Knowledge = Power

Alexander the Great, perhaps the most commanding leader in  history, united his empire and his army by the titanic force of his  will. His death at the age of thirty-two spelled the end of that unity.

The  Spartans were a society of warrior-heroes who were the living exemplars  of such core values as duty, discipline, self-sacrifice, and extreme  toughness. This book, written by one of the world’s leading experts on  Sparta, traces the rise and fall of Spartan society and explores the  tremendous influence the Spartans had on their world and even on ours.  Paul Cartledge brings to life figures like legendary founding father  Lycurgus and King Leonidas, who embodied the heroism so closely  identified with this unique culture, and he shows how Spartan women  enjoyed an unusually dominant and powerful role in this hyper-masculine  society. Based firmly on original sources, The Spartans is the definitive book about one of the most fascinating cultures of ancient Greece.

The New York Times best-selling sequel to "Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!"

Like the "funny, brilliant, bawdy" (The New Yorker) "Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!" this book’s many stories―some funny, others intensely moving―display  Richard P. Feynman’s unquenchable thirst for adventure and unparalleled  ability to recount important moments from his life.

Here  we meet Feynman’s first wife, Arlene, who taught him of love’s  irreducible mystery as she lay dying in a hospital bed while he worked  on the atomic bomb at nearby Los Alamos. We listen to the fascinating  narrative of the investigation into the space shuttle Challenger’s  explosion in 1986 and relive the moment when Feynman revealed the  disaster’s cause through an elegant experiment: dropping a ring of  rubber into a glass of cold water and pulling it out, misshapen. In "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century lets us see the man behind the genius.

“Plutarch  regularly shows that great leaders transcend their own purely material  interests and petty, personal vanities. Noble ideals actually do matter,  in government as in life.” —Michael Dirda, Washington Post

Pompey,  Caesar, Cicero, Brutus, Antony: the names still resonate across  thousands of years. Major figures in the civil wars that brutally ended  the Roman republic, their lives pose a question that haunts us still:  how to safeguard a republic from the flaws of its leaders.

This  reader’s edition of Plutarch delivers a fresh translation of notable  clarity, explanatory notes, and ample historical context in the Preface  and Introduction.

Timeless wisdom on death and dying from the celebrated Stoic philosopher Seneca

An  introduction to modern physics and to Richard Feynman at his witty and  enthusiastic best, discussing gravitation, irreversibility, symmetry,  and the nature of scientific discovery.

Richard Feynman  was one of the most famous and important physicists of the second half  of the twentieth century. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965,  celebrated for his spirited and engaging lectures, and briefly a star on  the evening news for his presence on the commission investigating the  explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, Feynman is best known for his  contributions to the field of quantum electrodynamics. The Character of Physical Law,  drawn from Feynman's famous 1964 series of Messenger Lectures at  Cornell, offers an introduction to modern physics—and to Feynman at his  witty and enthusiastic best.

In this classic book  (originally published in 1967), Feynman offers an overview of selected  physical laws and gathers their common features, arguing that the  importance of a physical law is not “how clever we are to have found it  out” but “how clever nature is to pay attention to it.” He discusses  such topics as the interaction of mathematics and physics, the principle  of conservation, the puzzle of symmetry, and the process of scientific  discovery. A foreword by 2004 Physics Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek  updates some of Feynman's observations—noting, however, “the need for  these particular updates enhances rather than detracts from the book.”  In The Character of Physical Law, Feynman chose to grapple with issues at the forefront of physics that seemed unresolved, important, and approachable.

Based  on an extraordinary collaboration between Steve Forbes, chairman, CEO,  and editor in chief of Forbes Media, and classics professor John Prevas,  Power Ambition Glory provides intriguing comparisons between six great leaders of the ancient world and contemporary business leaders.

Throughout  this lively and concise historical account of Mao Zedong's life and  thought, Rebecca E. Karl places the revolutionary leader's personal  experiences, social visions and theory, military strategies, and  developmental and foreign policies in a dynamic narrative of the Chinese  revolution. She situates Mao and the revolution in a global setting  informed by imperialism, decolonization, and third worldism, and  discusses worldwide trends in politics, the economy, military power, and  territorial sovereignty. Karl begins with Mao's early life in a small  village in Hunan province, documenting his relationships with his  parents, passion for education, and political awakening during the fall  of the Qing dynasty in late 1911.

She traces his transition from  liberal to Communist over the course of the next decade, his early  critiques of the subjugation of women, and the gathering force of the  May 4th movement for reform and radical change. Describing Mao's rise to  power, she delves into the dynamics of Communist organizing in an  overwhelmingly agrarian society, and Mao's confrontations with Chiang  Kai-shek and other nationalist conservatives. She also considers his  marriages and romantic liaisons and their relation to Mao as the  revolutionary founder of Communism in China.

The book is published by Duke University Press.

“Amazing stories . . . Intimate portraits of how [these five  ruthless leaders] were at home and at the table.” —Lulu Garcia-Navarro,  NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday

Perhaps no one in the twentieth century had a greater long-term  impact on world history than Deng Xiaoping. And no scholar of  contemporary East Asian history and culture is better qualified than Ezra Vogel to disentangle the many contradictions embodied in the life and legacy of China’s boldest strategist.

Once described by Mao Zedong as a “needle inside a ball of cotton,”  Deng was the pragmatic yet disciplined driving force behind China’s  radical transformation in the late twentieth century. He confronted the  damage wrought by the Cultural Revolution, dissolved Mao’s cult of  personality, and loosened the economic and social policies that had  stunted China’s growth. Obsessed with modernization and technology, Deng  opened trade relations with the West, which lifted hundreds of millions  of his countrymen out of poverty. Yet at the same time he answered to  his authoritarian roots, most notably when he ordered the crackdown in  June 1989 at Tiananmen Square.

Deng’s youthful commitment to the Communist Party was cemented in  Paris in the early 1920s, among a group of Chinese student-workers that  also included Zhou Enlai. Deng returned home in 1927 to join the Chinese  Revolution on the ground floor. In the fifty years of his tumultuous  rise to power, he endured accusations, purges, and even exile before  becoming China’s preeminent leader from 1978 to 1989 and again in 1992.  When he reached the top, Deng saw an opportunity to creatively destroy  much of the economic system he had helped build for five decades as a  loyal follower of Mao—and he did not hesitate.