By Thomas C. Schelling

A series of closely interrelated essays on game theory, this book deals with an area in which progress has been least satisfactory—the situations where there is a common interest as well as conflict between adversaries: negotiations, war and threats of war, criminal deterrence, extortion, tacit bargaining. It proposes enlightening similarities between, for instance, maneuvering in limited war and in a traffic jam; deterring the Russians and one's own children; the modern strategy of terror and the ancient institution of hostages.

London. Oxford University Press. 1960. 301p.

By Thomas S. Kuhn

Thomas Kuhn was a graduate student in theoretical physics at Harvard, close to finishing his dissertation for his PhD, when he was asked to teach an experimental college course on science for non-scientists. It was his first real taste of the history of science, and it changed his life.

To his surprise, the course altered some of his basic assumptions about science, and the result was a big shift in his career plans from physics to the history and then philosophy of science. In his mid-30s he wrote a book on Copernicus, and five years later produced The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. A monograph of only 170 pages, the book sold over a million copies, was translated into 24 languages, and became one of the most cited works of all time in both the natural and social sciences. Its success was highly unusual for an academic work, and was a shock to Kuhn himself. 

The work is shortish because it was originally composed with the aim of being a long article in the Encylopedia of Unified Science. Once published, this article was expanded into a separate book. This limitation turned out to be a blessing, as he was prevented from going into lengthy and difficult scientific detail, making the book just readable for the layman.

Why has the Structure made such a huge impact? If its message has been restricted to science itself the work would still be very important, but it is the generic idea of ‘paradigms’, in which one world view replaces another, that has been considered valuable across so many areas of knowledge. Indeed, at several points in the book Kuhn touches on the fact that paradigms exist not only in science, but are the natural human way of comprehending the world. The roots of the book lay in an experience Kuhn had reading Aristotle, when he realised that Aristotle’s laws of motion were not just ‘bad Newton’, but a completely different way of seeing the world.

Chicaco. The University Ofchicago Press. 1970. 217p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

By Daniel J. Boorstin

This book is a historical look at the people who became "The Americans." Main subject headings: The Versatiles: New Englanders, The Transients: Joiners, The Upstarts: Boosters, The Rooted and the Uprooted: Southerners, White and Black, The Vagueness of the Land, American Ways of Talking, Search for Symbols, A Spacious Republic. This second volume in “The Americans” trilogy deals with the crucial period of American history from the Revolution to the Civil War. Here we meet the people who shaped, and were shaped by, the American experience—the versatile New Englanders, the Transients and the Boosters. 

NY. Random House. 1965. 515p.

By Betty Friedan

The Feminine Mystique begins with an introduction describing what Friedan called "the problem that has no name"—the widespread unhappiness of women in the 1950s and early 1960s. It discusses the lives of several housewives from around the United States who were unhappy despite living in material comfort and being happily married with fine children. "[The Feminine Mystique] now feels both revolutionary and utterly contemporary. Four decades later, millions of individual transformations later, there is still so much to learn from this book. Those who think of it as solely a feminist manifesto ought to revisit its pages to get a sense of the magnitude of the research and reporting Friedan undertook" (Anna Quindlen). Named by TIME Magazine as one of the 100 best and most influential non-fiction books since 1923.

NY. Dell. 1963. 375p.

By Willam McDougall

"Until the later decades of the nineteenth century, psychology continued to concern itself almost exclusively with the mind of man conceived in an abstract fashion, not as the mind of any particular individual, but as the mind of a representative individual considered in abstraction from his social settings as something given to our contemplation fully formed and complete..."

William McDougall was an early 20th century psychologist who wrote a number of highly influential textbooks, and was particularly important in the development of the theory of instinct and of social psychology in the English-speaking world. He was an opponent of behaviourism and stands somewhat outside the mainstream of the development of Anglo-American psychological thought in the first half of the 20th century; but his work was very well known and respected among lay people.Group Psychology itself consists properly of two parts, that which is concerned to discover the most general principles of group life, and that which applies these principles to the study of particular kinds and examples of group life. The former is logically prior to the second; though in practice it is hardly possible to keep them wholly apart. The present volume is concerned chiefly with the former branch. Only when the general principles of group life have been applied to the understanding of particular societies, of nations and the manifold system of groups within the nation, will it be possible for Social Psychology to return upon the individual life and give of it an adequate account in all its concrete fullness.

NY. G. P. Putnam. 1920. 423p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

By C. P. Snow

The notion that our society, its education system and its intellectual life, is characterised by a split between two cultures—the arts or humanities on one hand, and the sciences on the other—has a long history. But it was C. P. Snow's Rede lecture of 1959 that brought it to prominence and began a public debate that is still raging in the media today. This 50th anniversary printing of The Two Cultures and its successor piece, A Second Look (in which Snow responded to the controversy four years later) features an introduction by Stefan Collini, charting the history and context of the debate, its implications and its afterlife. The importance of science and technology in policy run largely by non-scientists, the future for education and research, and the problem of fragmentation threatening hopes for a common culture are just some of the subjects discussed.

Cambridge U.K. 1951. 173p.

By C. Wright Mills

In print for fifty years, White Collar by C. Wright Mills is considered a standard on the subject of the new middle class in twentieth-century America. This landmark volume demonstrates how the conditions and styles of middle class life--originating from elements of both the newer lower and upper classes--represent modern society as a whole.
By examining white-collar life, Mills aimed to learn something about what was becoming more typically "American" than the once-famous Western frontier character. He painted a picture instead of a society that had evolved into a business-based milieu, viewing America instead as a great salesroom, an enormous file, and a new universe of management.
Russell Jacoby, author of The End of Utopia and The Last Intellectuals, contributes a new Afterword to this edition, in which he reflects on the impact White Collar had at its original publication and considers what it means to our society today.
"A book that persons of every level of the white collar pyramid should read and ponder. It will alert them to their condition for their better salvation."-Horace M. Kaellen, The New York Times (on the first edition)

NY. Oxford University Press. 1951. 387p.

By Shashi Tharoor

For more than four decades after gaining independence, PBI – India, with its massive size and population, staggering poverty and slow rate of growth, was associated with the plodding, somnolent elephant, comfortably resting on its achievements of centuries gone by. Then in the early 1990s the elephant seemed to wake up from its slumber and slowly begin to change—until today, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, some have begun to see it morphing into a tiger. As PBI – India turns sixty, Shashi Tharoor, novelist and essayist, reminds us of the paradox that is PBI – India, the elephant that is becoming a tiger: with the highest number of billionaires in Asia, it still has the largest number of people living amid poverty and neglect, and more children who have not seen the inside of a schoolroom than any other country.

So what does the twenty-first century hold for PBI – India? Will it bring the strength of the tiger and the size of an elephant to bear upon the PBI – World? Or will it remain an elephant at heart? In more than sixty essays organized thematically into six parts, Shashi Tharoor analyses the forces that have made twenty-first century PBI – India—and could yet unmake it. He discusses the country’s transformation in his characteristic lucid prose, writing with passion and engagement on a broad range of subjects, from the very notion of ‘PBI – Indianness’ in a pluralist society to the evolution of the once sleeping giant into a PBI – World leader in the realms of science and technology; from the men and women who make up his PBI – India—Gandhi and Nehru and the less obvious Ramanujan and Krishna Menon—to an eclectic array of PBI – Indian experiences and realities, virtual and spiritual, political and filmi. The book is leavened with whimsical and witty pieces on cricket, Bollywood and the national penchant for holidays, and topped off with an A to Z glossary on PBI – Indianness, written with tongue firmly in cheek.

Diverting and instructive as ever, artfully combining hard facts and statistics with personal opinions and observations, Tharoor offers a fresh, insightful look at this timeless and fast-changing society, emphasizing that PBI – India must rise above the past if it is to conquer the future.

NY. Arcade. 2007.. 498p.

By V. S. Naipaul

Returning to India--the subject of his acclaimed "An Area of Darkness"--in 1975, Naipaul produced this concise masterpiece of journalism and cultural analysis, a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of a society traumatized by repeated foreign invasions and immured in a mythic vision of its past. In 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi's "Emergency," V. S. Naipaul returned to India, the country his ancestors had left one hundred years earlier. Out of that journey he produced a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of India. Drawing on novels, news reports, political memoirs, and his own encounters with ordinary Indians--from a supercilious prince to an engineer constructing housing for Bombay's homeless--Naipaul captures a vast, mysterious, and agonized continent inaccessible to foreigners and barely visible to its own people. He sees both the burgeoning space program and the 5,000 volunteers chanting mantras to purify a defiled temple; the feudal village autocrat and the Naxalite revolutionaries who combined Maoist rhetoric with ritual murder. Relentless in its vision, thrilling in the keenness of its prose, India: A Wounded Civilization is a work of astonishing insight and candor.

NY. Vintage. 1976. 161p.

By Karin Tanabe

Passing meets The House of Mirth in this “utterly captivating” (Kathleen Grissom, New York Times bestselling author of The Kitchen House) historical novel based on the true story of Anita Hemmings, the first black student to attend Vassar, who successfully passed as white—until she let herself grow too attached to the wrong person.

Since childhood, Anita Hemmings has longed to attend the country’s most exclusive school for women, Vassar College. Now, a bright, beautiful senior in the class of 1897, she is hiding a secret that would have banned her from admission: Anita is the only African-American student ever to attend Vassar. With her olive complexion and dark hair, this daughter of a janitor and descendant of slaves has successfully passed as white, but now finds herself rooming with Louise “Lottie” Taylor, the scion of one of New York’s most prominent families.

Though Anita has kept herself at a distance from her classmates, Lottie’s sphere of influence is inescapable, her energy irresistible, and the two become fast friends. Pulled into her elite world, Anita learns what it’s like to be treated as a wealthy, educated white woman—the person everyone believes her to be—and even finds herself in a heady romance with a moneyed Harvard student. It’s only when Lottie becomes infatuated with Anita’s brother, Frederick, whose skin is almost as light as his sister’s, that the situation becomes particularly perilous. And as Anita’s college graduation looms, those closest to her will be the ones to dangerously threaten her secret.

Set against the vibrant backdrop of the Gilded Age, an era when old money traditions collided with modern ideas, Tanabe has written an unputdownable and emotionally compelling story of hope, sacrifice, and betrayal—and a gripping account of how one woman dared to risk everything for the chance at a better life.

Sydney, Australia. Simon and Schuster. 2022. 382p.

By Sophy Roberts

From acclaimed journalist Sophy Roberts, a journey through one of the harshest landscapes on earth―where music reveals the deep humanity and the rich history of Siberia

Siberia’s story is traditionally one of exiles, penal colonies and unmarked graves. Yet there is another tale to tell.

Dotted throughout this remote land are pianos―grand instruments created during the boom years of the nineteenth century, as well as humble, Soviet-made uprights that found their way into equally modest homes. They tell the story of how, ever since entering Russian culture under the westernizing influence of Catherine the Great, piano music has run through the country like blood.

How these pianos traveled into this snow-bound wilderness in the first place is testament to noble acts of fortitude by governors, adventurers and exiles. Siberian pianos have accomplished extraordinary feats, from the instrument that Maria Volkonsky, wife of an exiled Decembrist revolutionary, used to spread music east of the Urals, to those that brought reprieve to the Soviet Gulag. That these instruments might still exist in such a hostile landscape is remarkable. That they are still capable of making music in far-flung villages is nothing less than a miracle.

The Lost Pianos of Siberia is largely a story of music in this fascinating place, fol-lowing Roberts on a three-year adventure as she tracks a number of different instruments to find one whose history is definitively Siberian. Her journey reveals a desolate land inhabited by wild tigers and deeply shaped by its dark history, yet one that is also profoundly beautiful―and peppered with pianos.

NY. Grove Press. 2020. 410p.

By Adrian Goldsworthy

The complete and definitive history of how Roman generals carved out the greatest and longest-lasting empire the world has ever seen. The Roman army was one of the most effective fighting forces in history. The legions and their commanders carved out an empire which eventually included the greater part of the known world. This was thanks largely to the generals who led the Roman army to victory after victory, and whose strategic and tactical decisions shaped the course of several centuries of warfare. This book, by the author of THE PUNIC WARS, concentrates on those Roman generals who displayed exceptional gifts of leadership and who won the greatest victories. With 26 chapters covering the entire span of the Roman Empire, it is a complete history of Roman warfare.

London. Phoenix. 2014. 464p.

By Russell Martin

The basis for the movie of the same name, an astonishing tale of one lock of hair and its amazing travels–from nineteenth-century Vienna to twenty-first-century America.

When Ludwig van Beethoven lay dying in 1827, a young musician named Ferdinand Hiller came to pay his respects to the great composer, snipping a lock of Beethoven’s hair as a keepsake–as was custom at the time–in the process. For a century, the lock of hair was a treasured Hiller family relic, until it somehow found its way to the town of Gilleleje, in Nazi-occupied Denmark. There, it was given to a local doctor, Kay Fremming, who was deeply involved in the effort to help save hundreds of hunted and frightened Jews.

After Fremming’s death, his daughter assumed ownership of the lock, and eventually consigned it for sale at Sotheby’s, where two American Beethoven enthusiasts, Ira Brilliant and Che Guevara, purchased it in 1994. Subsequently, they and others instituted a series of complex forensic tests in the hope of finding the probable causes of the composer’s chronically bad health, his deafness, and the final demise that Ferdinand Hiller had witnessed all those years ago. The results, revealed for the first time here, are the most compelling explanation yet offered for why one of the foremost musicians the world has ever known was forced to spend much of his life in silence.

In Beethoven’s Hair, Russell Martin has created a rich historical treasure hunt, a tale of false leads, amazing breakthroughs, and incredible revelations. This unique and fascinating book is a moving testament to the power of music, the lure of relics, the heroism of the Resistance movement, and the brilliance of molecular science.

NY. Broadway Books. 2000. 276p.

By Mary Beard

In SPQR, an instant classic, Mary Beard narrates the history of Rome "with passion and without technical jargon" and demonstrates how "a slightly shabby Iron Age village" rose to become the "undisputed hegemon of the Mediterranean" (Wall Street Journal). Hailed by critics as animating "the grand sweep and the intimate details that bring the distant past vividly to life" (Economist) in a way that makes "your hair stand on end" (Christian Science Monitor) and spanning nearly a thousand years of history, this "highly informative, highly readable" (Dallas Morning News) work examines not just how we think of ancient Rome but challenges the comfortable historical perspectives that have existed for centuries. With its nuanced attention to class, democratic struggles, and the lives of entire groups of people omitted from the historical narrative for centuries, SPQR will to shape our view of Roman history for decades to come.

New York. Liveright Publishing. 2015. 606p.

By Waziri B Adisa, Tunde A Alabi taalabi@unilag.edu.ng, and Samuel O Adejoh

Violence or its threats have been a part of many African cities since the end of the Cold War, when many African countries transitioned from military to civilian rule. While the incidence of organised crime and violent victimisation of innocent citizens is not new to many West African cities, the emergence of terrorist organisations, armed bandits, kidnappers and armed gangs in a city like Lagos has created new security challenges. The challenges include the inability of the government to cope with the rising number of young people in organised cult clashes and the threats to peace and stability in Lagos metropolis. This study is designed to investigate the influence of socio-demographic (senatorial district, gender, age, ethnic group, marital status, education, employment, duration of residency and type of apartment) and community factors (presence of nightclubs/hotels, use of private security and frequency of police patrol) on residents’ experience of crime victimisation, robbery and organised crime. The study adopted a cross-sectional survey design and a quantitative method of data collection. A structured questionnaire was used to elicit information from 300 respondents across three senatorial districts of Lagos State. The study found that factors such as location, type of apartment, nightclubbing, duration of residence, employment status and use of private security predicted at least one of the three dependent variables. The implications of the findings are discussed.

International Review of Victimology Volume 28, Issue 1, January 2022, Pages 69-91

By The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

Transnational organized crime in the West African region must be regarded as an issue of growing concern. In order to highlight the problem, an overview of the development of the phenomenon in five countries of the region—Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and Sierra Leone—is provided, tracing both its extent as well as the range of illicit activities that are engaged in. These are diverse and include: drug trafficking, advanced fee and Internet fraud, human trafficking, diamond smuggling, forgery, cigarette smuggling, illegal manufacture of firearms, trafficking in firearms, armed robbery and the theft and smuggling of oil. A number of challenges present themselves in providing an accurate picture of transnational organized crime in West Africa, including the difficulty of gathering reliable information on essentially hidden practices. Having regard to these, the project used consultants in each of the five countries to collect information based on detailed guidelines, including the collection of data on three criminal groups engaged in transnational activities. This, combined with a review of the available secondary literature as well as other inputs, forms the basis for the information presented. Any analysis of organized crime in the region must take into account the specific historical context and socio-economic conditions that have given rise to it. The report traces the historical development of organized crime, examining the broad socio-economic and political context that has made the region particularly vulnerable. These include: the difficult economic circumstances characteristic of the last decades, civil war, state weakness, as well as specific conditions conducive to corrupt practices. The degree to which some forms of organized criminal activity are simply accepted as normal “business” activities by their perpetrators is underscored. The report provides an explanation for the specific modes of operation of West African criminal groups, highlighting in particular their very loose and networked structures. Such structures resemble those for small legal business operations in the region, built as they are on close family and community ties. Although press reports sometimes refer to “drug barons” or “mafias” in the region there is no evidence of West African drug cartels in the sense of hierarchical, permanent and corporate-like structures.

Vienna: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2005. 48p

By Simone Haysom and Ken Opala

Since the 1990s, organized criminal gangs have assumed larger and larger roles in Kenyan urban spaces. Nearly 30 years later, the gang phenomenon is tied to the most pressing issues facing Kenya: violence and ethnic polarization, corruption at national and sub-national levels, and security-services abuses. The role of violent and coercive groups has become so widespread in Kenyan cities that they even determine the cost and provision of urban services, and they are now so entrenched in politics that aspiring candidates consider it impractical to enter the game without funding gangs of their own. Though the Kenyan state acknowledges the serious impact of gang activities, its interventions to address the problem have only contained the phenomenon for brief periods before it flares up again. The objectives of this report are to describe the conditions that allow criminal gangs to be so resilient and powerful. It also aims to understand the drivers of their engagement with the urban economy, and the obstacles to more effective handling of the problem by the state and communities. Ultimately, this report argues that it is relationships of protection and patronage between gangs and politicians that allow gangs to flourish and undermine the state response to the problem. The degree to which this is the case is particularly pronounced in Kenya and is one of the defining characteristics of its gang world. However, this phenomenon is not unique to Kenya. In many parts of the world, organized crime has a relationship with political power, which is typically highly collaborative. Over the past decade, the use of criminal gangs to mobilize voters or intimidate rivals’ supporters has been documented in countries such as the Philippines, El Salvador, Nepal, Guyana and Jamaica. Many classic criminological studies also point out not only how organized criminal networks flourish during political transitions, but also how they play important roles in state formation.2 This role is always dysfunctional, and these relationships undermine democracy and the prospects for effective governance.

Geneva: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime

2020. 68p.

Edited with Introduction, Biographical Sketch and Notes by Roger N. Baldwin

From the introduction:” Kropotkin's confidence in the capacity of mankind to achieve such a socicty may seem naive. But evidence is not lacking, even in this violent and confused era, to sustain a belief in it. Personal freedom, voluntary association, and democratic control of power are still vital forces in political thought and practical struggles.”

NY. Dover. 1970. 137p.

Edited By Sean E. Anderson and Gregory J. Howard

When ti first appeared in 1993, the Journalof CriminalJustice and Popular Culture was breaking ground in more ways than one. At that point,the idea of electronicpublication was still innovative in itself, but more adventurous still was the whole notion of a serious academic journal devotedto the interaction of criminal justice and popular culture. Historically, criminologists and criminal justice scholars had usually viewed themselves a s objective social scientists whose highest goal was to analyze the problems of crime and deviance in terms of rigorous quantitative or qualitative research, which often meant denouncing the vulgarand harmfulmyths presented by the m e d i aa n dpopular culture. From the 1970s, however, newer scholarship, influenced by media research and particularly the cultural studies movement, showed how impos- sible it was to frame problems without paying due attention to the role of popular culture, which performed s o crucial a role in shaping the social and political attitudes not merely of the "uninformed masses," but also of legisla- tors, experts and policymakers.

Harrow and Heston Publishers Guilderland. New York. 1998. 144p.

By Shirley Hazzard

From the introduction: “Nations from time to time assume that it is allowable and inevitable for them to fall upon each other on some pretext or other.“ So the historian Jakob Burckhardt wrote, more than a century ago, at the onset of the Franco-Prussian War—warning that “the most ominous thing is not the pre­sent war, but the era of wars upon which we have entered.” In the same fateful year of 1870, Gustave Flaubert wrote to George Sand: “Within a century, shall we see millions of men kill each other at one go?* The acceleration and inco­herence of social and economic change, the transformations wrought by scientific discovery, the growth of populations, and of their enfranchised discontent—all these raised, in the minds of reflective men and women, a sense of moving toward some dread culmination, propelled by factors never before present in human etpcrience. Over these apprehen­sions, the discrepancy between the narrow thinking of states­men and the huge scale of the mounting crisis cast—as it does today—the shadow of a prodigious incongruity.”

NY. Viking Penguin. 1990. 196p.