" First rate popular history/biography, evoking the Byzantine empire at its peak. A remarkable story in an entertaining, informative book." — The Wall Street JournalThis is the biography of a Byzantine courtesan who rose from the gutter to the throne of an empire. It is a romantic and improbable story, and Theodora is an extraordinary woman, indeed. Her background and her many actions were scandalous, but she had qualities of gre...

As societies grapple with an unprecedented refugee and migration crisis, child refugees and migrants—who constitute a particularly vulnerable immigrant category—have been surprisingly overlooked in immigration scholarship. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Child Migrants: Seen but Not Heard addresses this lapse by presenting analyses of child refugees and migrants. This comprehensive overview considers the challenges facing young migrants and refugees through richly varied academic perspec...

A religion professor elucidates the theory of the multiverse, its history, and its reception in science, philosophy, religion, and literature.Multiverse cosmologies imagine our universe as just one of a vast number of others. Beginning with ancient Atomist and Stoic philosophies, Mary-Jane Rubenstein links contemporary models of the multiverse to their forerunners and explores the reasons for their recent appearance. One concerns the so-called fine-tuning of the un...

2021 Foreword INDIES Gold Winner for War & HistoryWhy have the major post-9/11 US military interventions turned into quagmires? Despite huge power imbalances in the United States' favor, significant capacity-building efforts, and repeated tactical victories by what many observers call the world's best military, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq turned intractable. The US government's fixation on zero-sum, decisive victory in these conflicts is a key reason why military operations to...

"An ethical and accessible introduction to a historical period often implicated in racist narratives of nationalism and imperialism." —Sierra Lomuto, Assistant Professor of Global Medieval Literature, Rowan UniversityA collection of twenty-two essays, Whose Middle Ages? gives nonspecialists access to the richness of our historical knowledge while debunking damaging misconceptions about the medieval past. Myths about the medieval period are especially belove...

The bestselling author of The Science of Happiness delivers a book "suffused with genuine wonder and affection for the beauty of particle physics" ( Foreword Reviews).A single rose suggests the sublime interdependence of all life. A sudden storm points to the world's unpredictability. A marble conjures the birth of the cosmos.How to Love the Universe shows us how everyday objects and events can reveal some of the deepest mysteries i...

An evolutionary biologist provides surprising insights into the changing nature of Homo sapiens in this "important and an entertaining read" ( Choice).In Future Humans, evolutionary biologist Scott Solomon draws on recent discoveries to examine the future evolution of our species. Combining knowledge of our past with current trends, Solomon offers convincing evidence that evolutionary forces are still affecting us today. But how will modernization—...

An astronomer explores the science of astrobiology in this " serious but accessible examination of the prospects for finding life elsewhere in the universe" (Sean Carroll, author of The Big Picture ).Describing the most recent discoveries made with space exploration technology, including the Kepler space telescope, the Mars Curiosity rover, and the New Horizons probe, astronomer Jon Willi...

A "blistering exposé" of the USA's secret history of financial, political, and cultural exploitation of Latin America in the 20th century, with a new introduction ( Publishers Weekly ).What happened when a wealthy industrialist and a visionary evangelist unleashed forces that joined to subjugate an entire continent? Historians Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett tell the story of the forty-year campaign led by Standard Oil s...

A major history of the Crusades that illuminates the strength and sophistication of the Western and Muslim armies.During the Crusades, the Western and Muslim armies developed various highly sophisticated strategies of both attack and defense, which evolved during the course of the battles. In this ambitious new work, Steve Tibble draws on a wide range of Muslim texts and archaeological evidence as well as more commonly cited Western sources to analyze the respective...

A Fields medalist recounts his lifelong effort to uncover the geometric shape—the Calabi-Yau manifold—that may store the hidden dimensions of our universe.Harvard geometer Shing-Tung Yau has provided a mathematical foundation for string theory, offered new insights into black holes, and mathematically demonstrated the stability of our universe. In this autobiography, Yau reflects on his improbable journey to becoming one of the world's most distinguished mathematici...

A New York Times Notable Book. A literary exploration that is "surely destined to become the quintessential companion to Camus's most enduring novel" ( PopMatters).The Stranger is a rite of passage for readers around the world. Since its publication in France in 1942, Camus's novel has been translated into sixty languages and sold more than six million copies. It's the rare novel that's as likely to be found in a teen's backpack as in a g...