We need our neighbors and community to stay healthy, produce jobs, raise our children, and care for those on the margin. Institutions and professional services have reached their limit of their ability to help us. The consumer society tells us that we are insufficient and that we must purchase what we need from specialists and systems outside the community. We have become consumers and clients, not citizens and neighbors. John McKnight and Peter Block...

Where more poignantly than in a small country graveyard can a traveler fathom the flow of history and tradition? During the past twenty years, Terry G. Jordan has traveled the back roads and hidden trails of rural Texas in search of such cemeteries. With camera in hand, he has visited more than one thousand cemeteries created and maintained by the Anglo-American, black, Indian, Mexican, and German settlers of Texas. His discoveries of sculptured stones...

Get the Summary of Jack Weatherford's Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World in the World in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Original book introduction: The Mongol army led by Genghis Khan subjugated more lands and people in twenty-five years than the Romans did in four hundred. In nearly every country the Mongols conquered, they brought an unprecedented rise in cultural communication, expanded trade,...

Holding the Calm is a practical and immediately useful guide that meticulously lays out twenty concrete, easy-to-use tools for defusing tension, settling cases, resolving disputes, and rechanneling arguments. How do you stop conflict? Settle disputes? Handle someone who is yelling at you, crying, or just won't speak? How do you find a solution when a solution seems impossible? Holding the Calm shares the secrets that enable everyone to avoid, minimize,...

It has been our nature as humans to be curious since birth, eager to learn, and to gain a comprehensive understanding of everything. There may be differences in our clothing styles and food preferences, but there are some things we all share in common. In our minds, this is the question we all ask regarding the creation of the universe. As a result of our desire to uncover when and how things all began, we are likewise curious about the exact moment...

Gary King is the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard University. His books include A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem (Princeton). Robert O. Keohane is professor emeritus of international affairs at Princeton University. His books include After Hegemony (Princeton). Sidney Verba (1932–2019) was the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor Emeritus and research professor of government at Harvard. His books include...

Get the Summary of Matt Ridley's “The Rational Optimist” in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Original book introduction: Life is getting better at an accelerating rate. Food availability, income, and life span are up; disease, child mortality, and violence are down all across the globe. Though the world is far from perfect, necessities and luxuries alike are getting cheaper; population growth is slowing; Africa...

A pioneering work in psychology, this enormously influential book served as a catalyst in the study of the foundations of social behavior. Ironically, its approach marked such a dramatic departure from contemporary trends that it stimulated little follow-up research at the time of its 1908 publication. In recent years, however, the author's ideas have been resurrected in sociobiological reasoning, making the republication of this systematic treatise...

Émile Durkheim is often referred to as the father of sociology. Along with Karl Marx and Max Weber he was a principal architect of modern social science and whose contribution helped established it as an academic discipline. "The Division of Labor in Society", published in 1893, was his first major contribution to the field and arguably one his most important. In this work Durkheim discusses the construction of social order in modern societies, which...

Marx wrote this 1847 work in response to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's 1847 book, The System of Economic Contradictions, or Philosophy of Poverty. Accusing Proudhon of not only wanting to rise above the bourgeoisie, but also adhering to a quasi-religious faith in economic utopianism; Marx, on the contrary, proposes a scientific approach to the study of economic development.