An autobiography of a young Chinese man whose childhood and adolescence were spent in Mao's China during the Cultural Revolution.

    Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century makes a powerful case that wealth, and accumulated wealth, tends to stay where it lands: and with the passage of time, just gets bigger…and bigger.But how many of us who bought or borrowed the book–or even, perhaps, reviewed it–have read more than a fraction of its 696 pages? How many more shuddered at the thought of committing $40 to such a venture? And how many of Piketty’s groundshaking concepts have gone unappreciated, all for want of intellectual stamina?Deliverance is at hand in the form of Pocket Piketty, written in clear and accessible prose by an experienced economist and teacher–and one whose work was relied on by Piketty for his masterpiece. In this handy and slim volume, Jesper Roine explains all things Piketty.

    Everyone said he was a good kid: a bit of a clown, maybe not too serious about his studies, but sweet and kind and quick to make friends. When, as a clean-cut teenager, he signed up with the army, the people of Reeds Springs, Missouri, expected to hear nothing but good things about R.J. and Lexie Mease's eldest son.It wouldn't work out that way. Darrell Mease would end up on the front lines of the Vietnam War and would come home a drug addict. Over the personally tumultuous, drifting decades that followed, he'd make a new name for himself in the Ozarks: as a tough drug dealer. Then, in 1987, he gunned down a 69-year-old meth kingpin, his wife, and their 20-year-old paraplegic grandson. After a desperate cross-country escape, he was captured, hauled back to Missouri, and sentenced to death for his crimes.In jail, Mease experienced a religious conversion, and he made a shocking prediction: he would be saved by miraculous intervention.No one believed it would happen. But it did. On January 27, 1999, Pope John Paul II visited St. Louis and spoke to Missouri's then-governor, Mel Carnahan. It was the same date that authorities had set for Mease's execution. The pope asked that he be spared. Carnahan agreed.

    Reserved and quiet, she didn't set out to be a trailblazer, but there was something in her way: the law. Hundreds of years of legal precedent, a line of devastating Supreme Court cases, and countless statutes depriving women of equal citizenship and keeping them from full participation in the legal and political process.Mixing social and legal history with a moving and intimate biography, award-winning author Teri Kanefield captures a turbulent era and tells the story of how Ruth Bader Ginsburg defied expectations to become one of the most influential and powerful women in America."We hear many voices in this wonderfully engaging biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and come away with a far richer understanding of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and of what the rise of feminism has meant for all of us, whatever our gender, whatever our politics."--Kathleen Vanden Heuvel, Law Library Director, Adjunct Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley School of Law"An absorbing personal biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg that is also equal parts legal history and political philosophy. Like Ginsburg herself, Kanefield's narrative is precise, candid, logical, yet filled with humor and irony. She shows the reader the warmth and humility behind a serious legal mind. Free to Be Ruth Bader Ginsburg will appeal to a wide range of readers and is a valuable addition to all types of libraries."--Suzy Szasz Palmer, Past President, Virginia Library Association"An engrossing biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg that doubles as a primer on how America's champions for gender equality pressed their cause in the courts. Recommended for every law student, lawyer, and lay reader looking for an authoritative yet readable treatment of how the law shapes women's lives, and vice-versa."--Kathleen Morris, Associate Professor of Law, Golden Gate Law School"Free to Be is a richly detailed biography offering fascinating insights into the groundbreaking career of Ruth Bader Ginsberg and at the same time charting for readers a thorough and engaging history of the law of sex discrimination and equal protection jurisprudence that she helped to shape. Kanefield's book is a must read, not only for fans of RBG but for anyone interested in a more complete understanding of the evolution of women's rights and legal status in the U.S."--Sharmilla Lodhia, Associate Professor, Women's and Gender Studies, Santa Clara University"Free to Be is a must read for those who love history, want to know more about the women's rights movement, or have an interest in modern politics and culture. I highly recommend it!"--Kristi Jensen, Librarian, University of Minnesota

    Out of this tumult is emerging a new map of energy and geopolitics. The "shale revolution" in oil and gas has transformed the American economy, ending the "era of shortage" but introducing a turbulent new era. Almost overnight, the United States has become the world's number one energy powerhouse. Yet concern about energy's role in climate change is challenging the global economy and way of life, accelerating a second energy revolution in the search for a low-carbon future. All of this has been made starker and more urgent by the coronavirus pandemic and the economic dark age that it has wrought.World politics is being upended, as a new cold war develops between the United States and China, and the rivalry grows more dangerous with Russia, which is pivoting east toward Beijing. Vladimir Putin and China's Xi Jinping are converging both on energy and on challenging American leadership, as China projects its power and influence in all directions. The South China Sea, claimed by China and the world's most critical trade route, could become the arena where the United States and China directly collide. The map of the Middle East, which was laid down after World War I, is being challenged by jihadists, revolutionary Iran, ethnic and religious clashes, and restive populations. But the region has also been shocked by the two recent oil price collapses--and by the very question of oil's future in the rest of this century.A master storyteller and global energy expert, Daniel Yergin takes the reader on an utterly riveting and timely journey across the world's new map. He illuminates the great energy and geopolitical questions in an era of rising political turbulence and points to the profound challenges that lie ahead.

    In recent years, however, the fundamental principles of the movement have influenced other academic disciplines, from sociology and politics to ethnic studies and history.And yet, while the critical race theory movement has spawned dozens of conferences and numerous books, no concise, accessible volume outlines its basic parameters and tenets. Here, then, from two of the founders of the movement, is the first primer on one of the most influential intellectual movements in American law and politics.

    For the first time in human history, the globe is dominated by one economic system. In Capitalism, Alone, leading economist Branko Milanovic explains the reasons for this decisive historical shift since the days of feudalism and, later, communism. Surveying the varieties of capitalism, he asks: What are the prospects for a fairer world now that capitalism is the only game in town? His conclusions are sobering, but not fatalistic. Capitalism gets much wrong, but also much right--and it is not going anywhere. Our task is to improve it.Milanovic argues that capitalism has triumphed because it works. It delivers prosperity and gratifies human desires for autonomy. But it comes with a moral price, pushing us to treat material success as the ultimate goal. And it offers no guarantee of stability. In the West, liberal capitalism creaks under the strains of inequality and capitalist excess. That model now fights for hearts and minds with political capitalism, exemplified by China, which many claim is more efficient, but which is more vulnerable to corruption and, when growth is slow, social unrest. As for the economic problems of the Global South, Milanovic offers a creative, if controversial, plan for large-scale migration. Looking to the future, he dismisses prophets who proclaim some single outcome to be inevitable, whether worldwide prosperity or robot-driven mass unemployment. Capitalism is a risky system. But it is a human system. Our choices, and how clearly we see them, will determine how it serves us.

    Mao Zedong was one of the most important figures of the twentieth century, the most important in the history of modern China. A complex figure, he was champion of the poor and brutal tyrant, poet and despot. Pantsov and Levine show Mao’s relentless drive to succeed, vividly describing his growing role in the nascent Communist Party of China. They disclose startling facts about his personal life, particularly regarding his health and his lifelong serial affairs with young women. They portray him as the loyal Stalinist that he was, who never broke with the Soviet Union until after Stalin’s death. Mao brought his country from poverty and economic backwardness into the modern age and onto the world stage. But he was also responsible for an unprecedented loss of life. The disastrous Great Leap Forward with its accompanying famine and the bloody Cultural Revolution were Mao’s creations. Internationally Mao began to distance China from the USSR under Khrushchev and shrewdly renewed relations with the U.S. as a counter to the Soviets. He lived and behaved as China’s last emperor.

    Historically, the humanities have been central to education because they have rightly been seen as essential for creating competent democratic citizens. But recently, Nussbaum argues, thinking about the aims of education has gone disturbingly awry both in the United States and abroad. Anxiously focused on national economic growth, we increasingly treat education as though its primary goal were to teach students to be economically productive rather than to think critically and become knowledgeable and empathetic citizens. This shortsighted focus on profitable skills has eroded our ability to criticize authority, reduced our sympathy with the marginalized and different, and damaged our competence to deal with complex global problems. And the loss of these basic capacities jeopardizes the health of democracies and the hope of a decent world. In response to this dire situation, Nussbaum argues that we must resist efforts to reduce education to a tool of the gross national product. Rather, we must work to reconnect education to the humanities in order to give students the capacity to be true democratic citizens of their countries and the world. Drawing on the stories of troubling--and hopeful--educational developments from around the world, Nussbaum offers a manifesto that should be a rallying cry for anyone who cares about the deepest purposes of education.

    Empires were abolished and replaced by a global arrangement enforced by the U.S. Navy. With all the world's oceans safe for the first time in history, markets and resources were made available for everyone. Enemies became partners.We think of this system as normal - it is not. We live in an artificial world on borrowed time.In The Accidental Superpower, international strategist Peter Zeihan examines how the hard rules of geography are eroding the American commitment to free trade; how much of the planet is aging into a mass retirement that will enervate markets and capital supplies; and how, against all odds, it is the ever-ravenous American economy that - alone among the developed nations - is rapidly approaching energy independence. Combined, these factors are doing nothing less than overturning the global system and ushering in a new (dis)order. For most, that is a disaster-in-waiting, but not for the Americans. The shale revolution allows Americans to sidestep an increasingly dangerous energy market. Only the United States boasts a youth population large enough to escape the sucking maw of global aging. Most important, geography will matter more than ever in a de-globalizing world, and America's geography is simply sublime.

    It's about states, armies and corporations. It's about orders from on high. Even history "from below" is often about trade unions and workers' parties. But what if that's simply because hierarchical institutions create the archives that historians rely on? What if we are missing the informal, less well documented social networks that are the true sources of power and drivers of change?The 21st century has been hailed as the Age of Networks. However, in The Square and the Tower, Niall Ferguson argues that networks have always been with us, from the structure of the brain to the food chain, from the family tree to freemasonry. Throughout history, hierarchies housed in high towers have claimed to rule, but often real power has resided in the networks in the town square below. For it is networks that tend to innovate. And it is through networks that revolutionary ideas can contagiously spread. Just because conspiracy theorists like to fantasize about such networks doesn't mean they are not real.From the cults of ancient Rome to the dynasties of the Renaissance, from the founding fathers to Facebook, The Square and the Tower tells the story of the rise, fall and rise of networks, and shows how network theory--concepts such as clustering, degrees of separation, weak ties, contagions and phase transitions--can transform our understanding of both the past and the present.Just as The Ascent of Money put Wall Street into historical perspective, so The Square and the Tower does the same for Silicon Valley. And it offers a bold prediction about which hierarchies will withstand this latest wave of network disruption--and which will be toppled.

    Chinese leaders talked of a future in which American money and technology would help lift China out of poverty. Mao Zedong himself held friendly meetings with U.S. emissaries, vowing to them his intention of establishing an American-style democracy in China. By year’s end, however, cordiality had been replaced by chilly hostility and distrust. Chinese Communist soldiers were setting ambushes for American marines in north China; Communist newspapers were portraying the United States as an implacable imperialist enemy; civil war in China was erupting. The pattern was set for a quarter century of almost total Sino-American mistrust, with the devastating wars in Korea and Vietnam among the consequences. Richard Bernstein here tells the incredible story of that year’s sea change, brilliantly analyzing its many components, from ferocious infighting among U.S. diplomats, military leaders, and opinion makers to the complex relations between Mao and his patron, Stalin. On the American side, we meet experienced “China hands” John Paton Davies and John Stewart Service, whose efforts at negotiation made them prey to accusations of Communist sympathy; FDR’s special ambassador Patrick J. Hurley, a decorated general and self-proclaimed cowboy; and Time journalist, Henry Luce, whose editorials helped turn the tide of American public opinion. On the Chinese side, Bernstein reveals the ascendant Mao and his intractable counterpart, Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek; and the indispensable Zhou Enlai.             A tour de force of narrative history, China 1945 examines the first episode in which American power and good intentions came face-to-face with a powerful Asian revolutionary movement, and challenges familiar assumptions about the origins of modern Sino-American relations.

     For decades, technology encouraged people to squander their time and intellect as passive consumers. Today, tech has finally caught up with human potential. In Cognitive Surplus, Internet guru Clay Shirky forecasts the thrilling changes we will all enjoy as new digital technology puts our untapped resources of talent and goodwill to use at last. Since we Americans were suburbanized and educated by the postwar boom, we've had a surfeit of intellect, energy, and time-what Shirky calls a cognitive surplus. But this abundance had little impact on the common good because television consumed the lion's share of it-and we consume TV passively, in isolation from one another. Now, for the first time, people are embracing new media that allow us to pool our efforts at vanishingly low cost. The results of this aggregated effort range from mind expanding-reference tools like Wikipedia-to lifesaving-such as Ushahidi.com, which has allowed Kenyans to sidestep government censorship and report on acts of violence in real time. Shirky argues persuasively that this cognitive surplus-rather than being some strange new departure from normal behavior-actually returns our society to forms of collaboration that were natural to us up through the early twentieth century. He also charts the vast effects that our cognitive surplus- aided by new technologies-will have on twenty-first-century society, and how we can best exploit those effects. Shirky envisions an era of lower creative quality on average but greater innovation, an increase in transparency in all areas of society, and a dramatic rise in productivity that will transform our civilization. The potential impact of cognitive surplus is enormous. As Shirky points out, Wikipedia was built out of roughly 1 percent of the man-hours that Americans spend watching TV every year. Wikipedia and other current products of cognitive surplus are only the iceberg's tip. Shirky shows how society and our daily lives will be improved dramatically as we learn to exploit our goodwill and free time like never before.

    But how did this come about? And what does it mean for the future?Populism and ultra-nationalism brought about the rise of Hitler and Mussolini in the 1930s. Now, as Trump sits in the White House, Britain negotiates its way out of the EU, and countries across Europe see substantial gains in support for the extreme Right, award-winning journalist, author, and historian Gwynne Dyer asks how we got here, and where we go next. Dyer examines the global challenges facing us all today and explains how they have contributed to a world of inequality, poverty, and joblessness, conditions which he argues inevitably lead to the rise of populism. The greatest threat to social and political stability lies in the rise of automation, which will continue to eliminate jobs, whether politicians admit that it is happening or not. To avoid a social and political catastrophe, we will have to find ways of putting real money into the pockets of those who have no work. But this is not a book without hope. Our capacity for overcoming the worst has been tested again and again throughout history, and we have always survived. To do so now, Dyer argues, we must embrace radical solutions to the real difficulties facing individuals, or find ourselves back in the 1930s with no way out.

    In doing so, he sheds new light on broad and enduring historical questions. How do we account for instances of systematic mass killing and detention? Why are some of these crimes remembered and punished, while others are forgotten? What are the social and political ramifications of such acts and such silence?Challenging conventional narratives of the mass violence of 1965-66 as arising spontaneously from religious and social conflicts, Robinson argues convincingly that it was instead the product of a deliberate campaign, led by the Indonesian Army. He also details the critical role played by the United States, Britain, and other major powers in facilitating mass murder and incarceration. Robinson concludes by probing the disturbing long-term consequences of the violence for millions of survivors and Indonesian society as a whole.Based on a rich body of primary and secondary sources, The Killing Season is the definitive account of a pivotal period in Indonesian history. It also makes a powerful contribution to wider debates about the dynamics and legacies of mass killing, incarceration, and genocide.