Why do men kill, rape, and wage war, and what can we do about it? Drawing on the latest discoveries about human evolution and about our closest living relatives, the great apes, Demonic Males offers some startling new answers. Dramatic, vivid, and firmly grounded in meticulous research, this book will change the way you see the world. As the San Francisco Chronicle said, it "dares to dig for the roots of a contentious and complicated subject that makes up much of our daily news."

    As chairman of the history department at all black women’s Spelman College, Zinn was an outspoken supporter of student activists in the nascent civil rights movement. In "The Southern Mystique," he tells of how he was asked to leave Spelman in 1963 after teaching there for seven years. "Behind every one of the national government’s moves toward racial equality," writes Zinn in one 1965 essay, "lies the sweat and effort of boycotts, picketing, beatings, sit-ins, and mass demonstrations." He firmly believed that bringing people of different races and nationalities together would create a more compassionate world, where equality is a given and not merely a dream. These writings, which span decades, express Zinn’s steadfast belief that the people have the power to change the status quo, if they only work together and embrace the nearly forgotten American tradition of civil disobedience and revolution. In clear, compassionate, and present prose, Zinn gives us his thoughts on the Abolitionists, the march from Selma to Montgomery, John F. Kennedy, picketing, sit-ins, and, finally, the message he wanted to send to New York University students about race in a speech he delivered during the last week of his life.

    Even as most Christian believers cleave to a traditional faith, other people give Jesus a leading role as folk hero, pitchman, and countercultural icon. And so it has been since the nation's founding--from Thomas Jefferson, who took scissors to his New Testament to sort out true from false Jesus material; to the Jews, Buddhists and Muslims who fit Jesus into their own traditions; to the people who adapt Jesus for stage and screen and the Holy Land theme park. American Jesus is a lively, illuminating and accessible survey that takes us into unexpected corners of our shared religious heritage (Dan Cryer, Newsday).

    In those years the author was teaching philosophy at American universities and exercising a growing influence on America's student population. The essays assembled here are fundamentally concerned with "the art of reckoning" in the fields of mathematics, logic and philosophy. The simplicity of Russell's exposition is astonishing, as is his ability to get to the core of the great philosophical issues and to skillfully probe the depth of philosophical analysis. Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, social reformer, and pacifist. Although he spent the majority of his life in England, he was born in Wales, where he also died. Russell led the British "revolt against Idealism" in the early 1900s and is considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy along with his prot�g� Wittgenstein and his elder Frege. He co-authored, with A. N. Whitehead, Principia Mathematica, an attempt to ground mathematics on logic. His philosophical essay "On Denoting" has been considered a "paradigm of philosophy." Both works have had a considerable influence on logic, mathematics, set theory, linguistics and analytic philosophy. He was a prominent anti-war activist, championing free trade between nations and anti-imperialism. Russell was imprisoned for his pacifist activism during World War I, campaigned against Adolf Hitler, for nuclear disarmament, criticized Soviet totalitarianism and the United States of America's involvement in the Vietnam War. In 1950, Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought."

    It asks questions such as: Do animals have moral rights? If so, what does this mean? What sorts of mental lives do animals have, and how should we understand welfare? By presenting models for understanding animals' moral status and rights, and examining their mental lives and welfare, David DeGrazia explores the implications for how we should treat animals in connection with our diet, zoos, and research. Animal Rights distinguishes itself by combining intellectual rigor with accessibility, offering a distinct moral voice with a non-polemical tone.

    This conclusion is reached through a broad examination of the consequences of our not being vegan – both in relation to human health, environmental pollution, the risk of the spread of diseases, and in relation to the beings we exploit and kill. On all these levels the conclusion is clear: We have no good reason to not go vegan, while we have many good reasons to stop our practice of raising, killing and eating non-human animals and things from them. The bottom line: We have a strong ethical obligation to go vegan."Magnus Vinding makes a compelling case for ending the abuse of other sentient beings. What will we tell our grandchildren? ("But I liked the taste?")"— David Pearce, founder of BLTC Research and co-founder of Humanity+, author of The Hedonistic Imperative."An excellent concise statement of the arguments for going vegan."— Peter Singer, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, author of The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty and Animal Liberation.

     The Octopus and the Orangutan finds intelligent behavior in surprising new places, ranging from the octopus's garden to the crow's nest. Amazing feats of stealth, deception, and larceny accompany unexpected acts of kindness and friendship. Animals show they are sensitive souls and tough negotiators both with their human keepers and with one another in this entirely new collection of stories sure to delight animal lovers everywhere.

    Countless behaviors separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom, but all of them can be traced one way or another to six traits that are unique to the human race—our big toe, our opposable thumb, our oddly shaped pharynx, and our ability to laugh, kiss, and cry. At first glance these may not seem to be connected but they are. Each marks a fork in the evolutionary road where we went one way and the rest of the animal kingdom went another. Each opens small passageways on the peculiar geography of the human heart and mind.Walter weaves together fascinating insights from complexity theory, the latest brain scanning techniques, anthropology, artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and robotics to explore how the smallest of changes over the past six million years – all shaped by the forces of evolution -- have enabled a primate once on the brink of extinction to evolve into a creature that would one day create all of the grand and exuberant edifices of human culture.As the story of each trait unfolds, Walter explains why our brains grew so large and complex, why we find one another sexually attractive, how toolmaking laid the mental groundwork for language, why we care about what others think, and how we became the creature that laughs and cries and falls in love. Thumbs, Toes and Tears is original, informative, and delightfully thought-provoking.

    We learn about how human arrogance—demonstrated by our disregard for the small and microscopic species that constitute the Earth's engine and our reckless use of powerful herbicides or genetically engineered crops—is threatening the health of our children and the safety of our food supply. But it's not too late to change our course.From Naked Ape to Superspecies shows us that we are at a turning point—we can either push ahead on our path to destruction or we can reshape our place in nature and prosper. A new introductory chapter provides an overview of how the world has changed since the first edition was published. The final chapter of the book has been revised, and new examples and analyses have been added to the existing chapters throughout the book.Published in partnership with the David Suzuki Foundation.

    He reveals the astonishing new culture wars playing out in our workplaces, universities, schools and homes in the names of social justice, identity politics and intersectionality.We are living through a postmodern era in which the grand narratives of religion and political ideology have collapsed. In their place have emerged a crusading desire to right perceived wrongs and a weaponization of identity, both accelerated by the new forms of social and news media. Narrow sets of interests now dominate the agenda as society becomes more and more tribal--and, as Murray shows, the casualties are mounting.

    Nim Chimpsky, the chimpanzee chosen to realize this potentially groundbreaking experiment, was raised like a human child and taught American Sign Language while living with his "adoptive family" in their elegant Manhattan town house. But when funding for the study ended, Nim's problems began. Over the next two decades he was exiled from the people he loved, put in a cage, and moved from one facility to another, including, most ominously, a medical research lab. But wherever he went, Nim's humanlike qualities and his ability to communicate with humans saved him.

    Yet, according to David Sloan Wilson, the Darwinian revolution won't be truly complete until it is applied more broadly--to everything associated with the words "human," "culture," and "policy."In a series of engaging and insightful examples--from the breeding of hens to the timing of cataract surgeries to the organization of an automobile plant--Wilson shows how an evolutionary worldview provides a practical tool kit for understanding not only genetic evolution but also the fast-paced changes that are having an impact on our world and ourselves. What emerges is an incredibly empowering argument: If we can become wise managers of evolutionary processes, we can solve the problems of our age at all scales--from the efficacy of our groups to our well-being as individuals to our stewardship of the planet Earth.

    In it, Berger and Luckmann reformulate the task of the sociological subdicipline that, since Max Scheler, has been known as the sociology of knowledge.

    Current estimates suggest that the rate of extinction is now thousands of times that counted in the fossil record before the emergence of modern man. At the same time, human societies themselves are in a cultural extinction crisis, with experts anticipating that of the world's nearly seven thousand languages as few as ten percent may survive into the next century. Melanie Challenger's extraordinary book is an exploration of how we might live to resist these extinctions and why such disappearances must be of concern to us. Adventurous, curious and passionate about her subject, Challenger takes us on a very personal journey as she tries to restore her own relationship with nature. The narrative unfolds through a series of landscapes haunted by extinction. From the ruined tin mines of Cornwall and the abandoned whaling stations of South Georgia to the Inuit camps of the Arctic and the white heart of Antarctica, she probes the critical relationship between human activities and environmental collapse. This is the first book to weave together the strands of cultural, biological and industrial extinctions into a meditation on the way we live beside nature in the modern world.

    Rarely is there a response from experts in the fields of language and language development. In this book Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill have invited nineteen respected linguists from all over the world to address these "language myths"--showing that they vary from the misconceived to the downright wrong. With essays ranging from "Women Talk Too Much" and "In the Appalachians They Speak Like Shakespeare" to "Italian Is Beautiful, German Is Ugly" and "They Speak Really Bad English Down South and in New York City," Language Myths is a collection that is wide-ranging, entertaining, and authoritative.