger is broader than that: even as climate change shrinks the space where our civilization...
Author
Formats
Description
Archaeologist and historian Ian Morris explains that Western dominance is largely the result of the effects of geography on the everyday efforts of ordinary people as they deal with crises of resources, disease, migration, and climate. As geography and human ingenuity continue to interact, however, the world over the next hundred years will subsequently change in astonishing ways, transforming Western rule in the process.
Author
Description
"Hope Jahren is an award-winning geobiologist, a brilliant writer, and one of the seven billion people with whom we share this earth. The Story of More is her impassioned open letter to humanity as we stand at the crossroads of survival and extinction. Jahren celebrates the long history of our enterprising spirit--which has tamed wild crops, cured diseases, and sent us to the moon--but also shows how that spirit has created excesses that are quickly...
Author
Formats
Description
Is civilization teetering on the edge of a cliff? Or are we just climbing higher than ever? Most people who read the news would tell you that 2017 is one of the worst years in recent memory. We're facing a series of deeply troubling, even existential problems: fascism, terrorism, environmental collapse, racial and economic inequality, and more. Yet this narrative misses something important: by almost every meaningful measure, the modern world is better...
Author
Pub. Date
c2009
Physical Desc
xiii, 322 p., [8] p. of plates : ill. ; 24 cm.
Description
Conventional historical wisdom focuses on the sixties as the era of pivotal change that swept the nation, yet, as Fred Kaplan argues, it was 1959 that ushered in the wave of tremendous cultural, political, and scientific shifts that would play out in the turbulent decade that followed. During this vital, overlooked period in American history, pop culture exploded, court rulings unshackled prevously banned books, civil rights laws and protests broadened...
Author
Pub. Date
2023.
Physical Desc
803 pages : illustrations (chiefly color) ; 25 cm
Description
"A monumental and exhilarating history of European thought from the end of Antiquity to the beginning of the Enlightenment--500 to 1700 AD--tracing the arc of intellectual history as it evolved over the course of 1,200 years, setting the stage for the modern era." -- inside front jacket flap.
"A history of European intellectual life from 500 AD to 1700 AD"--
Pub. Date
2017
Description
Set high in the Indian Himalaya, Ladakh is home to a rich Buddhist culture and an ancient tradition of folk singing. In the 1960s as economic development thrust change upon Ladakh, Morup Namgyal, Ladakh's greatest folk artist, began his lifelong efforts to preserve his beloved folk songs. Using song as the medium, Morup and his peers sparked a social movement that would bring about profound and enduring change in Ladakh. It was a movement built...
Author
Pub. Date
2016.
Physical Desc
xiv, 304 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
Description
The present is a contest between the bright and dark sides of discovery. To avoid being torn apart by its stresses, we need to recognize the fact - and gain courage and wisdom from the past. Age of Discovery shows how. Now is the best moment in history to be alive, but we have never felt more anxious or divided. Human health, aggregate wealth and education are flourishing. Scientific discovery is racing forward. But the same global flows of trade,...
Author
Formats
Description
"During the long centuries of Iberian and British imperial rule, the quest for new forms of energy led to the development of the colonial sugar plantation as a uniquely profitable kind of commerce. In a time when issues of race and social justice have arisen with pressing urgency, the book explains how the plantation's extraordinary profitability relied on a production system that literally worked the slaves to death, creating an insatiable appetite...
Didn't find it?
Can't find what you are looking for? Request an item not in the catalog. Submit Request