There are so many different ways of thinking and writing about history. I first noticed this while studying at university, when I saw just how different economic history looked from other kinds of history. I later learned that all kinds of historical writing are forms of literature, only they are rarely recognized as such. I am now a university professor and this is my area of expertise: the overlap between the philosophy of history and economics. The books on this list are great examples of unusual or ‘weird’ works on history that challenge some of our deepest assumptions about what history is and how best to think or write about it.
This book is the most relentlessly pessimistic book I have ever read. It will help you overcome optimism. The volume is comprised mostly of short aphorisms, each with their own title, and I’d say the titles alone are worth the price of entry. But more to the point, there is a fantastic essay in the middle called "Faces of Decadence," which tells the story of history as a story of decay and decline. It’s a familiar refrain, but I think the version that appears here is among the best. Certainly the most stylish.
E. M. Cioran confronts the place of today's world in the context of human history-focusing on such major issues of the twentieth century as human progress, fanaticism, and science-in this nihilistic and witty collection of aphoristic essays concerning the nature of civilization in mid-twentieth-century Europe. Touching upon Man's need to worship, the feebleness of God, the downfall of the Ancient Greeks and the melancholy baseness of all existence, Cioran's pieces are pessimistic in the extreme, but also display a beautiful certainty that renders them delicate, vivid, and memorable. Illuminating and brutally honest, A Short History of Decay dissects Man's decadence…
I am an academic at the University of Glasgow with a background in philosophy and psychology. My approach to critical thinking is broad and informed by several other teaching and research interests: emotional intelligence, the psychology of influence, interpersonal communication, and virtue ethics. Motivating much of what I do is the question: How are we to live well? With respect to critical thinking I don’t just deal with the nature and structure of arguments, but also with the role they play in constructive dialogues, and how poor reasoning is linked to psychological biases and the absence of certain virtues. The books I have chosen here are representative of these concerns.
This is one of my favourite textbooks. It came out 20 years after the first edition and is not an update so much as be an entirely different book. Topics include attributional biases, group decision making, nonverbal communication, intergroup hostility, and conflict resolution. He writes in detail and in such an engaging fashion that, very unusually for a textbook, it’s an immersive experience. It’s academically rigorous but his personality, as well as his authority, is continually present through firsthand research, the occasional anecdote, and idiosyncratic inclusions. An example of the latter is his application of the principles of group polarization to the film Twelve Angry Men – a film I love and one of the best resources I know for teaching both social influence and argumentation.
Providing a complete new set of information in the second edition, world renowned psychologist Roger Brown provides insight on language and communication, issues of sexual liberation, and equity and altruism in regard to social psychology.
A completely revised book with new organization and topics in comparison to the first volume, Social Psychology evaluates the pros and cons of current arguments in the ever-changing world of psychology.
In a balance of opinion and research in order to activate a flow of relevant memories and introspection, Roger Brown helps readers comprehend abstract concepts and principles in psychology. As each chapter is fully…
Resilience - helping people recover their capacities to deal with any adversity, stress, loss or trauma – is the heart of my work as a licensed psychotherapist (25 years) and an international trainer of mental health professionals (more than a decade). Bouncing Back is the book I wanted to be able to hand my clients to help them learn to use the capacities of resilience innate in their brains to develop more effective patterns of response to life crises and catastrophes. No such book was available at the time, so I wrote my own. It has become a tremendous resource for people to learn to how to be more resilient, and to learn that they can learn.
In a charming, reader-friendly style, this book offers ten universal principles for skillful parenting that lead to genuine goodness and happiness in their children. A delight to know it’s possible.
In every spiritual tradition, we find teachings on the virtues and qualities that we most want to pass on to our kids-such as generosity, kindness, honesty, determination, and patience. Today, a growing body of research from neuroscience and social psychology supports these teachings, offering insights into cultivating these virtues in ourselves and in our families. Raising Resilience is a practical guide for parents and educators of children from preschool through adolescence, detailing ten universal principles for happy families and thriving children.
Bridging the latest science with Eastern wisdom to explore ourselves and share with our children, Dr. Christopher Willard offers…
I’m a professor of communication and political science who’s been researching and publishing on the effects of political media on democratic health for 25 years. More recently, I’ve been trying to understand the roots of inter-party hostility, the drop in trust in institutions, and the rise in Americans’ belief in breathtakingly false information. My hope is that through this selection of books, you’ll start to understand the synergistic dynamics between America’s complicated history with race, changes in America’s parties, media, and culture, and various social psychological processes, and maybe even start to see a way out of this mess.
I literally could not have written my book without Mason’s incredible empirical work documented in this book.
Yes, this is an academic book, but Mason is engaging, clear, and masterful in her use of charts and graphs to illustrate what “social sorting” is and what it does. Whenever I explain to people how America’s political parties have come to represent not just different sets of policy positions but two very different types of people, I picture Mason’s charts and graphs in my head!
There are a few books that I cannot put back on my bookshelf because I cite them too often and have decided they just need to stay right on my desk, Lily Mason’s is at the top of this pile.
Political polarization in America is at an all-time high, and the conflict has moved beyond disagreements about matters of policy. For the first time in more than twenty years, research has shown that members of both parties hold strongly unfavorable views of their opponents. This is polarization rooted in social identity, and it is growing. The campaign and election of Donald Trump laid bare this fact of the American electorate, its successful rhetoric of "us versus them" tapping into a powerful current of anger and resentment. With Uncivil Agreement, Lilliana Mason looks at the growing social gulf across racial, religious,…
I started worrying about populism in 2008, when vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin chastised the elitists, whom she defined as “people who think they’re better than anyone else.” Meanwhile, she thought she was so much better than anyone else that she could serve as backup leader of the world despite the fact that she believed that the political leader of the United Kingdom is the queen. After she lost she vowed, “I’m never going to pretend like I know more than the next person. I’m not going to pretend to be an elitist. In fact, I’m going to fight the elitist.” She was unaware that there is a third option: to study so that you know more than the next person.
If you’ve ever wondered if people today are dumber than people in the past, you should watch Idiocracy. And then read this book. It shows how we’ve devolved into people who look at lists of the best five books and never actually read those books. In 2008, for a column for the L.A. Times, I had her take a quiz from the author of the book How Dumb Are You?: The Great American Stupidity Quiz and she got two wrong. I got 11 wrong. The point is: Read her book instead of mine.
A cultural history of the last forty years, The Age of American Unreasonfocuses on the convergence of social forces—usually treated as separate entities—that has created a perfect storm of anti-rationalism. These include the upsurge of religious fundamentalism, with more political power today than ever before; the failure of public education to create an informed citizenry; and the triumph of video over print culture. Sparing neither the right nor the left, Jacoby asserts that Americans today have embraced a universe of “junk thought” that makes almost no effort to separate fact from opinion.
Guy Beiner specializes in the history of social remembering in the late modern era. An interest in Irish folklore and oral traditions as historical sources led him to explore folk memory, which in turn aroused an interest in forgetting. He examines the many ways in which communities recall their past, as well as how they struggle with the urge to supress troublesome memories of discomfiting episodes.
A concise and lucid sociological treatise that relates forgetting to the transitions and rapid changes of contemporary urban life, which has eroded the ways in which societies traditionally remembered the past.
Why are we sometimes unable to remember events, places and objects? This concise overview explores the concept of 'forgetting', and how modern society affects our ability to remember things. It takes ideas from Francis Yates classic work, The Art of Memory, which viewed memory as being dependent on stability, and argues that today's world is full of change, making 'forgetting' characteristic of contemporary society. We live our lives at great speed; cities have become so enormous that they are unmemorable; consumerism has become disconnected from the labour process; urban architecture has a short life-span; and social relationships are less clearly…
As an academic familiar with marginalized
identities and intersectionality in science role models, I was eager to review
this book when approached by Columbia Press.
The book offers
diverse portraits of women scientists, highlighting the gender gap in promotions
and their shared determination to pursue science despite hardship, personal
struggles, and discrimination. The scientific field is known for its intense
competition, where only the most dedicated thrive.
What I appreciated was that the book
thoughtfully presented portraits of women scientists without imposing
conclusions. These profiles emphasized their diverse backgrounds—many
non-academic—yet all shared a common passion and curiosity that propelled them
out of their comfort zones to embrace science.
Women working in the sciences face obstacles at virtually every step along their career paths. From subtle slights to blatant biases, deep systemic problems block women from advancing or push them out of science and technology entirely.
Women in Science Now examines solutions to this persistent gender gap, offering new perspectives on how to make science more equitable and inclusive for all. This book shares stories and insights of women from a range of backgrounds working in various disciplines, illustrating the journeys that brought them to the sciences, the challenges they faced along the way, and the important contributions they…
I’ve always been fascinated and intrigued by human behavior and decision-making. What influences our thoughts and behavior and why? In hindsight, I probably should have majored in psychology instead of business, but as a business school professor I still get to investigate all the little quirks and biases of the human mind. I live in Bergen, Norway and devote much of my time researching and teaching consumer psychology and decision-making. I hope you find some inspiration in this list of brilliant books!
This is a book about (social) identity and how our understanding of self is derived from the social groups we are part of.
Two brilliant psychologists, Jay Van Bavel and Dominic Packer, use their own research and insights from social psychology and neuroscience to explain how identity really works and how it influences our thinking and doing every single day.
The book really makes you think about how our social nature impacts on all kinds of decision-making, and it will give you new ideas and insights about power and influence.
If you're like most people, you probably believe that your identity is stable. But in fact, your identity is constantly changing - often outside your conscious awareness and sometimes even against your wishes - to reflect the interests of the groups of which you're a part. And that fluid identity has a powerful influence over your feelings, beliefs, and behaviours.
In THE POWER OF US, psychologists Packer and Van Bavel integrate their own cutting-edge research in psychology, neuroscience and economics to explain what identity really is and show how to harness its dynamic nature to:
I have been working in critical thinking since 1987. This work has taken me to many countries in the world, working with both teachers and students, business people and other decision-makers, and it continues to excite me greatly. I always stress that critical thinking shouldn’t be seen as just a set of technical skills, but that it should make a real difference to people. For example, I’ve used it in working with juvenile offenders who had committed violent crimes and was impressed by how it got them to look at their lives in a much more positive way. These books provide a range of ways into and around the subject.
This book provides a very important background to how critical thinking needs to be seen in terms of how it fits with the ancient skills of rhetoric.
The author demonstrates how the skills of argumentation (central to critical thinking) were central to how classical scholars (including Aristotle, Protagoras, Quintilian, and Cicero) saw the huge value in being skilled in rhetoric. For example, the maxim of Protagoras that there are two sides to every question is given (with a worry for us -is there?).
The celebrated discussion between God and Moses in the Midrash is a wonderful example of how one’s position with regard to power and authority cannot trump the quality of an argument (such that Moses wins the day). This is a lively and thrilling ride in critical thinking.
Michael Billig's rhetorical approach has been key to the discursive turn in the social sciences. His witty and original book examines argumentation and its psychological importance in human conduct, and traces the connections between ancient rhetorical ideas and modern social psychology. In a new introduction, he offers further reflections on rhetoric and social psychology, discusses the recent scholarship, and allows some forgotten voices in the history of rhetoric to be heard.
I have a fixation with films about or using digital technology: my work in this area is about trying to grasp the impacts of technological change on the world in which we live. In writing about The Social Network, I was gripped by the idea that a group of college kids could create something so contagious and monstrous as Facebook. More recently, I’ve been exploring the impacts of data on our understanding and management of sport. I’m also working on a long-term project about Pixar, a long-term fascination. I just love the idea that the films we and our children watch started out with a bunch of computer scientists, playing around with polygons.
How did Hush Puppies become cool again? This is just one of the questions answered in Gladwell’s first and possibly still most influential book.
Gladwell is essentially a detective of cultural phenomena, which is probably why his writing has such an influence on what I do; both in terms of my book and my current work on sport.
While it never actually mentions computers, The Tipping Point, which analyses the social forces, networks, and mathematics that make things go viral (before the phrase ‘go viral’ went, well, viral) anticipates the impacts of Web 2.0. Little wonder that Sean Parker, of Napster and later Facebook fame, was so fond of quoting it.
An introduction to the Tipping Point theory explains how minor changes in ideas and products can increase their popularity and how small adjustments in an individual's immediate environment can alter group behavior.
