Reserves

We've all asked, "What is the world coming to?" But we seldom ask, "How bad was the world in the past?" In this startling new book, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker shows that the past was much worse. Evidence of a bloody history has always been around us: genocides in the Old…

Hannah Arendt's authoritative report on the trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann includes further factual material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendt's postscript directly addressing the controversy that arose over her account.

"Does allowing people to own or carry guns deter violent crime? Or does it cause more citizens to harm each other? Wherever people happen to fall along the ideological spectrum, their answers are all too often founded upon mere impressionistic and anecdotal evidence. In this…

"In the 1960s Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram famously carried out a series of experiments that forever changed our perceptions of morality and free will. The subjects--or "teachers"--Were instructed to administer electroshocks to a human "learner" with the shocks…

Updated to include information on twenty-first century military conflicts, recent crime rates, suicide bombings, school shootings, and much more, this account looks at the techniques the military uses to overcome soldiers' reluctance to kill and examines the psychological cost on…

"Kai T. Erikson uses the Puritan settlement in 17th-century Massachusetts as a setting in which to examine several ideas about deviant behavior in society. Combining sociology and history, the author draws on the records of the Bay Colony to illustrate the way in which deviant…