"You have changed my life" is a common refrain in the emails Walter Lewin receives daily from fans who have been enthralled by his world-famous video lectures about the wonders of physics. "I walk with a new spring in my step and I look at life through physics-colored eyes," wrote one such fan. When Lewin's lectures were made available online, he became an instant YouTube celebrity, and the New York Times declared, "Walter Lewin delivers his lectures with the panache of Julia Chil...

A magnet for controversy, the media, and followers, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr. was the premier voice of northern religious liberalism for more than a quarter-century, and a worthy heir to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. From his pulpits at Yale University and, later, New York City’s Riverside Church, Coffin focused national attention on civil rights, the anti-Vietnam War movement, disarmament, and gay rights. This revealing biography-based on unparalleled access to family pape...

From Chief Rabbi Dr Warren Goldstein – the creator of the international Shabbat Project – comes a book that tells the story of Shabbat in a way that has never been told before… and a call to “return Shabbat to the center of Jewish life”. Published as a non-profit private initiative, all book proceeds will go towards the Shabbat Project.What unites a Russian refusenik, a US senator, a Parisian fashion designer, a world-famous behavioral psychologist, and a world championship boxer?

In the late 1850s organized baseball was a club-based fraternal sport thriving in the cultures of respectable artisans, clerks and shopkeepers, and middle-class sportsmen. Two decades later it had become an entertainment business run by owners and managers, depending on gate receipts and the increasingly disciplined labor of skilled player-employees. Playing for Keeps is an insightful, in-depth account of the game that became America's premier spectator sport for nearly a century....

Exploring the wisdom of the great sages of Lithuania, The Legacy presents a moral and spiritual vision for the Jewish people. Providing a glimpse into the world of these sages – their own teachers’ rabbis – the authors outline the ideas and deeds, the values and ethics by which Jews should live. This is not a book about what once was: It is a book about what should, and can, be – now and forever in Jewish life.

Religion in Rebellions, Revolutions, and Social Movements demonstrates that, while religion is often a social force that maintains, if not legitimates, the sociopolitical order, it is also a decisive factor in economic, social, and political conflict.The book explores how and under what conditions religion functions as a progressive and/or reactionary force that compels people to challenge or protect social orders. The authors focus on the role that religion has played in ...

Auditory Perception: A New Synthesis focuses on the effort to show the connections between key areas in hearing. The book offers a review of classical problems, and then presents interpretations and evidence of this topic. A short introduction to the physical nature of sound and the way sound is transmitted and changed within the ear is provided. The book discusses the importance of being able to identify the source of a sound, and then presents processes in this regard. The text provides ...

Systems of Life offers a wide-ranging revaluation of the emergence of biopolitics in Europe from the mid– eighteenth to the mid–nineteenth century. In staging an encounter among literature, political economy, and the still emergent sciences of life in that historical moment, the essays collected here reopen the question of how concepts of animal, vegetable, and human life, among other biological registers, had an impact on the Enlightenment project of thinking politics and economi...

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges makes a forceful case that liberal institutions have failed Americans by ceding power to self-serving and elitist corporations**“Uncompromising. . . . Hedges indicts the press, the Church, the arts, labor unions, universities, and the Democratic Party for failing to protect the middle and lower classes.” —**The New YorkerHistory has shown time and time again that when the liberal class...

"As a rabbi and a convert, I appreciate this book deeply for its sensitivity to the complex feelings of those who are exploring paths to becoming Jewish, and for the deep love of Judaism it conveys. I will give it to every interfaith couple, and recommend that they give it to their parents. It is wonderful! "--Rachel Cowan, co-author of Mixed BlessingsIn the same knowledgeable, reassuring, and respectful style that has made her one of the most admired writers of gui...

Our understanding of how the human brain performs mathematical calculations is far from complete, but in recent years there have been many exciting breakthroughs by scientists all over the world. Now, in The Number Sense, Stanislas Dehaene offers a fascinating look at this recent research, in an enlightening exploration of the mathematical mind. Dehaene begins with the eye-opening discovery that animals--including rats, pigeons, raccoons, and chimpanzees--can perform simple mathem...

**A bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winner offers a compelling case for the necessity of resistance in our turbulent times, and shows how rebellions—however quixotic or irrational they seem—are key to realizing a more ideal worldA San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller**In the face of modern conditions, revolution is inevitable. The social inequality, political stagnation, devastation of our environment by corporations, stripping away of our civil liberties, and ...