"For evolutionary biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, the cause of many modern woes is clear: the world is out of sync with humans' ancient brains and bodies. The authors cut through the disputes surrounding issues like sex, gender, diet, parenting, sleep, education, and more to outline a science-based worldview that will empower the reader to live a better, wiser life. They distill more than twenty years of research and first-hand accounts...

Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data. In seventy-five graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force....

"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...

From Moyer's third PBS series, this text represents an unparalleled entree into the debates, the intellectual and cultural currents, and above all the fascinating people that have so powerfully shaped modern times.

"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,...

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...

The author surveys the traces we will leave for peoples in the very distant future. He shows that modern civilization has created objects and landscapes with the potential to endure through deep time, including the plastic polluting the oceans, the nuclear waste entombed within the earth, and the thirty million miles of paved roads spanning the planet. This is his meditation on climate change and the Anthropocene, and an urgent search for fossils--industrial,...

Thomas Keneally, the Booker Prize-winning author of Schindler's List, is universally praised for crafting smooth narratives from authentic historical events. With The Great Shame, he turns his insightful eye toward the Irish struggle through the nineteenth century. In sharp contrast to much of Europe, Ireland was a terrible place to be during the 1800s. Many of the nation's finest people set sail for America and Canada. Others were forcibly exiled...