Social Scientists

Jessica Stern is one of the world’s foremost experts on terrorism and post-traumatic stress disorder. She has interviewed some of the most feared terrorists in their own camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan. She has worked with the National Security Council and the FBI as an expert on what extreme trauma can do to a person. By her own admission, she feels no fear in these terrifying scenarios. On a fall night in Concord, a quiet Massachusetts suburb, in 1973, Jessica was 15. She and her sister were at doing their homework after ballet class when a serial rapist entered their bedroom.

Maude Julien's parents were fanatics who believed it was their sacred duty to turn her into the ultimate survivor - raising her in isolation and subjecting her to endless drills designed to "eliminate weakness." She endured a life without heat, hot water, adequate food, friendship, or any kind of affectionate treatment. But Maude's parents could not rule her inner life. Befriending the animals on the lonely estate as well as the characters in the novels she read in secret, young Maude nurtured in herself the compassion and love that her parents forbid as weak.

Her Space, Her Time shares the stories of women in physics and astronomy whose work expanded scientific understanding yet whose accomplishments are often overlooked—creating a thrilling account of scientific discovery, inspirational leadership and persistence in the face of overwhelming challenges. In shaping her narrative around the science that fascinated them and the social context in which they worked, award-winning quantum physicist Shohini Ghose champions these remarkable women’s contributions, which loom even larger given the misogyny and discrimination they faced.

In March 1938, German soldiers crossed the border into Austria and Hitler absorbed the country into the Third Reich. Anticipating these events, many Jews had fled Austria, but the most famous Austrian Jew remained in Vienna, where he had lived since early childhood. Sigmund Freud was eighty-one years old, ill with cancer, and still unconvinced that his life was in danger.

Drawing on rarely consulted archives, Crews shows us a man who blundered tragicomically in his dealings with patients, who never produced a corroborated cure, who promoted cocaine in one decade and was deluded by it in the next, who misunderstood the psychological controversies of the era, and who advanced his career through falsifying case histories and betraying the mentors who had helped him to rise.

Becoming Freud is the story of the young Freud—Freud up until the age of fifty—that incorporates all of Freud’s many misgivings about the art of biography. Freud invented a psychological treatment that involved the telling and revising of life stories, but he was himself skeptical of the writing of such stories.

Wilhelm Reich and the Function of the Orgasm; Great Minds Series, Vol. 11 - the 2017 revised, updated and reformatted edition - is a study about one of the greatest authorities on the discovery of the bioenergy for modern science and medical science. The author understands his engagement for Reich as a contribution to the rehabilitation of one of the greatest but also one of the most misunderstood scientists of the 20th century.

Uncovering the details of the experiments leads her to question the validity of that 65 percent statistic and the claims that it revealed something essential about human nature. Fleshed out with dramatic transcripts of the tests themselves, the book puts a human face on the unwitting people who faced the moral test of the shock machine and offers a gripping, unforgettable tale of one man’s ambition and an experiment that defined a generation.

As a girl in New York City in the 1940s, Mildred "Millie" Dresselhaus was taught that there were only three career options open to women: secretary, nurse, or teacher. In Carbon Queen, science writer Maia Weinstock describes how, with curiosity and drive, Dresselhaus defied expectations and forged a career as a pioneering scientist and engineer. Dresselhaus made highly influential discoveries about the properties of carbon and other materials and helped reshape our world in countless ways—from electronics to aviation to medicine to energy.

In a sweeping narrative, the author of the mega-bestseller A Beautiful Mind takes us on a journey through modern history with the men and women who changed the lives of every single person on the planet. It’s the epic story of the making of modern economics, and of how it rescued mankind from squalor and deprivation by placing its material fate in its own hands rather than in Fate. Nasar’s account begins with Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew observing and publishing the condition of the poor majority in mid nineteenth-century London, the richest and most glittering place in the world.

From one of the world’s leading data scientists, a landmark tour ofthe new science of idea flow, offering revolutionary insights into the mysteries of collective intelligence and social influence.

To a generation in revolt against authority, "Tune in, turn on, drop out" was a mantra, and its popularizer, Dr. Timothy Leary, a guru. A charismatic and brilliant psychologist, Leary became intrigued, and then obsessed, by the effects of psychedelic drugs in the 1960s while teaching at Harvard. What began as research into human consciousness turned into a mission to alter consciousness itself. Timothy Leary is the first major biography of one of the most controversial figures in postwar America.

President Nixon called him the most dangerous man in America, while Terence McKenna believed he made more people happy than anyone else in history. Few people have divided opinion as strongly as Dr. Timothy Leary.

Dr. Peter McGraw, founder of the Humor Research Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, teamed up with journalist Joel Warner on a far-reaching search for the secret behind humor. Their journey spanned the globe, from New York to Japan, from Palestine to the Amazon. Meanwhile, the duo conducted their own humor experiments along the way-to wince-worthy, hilarious, and illuminating results.

Das unglaubliche Leben des amerikanischen Psychiaters und Schriftstellers Irvin D. Yalom, Autor von "Und Nietzsche Weinte" und "Das Spinoza-Problem", erzählt von ihm selbst! "Und Nietzsche Weinte", "Das Spinoza-Problem", "Die Rote Couch", "Der Panama-Hut", "Der Schopenhauer-Kur". Bestimmt kennen Sie diese Bestseller. Aber was steht hinter diesen Werken? Wie ist Irvin Yalom auf die Ideen zu diesen Büchern gekommen? Und wie ist er überhaupt zu einem Schriftsteller geworden?

As a forensic psychiatrist, it's Dr Das' job to treat and rehabilitate what the tabloids might call the 'criminally insane', many of whom assault, rob, rape and even kill. His work takes him to high-security prisons and securely locked hospital wards across the country, as well as inside courtrooms, giving evidence as an expert witness.

For Amartya Sen, “home” has been many places, including Dhaka, in modern Bangladesh, where he grew up; Calcutta, where he studied economics; and Cambridge, where he engaged with the greatest minds of the 20th century. In Home in the World, these “homes” collectively form an unparalleled and truthful vision of 20th- and 21st-century life.

Over the course of nearly half a century, five American presidents - three Democrats and two Republicans - have relied on the financial acumen, and the integrity, of Paul A. Volcker. During his tenure as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, when he battled the Great Inflation of the 1970s, Volcker did nothing less than restore the reputation of an American financial system on the verge of collapse.

Did the Covid-19 lockdowns and mandates serve society’s best interests? Science alone can’t answer the question. Philosophers have important things to say about it. So do psychologists, economists, novelists, and lawyers.

On July 22, 2009, a special meeting was held with 24 leading scientists at the National Institutes of Health to discuss early findings that a newly discovered retrovirus was linked to chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), prostate cancer, lymphoma, and eventually neurodevelopmental disorders in children. When Dr. Judy Mikovits finished her presentation the room was silent for a moment, then one of the scientists said, "Oh my God!" The resulting investigation would be like no other in science.