By Richard Dawkins

From the Preface: “This book should be read almostas though it were science fiction. It is designed to appeal to the imagination. But it is not science fiction: it is science. Cliché or not, 'stranger than fiction' expresses exactly how I feel aboutt h etruth. We are survivalmachinesr o b o t vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is atruth which still fils me with astonishment. Though I have known it for years, I never seem to get fully used to it. One of my hopes is that I may have some success in astonishing others.”

Oxford New York. Oxford University Press. 1976. 360p. CONTAINS MARK=UP

By George C. Williams

“'Eyes are for seeing and ears for hearing, but what is life itself for? Does it serve any purpose, or did it spring quite by chance from the primeval soup?' Sunday Telegraph

'Anyone with even a casual interest in evolution can enjoy and profit by Williams's book. It can be read like a novel, a novel of ideas. It is a great way to find out what a leading evolutionist is thinking about' Nature

London. Weidenfeld & Nicholson. 1996. 258p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

By Joseph .J. Ellis

From the Preface: The pages that follow are concerned with the American Revolution, with the generation of Americans that came of age during the revolutionary crisis, with the expectations they harbored for the future of American culture, and with their responses when that future failed to materialize. After attempting to identify the rapidly changing social conditions and values of revolutionary America, I try to tell thestory offour men whoselives grew out of thatsocial context: Charles Willson Peale, an artist; Hugh Henry Brackenridge, a novelist; William Dunlap, a dramatist and theater manager; and Noah Webster, an educator, linguist, and all-purpose polemicist. Each of these men believed that the American Revolution was more than a war for colonial independence. Each expected the Revolution to alter American society in fundamental ways. Each thought that the Revolution would remove long-standing constraints to national development and thereby unleash vast reservoirs of untapped energy within American society and within individual personalities…….Expectations this excessive, you might say, are doomed from the start……

NY. W.W. Norton. 1979. 267p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

By David M. Buss

From the Introduction: “Human Mating Behavior delights and amuses us and galvanizes our gossip, but it is also deeply disturbing. Few domains of human activity generate as much discussion, as many laws, or such elaborate rituals in al cultures. Yet the elements of human mating seem to defyunder- standing. Women and men sometimes find themselves choosing mates who abuse them psychologically and physically. Efforts to attract mates often backfire. Conflicts eruptwithin couples, producing downward spirals of blame and despair. Despite their best intentions and vows of life- long love, half of all married couples end up divorcing.

Pain, betrayal, and loss contrast sharply with the usual romantic notions of love. We grow up believing in true love, in finding our "one and only." We assume that once we do, we will marry in bliss and live happily ever after. But reality rarely coincides withour beliefs.Even a cursory look at the divorce rate, the 30 to 50 percent incidence of extramarital affairs, and the jealous rages that rack so many relation- ships shatters these illusions.”

NY. Basic Books. 1994. 265p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

By Matt Ridley

From the Introduction. This is a book about human nature, and in particular the surprisingly social nature of the human animal. We live in towns, work in teams, and our lives are spiders' webs of connections - linking us to relatives, colleagues, companions, friends, superiors, inferiors. We are, misanthropes not withstanding, unable to live without each other. Even on a practical level, it is probably a million years since any human being was entirely and convincingly self-sufficient: able to survive without trading his skills for those of his fellow humans.We are far more dependent on other members of our species than any other ape or monkey. We are more like ants or termites who live as slaves to their societies. We define virtue almost exclusively as pro-social behaviour, and vice as anti-social behaviour. Kropotkin was right to emphasize the huge role that mutual aid plays in our species, but wrong and anthropomorphic to assume that therefore it applied to other species as well. One of the things that marks humanity out from other species, and accounts for our ecological success, is our collection of hyper-social instincts.

London. Penguin,. 1996.294p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

By John Maynard Smith

From the cover: Al living plants and animals, including man, are the modified descendants of one or a few simple living things. A hundred years ago Darwin and Wallace in their theory of natural selection, or the survival of the fittest, explained how evolution could have happened, in terms of processes known to take place today. In this book, John Maynard Smith describes how their theory has been confirmed, but at the same time transformed, by recent research, and ni particular by the discovery of the laws of inheritance.

Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 1975. 371p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

By Richard Dawkins

From the introduction: “Darwinism encompasses all of life- human, animal, plant, bacterial, and, fi I am right in the last chapter of this book, extraterrestrial. It provides the only satisfying explanation forwhy we all exist, why we are the way that we are. It is t h ebedrock on which rest all t h edisciplines known as the humanities. I do not mean that history, literarycriticism, and the law should be recast in a specifically Darwinian mould. Far fromit, very far. But all human works are the products of brains, brainsare evolved data processing devices, and we shall misunderstand their works if we forget this fundamental fact. If more doctors understood Darwinism, humanity would not now be facing a crisis of antibiotic resistance. Darwinian evolution, as onereviewer has observed, 'is the most portentous natural truth that science has yet discovered'. I'd add, o'r is likely to discover.”

London. Norton. 1986. 360p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

Biden, Joseph R., Jr.

From the document: "Hate and the violence it fuels are on the rise in America. Hate crimes, targeted violence, and acts of harassment--including online abuse--have increased in recent years, eroding our democracy, decreasing public trust, and putting so many American communities at risk. We have seen this unfold from bomb threats at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, to rising hate crimes against Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders (AANHPIs) fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic, to escalating threats against women and LGBTQI+ [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex and other] Americans, to persistent bias and violence against Muslim, Sikh, and South Asian communities, to harassment of Jews and attacks on Jewish communities. Antisemitism is often called 'the oldest hatred,' yet it remains all too present today--including in America. [...] While antisemitism most directly and intensely affects the American Jewish community, antisemitism also threatens the democracy, values, safety, and rights of all Americans. [...] This strategy represents the most comprehensive and ambitious U.S. government effort to counter antisemitism in American history. To implement this strategy, executive agencies will take a broad array of actions to address antisemitism. But the federal government cannot address antisemitism alone. This strategy also calls on Congress to act and play its part in countering antisemitism. It urges action from all of society--state and local authorities, civil society, community and faith leaders, the private sector, individual citizens."

United States. White House Office. 2023. 60p.

By Vian Bakir and Andrew McStay

This open access book deconstructs the core features of online misinformation and disinformation. It finds that the optimisation of emotions for commercial and political gain is a primary cause of false information online. The chapters distil societal harms, evaluate solutions, and consider what must be done to strengthen societies as new biometric forms of emotion profiling emerge. Based on a rich, empirical, and interdisciplinary literature that examines multiple countries, the book will be of interest to scholars and students of Communications, Journalism, Politics, Sociology, Science and Technology Studies, and Information Science, as well as global and local policymakers and ordinary citizens interested in how to prevent the spread of false information worldwide, both now and in the future.

Cham: Springer, 2022. 280p.

Edited By Ralph L. Holloway

From the Cover: This book is a truly wide-ranging comparative account of primate aggression. It covers the a gressive behavior of all primate taxa - from tree shrews to man - and incorporates not only social, behavioral, and physiological (i.e., endo- crinological and neurological) data, but also the broader ecological and evolutionary approaches. Each contributor is active in research in hisfield, and each fully develops his own particular view- point rather than attempting an artificial "syn- thesis of the whole field. The book will be of great interest and value to those in all of the behavioral sciences, e.g., psychobiology, anthropology, primatology, eth- ology, and psychology, as well as those in many of the life sciences, such as neurobiology, endocrinology, and zoology.

NY. Academic Press. 1974. 509p. CONTAINS MARK-UP.

By Karl Mannheim

Translated from the German by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils. From the Preface: The original German edition of Ideology and Utopia ap. peared in an atmosphereof acute intellectual tension marked by widespread discussion which subsided only with the exile or enforced silence of those thinkers who sought an honest and tenable solution to the problems raised. Since then the conflicts which in Germany led to the destruction of the liberal Weimar Republic have been felt in various countries all over the world, especially in Western Europe and the United States. The intellectual problems which at one time were considered the peculiar preoccupation of German writers have enveloped virtually the whole world. What was once regarded as the esoteric concern of a few intellectuals in a single country has become t h ecommon plight of the modern man.In response to this situation there has arisen an extensive literature which speaks of the "end," the "decline," the " crisis," the " decay," or the " death " of Western civilization. But despite the alarm….

NY. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1936. 381p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

By Jennifer J. Carroll

Against the backdrop of a post-Soviet state set aflame by geopolitical conflict and violent revolution, Narkomania considers whether substance use disorders are everywhere the same and whether our responses to drug use presuppose what kind of people those who use drugs really are. Jennifer J. Carroll's ethnography is a story about public health and international efforts to quell the spread of HIV. Carroll focuses on Ukraine where the prevalence of HIV among people who use drugs is higher than in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and unpacks the arguments and myths surrounding medication-assisted treatment (MAT) in Ukraine. What she presents in Narkomania forces us to question drug policy, its uses, and its effects on "normal" citizens. Carroll uses her findings to explore what people who use drugs can teach us about the contemporary societies emerging in post-Soviet space. With examples of how MAT has been politicized, how drug use has been tied to ideas of "good" citizenship, and how vigilantism towards people who use drugs has occurred, Narkomania details the cultural and historical backstory of the situation in Ukraine. Carroll reveals how global efforts supporting MAT in Ukraine allow the ideas surrounding MAT, drug use, and HIV to resonate more broadly into international politics and echo into the heart of the Ukrainian public.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. 251p.

By Claude Levi-Strauss

From the cover: 'This work is significant not only for students of anthropolgy but for students of philosophy and psychology as well. The distinguished anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss examines here the great variety of beliefs encompassed by totemism, the attacks to which it has been subject, and the constant attempts to restore useful meaning to it. His account deals with the views of such renowned anthropologists as Boas, van Gennep, Elkin, Fortes, Firth, Evans-Pritchard, and Radcliffe- Brown; it also brings to light some neglected observations by Bergson and Rousseau. In reviewing the major theories about totemism, the author notes that ti has gradually come to be understood not as a distinctive institution, but as a way of thinking which is as characteristic of our own thinking as it is of the "primitives" for whom totemism was an integral part of life.

London. Beacon Press. 1963. 120p . CONTAINS MARK-UP.

By Janice M. Irvine

Marginal People in Deviant Places revisits early- to mid-twentieth-century ethnographic studies, arguing that their focus on marginal subcultures—ranging from American hobos, to men who have sex with other men in St. Louis bathrooms, to hippies, to taxi dancers in Chicago, to elderly Jews in Venice, California—helped produce new ways of thinking about social difference more broadly in the United States. Irvine demonstrates how the social scientists who told the stories of these marginalized groups represented an early challenge to then-dominant narratives of scientific racism, prefiguring the academic fields of gender, ethnic, sexuality, and queer studies in key ways. In recounting the social histories of certain American outsiders, Irvine identifies an American paradox by which social differences are both despised and desired, and she describes the rise of an outsider capitalism that integrates difference into American society by marketing it.

Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2022. 349p.

Edited by Felice Blake Paula Ioanide and Alison  Reed

"Antiracism Inc. traces the ways people along the political spectrum appropriate, incorporate, and neutralize antiracist discourses to perpetuate injustice. It also examines the ways organizers continue to struggle for racial justice in the context of such appropriations. Antiracism Inc. reveals how antiracist claims can be used to propagate racism, and what we can do about it. While related to colorblind, multicultural, and diversity discourses, the appropriation of antiracist rhetoric as a strategy for advancing neoliberal and neoconservative agendas is a unique phenomenon that requires careful interrogation and analysis. Those who co-opt antiracist language and practice do not necessarily deny racial difference, biases, or inequalities. Instead, by performing themselves conservatively as non-racists or liberally as ‘authentic’ antiracists, they purport to be aligned with racial justice even while advancing the logics and practices of systemic racism. Antiracism Inc. therefore considers new ways of struggling toward racial justice in a world that constantly steals and misuses radical ideas and practices. The collection focuses on people and methods that do not seek inclusion in the hierarchical order of gendered racial capitalism. Rather, the collection focuses on aggrieved peoples who have always had to negotiate state violence and cultural erasure, but who work to build the worlds they envision. These collectivities seek to transform social structures and establish a new social warrant guided by what W.E.B. Du Bois called “abolition democracy,” a way of being and thinking that privileges people, mutual interdependence, and ecological harmony over individualist self-aggrandizement and profits. These aggrieved collectivities reshape social relations away from the violence and alienation inherent to gendered racial capitalism, and towards the well-being of the commons. Antiracism Inc. articulates methodologies that strive toward freedom dreams without imposing monolithic or authoritative definitions of resistance. Because power seeks to neutralize revolutionary action through incorporation as much as elimination, these freedom dreams, as well as the language used to articulate them, are constantly transformed through the critical and creative interventions stemming from the active engagement in liberation struggles."

Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2019. 382p.

Edited by Maik Fielitz and Nick Thurston

How have digital tools and networks transformed the far rights strategies and transnational prospects? This volume presents a unique critical survey of the online and offline tactics, symbols and platforms that are strategically remixed by contemporary far-right groups in Europe and the US. It features thirteen accessible essays by an international range of expert scholars, policy advisors and activists who offer informed answers to a number of urgent practical and theoretical questions: How and why has the internet emboldened extreme nationalisms? What counter-cultural approaches should civil societies develop in response?How have digital tools and networks transformed the far rights strategies and transnational prospects? This volume presents a unique critical survey of the online and offline tactics, symbols and platforms that are strategically remixed by contemporary far-right groups in Europe and the US. It features thirteen accessible essays by an international range of expert scholars, policy advisors and activists who offer informed answers to a number of urgent practical and theoretical questions: How and why has the internet emboldened extreme nationalisms? What counter-cultural approaches should civil societies develop in response?How have digital tools and networks transformed the far rights strategies and transnational prospects? This volume presents a unique critical survey of the online and offline tactics, symbols and platforms that are strategically remixed by contemporary far-right groups in Europe and the US. It features thirteen accessible essays by an international range of expert scholars, policy advisors and activists who offer informed answers to a number of urgent practical and theoretical questions: How and why has the internet emboldened extreme nationalisms? What counter-cultural approaches should civil societies develop in response?

Bielefeld, Germany:  transcript Verlag, 2019. 210p.

 Edited by Joanna Sondel-Cedarmas and Francesco Berti

The Right-Wing Critique of Europe analyses the opposition to the European Union from a variety of right-wing organisations in Western, Central and Eastern Europe. In recent years, opposition to the processes of globalisation and the programme of closer European integration, understood as a threat to the sovereignty of individual member states, has led to an intensification of Eurosceptic sentiments on the Old Continent. The results of the European parliamentary elections in 2014 and 2019, the Brexit referendum and electoral results in different European countries are all testament to the considerable growth of radical populist-nationalist and conservative-sovereignist movements and parties. The common idea that binds these groups, both in Western Europe and in Central and Eastern Europe, is a hostile attitude towards the idea of (an ever-more integrated) united Europe. These parties reject not only the project of building a European federation, but also the current model of the European Union and the values underlying its attitudes. They are united by their criticism of EU policies, in particular those concerning security, emigration, multiculturalism, gender equality and the rights of minorities, as well as economic liberalism and the common currency. However, this criticism manifests itself with varying degrees of intensity, and not all parties fit the classic definition of Euroscepticism but instead represent its mild form, Eurorealism. The authors bring together reflections on the organic and complex critique of the European Union, its policies and cultural and ideological character. The book provides a comparative analysis of this criticism at the transnational level. This book will be of interest to researchers of European politics, the radical right and Euroscepticism.

London; New York: Routledge, 2022. 290p.

By Samuel P. Huntington

From the Preface: “In the summer of 1993 the journal Foreign Affairs published an article of mine titled “The Clash of Civilizations?”. That article, according to the Foreign Affairs editors, stirred up more discussion in three years than any other article they had published since the 1940s. It certainly stirred up more debate in three years than anything else I have written. The responses and comments on it have come from every continent and scores of countries. People were variously impressed, intrigued, outraged, frightened, and perplexed by my argument that the central and most dangerous dimension of the emerging global politics would be conflict between groups from differing civilizations. Whatever else it did, the article struck a nerve in people of every civilization.

Given the interest in, misrepresentation of, and controversy over the article, it seemed desirable for me to explore further the issues it raised. One construc­tive way of posing a question is to state an hypothesis. The article, which had a generally ignored question mark in its title, was an effort to do that. This book is intended to provide a fuller, deeper, and more thoroughly documented answer to the articles question…”

NY. Touchstone. 1996. 350p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

By Stanford University. Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence

From the document: "Welcome to the sixth edition of the AI [artificial intelligence] Index Report! This year, the report introduces more original data than any previous edition, including a new chapter on AI public opinion, a more thorough technical performance chapter, original analysis about large language and multimodal models, detailed trends in global AI legislation records, a study of the environmental impact of AI systems, and more. The AI Index Report tracks, collates, distills, and visualizes data related to artificial intelligence. Our mission is to provide unbiased, rigorously vetted, broadly sourced data in order for policymakers, researchers, executives, journalists, and the general public to develop a more thorough and nuanced understanding of the complex field of AI. The report aims to be the world's most credible and authoritative source for data and insights about AI."

Stanford University. 2023. 386p.

By United States. Public Health Service. Office Of The Surgeon General

From the document: "As this advisory has shown, fulfilling connections are a critical and often underappreciated contributor to individual and population health and longevity, safety, prosperity, and well-being. On the other hand, social disconnection contributes to many poor health outcomes, and even to premature death. Sadly, around 50% of adults in the U.S. reported being lonely in recent years -- and that was even before COVID-19 separated so many of us from our friends, loved ones, and support systems. Our bonds with others and our community are also part of this equation. Research has shown that more connected communities enjoy higher levels of well-being. The converse is also true. How do we put this important information to practical use in our society? What actionable steps can we take to enhance social connection so that we can all enjoy its benefits? A National Strategy to Advance Social Connection is the critical next step to catalyze action essential to our nation's health, safety, and prosperity. The strategy includes six foundational pillars and a series of key recommendations, organized according to stakeholder group, to support a whole-of-society approach to advancing social connection. Individuals and organizations can use this framework to propel the critical work of reversing these worrisome trends and strengthening social connection and community."

United States. Public Health Service. Office of the Surgeon General. 2023.