Mind Expanding Books

📜 History

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari 2014

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100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations and human rights; to trust money, books and laws; and to be ens...

The Discoverers
The Discoverers

Daniel J. Boorstin 2012

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A lyrical novel about family and friendship from critically acclaimed author Benjamin Alire Sáenz. Aristotle is an angry teen with a brother in prison. Dante is a know-it-all who has an unusual way of looking at the world. When the two meet at the swimming pool, they seem to have nothing in common. But as the loners start spending time together, th...

How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone
How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone

Brian McCullough 2018

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The internet was never intended for you, opines Brian McCullough in this lively narrative of an era that utterly transformed everything we thought we knew about technology. In How the Internet Happened, he chronicles the whole fascinating story for the first time, beginning in a dusty Illinois basement in 1993, when a group of college kids set off ...

Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow
Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

Yuval Noah Harari

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Yuval Noah Harari, author of the critically-acclaimed New York Times bestseller and international phenomenon Sapiens, returns with an equally original, compelling, and provocative book, turning his focus toward humanity’s future, and our quest to upgrade humans into gods.Over the past century humankind has managed to do the impossible and rein in f...

One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War
One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War

Michael Dobbs 2008

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In October 1962, at the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union appeared to be sliding inexorably toward a nuclear conflict over the placement of missiles in Cuba. Veteran Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs has pored over previously untapped American, Soviet, and Cuban sources to produce the most authoritative book yet on...

The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet
The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet

David Kahn 1996

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The magnificent, unrivaled history of codes and ciphers—how they're made, how they're broken, and the many and fascinating roles they've played since the dawn of civilization in war, business, diplomacy, and espionage—updated with a new chapter on computer cryptography and the Ultra secret.Man has created codes to keep secrets and has broken codes ...

Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II
Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II

Madhusree Mukerjee 2010

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A dogged enemy of Hitler, resolute ally of the Americans, and inspiring leader through World War II, Winston Churchill is venerated as one of the truly great statesmen of the last century. But while he has been widely extolled for his achievements, parts of Churchill's record have gone woefully unexamined. As journalist Madhusree Mukerjee reveals, ...

From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present
From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present

Jacques Barzun 2001

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Highly regarded here and abroad for some thirty works of cultural history and criticism, master historian Jacques Barzun has now set down in one continuous narrative the sum of his discoveries and conclusions about the whole of Western culture since 1500.In this account, Barzun describes what Western Man wrought from the Renaisance and Reformation ...

El Tiempo Entre Costuras
El Tiempo Entre Costuras

María Dueñas 2009

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Una novela de amor y espionaje en el exotismo colonial de África.La joven modista Sira Quiroga abandona Madrid en los meses convulsos previos al alzamiento arrastrada por el amor des­bocado hacia un hombre a quien apenas conoce. Juntos se instalan en Tánger, una ciudad mundana, exótica y vibrante en la que todo lo impensable puede hacerse realidad....

Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future
Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future

Ian Morris 2010

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A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 Sometime around 1750, English entrepreneurs unleashed the astounding energies of steam and coal, and the world was forever changed. The emergence of factories, railroads, and gunboats propelled the West’s rise to power in the nineteenth century, and the development of computers and nuclear weapons in the twent...

The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide
The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide

Robert Jay Lifton 1986

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Nazi doctors did more than conduct bizarre experiments on concentration-camp inmates; they supervised the entire process of medical mass murder, from selecting those who were to be exterminated to disposing of corpses. Lifton (The Broken Connection; The Life of the Self shows that this medically supervised killing was done in the name of "healing,"...

God Created The Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs that Changed History
God Created The Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs that Changed History

Stephen Hawking 2005

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In this collection of landmark mathematical works, editor Stephen Hawking has assembled the greatest feats humans have ever accomplished using just numbers and their brains.

Discovery of India
Discovery of India

Jawaharlal Nehru 2004

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In conjunction with the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund in New Delhi, Oxford proudly announces the reissue of Glimpses of World History and The Discovery of India, two famous works by Jawaharlal Nehru. One of modern day's most articulate statesmen, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote a on a wide variety of subjects. Describing himself as "a dabbler in many thing...

Guns, Germs, And Steel : The Fates Of Human Societies
Guns, Germs, And Steel : The Fates Of Human Societies

Jared M. Diamond 2005

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"Diamond has written a book of remarkable scope ... one of the most important and readable works on the human past published in recent years."Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a national bestseller: the global account of the rise of civilization that is also a stunning refutation of ideas of human development based on race.In this "artful, informati...

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)

Matt Ridley 2010

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Life is getting better—and at an accelerating rate. Food availability, income, and life span are up; disease, child mortality, and violence are down — all across the globe. Though the world is far from perfect, necessities and luxuries alike are getting cheaper; population growth is slowing; Africa is following Asia out of poverty; the Internet, th...

Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground
Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground

Kevin Poulson 2011

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The true story of Max Butler, the master hacker who ran a billion dollar cyber crime network.The word spread through the hacking underground like some unstoppable new virus: an audacious crook had staged a hostile takeover of an online criminal network that siphoned billions of dollars from the US economy.The culprit was a brilliant programmer with...

The Rise and Fall of the British Empire
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

Lawrence James 1997

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Great Britain's geopolitical role has undergone many changes over the last four centuries. Once a maritime superpower and ruler of half the world, Britain now occupies an isolated position as an economically fragile island often at odds with her European neighbors. Lawrence James has written a comprehensive, perceptive and insighful history of the ...

The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World
The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World

Steven Johnson 2006

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From Steven Johnson, the dynamic thinker routinely compared to James Gleick, Dava Sobel, and Malcolm Gladwell, The Ghost Map is a riveting page-turner about a real-life historical hero, Dr. John Snow. It's the summer of 1854, and London is just emerging as one of the first modern cities in the world. But lacking the infrastructure—garbage removal, ...

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

Tim Wu 2010

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In this age of an open Internet, it is easy to forget that every American information industry, beginning with the telephone, has eventually been taken captive by some ruthless monopoly or cartel. With all our media now traveling a single network, an unprecedented potential is building for centralized control over what Americans see and hear. Could...

Spycraft
Spycraft

Robert Wallace, H. Keith Melton, Henry R. Schlesinger 2008

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From two men who know better than anyone how espionage really works, an unprecedented historyaheavily illustrated with neverbefore- seen imagesaof the CIAas most secretive operations and the gadgets that made them possible. It is a world where the intrigue of reality exceeds that of fiction. What is an invisible photo used for? What does it take to...

Civilization: The West and the Rest: Niall Ferguson
Civilization: The West and the Rest: Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson 2011

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Western civilization’s rise to global dominance is the single most important historical phenomenon of the past five centuriesHow did the West overtake its Eastern rivals? And has the zenith of Western power now passed? Acclaimed historian Niall Ferguson argues that beginning in the fifteenth century, the West developed six powerful new concepts, or...

The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate
The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate

Robert D. Kaplan 2012

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In this provocative, startling book, Robert D. Kaplan, the bestselling author of Monsoon and Balkan Ghosts, offers a revelatory new prism through which to view global upheavals and to understand what lies ahead for continents and countries around the world.   In The Revenge of Geography, Kaplan builds on the insights, discoveries, and theories of g...

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century

Thomas L. Friedman 2006

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When scholars write the history of the world twenty years from now, and they come to the chapter Y2K to March 2004 , what will they say was the most crucial development? The attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11 and the Iraq war? Or the convergence of technology and events that allowed India, China, and so many other countries to become part of...