Böcker utgivna av Basic Books

One of the leading scholars of Chinese military history offers a definitive guide to the ways in which military strategy and technology shaped the face of ancient Chinese civilization.

Can America's faith in public education be restored? As they analyze the ways in which public school leaders successfully formed and transformed American education, historian Tyack and political scientist Hansot conclude that the main challenge facing today's leaders is to create a new community of commitment to public education as a common good.

A KGB general's impressively illuminating memoir of the final years of the Soviet Union

Investigates the mode and effect of Hebrew poetry in the Bible. This title presents three major concepts in biblical poetry (parallelism; narrative vs delineation; and, intensification), delving into an illuminating textual analysis using many examples from the Bible.

Compelling scientific evidence that participating in hands-on activities can actually alter the stress responses that lead to depression

"Ms. Arrison entertainingly chronicles efforts to conquer aging and death from antiquity to today.... [Her] sunny outlook is infectious."-Wall Street Journal

Nothing in Keith Richburg’s long and respected journalistic career at the Washington Post prepared him for what he would encounter as the paper’s correspondent in Africa. He found a continent where brutal murder had become routine, where dictators and warlords silenced dissent with machine guns and machetes, and where starvation had become depressingly common. With a great deal of personal anguish, Richburg faced a difficult question: If this is Africa, what does it mean to be an African American?In this provocative and unvarnished account of his three years on the continent of his ancestors, Richburg takes us on a extraordinary journey that sweeps from Somalia to South Africa, showing how he confronted the divide between his African racial heritage and his American cultural identity.

A bracing narrative of wartime India and the tremendous famine that resulted when Churchill sacrificed the lives of four million Bengalis to win World War II

A revised edition of the classic pocket guide to making a life in academia

How can you become Steve Jobs, A.G. Lafley, or David Ogilvy? Hint: read this book.

A preeminent scholar of Catholicism transports readers to Rome for the traditional station churches pilgrimage, offering a vivid and informative guide to the Eternal City and the Lenten season.

"The End of Power makes a truly important contribution, persuasively portraying a compelling dynamic of change cutting across multiple game-boards of the global power matrix."-Washington Post

"An astonishingly detailed account of the Geodesic Mission.... Gripping, authoritative, and fair."-Washington Post

This study of the effect on women and families of the organizing principles of health care shows the consequences of the assumption that women are solely responsible for family problems and demonstrates the medical superiority of a clinical relationship based on communication rather than control.

In this examination of life in America in the 1950s, Alan Ehrenhalt reveals how an earlier generation fostered a sense of community by accepting limits in their lives and by deferring to authority figures to enforce those limits.

An original, thought-provoking book...Those who only have the time or the inclination to read a few books on the period should make every effort to read this one.- Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

The slave Phillis Wheatley literally wrote her way to freedom when, in 1773, she became the first person of African descent to publish a book of poems in the English language. This title examines how Wheatley has survived the judgment of past and contemporary critics.

Through a beautiful and compelling narrative, Schoppa traces the lives and history at Xiang Lake, a reservoir from its creation in 1112 to the present

This pathbreaking book documents for the first time the unanticipated decline in leisure both at work and in the home over the last twenty years and explains why Americans enjoy less leisure today than at any other time since the end of World War II.

In business today, all advantage is temporary. In order to survive-let alone thrive-companies must be able to anticipate and adapt to change, or face rapid, brutal extinction. In Clockspeed, Charles Fine draws on a decade’s worth of research at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management to introduce a new vocabulary for understanding the forces of competition and making strategic decisions that will determine the destiny of your company, as well as your industry.Taking inspiration from the world of biology, Fine argues that each industry has its own evolutionary life cycle (or “clockspeed”), measured by the rate at which it introduces new products, processes, and organizational structures. Just as geneticists study the fruit fly to gain insight into the evolutionary paths of all animals, managers in any industry can learn from the industrial fruit flies-such as Internet services, personal computers, and multimedia entertainment-which evolve through new generations at breakneck speed. Applying the lessons of the fruit flies to industries as diverse as bicycles, pharmaceuticals, and semiconductors, Fine illustrates how competitive advantage is lost or gained by how well a company manages dynamic web of relationships that run throughout its chain of suppliers, distributors, and alliance partners.Packed with revolutionary concepts and tools to help managers make key strategic decisions that affect current and future performance, Clockspeed shows, as no other book before it, how the ultimate core competency is mastering the art of supply chain design, carefully choosing which components and capabilities to keep in-house and which to purchase from outside.The consequences of faulty of visionary decisions can be enormous and dramatic. Witness the case of IBM in the early 1980s, when it outsourced key PC components to Microsoft and Intel, unleashing the “Intel Inside” phenomenon and a complete restructuring of the computer industry. Going further, Fine sees the personal computer as merely a component in the vast information-entertainment industry, which evolves at speeds unimagined a few years ago. He uses this “fruit fly” as well to peer into the future of industrial evolution and find practical advice for players in all industries, from automobiles to health care information systems.Clockspeed not only serves up some new “laws” of value chain dynamics, but it also offers recommendations for achieving industry leadership through simultaneous product, process, and supply chain design. In challenging managers to think like corporate geneticists Clockspeed contributes the next creative leap in business strategy.

Fables of Abundance ranges from the traveling peddlers of early modern Europe to the twentieth-century American corporation, exploring the ways that advertising collaborated with other cultural institutions to produce the dominant aspirations and anxieties in the modern United States.

One of the greatest mysteries of twentieth-century science: a tormented genius discovers a key element of atomic fission, then disappears forever

Similar to the I Ching, this new translation from best-selling Chinese historian and translator Ralph Sawyer presents a popular divination tool for attaining self-knowledge and wisdom in the authentic Chinese tradition

Explains to American Jews the core religious beliefs of Christianity and assesses the threats and promises of the Jewish--Christian encounter from a Jewish perspective.

An anthology of the best work of an always compelling, often controversial, and absolutely essential philosopher of the modern American Experience.

"During the Second World War, Germany captured nearly 94,000 American soldiers, while the Allies shipped almost 380,000 Germans to the United States. We Were Each Other's Prisoners compares, for the fi"

This is an ambitious, sweeping book that argues how rights are vital to the continuing security of our nation.

Inspired by the surge in global terrorism and violence, one of America's foremost political philosophers mounts an impassioned defense of "just war" against terror

Signs of Life applies the mathematics of order and disorder, of entropy, chance, and randomness, of chaos and nonlinear dynamics to the various mysteries of the living world at all levels. This book is an entirely new approach to understanding living systems and will help set the agenda for biology in the coming century.