Bøger udgivet af Basic Books

*A New York Times Editor's Choice pick*Shortlisted for the 2022 Pacific Northwest Book AwardsA beloved natural historian explores how climate change is driving evolution In  Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid, biologist Thor Hanson tells the remarkable story of how plants and animals are responding to climate change: adjusting, evolving, and sometimes dying out. Anole lizards have grown larger toe pads, to grip more tightly in frequent hurricanes. Warm waters have caused the development of Humboldt squid to alter so dramatically that fishermen mistake them for different species. Brown pelicans have moved north, and long-spined sea urchins south, to find cooler homes. And when coral reefs sicken, they leave no territory worth fighting for, so aggressive butterfly fish transform instantly into pacifists.  A story of hope, resilience, and risk, Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid is natural history for readers of Bernd Heinrich, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and David Haskell. It is also a reminder of how unpredictable climate change is as it interacts with the messy lattice of life.

"According to conventional wisdom, American women's campaign for the vote began with the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The movement was led by storied figures such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. But this women's movement was an overwhelmingly white one, and it secured the constitutional right to vote for white women, not for all women. In Vanguard, acclaimed historian Martha Jones offers a sweeping history of African American women's political lives in America, recounting how they fought for, won, and used the right to the ballot and how they fought against both racism and sexism. From 1830s Boston to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and beyond to Shirley Chisholm, Stacey Abrams, and Kamala Harris, Jones excavates the lives and work of Black women who, although in many cases suffragists, were never single-issue activists. She recounts the lives of Maria Stewart, the first American woman to speak about politics before a mixed audience of men and women; African Methodist Episcopal preacher Jarena Lee; Reconstruction-era advocate for female suffrage Frances Ellen Watkins Harper; Boston abolitionist, religious leader, and women's club organizer Eliza Ann Gardner; and other hidden figures who were pioneers for both gender and racial equality. Revealing the ways Black women remained independent in their ideas and their organization, Jones shows how Black women were again and again the American vanguard of women's rights, setting the pace in the quest for justice and collective liberation. In the twenty-first century, Black women's power at the polls and in politics is evident. Vanguard reveals that this power is not at all new, but is instead the culmination of two centuries of dramatic struggle"--

"Why do Jews pray? What is the role of prayer in their lives as moral and ethical beings? From the simplest details of how to comport oneself on entering a synagogue to the most profound and moving comments on the prayers themselves, Rabbi Hayim Halevy Donin guides readers of To Pray as a Jew through the entire prescribed course of Jewish liturgy, passage by passage, ritual by ritual, in this handsome and indispensable guide to Jewish prayer. Unexcelled for beginners as well as the religiously observant, To Pray as a Jew is intended to show the way, to enlighten, and hopefully to inspire."--

A “brilliant” (Los Angeles Review of Books) history of accounting, showing how financial and political accountability has shaped the rise and fall of nations and empires Whether building a road or fighting a war, leaders from ancient Mesopotamia to the present have relied on financial accounting to track their state's assets and guide its policies. Basic accounting tools such as auditing and double-entry bookkeeping form the basis of modern capitalism and the nation-state. Yet our appreciation for accounting and its formative role throughout history remains minimal at best-and we remain ignorant at our peril. Poor or risky practices can shake, and even bring down, entire societies. In The Reckoning, historian and MacArthur "Genius" Award-winner Jacob Soll presents a sweeping history of accounting, drawing on a wealth of examples from over a millennia of human history to reveal how accounting has shaped kingdoms, empires, and entire civilizations. The Medici family of 15th century Florence used the double-entry method to win the loyalty of their clients, but eventually began to misrepresent their accounts, ultimately contributing to the economic decline of the Florentine state itself. In the 17th and 18th centuries, European rulers shunned honest accounting, understanding that accurate bookkeeping would constrain their spending and throw their legitimacy into question. And in fact, when King Louis XVI's director of finances published the crown's accounts in 1781, his revelations provoked a public outcry that helped to fuel the French Revolution. When transparent accounting finally took hold in the 19th Century, the practice helped England establish a global empire. But both inept and willfully misused accounting persist, as the catastrophic Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Recession of 2008 have made all too clear. A masterwork of economic and political history, and a radically new perspective on the recent past, The Reckoning compels us to see how accounting is an essential instrument of great institutions and nations-and one that, in our increasingly transparent and interconnected world, has never been more vital.

"The formidable Dartmoor Prison was the first permanent facility for prisoners of war on British soil. Known as the "hated cage," American captives-Black and white-from the War of 1812 languished in it for years, even after the war ended, stewing in frustration and rage. Although the prisoners had been racially integrated as sailors on American naval ships, Dartmoor became deeply segregated, like the United States itself. Then, on April 6, 1815, a minor flashpoint between the prisoners and the guards turned into a massacre, as guards opened fire. Nine Americans were killed, and dozens injured. It was the last time Britons intentionally killed Americans in a war-and it also led to the prisoners developing a shared national identity that began to trump their racial differences. The Hated Cage provides astonishing insight into the War of 1812, a conflict which proved embarrassing to both sides, by illuminating the tensions between a massive power with a foothold still in the Americas and the upstart nation desperate for true sovereignty. Celebrated historian Nicholas Guyatt brings to vivid life the forgotten story of how these prisoners came into British custody and of how they negotiated and renegotiated their racial identities as they faced a common enemy. Drawing on extensive material from archives in Britain and the United States, The Hated Cage reveals how, in unlikely and dire circumstances, the men trapped within Dartmoor came together to chart a new sense of themselves-as Americans"--

"On December 12, 1719, a ship named La Mutine, or the Mutinous Woman, sailed from the French port of Le Havre, bound for the vast North American territory then referred to as 'the Mississippi.' La Mutine was loaded with goods that the fledgling French colony urgently required for its survival, basic foodstuffs such as flour and lard. But its principal commodity was a new kind of French export: women. The women who arrived in the New World from that frigate would go on to found Gulf dynasties, but their beginnings were less auspicious. Falsely accused of sex crimes--some for reporting rape, others because their families were obscenely poor and it was financially expedient to imprison them--these women were prisoners, shackled in the ship's hold. Of the 98 women who were shipped to the colony, only 44 survived. Despite the bleakness of these women's origins, they achieved unlikely triumph across the Atlantic. They managed to carve out a place for themselves in the colonies that would have been impossible in France, making advantageous marriages and accumulating property. Many were instrumental in the building of New Orleans, founded only a year before their arrival, and in settling Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. Today, hundreds of thousands of Americans can trace their lineage La Mutine. Drawing on an impressive range of sources to restore the voices of these women to the historical record ... [this work] introduces us to the Gulf's Founding Mothers--the 'mutinous women' of La Mutine"--

"Embraced over many decades by hundreds of thousands of readers, To Be a Jew offers a clear and comprehensive introduction to traditional Jewish laws and customs as they apply to daily life in the contemporary world. In simple and powerful language, Rabbi Hayim Halevy Donin presents the fundamentals of Judaism, including the laws and observances for the Sabbath, the dietary laws, family life, prayer at home and in the synagogue, the major and minor holidays, and the guiding principles and observances of life, such as birth, naming, circumcision, adoption and conversion, Bar-mitzvah, marriage, divorce, death, and mourning. Ideal for reference, reflection, and inspiration, To Be a Jew will by greatly valued by anyone who feels that knowing, understanding, and observing the laws and traditions of Judaism in daily life is the essence of what it means to be a Jew."-

"With a new epilogue by the author"--Cover.

"Physician Haider Warraich offers a ... reexamination of the nature of pain, not as a simple physical sensation, but as a cultural experience. Warraich, himself a sufferer of chronic pain, considers the ways our notions of pain have been shaped not just by science but by politics and power, by whose suffering mattered and whose didn't. He weaves a ... history from the Renaissance, when pain transformed into a medical issue, through the racial legacy of pain tolerance, to the opiate epidemics of both the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, to the cutting edge of present-day pain science"--Publisher marketing.

"On a Saturday afternoon in New York in late 1912 ... a group of women gathered, all of them convinced that they were going to change the world. It was the first meeting of 'Heterodoxy, ' a secret supper club. The goals of the group were simple: they would meet to talk about their lives, their politics, and the still-not widely recognized idea that women were fundamentally equal to men. In a move of liberation, they kept no records of their meetings, leaving them free to discuss a new term borrowed from the French: feminism ... [The] members were passionate advocates of free love, equal marriage, and easier divorce; several lived openly in same-sex relationships. The friendships of Heterodoxy made their unconventional lives possible, through its reassurance that other women felt differently about the world and wanted more from it than they had been raised to expect"--Publisher marketing.

"Also called Zero degrees of empathy by the UK publisher Penguin Random House"--Page ix.

The epic story of the planet’s oldest trees and the making of the modern world  Humans have always revered long-lived trees. But as historian Jared Farmer reveals in Elderflora, our veneration took a modern turn in the eighteenth century, when naturalists embarked on a quest to locate and precisely date the oldest living things on earth. The new science of tree time prompted travelers to visit ancient specimens and conservationists to protect sacred groves. Exploitation accompanied sanctification, as old-growth forests succumbed to imperial expansion and the industrial revolution. Taking us from Lebanon to New Zealand to California, Farmer surveys the complex history of the world’s oldest trees, including voices of Indigenous peoples, religious figures, and contemporary scientists who study elderflora in crisis. In a changing climate, a long future is still possible, Farmer shows, but only if we give care to young things that might grow old.

""From all things One and from One all things," wrote the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. You might read this as a platitude, or as a pleasant spiritual or philosophical idea. You probably wouldn't read it as a more-or-less accurate scientific statement about the nature of the universe. Particle physicist Heinrich Pèas, however, does. In The One, Pèas makes the surprising and compelling case for monism-the philosophical idea that one single, all-encompassing thing underlies everything we experience-rehabilitating the idea's reputation and reclaiming it for science. At first glance, the idea that "all is one" seems patently absurd. But Pèas reveals that monism follows logically from certain principles of quantum mechanics once they are applied to the entire universe. He shows how monism is not only a feasible theory from a scientific perspective but a potentially powerful solution to the stagnation of thought in contemporary physics, arguing that if physics is ever to progress, physicists must learn to embrace insights from outside the narrow silo of experimental knowledge. Along the way, Pèas traces monism's often-buried 3000-year history, passing through the lives of a diverse array of great thinkers, including Plato, Galileo, Spinoza, and Goethe, and the churchmen, philosophers, and physicists who fought against monism as well. The result is an epic and expansive journey through thousands of years of human thought and into the nature of reality itself. Equal parts physics, philosophy, and history of ideas, The One is of the rare sort of book that can both the first-time reader with its marvels and revolutionize the worldview of even the most experienced physics buff"--

"The Black Power movement is usually associated with heroic, iconic figures, like Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X, but largely missing from stories about the Black freedom struggle are the hundreds of ordinary foot soldiers who were just as essential to the movement. Stayed on Freedom presents a new history of Black Power by focusing on two unheralded organizers: Zoharah Robinson and Michael Simmons. Robinson was born in Memphis, raised by her grandmother who told her stories of slavery and taught her the value of self-reliance. Simmons was born in Philadelphia, a child of the Great Migration. They met in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, where Robinson was one of the only woman project directors in Mississippi Freedom Summer, after she had dropped out of college to work in the movement full-time. Falling in love while organizing against the war in Vietnam and raising the call for Black Power, their simultaneous commitment to each other and social change took them from SNCC, to the Nation of Islam, to a global movement, as they fought for social justice well after the 1960s. By centering the lives of Robinson and Simmons, Stayed On Freedom offers a history of Black Power that is more expansive, complex, and personal than those previously written. Historian Dan Berger shows how Black Power linked the political futures of African Americans with those of people in Angola, Cambodia, Cuba, South Africa, and the Soviet Union, making it a global movement for workers and women's rights, for peace and popular democracy. Robinson's and Simmons's activism blurs the divides -- between North and South, faith and secular, the US and the world, and the past and the present -- typically applied to Black Power. And, in contrast to conventional surveys of the history of civil rights, Stayed on Freedom is an intimate story anchored in lives of the people who made the movements move, where heroism mingles with uncertainty over decades of intensive political commitment. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews with Robinson and Simmons, their families and their friends, in addition to immense archival research, Berger weaves a joyous and intricate history of the Black Power movement, providing a powerful portrait of two people trying to make a life while working to make a better world"--

"Modern dating can feel overwhelming, with so many online dating apps offering a seemingly endless sea of possible matches. Ghosting, outdated assumptions about relationships, and a massive assortment of dating platforms have obscured the point of all of it: this is supposed to be fun. Enter professional sex and dating coach Myisha Battle. Over the course of a decade as a licensed clinical sexologist, she's developed a set of tools that allow singles to bypass the games. This Is Supposed to Be Fun presents a guide to every step of the relationship process, from creating the perfectly imperfect dating profile, to staying true to your authentic self on dates, to breaking up with compassion. More so than any other previously written, this book is radically inclusive-tackling issues confronting different racial, sexual, and gender identities, and body types"--

"Before, during, and after the US Civil War, Boston's Black workers were barred from the skilled trades, factory work, and public-works projects. In Boston, as in cities across the North, white abolitionists focused virtually all their energies on the plight of enslaved Black Southerners, while refusing to address the challenges faced by their Black neighbors. The author presents inspiring and heart-wrenching stories of people-from day laborers and domestics to physicians and lawyers-who ingeniously forged careers in the face of monumental obstacles"--

*A New York Times Editors’ Choice Pick*  An “ambitious work” (Washington Post) tracing the links between autism and ingenuity   Is the ability to invent things unique to humans? In The Pattern Seekers, Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen argues that it is, and proposes that autistic people have played a key role in human progress for seventy to one hundred thousand years, from the first complex tools like the bow and arrow and the first musical instrument to the digital revolution.   He presents the science that the same genes that contribute to autism enable a special kind of pattern seeking that is essential to our species’ inventiveness. However, these abilities come at a cost for autistic people, including social and neurological challenges. Baron-Cohen calls on us to support and celebrate autistic people in both their disabilities and their talents. Ultimately, The Pattern Seekers isn’t just a new theory of human evolution, but a call to reconsider how society treats those who think differently.

"Say you are afraid of heights. Very afraid. And say your friend is pressuring you to go sky diving with them. You're wavering, and they deliver a rousing speech about taking the opportunities you're offered. They tell you, Come on, you only live once! You relent. Why? In This Beauty, philosopher Nick Riggle investigates the things we say to inspire each other and ourselves: seize the day, treat yourself, you only live once. Riggle calls them existential imperatives, and they present a conundrum. Their meanings are at best vague, at worst stupid. They're as likely to encourage you to ride down a steep hill in a shopping cart as to marry the love of your life. They imply that you should do something wild with your life because your life is precious, which is a little like saying you should go swimming with your grandfather's watch because it is irreplaceable. And yet these exhortations can't help but be profound. We didn't choose to live this life, in this body, in these conditions. But when we consider the thought that we have only one life, that time is fleeting, or that we might die tomorrow, we often feel a tinge of inspiration, a sense of urgency. We want to embrace the life we were unwittingly given. Drawing on insights from his field of aesthetics and from his own experiences as a professional skater, an academic, and a new father, Riggle considers how they force us to confront what it means to live a worthwhile life. Existential imperatives shock us out of our predictable lives, he argues, and remind us that we aren't bound to the same thing every day, forever. Insightful and deeply humane, This Beauty offers a personal and searching inquiry into the mystery of life's beauty"--

"Filled with dry humor, sharp wit, and motherly care, Karen Duffy offers timeless pearls of wisdom. When she was diagnosed with a life-threatening neurological disease, she decided that to survive, she had to learn to laugh. In adulthood and motherhood, she has found that she has earned more than her fair share of wisdom and wisecracks to offer her teenage son. These are her stories, advice, and insights that have helped her embrace all that her whirlwind life has thrown her way"--

"When your dog growls and barks, you might assume that he's angry. But how do you know? You can't very well ask him. Even if you could, it's not at all clear that animals even have emotions like humans do. We still know very little about what emotions are and how they drive behavior. In fact, scientists haven't even been able to reach a consensus on how to study them. In The Nature of the Beast, neuroscientist David Anderson argues that the only way to solve this problem is to totally rethink our approach. One of the main sources of confusion is that we often fail to differentiate between feelings and emotions. Feelings are the subjective experiences of emotion, but they are not actually emotions. Anderson argues that emotions are internal states of the brain, similar to the state of being tired or thirsty, which you can observe in a brain's neural activity. They are like programs that our brain runs to address specific needs. Feelings are just one of many ways your brain tries to address a need. This neuroscientific approach offers us a much more precise and objective way of understanding emotions than older methods like self-report. And because it doesn't rely on language, you don't actually have to ask a dog if he's angry to find out. Anderson has been able to get some of the first reliable evidence about whether animals experience emotions like humans (spoiler alert: they do), and he is using those results to learn new things about how emotions drive our own actions. The Nature of the Beast takes readers into Anderson's groundbreaking studies of animal aggression and explores provocative new insights into how we choose between fight or flight responses, why isolation makes us more aggressive and social circles make us more peaceful, why sex and violence often bleed into one another, and whether there is in fact a connection between aggression and mental illness. The Nature of the Beast is How Emotions Are Made meets Mama's Last Hug: an exciting new framework for understanding how the brain regulates emotions, and why we have them at all"--