The tree, the fireside, the candles, the presents and the festive food may be the main features of the traditional Christmas, but so were the stories, the poems, and the traditional tales. Here, is a delightful confection of Christmas texts: the story of The Nutcracker told with Tchaikovsky’s immortal music, Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales, as well as nineteenth and twentieth century poems and the always affecting tale of The Little Match Girl. An enchanting collection for those...

In the second novel of James’s celebrated late period, American Lambert Strether is sent to Paris on behalf of Mrs Newsome, his fiancée, to collect her son, Chad. When Strether finds Chad, he discovers an altered man and becomes introduced to a free and unconventional style of life that soon intoxicates him. His views begin to change; the morality of Woollett, his hometown, becomes foreign, and the ‘ambassador’ loses sight of his mission… Part tragedy, part comedy, The Ambassadors is a rew...

**From the bestselling author of Kafka on the Shore: A magnificent coming-of-age story steeped in nostalgia, “a masterly novel” (The New York Times Book Review) blending the music, the mood, and the ethos that were the sixties with a young man’s hopeless and heroic first love.Now with a new introduction by the author.**Toru, a serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is...

Crosby’s landmark 1972 work argues that environmental factors shape our history just as much as—and sometimes more than—human factors. While earlier scholars emphasized cultural and technological factors as defining the way our world developed, Crosby claims that nonhuman factors, such as the exchange of plants, animals, and microbes between the Old and New Worlds, had greater overall impact. ¶One of the first historians to look at the importance of the spread of food crops and diseases in...

With the same deadpan mania and genius for dislocation that he brought to his internationally acclaimed novels A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami makes this collection of stories a determined assault on the normal. A man sees his favorite elephant vanish into thin air; a newlywed couple suffers attacks of hunger that drive them to hold up a McDonald's in the middle of the night; and a young woman discove...

Stephen Pinker’s optimistic 2011 book argues that, despite humanity’s biological tendency toward violence, we are, in fact, less violent today than ever before citing extensive statistical evidence. For him, much of the credit for the decline goes to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment movement, whose ideas of liberty, tolerance, and respect for the value of human life filtered down through society and affected how people thought. That psychological change led to behavioral change—and ove...

Du Bois's 1903 examination of the plight of African Americans is widely recognized as among the most important ever written on race and identity. Exposing the ways in which the Jim Crow Laws kept blacks in conditions they thought they had escaped when slavery was abolished, Du Bois explains how interaction with a white world caused them psychological anguish. He concluded that blacks should demand total equality a view in opposition to that of other black intellectuals, who accepted inequa...

The Anti-Politics Machine (1990) examines how international development projects are conceived, researched, and put into practice. It also looks at what these projects actually achieve. Ferguson criticizes the idea of externally-directed ‘development’ and argues that the process doesn’t take proper account of the daily realities of the communities it is intended to benefit. Instead, they often prioritize technical solutions for addressing poverty and ignoring its social and political dimen...

The first work written for the general public by the highly influential American economist Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom argues that economies and societies work best when a free market functions with minimal government interference. Friedman’s ideas were on the fringes of the economic debate when the book was first published in 1962, but they came to be seen as powerful new challenges to the then-dominant economic ideas put forward by John Maynard Keynes. Friedman’s arguments wo...

Do people always act rationally and in their own best interests? Thaler and Sunstein do not believe so. They are convinced that psychological factors often stop people from making the best decisions. Their 2008 work argues that governments should ‘nudge’ citizens to make better choices in all sorts of areas, from eating habits, to health, to financial planning. They also argue, however, that such interventions must not restrict freedom of choice, since ‘nudges’ can have a significant effec...

Born in 1961, US anthropologist and activist David Graeber was weaned on leftist politics, and declared himself an anarchist at age 16. He became an anthropology professor, and his early cultural research in Madagascar exposed him to poverty that he saw as caused by pressures to repay excessive government debt. Through a combination of activism and scholarship he has devoted much of his career to developing an intellectual basis for undermining capitalism. In his 2011 book Debt: The First ...

Joint Gold medallist of the Axiom Business Book Award 2019 - Personal Finance/Retirement Planning/InvestingHow does money figure into a happy life?In The Geometry of Wealth, behavioral finance expert Brian Portnoy delivers an inspired answer, building on the critical distinction between being rich and being wealthy. While one is an unsatisfying treadmill, the other is the ability to underwrite a meaningful life, however one chooses to defi...