Books published by 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.

"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

"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.

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

"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"

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.

This new edition of one of the books most closely identified with clinical psychology since 1965 will expose a new generation to Shapiro's stunningly defining conceptualizations of the Obsessive-Compulsive, Paranoid, Hysterical, and Impulsive ways of being.

This classic work by the distinguished economist traces the history of nine American ethnic groups,the Irish, Germans, Jews, Italians, Chinese, African-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans.

"Here is a practical guide to doing psychotherapy which, unlike most other manuals that present an idealized view of the therapist-patient relationship, shows what the therapeutic encounter is really l"

A renowned historian of Christianity reveals that the "Lost Gospels" were never lost, and have shaped creeds across the world from antiquity to the present

This comprehensive guide to the future of therapy in collabourative practice combines a broad perspective with consideration of the detail.

An essential guide to the best and most practical survival information available from the American Armed Forces, edited for civilian use by the same packager who brought us The U.S. Armed Forces Survival Manual that sold over 600,000 copies in the 1980s.

"In this groundbreaking book, Dorothy Becvar shows how a spiritual orientation can be used to facilitate healing at the deepest level. By incorporating a "soul healing" perspective into their practices"

A book based on eyewitness accounts of the American Civil War by 120 children between the ages of four and 16. Their diaries, letters and reminiscences are a testimony to their resilience in the face of great adversity and their capacity to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives.