Lie detection, offender profiling, jury selection, insanity in the law, predicting the risk of re-offending, the minds of serial killers, and many other topics that fill news and fiction are all aspects of the rapidly developing area of scientific psychology broadly known as forensic psychology.This fascinating Very Short Introduction discusses all the aspects of psychology that are relevant to the legal and criminal process as a whole. It includes explanations of criminal...

The landmark history of France and French culture in the eighteenth-century, a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book PrizeWhen the apprentices of a Paris printing shop in the 1730s held a series of mock trials and then hanged all the cats they could lay their hands on, why did they find it so hilariously funny that they choked with laughter when they reenacted it in pantomime some twenty times?Why in the eighteenth-century version of Little Red Riding Ho...

An all-new approach to understanding and inspiring the (in)formal connections of an organizationIn this dynamic work, thought leaders Jon R. Katzenbach, coauthor of the business classic The Wisdom of Teams, and Zia Khan offer an all-new examination of the modern workplace, and how leaders and managers must embrace it for success. Together they reveal how two distinct factions form the bigger picture for how organizations actually work: the more defined and visible “formal organizat...

In this highly provocative book, two Harvard Business School professors synthesize 200 years of thought from the biological and social sciences to formulate a new theory of human nature. Comparable to Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence, Lawrence and Nohria's work examines the four drives that influence the choices people make. These innate and often conflicting drives are the drive to acquire, the drive to bond, the drive to learn and the drive to defend. The authors have studied the ...

This Very Short Introduction provides an up-to-date, authoritative, and accessible guide to modern child psychology, from birth to early adolescence. Beginning with infancy, Usha Goswami considers the process of attachment and 'bonding', showing how secure attachments enable the development of self-understanding. Exploring childhood learning, ranging from aspects of language and thinking to cognitive reasoning, Goswami looks at how babies and toddlers develop an understanding of t...

In this engaging, anecdotal history of food, world conquest, and desire, a chef-turned-journalist tells the story of three legendary cities—Venice, Lisbon, and Amsterdam—that transformed the globe in the quest for spice.Written in a colorful style that will appeal to fans of Mark Kurlansky and Michael Pollan, this ambitious yet accessible book travels effortlessly from the Crusades to the present day. Michael Krondl explains that it was the desire for spices that got international ...

When a Parisian crowd stormed the Bastille in July 1789, it triggered an event of global consequence: the overthrow of the monarchy and the birth of a new society. Most historians account for the French Revolution by viewing it in retrospect as the outcome of underlying conditions such as a faltering economy, social tensions, or the influence of Enlightenment thought. But what did Parisians themselves think they were doing—how did they understand their world? What were the motivations and ...

As the euphoria of Armistice Day in 1918 quickly subsided, there was no denying the carnage that the Great War had left in its wake. Grief and shock overwhelmed the psyche of the British people—but from their despair, new life would slowly emerge.For veterans with faces demolished in the trenches, surgeon Harold Gillies brings hope with his miraculous skin-grafting procedure. Women win the vote, skirt hems leap, and Brits forget their troubles at packed dance halls. And two years l...

Part of the acclaimed Eminent Lives series, Machiavelli is a superb portrait of the brilliant and revolutionary political philosopher—history’s most famous theorist of “warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed”—and the age he embodied. Ross King, the New York Times bestselling author of Brunelleschi’s Dome, argues that the author of The Prince was a far more complex and sympathetic character than is often portrayed.

For as long as we’ve gathered by campfires to tell ghost stories, humans have always loved a good scare. From the splatter flicks of the 70s, to Japan’s obsession with drowned girls, to creepy modern experiences like the overnight ghost hunt at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, the horror industry has thrived across time and cultures. Our obsession with getting scared is obvious to anyone who visits ScareHouse, a haunted house in Pittsburgh that is annually ranked among the scariest in t...

Improving the performance of your employees involves one of the hardest challenges in the known universe: changing the way they think. In constant demand as a coach, speaker, and consultant to companies around the world, David Rock has proven that the secret to leading people (and living and working with them) is found in the space between their ears. ""If people are being paid to think,"" he writes, ""isn't it time the business world found out what the thing doing the work, the brain, is ...

In the years following her role as the lead author of the international bestseller, Limits to Growth—the first book to show the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet— Donella Meadows remained a pioneer of environmental and social analysis until her untimely death in 2001.Thinking in Systems, is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute’s Di...