"Excerpts from the Preface and Chapter 8: Materials Science, wedged as it is between the two better-known fields of Chemistry and Physics, teaches us that everything in our world is due to the interactions of atoms. If you can find out how they interact to make up the physical world, then you can also change the way that atoms act to make them do new things and, as we develop new materials, we discover that materials and humans are constantly being...

"The Mohawk phrase for depression, Wake' nikonhra'kwenhtará:'on, can be roughly translated to 'a mind spread out on the ground.' Alicia Elliott explores how apt a description that is for the ongoing effects of persona, intergenerational, and colonial traumas she and so many Native people have experienced. Elliott's writing details a life spent between Indigenous and white communities, a divide reflected in her own family, and engages with such wide-ranging...

"In a forceful but humane narrative, former soldier and head of the West Point history department Ty Seidule's Robert E. Lee and Me challenges the myths and lies of the Confederate legacy-and explores why some of this country's oldest wounds have never healed. Ty Seidule grew up revering Robert E. Lee. From his southern childhood to his service in the U.S. Army, every part of his life reinforced the Lost Cause myth: that Lee was the greatest man who...

Suffused with a profound intimacy and tenderness in response to these extraordinary times, Intimations is a slim, suggestive volume with a wide scope, in which Zadie Smith clears a generous space for thought, open enough for each reader to reflect on what has happened - and what should come next.

Upon becoming a new mother, Eula Biss addresses a chronic condition of fear: fear of the government, the medical establishment, and what is in children's food, mattresses, medicines, and vaccines. Biss investigates the metaphors and myths surrounding the conception of immunity and its implications for the individual and the social body. As she hears more and more fears about vaccines, Biss researches what they mean for her own child, her immediate...

"Explores ways that people can reduce their use of fossil fuels, and thereby reduce the amount of greenhouse gases emitted, and ways to adapt to a warming world; includes glossary, additional resources, and index"--Provided by publisher.

Explores the reasons that old places matter to people such as the feelings of belonging, continuity, stability, identity and memory, as well as more traditional reasons such as history, national identity, and architecture.

"America's higher education system is failing its students. In the space of a generation, we have gone from being the best-educated society in the world to one in which a college degree benefits only to those in the top income brackets. In Degrees of Inequality, acclaimed political scientist Suzanne Mettler explains why the system has gone so horribly wrong and why the American Dream is increasingly out of reach for so many. In her eye-opening account,...

An incisive, groundbreaking book that examines how a biological concept of race is a myth that promotes inequality in a supposedly “post-racial” era.
 
Though the Human Genome Project proved that human beings are not naturally divided by race, the emerging fields of personalized medicine, reproductive technologies, genetic genealogy, and DNA databanks are attempting to resuscitate race as a biological category...