History Science Art

Avengers assemble! Tackling intriguing dilemmas and issues that no single great philosopher can withstand, this powerful book enlists the brainpower of an A-list team of history's most prominent thinkers to explore the themes behind the action of Marvel Comics' all-star superhero team.

The first book dedicated solely to exploring his creative work, Man in the Music guides us through an unparalleled analysis of Jackson’s recordings, album by album, from his trailblazing work with Quincy Jones to his later collaborations with Teddy Riley, Jimmy Jam, Terry Lewis, and Rodney Jerkins. Drawing on rare archival material and on dozens of original interviews with many who helped bring the artist’s music into the world, Jackson expert and acclaimed cultural critic Joseph Vogel reveals what gave rise to an immortal body of work.

Since Stan Lee and Marvel introduced Spider-Man in Amazing Fantasy 15 in 1962, everyone's favorite webslinger has had a long career in comics, graphic novels, cartoons, movies, and even on Broadway. In this book some of history's most powerful philosophers help us explore the enduring questions and issues surrounding this beloved superhero: Is Peter Parker to blame for the death of his uncle? Does great power really bring great responsibility? Can Spidey champion justice and be with Mary Jane at the same time?

For all the near-fanatic attention brought each year to the Academy Awards, the organization that dispenses those awards—the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—has yet to be understood. To date, no one has ever produced a thorough account of the Academy’s birth and its awkward adolescence, and the few reports on those periods from outside have always had a glancing, cursory quality. Yet the story of the Academy’s creation and development is a critical piece of Hollywood’s history. Now that story is finally being told.

Can't Slow Down is the definitive portrait of the exploding world of mid-80s pop and the time it defined, from Cold War anxiety to the home-computer revolution. The story of that thrilling, turbulent time, an era when Top 40 radio was both the leading edge of popular culture and a moral battleground, has never been told with the full detail it deserves - until now.

Test your knowledge or brush up on it with this unofficial Trivia Book. If you want to remember some of the great moments (with the expanse of time, we couldn’t remember them all!) of one of the most loved television shows ever, this book is for you.

Goodbye, Guns N' Roses is a genre-rattling attempt to explain the appeal of America's most divisive rock band. While it includes uncharted history and the self-lacerating connoisseurship of a Guns N' Roses fetishist, it is not a recycled chronicle - this book is a deconstruction of myth, one that blends high and low art sketches to examine how Guns N' Roses impacted popular culture.

One of the most profound studies of warfare ever written, The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China presents us with an Eastern tradition of strategic thought that emphasizes outwitting one's opponent through speed, stealth, flexibility, and a minimum of force - an approach very different from that stressed in the West, where the advantages of brute strength have overshadowed more subtle methods.

You either were there or you wanted to be. A defining New York City institution co-founded by Norman Mailer, The Village Voice was the first newspaper to cover hip-hop, the avant-garde art scene, and Off-Broadway with gravitas. It reported on the AIDS crisis with urgency and seriousness when other papers dismissed it as a gay disease. In 1979, the Voice’s Wayne Barrett uncovered Donald Trump as a corrupt con artist before anyone else was paying attention.

Jean-Paul Sartre is one of the undisputed giants of 20th-century philosophy. His intellectual writings popularizing existentialism, combined with his creative and artistic flair, have made him a legend of French thought. His tumultuous personal life - so inextricably bound up with his philosophical thinking - is a fascinating tale of love and lust, drug abuse, high-profile fallings-out and political and cultural rebellion.

Audiolibro de Vive el Tiempo. Escrito hace más de dos mil años, El Arte de la Guerra es un manual de enseñanzas para salir exitoso de cualquier batalla que se presente en la vida. Hoy en día este libro ha superado su original carácter militar y se ha convertido en una ineludible herramienta para quienes quieren ser triunfadores en la política, en los negocios, en los deportes, en la diplomacia y en todas las relaciones humanas.

The Allman Brothers Band’s Brothers and Sisters was not only the band’s best-selling album at over seven million copies sold, it was also a powerfully influential release, both musically and culturally, one whose influence continues to be profoundly felt.

In this captivating, sweeping history, Michael Brooks makes clear that mathematics was one of the foundational innovations that catapulted humanity from a nomadic existence to civilization, and that it has been instrumental in every subsequent great leap of humankind: from charting the movements of celestial bodies to navigating the globe to tracking the dissemination of viruses.

The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense - economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World, the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar and critic Louis Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind.

In 1939, 50 million Americans went to the movies every week, Louis B. Mayer was the highest-paid man in the country, and Hollywood produced 530 feature films a year. One decade and five thousand movies later, the studios were faltering....

In 2021, when the gavel fell at Christie’s on the sale of Mike Winkelmann’s Everydays series—a compilation of 5,000 digital artworks—it made a thunderous announcement: Non-fungible tokens had arrived. The ludicrous world of CryptoKitties and Bored Apes had just produced a piece of art worth $69.3 million (at least according to the highest bidder). On that day, the traditional art market—the largest unregulated market in the world—put its stamp of approval on a very new and carnivalesque digital reality. But what did it mean for these two worlds to collide?

Nelson George's chronicle of Motown Records' rise and fall remains a classic account of an essential American music company and its dynamic founder, Berry Gordy Jr. Gordy's uncanny instinct for finding extraordinary talent - from performers and musicians to songwriters and producers - packed the label's roster with a who's who of historic artists and hitmakers.

From Nelson George, supervising producer and writer of the hit Netflix series The Get Down, Hip Hop America is the definitive account of the society-altering collision between Black youth culture and the mass media.

When a major Hollywood studio released Five Fingers of Death to thrill-seeking Times Square moviegoers on March 21, 1973, only a handful of Black and Asian American audience members knew the difference between an Iron Fist and an Eagle's Claw. That changed overnight as kung fu movies kicked off a craze that would earn millions at the box office, send TV ratings soaring, sell hundreds of thousands of video tapes, influence the birth of hip hop, reshape the style of action we see in movies today, and introduce America to some of the biggest non-White stars.

For the first time in any modern language, a female scholar and translator reimagines The Art of War. Sun Tzu’s ancient book of strategy and psychology has as much to tell us today as when it was first written 2,500 years ago. In a world forever at odds, his rules for anticipating the motivations and strategies of our competitors never cease to inspire leaders of all kinds.