Tamim Ansary is the son of an Afghan father and an American mother. As a writer, growing up in Afghanistan and growing old in America has drawn him to issues that arise from cultural confusion in zones where civilizations overlap. His books include histories and memoirs, which he considers two sides of the same coin: a memoir is history seen up close, history is memoir seen from a distance. Much of his work explores how perspective shapes perceptions of realityâa central theme of his best-known book, Destiny Disrupted, A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes.
I wrote
The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection
History isnât just âwhat happened.â Trillions of things happened. History is about the patterns to be found among those trillions of facts. Getting at such patterns means following deep themes, and what could be deeper than ideas? Watson explores when, where, how, and why significant ideas emerged in history, how ideas led to more ideas, to inventions, to cultural changesâŚwe witness the emergence of a soul as a concept, weâre there to see Freud construct his tripartite model of the human psyche⌠Every idea is part of a thread and this book is woven of many threads.
Peter Watson's hugely ambitious and stimulating history of ideas from deep antiquity to the present dayâfrom the invention of writing, mathematics, science, and philosophy to the rise of such concepts as the law, sacrifice, democracy, and the soulâoffers an illuminated path to a greater understanding of our world and ourselves.
Money. Surely the history of money is vital to understanding where weâve been and where weâre going. Ah, but Graeber looks through surface manifestations of money such as coins and currency. He goes to the deeper roots. We learn that no society ever operated on barter. What existed before coinage was credit and debt. Greaber traces the evolution of this fundamental category of human relationship through the millennia, illuminating debt as an ever-present aspect of government, family life, wars, revolutions, slavery, history through the ages.
The groundbreaking international best-seller that turns everything you think about money, debt, and society on its headâfrom the âbrilliant, deeply original political thinkerâ David Graeber (Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things to Me)
Before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goodsâthat is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditorsâwhich lives on in full force to this day.
The day the second atomic bomb was dropped, Clabe and Leora Wilsonâs postman brought a telegram to their acreage near Perry, Iowa. One son was already in the U.S. Navy before Pearl Harbor had been attacked. Four more sons worked with their father, tenant farmers near Minburn until, one byâŚ
Yes, yes, history is an unbroken river of themes, but itâs also a chain of pivotal dramatic episodes. Dolnick gives us one such moment. In 17th century Europe, within two generations, a collection of brilliant oddballs invented science. Theyâre people, so theyâre doing the sorts of things people do, elbowing and shoving one another to find the ultimate truth before the other guy. I appreciate that in the course of reading such a wonderfully enjoyable story, I somehow learn a great deal about the truth they were seeking, the underlying mathematical order of the universe in which they believed.
âEdward Dolnickâs smoothly written history of the scientific revolution tells the stories of the key players and events that transformed society.â â Charlotte Observer
From New York Times bestselling author Edward Dolnick, the true story of a pivotal moment in modern history when a group of strange, tormented geniusesâIsaac Newton chief among themâinvented science and remade our understanding of the world.
At a time when the world was falling apartâ in an age of religious wars, plague, and the Great Fire of Londonâa group of men looked around them and saw a world of perfect order. Chaotic as it looked,âŚ
Culture is how we group ourselves. Culture is how we see. To make ourselves understood by people of other cultures, we have to lend them our eyes. Thatâs hard, but Yu Hua meets that challenge for me. His book China in Ten Words offers ten essays about China, each with a one-word title: Revolution. Reading. Copycat. Words like that. Each essay surrounds its title-word with content until one understands what the word means, not to oneself, but to Hua. The essays work like a fusion of memoir and history. They draw the reader into one manâs experience; and at the same time they illuminate a broad patch of historyâMaoist and post-Maoist China.
People. Leader. Reading. Writing. Revolution. Grassroots. Through these and other common vernacular words and phrases, Yu Hua - widely regarded as one of China's greatest living writers - frames powerful personal stories of the Chinese experience from the Cultural Revolution to the 2010s. With wit, insight and courage, he presents a refreshingly candid vision of the 'Chinese miracle' and its consequences, and reveals a unique perspective on the world's most populous yet misunderstood nation.
Traumatization and Its Aftermath
by
Antonieta Contreras,
A fresh take on the difference between trauma and hardship in order to help accurately spot the difference and avoid over-generalizations.
The book integrates the latest findings in brain science, child development, psycho-social context, theory, and clinical experiences to make the case that trauma is much more than a clusterâŚ
If history is a story, the breaking news might be: Humans Dominate Planet. Why? Because of our superior brains, Iâm told. But how do these brains work? Dr. Stephens explains it. He explains it like weâre on our way to get a beer, say, and heâs just telling me something he knows in his usual wisecracking way. Iâm chuckling, but his explanation is working, its putting pieces together, I think I see how we operate, how we humans are churning out this history weâre swimming in.
In The Left Brain Speaks, but the Right Brain Laughs, physicist Ransom Stephens explains the interesting and often amusing tale of how the human brain works. Using understandable metaphors and easy to follow language, Stephens gives readers of any scientific level an introduction to neuroscience and shows them how things like creativity, skill, and even perception of self can grow and change by utilizing the body's most important muscle. Fans of Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson will love Stephens' down to earth attitude and those interested in science will appreciate his thoughtful explanations of scientific terms. The Left BrainâŚ
The Invention of Yesterday is a birdsâ-eye view of world history from the perspective of the emerging global âweâ. It follows our journey from the Stone Age to the Virtual Age, from the tens of thousands of tiny bands of relatives we were 50,000 years ago, to the single intertangled spaghetti of human lives that we are today, all of us shouting at once. What were the stages of this drama; what were its pivotal moments, what drove the story, how did one thing connect to another, where might this all be going, and now that we are so interconnected, how come weâre still fighting?
Known more for his books on Mayas, Aztecs, and Spanish conquistadors, historian Matthew Restall's latest book takes his deepest dive yet into the history of pop music.
In the late-1970s, three music-obsessed, suburban London teenagers set out to make their own kind of pop music: after years of struggle, successâŚ
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