Winner of the NBCC Award for General NonfictionNamed on Amazon’s Best Books of the Year 2015–Michael Botticelli, U.S. Drug Czar (Politico) Favorite Book of the Year–Angus Deaton, Nobel Prize Economics (Bloomberg/WSJ) Best Books of 2015–Matt Bevin, Governor of Kentucky (WSJ) Books of the Year–Slate.com’s 10 Best Books of 2015–Entertainment Weekly’s 10 Best Books of 2015 –Buzzfeed’s 19 Best …
“Merchants of Doubt should finally put to rest the question of whether the science of climate change is settled. It is, and we ignore this message at our peril.”-Elizabeth Kolbert “Brilliantly reported andwritten with brutal clarity.”-Huffington Post Now a powerful documentary from the acclaimed director of Food Inc., Merchants of Doubt was one of the most talked-about climate …
The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger
It is a well-established fact that in rich societies the poor have shorter lives and suffer more from almost every social problem. The Spirit Level, based on thirty years of research, takes this truth a step further. One common factor links the healthiest and happiest societies: the degree of equality among their members. Further, more unequal societies are …
In Baltimore’s inner-city neighborhood of Upton/Druid Heights, a man’s life expectancy is sixty-three; not far away, in the Greater Roland Park/Poplar neighborhood, life expectancy is eighty-three. The same twenty-year avoidable disparity exists in the Calton and Lenzie neighborhoods of Glasgow, and in other cities around the world.In Sierra Leone, one in 21 fifteen-year-old women will die in her …
Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World
“Elegant and quietly important…Brook does more than merely sketch the beginnings of globalization and highlight the forces that brought our modern world into being; rather, he offers a timely reminder of humanity’s interdependence.”–Seattle Times A painting shows a military officer in a Dutch sitting room, talking to a laughing girl. I n another, a woman at a window …
In fascinating detail, Sam Quinones chronicles how, over the past 15 years, enterprising sugar cane farmers in a small county on the west coast of Mexico created a unique distribution system that brought black tar heroin–the cheapest, most addictive form of the opiate, 2 to 3 times purer than its white powder cousin–to the veins of people across …