BASIC BOOKS

(P/B) Mindstorms (Revised)
Computers have completely changed the way we teach children. We have Mindstorms to thank for that. In this book, first published in 1980, pioneering computer scientist Seymour Papert uses the invention of LOGO, the first child-friendly programming language, to make the definitive case for the educational value computer programming. Papert argues that children are more than capable of mastering computers, and that teaching computational processes like de-bugging in the classroom can change the way we learn everything else. He also shows tha...
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(P/B) GODEL, ESCHER, BACH
A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll. Douglas Hofstadter's book is concerned directly with the nature of "maps" or links between formal systems. However, according to Hofstadter, the formal system that underlies all mental activity transcends the system that supports it. If life can grow out of the formal chemical substrate of the cell, if consciousness can emerge out of a formal system of firing neurons, then so too will computers attain human intelligence. Goedel, Escher, Bach is a wonderful explorati...
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(H/B) INTELLECTUALS AND RACE
Intellectuals and Race is a radical book in the original sense of one that goes to the root of the problem. The role of intellectuals in racial strife is explored in an international context that puts the American experience in a wholly new light. The views of individual intellectuals have spanned the spectrum, but the views of intellectuals as a whole have tended to cluster. Indeed, these views have clustered at one end of the spectrum in the early twentieth century and then clustered at the opposite end of the spectrum in the late twent...
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(P/B) Justinian : Emperor, Soldier, Saint
In this groundbreaking new biography of Justinian, Peter Sarris gives us an intimate insight into both the Emperor and his times. We meet a man who from the humblest beginnings, rose to become ruler of much of the known world achieving an almost god-like status. An emperor who infused even the most mundane tasks with spiritual and religious significance. A gifted administrator obsessed with detail. A middle aged lover who fell for a dancing girl and changed the law so he could marry her, ruling with Empress Theodora by his side for over t...
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(P/B) EMOTIONAL DESIGN - WHY WE LOVE (OR HATE) EVERYDAY THINGS
Did you ever wonder why cheap wine tastes better in fancy glasses? Why sales of Macintosh computers soared when Apple introduced the colourful iMac? New research on emotion and cognition has shown that attractive things really do work better, as Donald Norman amply demonstrates in this fascinating book, which has garnered acclaim everywhere from Scientific American to The New Yorker. Emotional Design articulates the profound influence of the feelings that objects evoke, from our willingness to spend thousands of dollars on Gucci bags and R...
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(P/B) EINSTEIN PICASSO - SPACE TIME AND THE BEAUTY THAT CAUSES
The most important scientist of the twentieth century and the most important artist had their periods of greatest creativity almost simultaneously and in remarkably similar circumstances. This fascinating parallel biography of Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso as young men examines their greatest creations-Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and Einstein's special theory of relativity. Miller shows how these breakthroughs arose not only from within their respective fields but from larger currents in the intellectual culture of the times. U...
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(P/B) Power and Progress
A bold new interpretation of why technology benefits the elites - and how we must reshape the path of innovation to create true shared prosperity. A thousand years of history make one thing clear: progress is not automatic but depends on the choices we make. Much of the wealth generated by agricultural advances during the Middle Ages was captured by the Church while the peasants starved. The first hundred years of industrialization delivered stagnant incomes for workers, while making a few people rich. Throughout the world today, digital t...
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(P/B) THE SPINOZA PROBLEM
In The Spinoza Problem, Irvin Yalom spins fact and fiction into an unforgettable psycho-philosophical novel. A psychiatrist with a deep interest in philosophical issues, Yalom jointly tells the story of the seventeenth-century thinker Baruch Spinoza, his philosophy and subsequent excommunication from the Jewish community, and his apparent influence on the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, whose einsatzgruppe was dispatched during the Second World War to investigate a mysterious "Spinoza Problem." Seamlessly alternating between Golden Age Am...
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(H/B) EXISTENTIAL PSYCHOTHERAPY
Existential therapy has been practiced and continues to be practiced in many forms and situations throughout the world. But until now, it has lacked a coherent structure, an analysis of its tenets, and an evaluation of its usefulness. Irvin Yalom, whose Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy has rendered such a service to that discipline since 1970, provides existential psychotherapy with a background, a synthesis, and a framework. Organized around what Yalom identifies as the four "ultimate concerns of life"-death, freedom, existentia...
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(P/B) THE RAPE OF NANKING
The New York Times bestselling account of one of history's most brutal-and forgotten-massacres, when the Japanese army destroyed China's capital city on the eve of World War II. In December 1937, one of the most horrific atrocities in the long annals of wartime barbarity occurred. The Japanese army swept into the ancient city of Nanking (what was then the capital of China), and within weeks, more than 300,000 Chinese civilians and soldiers were systematically raped, tortured, and murdered. In this seminal work, Iris Chang, whose own grandp...
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(P/B) MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES
Howard Gardner's brilliant conception of individual competence has changed the face of education in the twenty-three years since the publication of his classic work, Frames of Mind. Since then thousands of educators, parents, and researchers have explored the practical implications and applications of Multiple Intelligences theory--the powerfulnotion that there are separate human capacities, ranging from musical intelligence to the intelligence involved in self-understanding. The first decade of research on MI theory and practice was repor...
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(P/B) SO YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT RACE
In this New York Times bestseller, Ijeoma Oluo offers a hard-hitting but user-friendly examination of race in America Widespread reporting on aspects of white supremacy - from police brutality to the mass incarceration of Black Americans - has put a media spotlight on racism in our society. Still, it is a difficult subject to talk about. How do you tell your roommate her jokes are racist? Why did your sister-in-law take umbrage when you asked to touch her hair - and how do you make it right? How do you explain white privilege to your white...
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(P/B) Philosophy In The Flesh
Three major findings of cognitive science cast doubt on the past 2,500 years of Western philosophy. Lakoff and Johnson propose to rebuild philosophy from the ground up, starting from clearly known facts about the mind. . In this radical rebuilding of Western philosophy from a scientific basis, Lakoff and Johnson first describe the kind of philosophical stance that must follow from taking cognitive science seriously; reexamine such basic concepts as time, the mind, the self, and morality; reexamine a host of philosophical traditions from th...
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(P/B) Strategic Vision
By 1991, following the disintegration first of the Soviet bloc and then of the Soviet Union itself, the United States was left standing tall as the only global super-power. The 21st century seemed destined to be yet another American century. But that optimism did not last long as the stock market bubble and the costly foreign unilateralism of the younger Bush presidency, as well as the financial catastrophe of 2008 jolted America - and much of the West - into a sudden recognition of its systemic vulnerability to unregulated greed. In Strat...
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THE DISCOVERY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
This classic work is a monumental, integrated view of man's search for an understanding of the inner reaches of the mind. In an account that is both exhaustive and exciting, the distinguished psychiatrist and author demonstrates the long chain of development -through the exorcists, magnetists, and hypnotists- that led to the fruition of dynamic psychiatry in the psychological systems of Janet, Freud, Adler, and Jung. (From the publisher) "A major contribution to the literature of dynamic psychiatry and one that will be a source book and r...
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(P/B) QUEENS OF A FALLEN WORLD
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(P/B) THE BOY WHO WAS RAISED AS A DOG
What happens when a young child is traumatized? How does terror affect a child's mind-and how can that mind recover? Child psychiatrist Bruce Perry has treated children faced with unimaginable horror: homicide survivors, witnesses to their own parents' murders, children raised in closets and cages, the Branch Davidian children, and victims of extreme neglect and family violence. In The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, Dr. Perry tells their stories of trauma and transformation. He explains what happens to the brain when children are exposed to ...
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(P/B) FREE TO LEARN
In Free to Learn, developmental psychologist Peter Gray argues that in order to foster children who will thrive in today's constantly changing world, we must entrust them to steer their own learning and development. Drawing on evidence from anthropology, psychology, and history, he demonstrates that free play is the primary means by which children learn to control their lives, solve problems, get along with peers, and become emotionally resilient. A brave, counterintuitive proposal for freeing our children from the shackles of the curiosit...
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(P/B) THE GRAND CHESSBOARD
Bestselling author and eminent foreign policy scholar Zbigniew Brzezinski's classic book on American's strategic mission in the modern world. In The Grand Chessboard, renowned geostrategist Zbigniew Brzezinski delivers a brutally honest and provocative vision for American preeminence in the twenty-first century. The task facing the United States, he argues, is to become the sole political arbiter in Eurasian lands and to prevent the emergence of any rival power threatening our material and diplomatic interests. The Eurasian landmass, home ...
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(P/B) THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE
More than twenty years ago, a little-known Swiss psychoanalyst wrote a book that changed the way many people viewed themselves and their world. In simple but powerful prose, the deeply moving Drama of the Gifted Child showed how parents unconsciously form and deform the emotional lives of their children. Alice Miller's stories about the roots of suffering in childhood resonated with readers, and her book soon became a backlist best seller. In The Truth Will Set You Free Miller returns to the intensely personal tone and themes of her best-l...
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