Social High

The ancient biographer and essayist Plutarch thought deeply about the leadership qualities of the eminent Greeks and Romans he profiled in his famous - and massive - Lives, including politicians and generals such as Pericles, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Mark Antony. Luckily for us, Plutarch distilled what he learned about wise leadership in a handful of essays, which are filled with essential lessons for experienced and aspiring leaders in any field today.

In his essay On Anger, the Roman Stoic thinker Seneca argues that anger is the most destructive passion. This splendid new translation of essential selections from On Anger, presented with an enlightening introduction, offers listeners a timeless guide to avoiding and managing anger. Drawing on his great arsenal of rhetoric, including historical examples, anecdotes, quips, and soaring flights of eloquence, Seneca builds his case against anger with mounting intensity.

How did America end up with a leader who acts so crudely and despotically, and counter to our democratic principles? Why do his followers stick with him, even when he acts against their interests? John Dean, a man with a history of standing up to autocratic presidents, joins with Bob Altemeyer, a psychology professor with a unique area of expertise: authoritarianism. Together, using psychological diagnostic tools, as well as exclusive research and analysis from the Monmouth University Polling Institute, the authors provide us with an eye-opening understanding of the Trump phenomenon.

Germany's financial collapse in the summer of 1931 was one of the biggest economic catastrophes of modern history. It led to a global panic, brought down the international monetary system, and turned a worldwide recession into a prolonged depression. Hitler managed to profit from the crisis, because he had been the most vocal critic of the reparation regime. As the financial system collapsed, his relentless attacks against foreign creditors and the alleged complicity of the German government resonated more than ever with the electorate.

Poet, memoirist, labor organizer, and Episcopal priest, Pauli Murray helped transform the law of the land. Arrested in 1940 for sitting in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus, Murray propelled that life-defining event into a Howard law degree and a fight against "Jane Crow" sexism. Now Murray is finally getting long-deserved recognition: The first African American woman to receive a doctorate of law at Yale, her name graces one of the university's new colleges.

Decades of research have produced profound insights into how student learning and motivation can be unleashed - and it's not through technology or even the best of lectures. In Super Courses, education expert and best-selling author Ken Bain tells the fascinating story of enterprising college, graduate school, and high school teachers who are using evidence-based approaches to spark deeper levels of learning, critical thinking, and creativity - whether teaching online, in class, or in the field.

For nearly 2,500 years, students, politicians, political thinkers, and military leaders have read the eloquent and shrewd speeches in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War for profound insights into military conflict, diplomacy, and the behavior of people and countries in times of crisis. How to Think about War presents the most influential and compelling of these speeches in an elegant new translation by classicist Johanna Hanink, accompanied by an enlightening introduction.

Rachel Herz uncovers the fascinating and surprising facts that affect food consumption. Why You Eat What You Eat mixes the social with the scientific to uncover how psychology, neurology, and physiology shape our relationship with food and how food alters the relationships we have with ourselves and with one another.

In 1992, the deadliest year in Chicago’s history, seven-year-old Dantrell Davis was shot and killed in front of his elementary school inside the public housing complex Cabrini-Green. What happened to Dantrell led to a truce among Chicago’s gangs, but it also ignited a national panic about poverty and violence in America’s cities. Dantrell’s name would soon be used to demolish all of Chicago’s high-rise public housing, displacing tens of thousands of low-income families.

Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China, and Northeastern Brazil.

Helping widows and widowers learn how to cope with the grief of losing their helpmate, their lover, and perhaps their financial provider, this guide reveals how to find continued meaning in life when doing so seems difficult. Bereaved spouses will find advice on when and how to dispose of their mate's belongings, dealing with their children, and redefining their role with friends and family.

Macbeth is one of William Shakespeare's more brilliantly populated plays and remains among the most widely read. Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom investigates Macbeth's interiority and unthinkable actions with razor-sharp insight, agility, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character. The book also becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity.

Can the president launch a nuclear attack without congressional approval? Is it ever a crime to criticize the president? Can states legally resist a president's executive order? Corey Brettschneider takes us on a deep dive into the US Constitution to answer questions that, in our tumultuous era, Americans are asking more than ever before. From the document itself and from history's pivotal court cases, we learn why certain powers were granted to the presidency, how the Bill of Rights limits those powers, and what "we the people" can do.

A native of Birmingham, Alabama, who overcame the racism of the civil rights era to become a brilliant academic and expert on foreign affairs, Condoleezza Rice first distinguished herself as an advisor to George W. Bush during the 2000 presidential campaign, and eventually became one of his closest confidantes.

Nearly 30 years after the end of the Cold War, today's world leaders are abandoning disarmament treaties, building up their nuclear arsenals, and exchanging threats of nuclear strikes. To survive this new atomic age, we must relearn the lessons of the most dangerous moment of the Cold War: the Cuban missile crisis. Serhii Plokhy offers an international perspective on the crisis, tracing the tortuous decision-making that produced and then resolved it, which involved John Kennedy and his advisers, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, and their commanders on the ground.

The author - a.k.a. "The Baby Whisperer - unlocks the secrets of infant language so that any parents, grandparents, or caregiver can interpret what babies are "saying" and give them what they need.

Blending personal history, gender politics, philosophy, and literary theory into a luminescent treatise on writing, love, and loss, Things I Don't Want to Know is Deborah Levy's witty response to George Orwell's influential essay "Why I Write." Orwell identified four reasons he was driven to hammer at his typewriter - political purpose, historical impulse, sheer egoism, and aesthetic enthusiasm - and Levy's work riffs on these same commitments from a female writer's perspective.

Who doesn't worry sometimes that smart phones, the Internet, and TV are robbing us of time and preventing us from having a life? How can we make the most of our time on earth? In the first century AD, the Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger offered one of the most famous answers to that question in his essay "On the Shortness of Life"—a work that has more to teach us today than ever before.

Following his book Captured on corporate capture of regulatory and government agencies, and his years of experience as a prosecutor, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse here turns his attention to the right-wing scheme to capture the courts, and how it influenced the Trump administration's appointment of over 230 "business-friendly" judges, including the last three justices of the United States Supreme Court.

If recent history has taught us anything, it's that sometimes the best guide to leadership is the negative example. But that insight is hardly new. Nearly 2,000 years ago, Suetonius wrote Lives of the Caesars, perhaps the greatest negative leadership book of all time. In How to Be a Bad Emperor, Josiah Osgood provides crisp new translations of Suetonius's briskly paced, darkly comic biographies of the Roman emperors Julius Caesar, Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero. Entertaining and shocking, these ancient anti-role models show how power inflames leaders' worst tendencies.