My interest in demography began when I saw rapid demographic change taking place before my eyes in London, and when I noted the different fertility choices of friends and relations and started to put the pieces together and to understand how demography shapes our changing reality. I have published three books on the subject—the first, a version of my PhD thesis, the second and third captured below—and have broadcast and written articles for the press extensively on these topics.
It takes real historic breadth to write a comprehensive history of the nineteenth century and only a historian of the quality of Evans could pull it off so convincingly. Like his mentor Eric Hobsbawm—but unencumbered by the Marxian straight-jacket—Evans masterfully draws the links not only between decades and between countries and continents but also between the social, the economic, and the political. His book is no demographic history, but it takes demography seriously. This really matters in a century in which the Malthusian bonds were broken for some of humanity, not all of it, making it a period of European global supremacy underpinned by demographic takeoff, the effects of which we are still feeling.
"Sweeping . . . an ambitious synthesis . . . [Evans] writes with admirable narrative power and possesses a wonderful eye for local color . . . Fascinating."-Stephen Schuker, The Wall Street Journal
From the bestselling author of The Third Reich at War, a masterly account of Europe in the age of its global hegemony; the latest volume in the Penguin History of Europe series
Richard J. Evans, bestselling historian of Nazi Germany, returns with a monumental new addition to the acclaimed Penguin History of Europe series, covering the period from the fall…
My interest in demography began when I saw rapid demographic change taking place before my eyes in London, and when I noted the different fertility choices of friends and relations and started to put the pieces together and to understand how demography shapes our changing reality. I have published three books on the subject—the first, a version of my PhD thesis, the second and third captured below—and have broadcast and written articles for the press extensively on these topics.
There are two reasons for recommending this book by the late Ben Wattenberg. First, Wattenberg was early to recognize the huge consequences of fertility rates falling across the world, not only in the West but in East Asia and even in quite poor countries. Second, Wattenberg convinced me that it was possible to write simply and straightforwardly about the subject of demography, without the need for inaccessible terminology and making the ideas exciting and relevant.
Never before have birth and fertility rates fallen so far, so fast, so low, for so long, in so many places, so surprisingly. In Fewer, Ben Wattenberg shows how and why this has occurred, and explains what it means for the future. These stark demographic changes will affect commerce, the environment, public financing, and geo-politics. In Wattenberg's world of The New Demography readers get a look at a topic often chattered about, but rarely understood.
My interest in demography began when I saw rapid demographic change taking place before my eyes in London, and when I noted the different fertility choices of friends and relations and started to put the pieces together and to understand how demography shapes our changing reality. I have published three books on the subject—the first, a version of my PhD thesis, the second and third captured below—and have broadcast and written articles for the press extensively on these topics.
Simon was something of a prophet who felt that he had a contrarian worldview that the world needed to know about. His basic idea is that the human brain is the ultimate resource and that with the right application and opportunity, humans can solve so many of the serious problems that environmentalism and the limits on resources throw at us. I cannot say that I agree with Simon on everything, nor that his optimism is apt in every situation, but his is an exciting and bracing can-do-ism that sees the best in humanity once it is freed to fulfill its potential.
Arguing that the ultimate resource is the human imagination coupled to the human spirit, Julian Simon led a vigorous challenge to conventional beliefs about scarcity of energy and natural resources, pollution of the environment, the effects of immigration, and the "perils of overpopulation." The comprehensive data, careful quantitative research, and economic logic contained in the first edition of The Ultimate Resource questioned widely held professional judgments about the threat of overpopulation, and Simon's celebrated bet with Paul Ehrlich about resource prices in the 1980s enhanced the public attention--both pro and con--that greeted this controversial book. Now Princeton University Press presents…
My interest in demography began when I saw rapid demographic change taking place before my eyes in London, and when I noted the different fertility choices of friends and relations and started to put the pieces together and to understand how demography shapes our changing reality. I have published three books on the subject—the first, a version of my PhD thesis, the second and third captured below—and have broadcast and written articles for the press extensively on these topics.
Shriver is an unusual combination: a contemporary novelist who is seriously interested in the big socio-economic changes going on in the world and writes razor-sharp columns. Although not her best-known book (that title must belong to We Need to Talk about Kevin), The Mandibles is I think her best. In contrast to the optimism of Julian Simon cited above, Shriver looks into a dystopian future in which (among many other things) more Mexicans are trying to leave the US than arrive and inflation takes off again. All the while, civilisation breaks down. Taking this book and Simon’s together—an unlikely duo—you have in a nutshell technical optimism, civilisational pessimism. The Mandibles is also, like most of her work, hilarious.
'Unsettling as it is entertaining' Financial Times
'It's scaring the hell out of me' Tracy Chevalier
THE BRILLIANT NEW NOVEL FROM THE ORANGE PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN.
It is 2029.
The Mandibles have been counting on a sizable fortune filtering down when their 97-year-old patriarch dies. Yet America's soaring national debt has grown so enormous that it can never be repaid. Under siege from an upstart international currency, the dollar is in meltdown. A bloodless world war will wipe out the savings of millions of American families.
I’ve been a liberal all my life: I went to my first protest march by myself when I was 13 and cast my first vote for George McGovern. I’ve also been an academic most of my life, studying and teaching at multiple colleges and universities. Over the last decade I’ve watched the animating principles of both academia and liberalism – the spirit of free inquiry and the willingness to debate ideas – descend into an authoritarian conformism that brooks no dissent. I hope that these books can persuade people to fight against these trends before it’s too late: “Do not go gentle into that good night; Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.”
Like Stone’s book, this is a book about history, not wokeness. It’s not an easy read, but it’s worth the effort.
It recounts the triumph of scientific reasoning and liberal tolerance over several decades in the mid-twentieth century. That triumph was largely brought about by the “secularization” of American culture, spearheaded by Jewish intellectuals.
I read it long before wokeness was a thing – it was published in 1996 – and found it interesting but not particularly relevant to anything I was thinking about. But when wokeness came along, it suddenly hit me that this new religion was taking us backwards, back to the beginning of Hollinger’s story.
If that trend continues, we are in danger of losing the gains that science and tolerance have produced.
This remarkable group of essays described the "culture wars" that consolidated a new, secular ethos in mid-twentieth-century American academia and generated the fresh energies needed for a wide range of scientific and cultural enter-prises. Focusing on the decades from the 1930s through the 1960s, David Hollinger discusses the scientists, social scientists, philosophers, and historians who fought the Christian biases that had kept Jews from fully participating in American intellectual life. Today social critics take for granted the comparatively open outlook developed by these men (and men they were, mostly), and charge that their cosmopolitanism was not sufficiently multicultural. Yet Hollinger…
I have long been passionate about helping people connect with God through their work. After graduating from college, I worked in full-time minister for six years and then became an entrepreneur. Was I dropping off a spiritual cliff by leaving full-time ministry? I later pursued my PhD and became a professor. At the University of Oklahoma, I became a top researcher and co-founded the Center for Entrepreneurship. The impact of work on my faith has long been an important issue for me. I ultimately gained valuable insights from God that enhanced my spiritual journey. In my book, I explain the profound significance of work for knowing God.
This book does a phenomenal job of building on a biblical foundation to help readers see the relevance of their work to God and their spiritual journey. I love how this book helps me develop strategies for positioning my work to build an eternal legacy.
Jordan Raynor also helped me to see how my view of work can offer important insights about heaven. I feel affirmed in my career and the significant value it can bring to the kingdom of God.
From a leading voice in the faith and work movement and author of Redeeming Your Time comes the revolutionary message that God sees our daily work—in whatever form it takes—with far more value than we ever imagined.
“The Sacredness of Secular Work does an extraordinary job of being both personally relevant and, more importantly, biblically faithful.”—Randy Alcorn, New York Times bestselling author of Heaven
Does your work matter for eternity?
Sadly, most believers don’t think so. Sure, the 1 percent of the time they spend sharing the gospel with their co-workers matters. But most Christians view the other 99 percent…
I’m a recovering atheist: a Christian convert who has more sympathy with some of my former atheist brethren than with a lot of my fellow believers. And I’m a historian by trade, which means I believe in the importance of trying to get inside the heads of people living in very different times – but who were still people. I’ve chosen polemical books by atheists and by believers, but in my own writing I try to get sympathetically inside the heads of both. I find that I get on better if I listen to the other side rather than banging the drum for my own – whichever ‘my own side’ is.
Callum Brown is a card-carrying humanist and one of the greatest (and most combative) historians of modern secularism. This book’s concept is very simple: he’s conducted 85 in-depth interviews with self-identified atheists in Europe and the United States about how they got that way, how they understand their world and construct their values, and how they relate to the religions that some of them used to embrace. I think his celebration of these good people blinds him to the very particular historical processes at work here, but I challenge anyone to read this book and not acknowledge that our world has profoundly changed in the past half-century.
The Western World is becoming atheist. In the space of three generations churchgoing and religious belief have become alien to millions. We are in the midst of one of humankind's great cultural changes. How has this happened?
Becoming Atheist explores how people of the sixties' generation have come to live their lives as if there is no God. It tells the life narratives of those from Britain, Western Europe, the United States and Canada who came from Christian, Jewish and other backgrounds to be without faith. Based on interviews with 85 people born in 18 countries, Callum Brown shows how…
I'm an artist, activist, and social entrepreneur. Latino bilingüe and history nerd. I’m the Founder of Resilient Coders, a free and stipended nonprofit coding bootcamp that trains people of color for careers as software engineers. I built that organization for the same reason I write: I care about the economic wellness of Black and Latinx people. I want my neighbors to have the purchasing power to keep my local bodega open. They carry my coffee. Whole Foods doesn’t.
This is the philosophical bedrock of the modern struggle for economic justice. It’s a cornerstone of my own book, actually.
“To sustain your existential identity,” writes Haaglund, “is to lead your life in light of what you value.”
Freedom is the ability to sustain that existential identity. It means having more time than that which you need to survive. The more time you have to live your life in light of what you value, the freer you are.
A society in which an entire class of people can spend their entire lifetimes working and remain poor is not a free society.
And yes, it’s a philosophy book, but it’s clear and accessible.
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian, The Millions, and The Sydney Morning Herald
This Life offers a profoundly inspiring basis for transforming our lives, demonstrating that our commitment to freedom and democracy should lead us beyond both religion and capitalism. Philosopher Martin Hägglund argues that we need to cultivate not a religious faith in eternity but a secular faith devoted to our finite life together. He shows that all spiritual questions of freedom are inseparable from economic and material conditions: what matters is how we treat one another in this…
I am an award-winning historian and philosopher of the human sciences. But I got here by means of an unusually varied path: working for a private investigator, practicing in a Buddhist monastery, being shot at, hiking a volcano off the coast of Africa, being jumped by a gang in Amsterdam, snowboarding in the Pyrenees, piloting a boat down the canals of Bourgogne, playing bass guitar in a punk band, and once I almost died from scarlet fever. Throughout my journey, I have lived and studied in five countries, acquired ten languages, and attended renowned universities (Oxford, Harvard, and Stanford), all while seeking ways to make the world a better place.
In this book, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor challenges the notion that modernization automatically leads to secularization.
Instead of viewing modernity as either the decline of religion or subtraction of religion from public life, Taylor presents the idea that modernity brings about the expansion and variety of religious beliefs. In Taylor’s view Christianity has been relativized insofar as it has been rendered but one kind of belief among others.
He also argues that many transcendent values have been replaced by immanent concerns. But in certain important ways the book is still hopeful. It is a very long text, but it is definitely important reading for anyone navigating faith, spirituality, and the search for meaning in today’s world.
What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that we--in the West, at least--largely do. And clearly the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundly in the last few centuries. In what will be a defining book for our time, Charles Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean--of what, precisely, happens when a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God becomes one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is only one human possibility among others.
I moved to the University of Notre Dame in 1997 because I fell in love with its distinctive vision, including its core mission as a Catholic university. A year later I became dean. When during interviews I asked prospective faculty members how they might contribute to the distinctive mission of Notre Dame, broadly understood, I realized that they did not really understand what a Catholic university was, so I gave them my own understanding of Notre Dame and of the idea of a Catholic university. Eventually, I turned my oral answer into a short book, which articulates that vision in ways that should inspire anyone, whether they are Catholic or not.
Robert Benne interviewed me for his book, which offers case studies of several different kinds of religious universities. You know the interview is conducted well, when the person asking the questions is forcing you to think anew about your own implementation of vision.
Benne asked me how we socialize faculty into our distinctive vision. I immediately sensed that we did not do enough and addressed the issue more fully both in practice and in one of my books.
At a Catholic university, one should also think about how other kinds of religious universities define and realize their mission. This book accomplishes that.
This book demonstrates that, despite much evidence to the contrary, there are still Christian colleges and universities of high academic quality that have also kept their religious heritages publicly relevant. Respected scholar Robert Benne explores how six schools from six different religious traditions (Calvin College, Wheaton College, St. Olaf College, Valparaiso University, Baylor University, and the University of Notre Dame) have maintained "quality with soul". These constructive case studies examine the vision, ethos, and personnel policies of each school, showing how 'and why' its religious foundation remains strong.
