Literature & Ideas is the fifth volume in The Human Record. It turns from the world we discover to the words and ideas we use to make sense of it: 126 discussion cards arranged in six groups, from The Spoken and the Written through The Shapes of Story, How to Live How to Die, The Word and the World, and The Inner World, closing with How We Live Together. Each card is built around a single work or idea and the knowledge behind it, something worth knowing and worth talking about. Made for gu...

Art & Music is the third volume in The Human Record. It moves the series from the world's past into the world we make: 126 discussion cards arranged in six groups, from First Images & First Songs through The Sacred Arts, Masters, Makers & Patrons, The Performing World, and Breaking the Frame, closing with The Modern Eye & Ear. Each card is built around a single work, maker, or idea and the knowledge behind it, something worth knowing and worth talking about. Made for guides, families, clas...

Science & Wonder is the fourth volume in The Human Record. It turns the series from the world we make to the world we discover: 126 discussion cards arranged in six groups, from The Sky Above Us through The Living Earth, The Invisible World, Pattern & Proof, and The Body & the Brain, closing with The Method & the Frontier. Each card is built around a single discovery, instrument, or question and the knowledge behind it, something worth knowing and worth talking about. Made for guides, fami...

History & Place is the second volume in The Human Record. It carries the structure readers know from Culture Générale into new ground: 126 discussion cards arranged in six groups, from Origins & First Civilizations through Empires & Exchanges, Encounters & Upheavals, Revolutions & Industries, and Modern Crossroads, closing with an atlas of the places that made us. Each card is built around a single moment, figure, or place and the knowledge behind it, something worth knowing and worth talk...

Culture Générale is the first volume in The Human Record, a series built to start real conversations. Inside are 260 discussion cards arranged in thirteen groups, moving from Wonder & Discovery and The Natural World through Words & Language, The Ancient World, Art & Beauty, Philosophy & Ideas, and Geography & Place. Each card opens onto something worth knowing and worth talking about. Made for guides, families, classrooms, and curious readers, the book treats general knowledge not as trivi...

People & Society is the sixth and final volume in The Human Record. It turns from the words and ideas we think with to the lives we actually share: 126 discussion cards arranged in six groups, from Kinship & Custom through Work & the Marketplace, Law & Judgment, Power & the State, and Movements & Change, closing with The City & the Commons. Each card is built around a single institution, struggle, or idea and the knowledge behind it, something worth knowing and worth talking about. Made fo...

A " concise and utterly enlightening" look at why we can't wrap our minds around climate change ( Publishers Weekly).Are we deranged? Award-winning essayist and novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? The Great Derangement examines our inability—at the level of literature, history, and politics—to grasp the scale and violence of c...

A completely updated, revised edition of the classic, outfitted with a whole new arsenal of indispensable knowledge on global affairs, popular culture, economic trends, scientific principles, and modern arts. Here’s your chance to brush up on all those subjects you slept through in school, reacquaint yourself with all the facts you once knew (then promptly forgot), catch up on major developments in the world today, and become the Renaissance man or woman you always knew you could b...

A groundbreaking book that explores how astrology can inform our understanding of the events that have shaped our world—the inspiration for the docuseries Changing of the Gods.In these pages, distinguished philosopher and cultural historian Richard Tarnas traces the connection between cosmic cycles and archetypal patterns of human experience. Based on thirty years of meticulous research, and on thinkers from Plato to Jung, Cosmos and Psyche explor...

In Prehistory, the award-winning archaeologist and renowned scholar Colin Renfrew covers human existence before the advent of written records–which is to say, the overwhelming majority of our time here on earth. But Renfrew also opens up to discussion, and even debate, the term “prehistory” itself, giving an incisive, concise, and lively survey of the past, and how scholars and scientists labor to bring it to light.Renfrew begins by looking at prehistory as a discipline, particular...

A delightful intellectual feast from the bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, The Order of Time, and AnaximanderOne of the world’s most prominent physicists and fearless free spirit, Carlo Rovelli is also a masterful storyteller. His bestselling books have introduced millions of readers to the wonders of modern physics and his singular perspective on the cosmos. This new collection of essays reveals a curious intellect al...

Shortlisted for the 2024 British Academy Book PrizeA new history of mathematics focusing on the marginalized voices who propelled the discipline, spanning six continents and thousands of years of untold stories."A book to make you love math." —Financial TimesMathematics shapes almost everything we do. But despite its reputation as the study of fundamental truths, the stories we have been told about it are wrong—warped like the sixteenth-century map that enl...