You are here: Home / Archives for Kathryn Lopez

New Earth Science Catalog!

December 9, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Be among the first to browse and download our new earth science catalog!

Of particular interest is Stephen R. Palumbi and Anthony R. Palumbi’s The Extreme Life of the Sea. The ocean teems with life that thrives under difficult situations in unusual environments. The Extreme Life of the Sea takes readers to the absolute limits of the aquatic world—the fastest and deepest, the hottest and oldest creatures of the oceans. It dives into the icy Arctic and boiling hydrothermal vents—and exposes the eternal darkness of the deepest undersea trenches—to show how marine life thrives against the odds. This thrilling book brings to life the sea’s most extreme species, and reveals how they succeed across the wide expanse of the world’s global ocean.

Also be sure to note Donald E. Canfield’s Oxygen: A Four Billion Year History. The air we breathe is twenty-one percent oxygen, an amount higher than on any other known world. While we may take our air for granted, Earth was not always an oxygenated planet. How did it become this way? Oxygen is the most current account of the history of atmospheric oxygen on Earth. Donald Canfield—one of the world’s leading authorities on geochemistry, earth history, and the early oceans—covers this vast history, emphasizing its relationship to the evolution of life and the evolving chemistry of the Earth. With an accessible and colorful first-person narrative, he draws from a variety of fields, including geology, paleontology, geochemistry, biochemistry, animal physiology, and microbiology, to explain why our oxygenated Earth became the ideal place for life.

And don’t miss out on Gillen D’Arcy Wood’s Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World. When Indonesia’s Mount Tambora erupted in 1815, it unleashed the most destructive wave of extreme weather the world has witnessed in thousands of years. The volcano’s massive sulfate dust cloud enveloped the Earth, cooling temperatures and disrupting major weather systems for more than three years. Amid devastating storms, drought, and floods, communities worldwide endured famine, disease, and civil unrest on a catastrophic scale. On the eve of the bicentenary of the great eruption, Tambora tells the extraordinary story of the weather chaos it wrought, weaving the latest climate science with the social history of this frightening period to offer a cautionary tale about the potential tragic impacts of drastic climate change in our own century.

Even more foremost titles in earth science can be found in the catalog. You may also sign up with ease to be notified of forthcoming titles at http://press.princeton.edu/subscribe/. Your e-mail address will remain confidential!

If you’re heading to the annual American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, CA December 9th-13th, come visit us at booth 632, and follow #AGU13 and @PrincetonUPress on Twitter for updates and information on our new and forthcoming titles throughout the meeting. See you there!

Filed Under: Earth Sciences, New Catalog Tagged With:

New Religion Catalog

November 22, 2013 by

Be among the first to browse and download our new religion catalog!

Of particular interest are the new additions to the Lives of Great Religious Books series including The Book of Common Prayer by Alan Jacobs, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae by Bernard McGinn, The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali by David Gordon White, and more. The new series is comprised of short volumes that recount the complex and fascinating histories of important religious texts from around the world. Written for general readers by leading authors and experts, these books examine the historical origins of texts from the great religious traditions, and trace how their reception, interpretation, and influence have changed—often radically—over time. As these stories of translation, adaptation, appropriation, and inspiration dramatically remind us, all great religious books are living things whose careers in the world can take the most unexpected turns.

Even more foremost titles in religion can be found in the catalog. You may also sign up with ease to be notified of forthcoming titles at http://press.princeton.edu/subscribe/. Your e-mail address will remain confidential!

If you’re heading to the annual meeting hosted by the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature in Baltimore, MD November 23rd through the 26th, come visit us at booth 345, and follow us on Twitter @PrincetonUPress for updates and information on our new and forthcoming titles throughout the meeting. See you there!

Filed Under: New Catalog, Religion Tagged With:

New Anthropology Catalog

November 22, 2013 by

Be among the first to browse and download our new anthropology catalog!

Of particular interest is Margaret Lock’s The Alzheimer Conundrum: Entanglements of Dementia and Aging. Because of rapidly aging populations, the number of people worldwide experiencing dementia is increasing and the projections are grim. Despite hundreds of millions of dollars invested in medical research, no effective treatment has been discovered for Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia. The Alzheimer Conundrum exposes the predicaments embedded in current efforts to slow down or halt Alzheimer’s disease through early detection of presymptomatic biological changes in healthy individuals.

Also be sure to note Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind by Nikolas Rose and Joelle M. Abi-Rached. The brain sciences are influencing our understanding of human behavior as never before, from neuropsychiatry and neuroeconomics to neurotheology and neuroaesthetics. Many now believe that the brain is what makes us human, and it seems that neuroscientists are poised to become the new experts in the management of human conduct. Neuro describes the key developments—theoretical, technological, economic, and biopolitical—that have enabled the neurosciences to gain such traction outside the laboratory. It explores the ways neurobiological conceptions of personhood are influencing everything from child rearing to criminal justice, and are transforming the ways we “know ourselves” as human beings. In this emerging neuro-ontology, we are not “determined” by our neurobiology: on the contrary, it appears that we can and should seek to improve ourselves by understanding and acting on our brains.

And don’t miss out on When People Come First: Critical Studies in Global Health, edited by João Biehl & Adriana Petryna. When People Come First critically assesses the expanding field of global health. It brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars to address the medical, social, political, and economic dimensions of the global health enterprise through vivid case studies and bold conceptual work. The book demonstrates the crucial role of ethnography as an empirical lantern in global health, arguing for a more comprehensive, people-centered approach.

Even more foremost titles in anthropology can be found in the catalog. You may also sign up with ease to be notified of forthcoming titles at http://press.princeton.edu/subscribe/. Your e-mail address will remain confidential!

If you’re heading to the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting in Chicago, IL November 20th through the 23rd, come visit us at booth 307, and follow #AAA2013 on Twitter for updates and information on our new and forthcoming titles throughout the meeting. See you there!

Filed Under: Anthropology, New Catalog Tagged With:

September Book Giveaways

September 19, 2013 by

Looking for your next read? Princeton University Press is participating in several book giveaways this month. See the details below for a chance to win something new for your bookshelf!

Calaprice_QuotableEinstein_cvr.inddThe Ultimate Quotable Einstein
Alice Calaprice
(signed)

The Ultimate Quotable Einstein features roughly 1,600 quotes in all. This paperback edition includes sections unique to the ultimate collection—”On and to Children,” “On Race and Prejudice,” and “Einstein’s Verses: A Small Selection”—as well as a chronology of Einstein’s life and accomplishments, Freeman Dyson’s authoritative foreword, and commentary and descriptive source notes by Alice Calaprice.

Enter here.

What W.H. Auden Can Do for YouMcCallSmith_Auden
Alexander McCall Smith

When facing a moral dilemma, Isabel Dalhousie—Edinburgh philosopher, amateur detective, and title character of a series of novels by best-selling author Alexander McCall Smith—often refers to the great twentieth-century poet W. H. Auden. This is no accident: McCall Smith has long been fascinated by Auden. Indeed, the novelist, best known for his No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, calls the poet not only the greatest literary discovery of his life but also the best of guides on how to live. In this book, McCall Smith has written a charming personal account about what Auden has done for him—and what he just might do for you.

Enter here.

Stephenson_WarblerGBirding Package

Includes one of each of the following:

–The Warbler Guide
–The Crossley ID Guide: Raptors
–How to Be a Better Birder
–Zeiss TERRA binoculars
–audio companion to The Warbler Guide

Enter here.

The Book of Common Prayer: A BiographyJacobs_BkCommonPrayer
Alan Jacobs

Jacobs shows how The Book of Common Prayer—from its beginnings as a means of social and political control in the England of Henry VIII to its worldwide presence today—became a venerable work whose cadences express the heart of religious life for many.

Enter here.

Larrimore_BkJobThe Book of Job: A Biography
Mark Larrimore

The book of Job raises stark questions about the nature and meaning of innocent suffering and the relationship of the human to the divine, yet it is also one of the Bible’s most obscure and paradoxical books, one that defies interpretation even today. Mark Larrimore provides a panoramic history of this remarkable book, traversing centuries and traditions to examine how Job’s trials and his challenge to God have been used and understood in diverse contexts, from commentary and liturgy to philosophy and art.

Enter here.

Filed Under: Twitter

American prison system debate reaches new level

September 4, 2013 by

Hagan_Who_F12Orange Is the New Black, a comedy-drama series based on Piper Kerman’s memoir of the same name, recently hit the screens of Netflix users, receiving widespread critical acclaim. The show, revolving around Kernan’s sentence in a women’s federal prison, sheds light on social structure, rules, culture, and overall the experiences of the inmates in U.S. prisons.

Kernan, now a board member of the Women’s Prison Association, recently discussed her experience and suggestions for changing the American prison system on NPR’s Fresh Air. That same week, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder stated that the U.S. has an “unnecessarily large prison population,” calling the system “both ineffective and unsustainable.”

While the consensus that change is necessary is spread across party lines, the debate among lawmakers over what to do and how to do it is heavy. One certainty is, however, that the conversation has reached a national level, and an understanding of the U.S. prison system is becoming increasingly necessary.

In Who Are the Criminals?, John Hagan argues that the recent history of American criminal justice can be divided into two eras—the age of Roosevelt (roughly 1933 to 1973) and the age of Reagan (1974 to 2008). A focus on rehabilitation, corporate regulation, and the social roots of crime in the earlier period was dramatically reversed in the later era. In the age of Reagan, the focus shifted to the harsh treatment of street crimes, especially drug offenses, which disproportionately affected minorities and the poor and resulted in wholesale imprisonment. At the same time, a massive deregulation of business provided new opportunities, incentives, and even rationalizations for white-collar crime—and helped cause the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent recession. The time for moving beyond Reagan-era crime policies is long overdue, Hagan argues. The understanding of crime must be reshaped and we must reconsider the relative harms and punishments of street and corporate crimes. In a new afterword, Hagan assesses Obama’s policies regarding the punishment of white-collar and street crimes and debates whether there is any evidence of a significant change in the way our country punishes them.

Sykes_SocietyThe Society of Captives, first published in 1958, is a classic of modern criminology and one of the most important books ever written about prison. Gresham Sykes wrote the book at the height of the Cold War, motivated by the world’s experience of fascism and communism to study the closest thing to a totalitarian system in American life: a maximum security prison. His analysis calls into question the extent to which prisons can succeed in their attempts to control every facet of life—or whether the strong bonds between prisoners make it impossible to run a prison without finding ways of “accommodating” the prisoners. Re-released fifty years later, The Society of Captives will continue to serve as an indispensable text for coming to terms with the nature of modern power.

For further reading:

When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment by Mark A. R. Kleiman
Games Prisoners Play: The Tragicomic Worlds of Polish Prison by Marek M. Kaminski
Prison Religion: Faith-Based Reform and the Constitution by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan

Filed Under: Law, Political Science, Sociology Tagged With: , , , , , ,

New Politics and International Relations Catalog

August 28, 2013 by

Be among the first to browse and download our new politics and international relations catalog!

Of particular interest is The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present. The current financial crisis is just the latest example of how things continue to go wrong, just when it looked like they were going right. In this wide-ranging, original, and compelling book, David Runciman tells the story of modern democracy through the history of moments of crisis, from the First World War to the economic crash of 2008.

Also be sure to note The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election. In this groundbreaking book, John Sides and Lynn Vavreck tell the dramatic story of the election—with a big difference. Using an unusual “moneyball” approach, they look beyond the anecdote, folklore, and conventional wisdom that often pass for election analysis. Instead, they draw on extensive quantitative data about the economy, public opinion, news coverage, and political advertising to separate what was truly important from what was irrelevant. Combining this data with the best social science research and colorful on-the-ground reporting, they provide the most accurate and precise account of the election yet written—and the only book of its kind.

And don’t miss out on Michael Suk-Young Chwe’s Jane Austen, Game Theorist. Game theory—the study of how people make choices while interacting with others—is one of the most popular technical approaches in social science today. But as Michael Chwe reveals in his insightful new book, Jane Austen explored game theory’s core ideas in her six novels roughly two hundred years ago. Jane Austen, Game Theorist shows how this beloved writer theorized choice and preferences, prized strategic thinking, argued that jointly strategizing with a partner is the surest foundation for intimacy, and analyzed why superiors are often strategically clueless about inferiors. With a diverse range of literature and folktales, this book illustrates the wide relevance of game theory and how, fundamentally, we are all strategic thinkers.

Even more foremost titles in politics and international relations can be found in the catalog. You may also sign up with ease to be notified of forthcoming titles at http://press.princeton.edu/subscribe/. Your email address will remain confidential!

If you’re heading to the American Political Science Association’s annual meeting in Chicago, IL August 29th through September 1st, come visit us at booth 300, and follow #APSA2013 on Twitter for updates and information on our new and forthcoming titles throughout the meeting. See you there!

Filed Under: New Catalog, Political Philosophy, Political Science, Political Science and International Relations, Political Theory

Political Science Blog the Monkey Cage to Join the Washington Post

August 27, 2013 by

Sides_TheGamble3 After more than five years of independence, yesterday the prominent political science blog the Monkey Cage told its readers that it will become part of the Washington Post.

The Monkey Cage has grown in popularity through its unique blend of journalism and academic research, spurred by a group of political scientists’ attempt to “indulge [their] non-academic interests” and cultivate a blog with a “‘personality’ that extends beyond political science,” according to their mission statement.

“[T]he Post offers a tremendous opportunity both to increase and broaden our audience and to improve our content,” said John Sides, cofounder of the Monkey Cage, in a blog post. “We think that it will be a great place to continue the blog’s mission of publicizing political science research and providing informed commentary on politics and current events.”

Sides is coauthor of forthcoming The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election with Lynn Vavreck. Using an unusual “moneyball” approach, they look beyond the anecdote, folklore, and conventional wisdom that often pass for election analysis. Instead, they draw on extensive quantitative data about the economy, public opinion, news coverage, and political advertising to separate what was truly important from what was irrelevant. Combining this data with the best social science research and colorful on-the-ground reporting, they provide the most accurate and precise account of the election yet written—and the only book of its kind.

Garnering posts from various contributors, the blog is maintained by four political scientists in addition to Sides, including Andrew Gelman, author of Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do.

Stay tuned to the Monkey Cage for more groundbreaking political commentary and Princeton University Press for The Gamble, out next month.

Filed Under: Election 2012, Political Science, Political Science and International Relations Tagged With: , , ,

Raghuram Rajan to take charge of the Reserve Bank in India amidst spike in economic challenges

August 20, 2013 by
Photo by Dan Dry. © University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Photo by Dan Dry. © University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Raghuram Rajan was one of the few economists who warned of the global financial crisis before it hit. Now, he is preparing to take charge of the Reserve Bank in India during a spike in economic challenges for the country.

In India, growth is at its slowest in several years, and the rupee has hit a low of 61.80 to one U.S. dollar. Rajan, who was previously the Eric J. Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, has spent the past year as counsel on India’s economic reforms. Come September, when Rajan takes office, he plans to initiate a series of measures to stabilize the rupee involving decreasing imports and increasing exports.

While the challenge is great, Rajan has been praised for his rare and essential record of speaking out about economic instability (of the U.S. financial system), as well as his sound warnings regarding India’s economy the past few years. In a now-famous encounter, he predicted the impending crisis at a conference in Jackson Hole in 2005 for outgoing Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, for which he was attacked as an anti-market Luddite. Three years later, he was proven right and has demonstrated how imbalances—both within the U.S. as well as between the U.S. and the rest of the world—brought about an unstable system which led to the financial crisis in 2008.

In Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy, winner of the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs 2010 Business Book of the Year Award, Rajan shows how the individual choices that collectively brought about the economic meltdown—made by bankers, government officials, and ordinary homeowners—were rational responses to a flawed global financial order in which the incentives to take on risk are incredibly out of step with the dangers those risks pose. He traces the deepening fault lines in a world overly dependent on the indebted American consumer to power global economic growth and stave off global downturns. He exposes a system where America’s growing inequality and thin social safety net create tremendous political pressure to encourage easy credit and keep job creation robust, no matter what the consequences to the economy’s long-term health; and where the U.S. financial sector, with its skewed incentives, is the critical but unstable link between an overstimulated America and an underconsuming world. Rajan outlines the hard choices we need to make to ensure a more stable world economy and restore lasting prosperity.

“Mr Rajan is no administrator but will also have to reform the RBI,” wrote the Economist. “In the 1990s [the RBI] toyed with relinquishing some of its vast empire—it runs everything from monetary policy to public-debt issuance and bank regulation. Recently it has clung to its powers only to find that its multiple goals of stability, growth and low inflation conflict. Mr Rajan’s task is to resolve those contradictions. If he succeeds, Western central bankers, who have seen a proliferation in their responsibilities since the crisis, will have another reason to listen to his views.”

More by Raghuram Rajan:
Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists: Unleashing the Power of Financial Markets to Create Wealth and Opportunity
The Squam Lake Report: Fixing the Financial System

More on India:
Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India by Pranab Bardhan
An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions by Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen

Filed Under: Economics Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Be among the first to browse and download our new sociology catalog!

August 9, 2013 by

Be among the first to browse and download our new sociology catalog!

Of particular interest is William B. Helmreich’s The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City. Helmreich decided that the only way to truly understand New York was to walk virtually every block of all five boroughs–an astonishing 6,000 miles. His epic journey lasted four years and took him to every corner of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. Helmreich spoke with hundreds of New Yorkers from every part of the globe and from every walk of life, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former mayors Rudolph Giuliani, David Dinkins, and Edward Koch. Their stories and his are the subject of this captivating and highly original book. Follow #NYNobodyKnows on social media for author events, book giveaways, and interesting information about the book and New York City.

Also be sure to note Climbing Mount Laurel: The Struggle for Affordable Housing and Social Mobility in an American Suburb by Douglas S. Massey, Len Albright, Rebecca Casciano, Elizabeth Derickson, and David N. Kinsey. Under the New Jersey State Constitution as interpreted by the State Supreme Court in 1975 and 1983, municipalities are required to use their zoning authority to create realistic opportunities for a fair share of affordable housing for low- and moderate-income households. Mount Laurel was the town at the center of the court decisions. As a result, Mount Laurel has become synonymous with the debate over affordable housing policy designed to create economically integrated communities. This analysis reveals what social scientists call neighborhood effects–the notion that neighborhoods can shape the life trajectories of their inhabitants. Climbing Mount Laurel proves that the building of affordable housing projects is an efficacious, cost-effective approach to integration and improving the lives of the poor, with reasonable cost and no drawbacks for the community at large.

The selection of foremost titles in sociology abounds, so if you would like to learn more, please browse our catalog. You may also sign up with ease to be notified of forthcoming titles at http://press.princeton.edu/subscribe/. Your email address will remain confidential!

We will see everyone at the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting in New York, NY August 10th-13th. Come visit us at booth 1007, and follow our editor @ei_schwartz for book giveaway details and live tweets from #ASA13.

Filed Under: New Catalog, Sociology Tagged With: , , , ,

New Biology Catalog!

June 17, 2013 by

Be among the first the check out our new biology catalog!

Of particular interest is The Princeton Guide to Evolution, a forthcoming comprehensive, concise, and authoritative reference to the major subjects and key concepts in evolutionary biology, from genes to mass extinctions. Edited by a distinguished team of evolutionary biologists, with contributions from leading researchers, the guide contains some 100 clear, accurate, and up-to-date articles on the most important topics in seven major areas: phylogenetics and the history of life; selection and adaptation; evolutionary processes; genes, genomes, and phenotypes; speciation and macroevolution; evolution of behavior, society, and humans; and evolution and modern society.

For further reading, check out John Tyler Bonner’s Randomness in Evolution. In this concise, elegantly written book, he makes the bold and provocative claim that some biological diversity may be explained by something other than natural selection.

Also be sure to note Daphne J. Fairbairn’s Odd Couples: Extraordinary Differences between the Sexes in the Animal Kingdom. While we joke that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, our gender differences can’t compare to those of other animals. Looking at some of the most amazing creatures on the planet, Odd Couples sheds astonishing light on what it means to be male or female in the animal kingdom.

We’ll also see you at the Society for the Study of Evolution’s annual meting June 21-25 in Snowbird, Utah at booth 14. Please join us Saturday, June 22 at 7:30 p.m. for a reception in celebration of the publication of Odd Couples: Extraordinary Differences between the Sexes in the Animal Kingdom and our forthcoming The Princeton Guide to Evolution. Meet the authors and editors, and enjoy wine and cheese!

Filed Under: Biological Sciences, New Catalog, Twitter Tagged With: , ,

Announcing the 3rd Annual Princeton in Europe Lecture – Sunetra Gupta: Pandemics: Are We All Doomed?

April 16, 2013 by

Gupta_Pandemics poster - April 2013.inddAll are invited to attend the 3rd annual Princeton in Europe lecture, “Pandemics: Are We All Doomed?” given by Sunetra Gupta, Professor of theoretical epidemiology at the University of Oxford.

The lecture will take place tomorrow, Wednesday, April 17th, 2013 at The St Pancras Room, Kings Place.* Drinks and canapés will be served from 6:30 p.m. The lecture will begin at 7:00 p.m.

*Kings Place
90 York Way
London
N1 9AG

http://www.kingsplace.co.uk/

Filed Under: Twitter Tagged With: ,

Parrots of the World Debuts in House of Cards

April 1, 2013 by

Forshaw_Parrots of the World_F10Even House Majority Whips need some ornithology schooling. Frank Underwood, played by Kevin Spacey in the Netflix series House of Cards, demonstrates in episode 12 of season one that birds–specifically parrots–maintain exquisite complexities in both behavior and appearance that differentiate one species from another. Such intricacies are not easily detectable to the untrained eye. Fortunately, Underwood finds the publisher and field guide to solve his parrot identification dilemma: Princeton University Press’s Parrots of the World, written by Joseph. M. Forshaw and illustrated by Frank Knight.

When asked to identify the caged bird in the kitchen of Raymond Tusk, played by Gerald McRaney, Underwood, who hails from South Carolina’s 5th congressional district, dismissively offers, “Carolina Parakeet,” a “midsize green parrot with yellow head” with orange upper cheeks. “You’re wrong, but you’re close,” rebuts Tusk. He expounds, as noted in Parrots of the World, the Carolina Parakeet is extinct; the winged beauty in the room is a Sun Conure, a “black-billed yellow conure with green primaries and secondary-converts.”

Underwood comes to realize he has been too quick to assume and should have first honed his identification skills, both in birding and the context of his political conquest. Don’t follow in his footsteps–take a closer look at some Parrots of the World two-page spreads here:

whiteFrom the macaws of South America to the cockatoos of Australia, parrots are among the most beautiful and exotic birds in the world–and also among the most endangered. This stunningly illustrated, easy-to-use field guide covers all 356 species and well-differentiated subspecies of parrots, and is the only guide organized by geographical distribution–Australasian, Afro-Asian, and neotropical. It features 146 superb color plates depicting every kind of parrot, as well as detailed, facing-page species accounts that describe key identification features, distribution, subspeciation, habitat, and status. Color distribution maps show ranges of all subspecies, and field identification is further aided by relevant upperside and underside flight images. This premier field guide also shows where to observe each species in the wild, helping make this the most comprehensive and user-friendly guide to the parrots of the world.

To stay current with Princeton University Press’s natural history endeavors, follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Filed Under: Birds and Natural History, Princeton Field Guides, Twitter Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
Next Page»