Basic Books: 1466 books
The Art of Looking
How to Read Modern and Contemporary Art
Language: English
Release Date: November 27, 2018
A veteran art critic helps us make sense of modern and contemporary art
The landscape of contemporary art has changed dramatically during the last hundred years: from Malevich's 1915 painting of a single black square and Duchamp's 1917 signed porcelain urinal to Jackson Pollock's midcentury...
The Death and Life of the Great American School System
How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education
Language: English
Release Date: June 28, 2016
An urgent case for protecting public education, from one of America's best-known education experts
In this landmark book, Diane Ravitch - former assistant secretary of education and a leader in the drive to create a national curriculum - examines her career in education reform and repudiates...
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?
And Other Conversations About Race
Language: English
Release Date: September 5, 2017
The classic, bestselling book on the psychology of racism -- now fully revised and updated
Walk into any racially mixed high school and you will see Black, White, and Latino youth clustered in their own groups. Is this self-segregation a problem to address or a coping strategy? Beverly Daniel...
Language at the Speed of Sight
How We Read, Why So Many Can't, and What Can Be Done About It
Language: English
Release Date: January 3, 2017
"An important and alarming new book." --New York Times
The way we teach reading is not working, and it cannot continue. We have largely abandoned phones-based reading instruction, despite research that supports its importance for word recognition. Rather than treating Black English as a valid...
The Meaning of It All
Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist
Language: English
Release Date: April 29, 2009
Many appreciate Richard P. Feynman's contributions to twentieth-century physics, but few realize how engaged he was with the world around him—how deeply and thoughtfully he considered the religious, political, and social issues of his day. Now, a wonderful book—based on a previously unpublished,...
Unruly Waters
How Rains, Rivers, Coasts, and Seas Have Shaped Asia's History
Language: English
Release Date: December 11, 2018
From a MacArthur "Genius," a bold new perspective on the history of Asia, highlighting the long quest to tame its waters
Asia's history has been shaped by her waters. In Unruly Waters, historian Sunil Amrith reimagines Asia's history through the stories of its rains, rivers, coasts,...
Coyote America
A Natural and Supernatural History
Language: English
Release Date: June 7, 2016
The New York Times best-selling account of how coyotes--long the target of an extermination policy--spread to every corner of the United States
Finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
"A masterly synthesis of scientific research and personal observation."-Wall...
The Theoretical Minimum
What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics
Language: English
Release Date: April 22, 2014
A master teacher presents the ultimate introduction to classical mechanics for people who are serious about learning physics
"Beautifully clear explanations of famously 'difficult' things," --Wall Street Journal
A Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2013
If you ever regretted not...
Catching Fire
How Cooking Made Us Human
Language: English
Release Date: May 26, 2009
The groundbreaking theory of how fire and food drove the evolution of modern humans
Ever since Darwin and The Descent of Man, the evolution and world-wide dispersal of humans has been attributed to our intelligence and adaptability. But in Catching Fire, renowned primatologist Richard Wrangham...
I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual
A Memoir of Nazi Terror
Language: English
Release Date: April 26, 2011
On a fateful day in May 1941, in Nazi-occupied Strasbourg, seventeen-year- old Pierre Seel was summoned by the Gestapo. This was the beginning of his journey through the horrors of a concentration camp.
For nearly forty years, Seel kept this secret in order to hide his homosexuality. Eventually...
Lactivism
How Feminists and Fundamentalists, Hippies and Yuppies, and Physicians and Politicians Made Breastfeeding Big Business and Bad Policy
Language: English
Release Date: November 24, 2015
Social scientist and mother Courtney Jung explores the ever-expanding world of breastfeeding advocacy, shining a new light on the diverse communities who compose it, the dubious science behind it, and the pernicious public policies to which it has given rise
Is breast really best? Breastfeeding...
Trading with the Enemy
A Yankee Travels Through Castro's Cuba
Language: English
Release Date: September 9, 2008
Havana knew me by my shoes,” begins Tom Miller's lively and entertaining account of his sojourn for more than eight months traveling through Cuba, mixing with its literati and black marketers, its cane cutters and cigar rollers. Granted unprecedented access to travel throughout the country, the...
Army of Empire
The Untold Story of the Indian Army in World War I
Language: English
Release Date: December 4, 2018
Drawing on untapped new sources, the first global history of the Indian Expeditionary Forces in World War I
While their story is almost always overlooked, the 1.5 million Indian soldiers who served the British Empire in World War I played a crucial role in the eventual Allied victory. Despite...
by Robert Brustein
Language: English
Release Date: April 28, 2009
Language: English
Release Date: April 28, 2009
The founder and director of the Yale Repertory Theater, as well as Harvard's American Repertory Theater, and a drama critic for more than thirty years, Robert Brustein is a living legend in theatrical circles. Letters to a Young Actor not only inspires the multitudes of struggling dramatists out pounding the pavement, but also reinvigorates the very state of the art of acting itself.