Time: A Very Short Introduction

'Globalization' is one of the defining buzzwords of our time, describing a variety of accelerating economic, political, and cultural processes that...

The heritage of literature in the French language is rich, varied, and extensive in time and space. This Very Short Introduction presents this live...

What is time? This book describes the developing physics of the concept of time from Newton, via Einstein, to the present day, and the related phil...

Against the backdrop of unprecedented concern for the future of health care, this Very Short Introduction surveys the history of medicine from clas...

We make choices all the time - about trivial matters, about how to spend our money, about how to spend our time, about what to do with our lives. A...

In this Very Short Introduction, Ali Rattansi provides a balanced assessment of what's true and what's false about multiculturalism. Rattansi provi...

Martin Heidegger is one of the twentieth century's greatest yet most enigmatic and divisive philosophers. Michael Inwood explores the major themes ...

When humanity first glimpsed planet Earth from space, the unity of the system that supports humankind entered the popular consciousness. The concep...

The Devil has fascinated Christians since the time of the New Testament, and inspired many haunting works of art. This Very Short Introduction look...

Since its inception, psychoanalysis has been hailed as a revolutionary theory of how the mind works, whilst some of its ideas such as the Oedipus c...

A bilingual, multicultural, and multinational nation, Canada borders the United States, reaches into the Arctic, and stretches across six time zone...

Famous for her novel Frankenstein, Mary Shelley was also infamous in her own time for breaking social and literary conventions, and taking a politi...

Public administration ensures the development and delivery of the essential public services required for sustaining modern civilization. Covering a...

The earth's daily rotation affects just about every living creature. From dawn through to dusk, there are changes in light, temperature, humidity, ...

Is matter real? Are persons real? Is time real? This Very Short Introduction discusses what, if anything, is "real" by looking at a variety of argu...

As ancient literature and a cornerstone of the Christian faith, the New Testament has exerted a powerful religious and cultural impact. But how muc...

Tragedy, including grief, pain and suffering, is a common theme in Shakespeare's plays, often leading to the death of at least one character, if no...

Part geographical location, part time period, and part state of mind, the American West is a concept often invoked but rarely defined. Though popul...

Metaphysics is traditionally one of the four main branches of philosophy, alongside ethics, logic and epistemology. It is an area that continues to...

Psychotherapy and counselling are now widely available to help people overcome emotional and psychological difficulties in their lives. They involv...

The generation into which each person is born, the demographic composition of that cohort, and its relation to those born at the same time in other...

Crime is big news. From murder to theft to drug gangs, crime and criminal justice affect the lives of millions of people worldwide. Hardly surprisi...

This book provides a fresh modern introduction to geometry, an ancient branch of mathematics with important applications. It takes readers from Euc...

Philosophy of physics is concerned with the deepest theories of modern physics - quantum theory, our theories of space, time and symmetry, and ther...

'Ghetto' is an extraordinarily complex word that encompasses Jewish history, black experiences in northern America, and our contemporary sense of c...

James Naremore introduces film noir, highlighting key themes, films, and styles, and exploring why the genre is so difficult to categorize. First a...

Journalism entered the twenty-first century caught in a paradox. The world had more journalism, across a wider range of media, than at any time sin...

The 2014 Ebola epidemic demonstrated the power of pandemics and their ability not only to destroy lives locally but also to capture the imagination...

DescriptionAutobiography is one of the most popular of written forms. From Casanova to Benjamin Franklin to the Kardashians, individuals throughout...

DescriptionPilgrimage is found in most religious cultures, with large numbers of sites - from globally renowned places to regional shrines - flouri...

From the eighteenth century until the 1950s, the British Empire was the largest and most far-flung political entity in the world, holding sway at o...

Hormones play an integral part in the balance and workings of the body. While many people are broadly aware of their existence, there are many misc...

Jane Austen is one of the most widely-read novelists in the English language, and one of very few pre-Victorian writers to have a large popular fol...

The importance of the oceans to life on Earth cannot be overstated. Liquid water covers more than 70% of our planet's surface and, in past geologic...

From the beginning of time, humans have been driven by both a fear of the unknown and a curiosity to know. We have always yearned to know what lies...

War and Peace and Anna Karenina are widely recognized as two of the greatest novels ever written. Their author Leo Tolstoy has been honored as the ...

Opening with a lucid overview of the rise and spread of Islam, from the seventh to the twenty-first century, this Very Short Introduction introduce...

DescriptionVast, majestic, and often stunningly beautiful, glaciers lock up some 10% of the world's freshwater. These great bodies of ice play an i...

There is often a demand for a short, sharp definition of racism, for example as captured in the popular formula Power + Prejudice= Racism. But in r...

Volcanoes are some of the most dramatic expressions of the powerful tectonic forces at work in the Earth beneath our feet. But volcanism, a profoun...

Gravity is one of the four fundamental interactions that exist in nature. It also has the distinction of being the oldest, weakest, and most diffic...

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) was one of the few men in history to fight simultaneously on moral, religious, political, social, economic, ...

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, developed a totally new way of looking at human nature. Only now, with the hindsight of the half-cent...

In this valuable introduction, Michael Carrithers guides us through the complex and sometimes conflicting information that Buddhist texts give us a...

Why do we measure time in the way that we do? Why is a week seven days long? At what point did minutes and seconds come into being? Why are some ca...

Logic is often perceived as having little to do with the rest of philosophy, and even less to do with real life. In this lively and accessible intr...

Savage and bloodthirsty, or civilized and peaceable? The Celts have long been a subject of enormous fascination, speculation, and misunderstanding....

If you move at high speed, time slows down, space squashes up and you get heavier. Travel fast enough and you could weigh as much as a jumbo jet, b...

For four centuries Britain was an integral part of the Roman Empire, a political system stretching from Turkey to Portugal and from the Red Sea to ...

We make choices all the time--about how to spend our money, about how to spend our time, about what to do with our lives. And we are also constantl...

The idea of the sword-wielding samurai, beholden to a strict ethical code and trained in deadly martial arts, dominates popular conceptions of the ...

How have the Jews survived? For millennia, they have defied odds by overcoming the travails of exile, persecution, and recurring plans for their an...

Contributor(s): Author: Julian D. RichardsThe Viking reputation is one of bloodthirsty seafaring warriors, repeatedly plundering the British Isles ...

DescriptionFrom the Plantation of Ulster in the seventeenth century to the entry into peace talks in the late twentieth century the Northern Irish ...

Mark A. Noll, named one of America's most influential evangelicals by Time Magazine, provides a fresh and accessible history of Protestantism from ...

"Vivam" is the very last word of Ovid's masterpiece, the Metamorphoses: "I shall live." If we're still reading it two millennia after Ovid's death,...

Karl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) is considered by many to have been one of the greatest writers on war. His study On War was described by the Americ...

How much faith should we place in what scientists tell us? Is it possible for scientific knowledge to be fully -objective?- What, really, can be de...

From around 900 to 400 BC, the Etruscans were the most innovative, powerful, wealthy, and creative people in Italy. Their archaeological record is ...

DescriptionLearn the art of impeccably tied neckwear with this guide to the 20 knots that every man should know. This indispensible companion for t...

Reducere. Jesus was a skilled storyteller and perceptive teacher who used parables from everyday life to effectively convey his message and meaning. Life in ...

Contributor(s): Author: David SeedFrankenstein, The Time Machine, Star Trek, Dune, 1984, Blade Runner--science fiction has been explained as a comb...

Reducere. Contributor(s): Author: Joseph VitteritoIllustrator: Abe ChuzzlewitHaving an infant in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit is full of a flurry of emot...

Reducere. Contributor(s): Author: Joseph VitteritoIllustrator: Abe ChuzzlewitHaving an infant in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit is full of a flurry of emot...

The ancient Near East is known as the "cradle of civilization"--and for good reason. Mesopotamia, Syria, and Anatolia were home to an extraordinari...

There is no denying that thinking comes naturally to human beings and that thinking is indeed central to what it means to be human. But what are th...

Reducere. Start developing with Oracle SQL. This book is a one-stop introduction to everything you need to know about getting started developing an Oracle Da...

Reducere. Benjamin Tallmadge narrates his time spent as a military officer during the American Revolutionary War, detailing his roles as both commander and i...

DescriptionDictionaries are far more than works which list the words and meanings of a language. In this Very Short Introduction, Lynda Mugglestone...

If now in decline since the tumultuous events of 1989, communism was without doubt the great political movement of the twentieth century--at its pe...