"The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his groundbreaking podcast, John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet-from the QWERTY keyboard and Staphylococcus aureus to the Taco Bell breakfast menu-on a five-star scale. John Green's gift for storytelling shines throughout this artfully...

Who formed the first literate society? Who invented our modern ideas of democracy and free market capitalism? The Scots. As historian and author Arthur Herman reveals, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Scotland made crucial contributions to science, philosophy, literature, education, medicine, commerce, and politics, contributions that have formed and nurtured the modern West ever since. This book is not just about Scotland: it is an exciting...

"One of the most stunning achievements of moral philosophy is something we take for granted: moral universalism, or the idea that every human has equal moral worth. In What We Owe the Future, Oxford philosopher William MacAskill demands that we go a step further, arguing that people not only have equal moral worth no matter where or how they live, but also no matter when they live. This idea has implications beyond the obvious (climate change) - including...

Briefly explores the lives and legacies of important leaders and thinkers of ancient Greece, including Homer, Herodotus, and Alexander the Great.

Is America a source of pride, as Americans have long held, or shame, as Progressives allege? Beneath an innocent exterior, are our lives complicit in a national project of theft, expropriation, oppression, and murder, or is America still the hope of the world? D'Souza offers a passionate and sharply reasoned defense of America, knocking down every important accusation made by Progressives against our country.

In this book the author transports readers to the dawn of the Renaissance and chronicles the life of an intrepid book lover who rescued the Roman philosophical text On the Nature of Things from certain oblivion. In this work he has crafted both a work of history and a story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it. Nearly six hundred...

"From a New York Times best-selling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist, a sweeping epic of how the Vikings and their descendants have shaped history and America"-- For millennia Norwegians, Danes, Finns, and Swedes lived a remote and rugged existence among the fjords and peaks of the land of the midnight sun. When they finally left their homeland in search of opportunity, these wanderers would reshape Europe and beyond. Their ingenuity, daring,...

"Axelrod spins his personal philosophy out into the wider world, where technology is changing the nature of human consciousness faster than we can see it happening. He draws a parallel between the environmental crisis and a lesser-known, but equally pressing issue: as we lose the world around us, he argues, we are losing our interior worlds, too. We can't navigate without a GPS, we can't pay attention unless our attention is DEMANDED in all caps and...

"One of the most violent conflicts in the history of civilization, World War I has been strangely forgotten in American culture. It has become a ghostly war fought in a haze of memory, often seen merely as a distant preamble to World War II. In The Long Shadow critically acclaimed historian David Reynolds seeks to broaden our vision by assessing the impact of the Great War across the twentieth century."--Book jacket.

Traces three thousand years of Western history to profile influential ideas and setbacks that have shaped the modern world, from the spread of monotheism and the invention of the printing press to the U.S. metric campaign and the smart drink trend.