A critical analysis of African-American novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston' 1934 essay Characteristics of Negro Expression: A crushing evaluation of the many racial prejudices of 1930s America, including a common presumption that African American art was unoriginal - merely poorly copying white culture.
Perhaps the most peculiar feature of a financial bubble - one that Charles Kindleberger's classic work Manias, Panics and Crashes draws particular attention to - is the inability of those trapped inside it to grasp the seriousness of their predicament.
John Lewis Gaddis had written four previous books on the Cold War by the time he published We Now Know - so the main thrust of his new work was not so much to present new arguments as to re-examine old ones in the light of new evidence that began emerging from behind the Iron Curtain after 1990.
Martin Luther King's policy of non-violent protest in the struggle for civil rights in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century led to fundamental shifts in American government policy relating to segregation, and a cultural shift in the treatment of African Americans.
Clifford Geertz has been called 'the most original anthropologist of his generation' - and this reputation rests largely on the huge contributions to the methodology and approaches of anthropological interpretation that he outlined in The Interpretation of Cultures.
A critical analysis of African-American novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston' 1934 essay Characteristics of Negro Expression: A crushing evaluation of the many racial prejudices of 1930s America, including a common presumption that African American art was unoriginal - merely poorly copying white culture.
Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is a seminal piece of literary criticism, and a masterclass in the critical thinking skill of interpretation.
Aphorisms have been described as 'the obscure hinterland between poetry and prose' (New Yorker) - short pithy statements that capture the essence of the human condition in all its shades.
Many people want to understand what revolutions are and - especially - how they come about, from the academics who study them to the states that wish to prevent (or, in some cases, provoke) them.
Francis Fukuyama's controversial 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man demonstrates an important aspect of creative thinking: the ability to generate hypotheses and create novel explanations for evidence.
Social anthropologist Jean Lave and computer scientist Etienne Wenger's seminal Situated Learning helped change the fields of cognitive science and pedagogy by approaching learning from a novel angle.
Benedict Anderson's 1983 masterpiece Imagined Communities is a ground-breaking analysis of the origins and meanings of "e;nations"e; and "e;nationalism"e;.
Few works can claim to form the foundation stones of one entire academic discipline, let alone two, but Thucydides's celebrated History of the Peloponnesian War is not only one of the first great works of history, but also the departure point from which the modern discipline of international relations has been built.
Vision and Difference, published in 1988, is one of the most significant works in feminist visual culture arguing that feminist art history of is a political as well as academic endeavour.
Gilbert Ryle's 1949 The Concept of Mind is now famous above all as the origin of the phrase "e;the ghost in the machine"e; - a phrase Ryle used to attack the popular idea that our bodies and minds are separate.
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman offers a general audience access to over six decades of insight and expertise from a Nobel Laureate in an accessible and interesting way.
Despite being written between 170 and 180, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations often resonates with modern readers because of its remarkable resemblance to a self-help book.
Debt is one of the great subjects of our day, and understanding the way that it not only fuels economic growth, but can also be used as a means of generating profit and exerting control, is central to grasping the way in which our society really works.
In this book, Sedgwick examines texts from Europe and America such as Wilde, Nietzsche and Proust and considers the historical moment when sexual orientation came to be as important a signifier of personhood as gender had been for centuries.
In The Wisdom of Crowds, New Yorker columnist, Surowiecki, explores the question of whether the many are better than an elite few - no matter their qualifications - at solving problems, promoting innovation and making wise decisions.
Brilliant and original, 'A Thousand Years of Good Prayers' introduces a remarkable first collection of stories about China from an author set to become a major literary talent.
Hay un ideal de justicia en el Quijote que excede por mucho nuestras representaciones ordinarias, pues está hecho de todo lo que falta a nuestras tradicionales ideas de la justicia: generosidad para emprender día a día nuevas aventuras, magnanimidad para mantenerse rme ante las afrentas y conservar la sencillez en el éxito, apertura para el reconocimiento de los otros en sus virtudes y en sus derechos, delicadeza en el trato de las personas, fortaleza para enfrentar los miedos y las derrotas, serenidad para contener los impulsos más elementales y transformarlos en reconocimiento de la propia vulnerabilidad, disposición para la escucha y la buena deliberación.
Este ensayo es el resultado de años de trato con la actividad literaria a cargo de su autor, Constantino Bértolo, uno de los críticos y editores más prestigiosos de España, y es también el resultado de la reflexión sobre algunas de las claves de dicha actividad: la escritura, la lectura y la crítica.
Desastre: lo que queda por decir cuando se ha dicho todo, ruina del habla, desfallecimiento de la escritura, rumor que murmura, lo que resta sin resto; siempre por venir, siempre pasado; histórico fuera-de-la-historia.
La relación entre la escritura y el género femenino está signada por la lucha entre el disciplinamiento y la transgresión, entre las prohibiciones y los espacios asfixiantes.
Este libro parte de la reflexión colectiva en torno a los estudios culturales, proyecto heterogéneo que surgió en Birmingham, Inglaterra, en la década de los años sesenta del siglo XX, el cual rápidamente se convirtió en un vasto campo de producción en torno a una gran diversidad de enfoques e intereses, en cuyo centro se situaba una clara preocupación política, pues además de su reformulación del marxismo se incorporó a los "nuevos movimientos sociales", como el feminismo, el poscolonialismo y el movimiento gay, entre otros.
Este libro parte de un enigma: desvelar la identidad de la autora de uno de los más importantes textos críticos sobre la condición de las mujeres de su época, la 'Apología de las mujeres' (1798), un ensayo cuya audacia contrasta con la oscuridad que rodea las circunstancias de su aparición.
