Showing titles in Sociology

Neuroscientist, philosopher, podcaster and best-selling author Sam Harris has been exploring some of the greatest questions concerning the human mind, society and the events that shape our world. Harris’ search for deeper understanding of how we think has led him to engage and exchange with some of our most brilliant and controversial contemporary minds - Daniel Kahneman, Robert Sapolsky, Anil Seth and Max Tegmark - in order to unpack and understand ideas of consciousness, free will, extremism and ethical living. 

Are men literally born to cheat? Does monogamy actually serve women's interests? These are among the questions that have made The Moral Animal one of the most provocative science books in recent years. Wright unveils the genetic strategies behind everything from our sexual preferences to our office politics - as well as their implications for our moral codes and public policies.

From Halloween costumes to patriotic parades to belly-busting meals, every holiday tradition tells a unique story—one encoded in symbols and layered meanings that stretch back over the centuries. In 19 lectures, professional storyteller Dr. Hannah B. Harvey takes listeners through the seasons and investigates the surprising stories behind seemingly odd holiday traditions.

As one of the foremost evangelical thinkers of the 20th century, Francis Schaeffer long pondered the fate of declining Western culture. In this brilliant book, he analyzed the reasons for modern society's state of affairs and presented the only viable alternative: living by the Christian ethic, acceptance of God's revelation, and total affirmation of the Bible's morals, values, and meaning.

In The Power of Ritual, ter Kuile invites us to deepen these ordinary practices as intentional rituals that nurture connection and well-being. With wisdom and endearing wit, ter Kuile’s call for ritual is ultimately a call to heal our loss of connection to ourselves, to others and to our spiritual identities. The Power of Ritual reminds us that what we already do every day matters - and has the potential to become a powerful experience of reflection, sanctuary and meaning.

My Big TOE: Awakening, written by a nuclear physicist in the language of contemporary culture, unifies science and philosophy, physics and metaphysics, mind and matter, purpose and meaning, the normal and the paranormal. The entirety of human experience (mind, body, and spirit) including both our objective and subjective worlds is brought together under one seamless scientific understanding.

The microbiome is the missing link in modern medicine: a vast genetic universe of bacteria, yeasts, viruses and parasites that live inside us, influencing every aspect of our health, even the way we think and feel. In this mindblowing book, scientist and surgeon James Kinross explains how the organisms that live within us have helped us evolve, shaped our biology and defined the success of our species. With dazzling science and fascinating stories, this pioneering book will change the way you think about human health forever.

The Vision of the Anointed is a devastating critique of the mindset behind the failed social policies of the past thirty years. Thomas Sowell sees what has happened not as a series of isolated mistakes, but as a logical consequence of a vision whose defects have led to disasters in education, crime, family disintegration, and other social pathology. In this book, "politically correct" theory is repeatedly confronted with facts-and sharp contradictions between the two are explained in terms of a whole set of self-congratulatory assumptions held by political and intellectual elites.

Polyamorous psychotherapist Jessica Fern breaks new ground by extending attachment theory into the realm of consensual nonmonogamy. Using her nested model of attachment and trauma, she expands our understanding of how emotional experiences can influence our relationships. Then, she sets out six specific strategies to help you move toward secure attachments in your multiple relationships.

Recently many people have assumed that we are blank slates shaped by our environment. But this denies the heart of our being: human nature. Violence is not just a product of society; male and female minds are different; the genes we give our children shape them more than our parenting practices. To acknowledge our innate abilities, Pinker shows, is not to condone inequality but to understand the very foundations of humanity.

An unmatched guide to the religious dimensions of American politics, Jeff Sharlet journeys into corners of our national psyche where others fear to tread. The Undertow is both inquiry and meditation, an attempt to understand how, over the last decade, reaction has morphed into delusion, social division into distrust, distrust into paranoia, and hatred into fantasies—sometimes realities—of violence.

The knowledge of death is so terrifying that we live most of our lives in denial of it. Our fear of death has underpinned our religions, inspired our cultures, and also driven our science. Today we are living through a revolution in biology. Giant strides are being made in our understanding of why we age and die, and why some species live longer than others. Immortality, once a faint hope, has never been more within our grasp. Here, Nobel Prize-winning biologist Venki Ramakrishnan offers a definitive look at why we die - and whether we can do anything about it.

A Paradise Built in Hell is an investigation of the moments of altruism, resourcefulness, and generosity that arise amid disaster's grief and disruption and considers their implications for everyday life. It points to a new vision of what society could become - one that is less authoritarian and fearful, more collaborative and local.

This new edition of What Makes Us Tick takes us beneath the often overwhelming surface noise of politics, economics, new technology and social change to explore something that hasn't changed: the 10 desires that drive us all and, now in a new prologue, the seven characteristics that define us as a species. From our desire to be taken seriously, to be useful and to be loved, to the desire for more, the desire for control and the desire for something to believe in, these universal human motivations powerfully influence our behaviour towards each other.

Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think we live in the most violent age ever seen. Yet as New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true: violence has been diminishing for millennia and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species's existence.

Energy medicine. Acupuncture. Superfoods. Healing magnets. What does the scientific evidence really say about these and other eclectic treatments for personal wellness that fall under the popular term “alternative medicine”? How can we know if a treatment is safe and effective? How can you become your own best skeptical consumer of health news in the media? Join neurologist and science educator Dr. Steven Novella for a fascinating exploration of these and other important questions about the truths - and myths - behind alternative medicine.

In “You Just Need to Lose Weight,” Aubrey Gordon equips listeners with the facts and figures to reframe myths about fatness in order to dismantle the anti-fat bias ingrained in how we think about and treat fat people. Bringing her dozen years of community organizing and training to bear, Gordon shares the rhetorical approaches she and other organizers employ to not only counter these pernicious myths, but to dismantle the anti-fat bias that so often underpin them.

The consequences of racism can be found in our bodies - in skin and sinew, in bone and blood. In this groundbreaking, inspiring work, therapist Resmaa Menakem examines the damage, the physical consequences of discrimination, from the perspective of body-centred psychology. He argues that until we learn to heal and overcome the generational anguish of white supremacy, we will all continue to bear its scars. My Grandmother's Hands is an extraordinary call to action for all of us to recognise that racism affects not only the mind, but also the body. 

Intellectuals and Race is a radical book in the original sense - 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 book explores the incentives, the visions, and the rationales that drive intellectuals at the highest levels to conclusions that have often turned out to be counterproductive and even disastrous, not only for particular racial or ethnic groups but for societies as a whole.

This reissue of Thomas Sowell’s classic study of decision making, which includes a preface by the author, updates his seminal work in the context of The Vision of the Anointed. Sowell, one of America’s most celebrated public intellectuals, describes in concrete detail how knowledge is shared and disseminated throughout modern society. He warns that society suffers from an ever-widening gap between firsthand knowledge and decision making—a gap that threatens not only our economic and political efficiency but our very freedom.