In a work of prodigious scholarship and enormous breadth, which draws on the tribal, ancient, premodern, and modern worlds, Orlando Patterson discusses the internal dynamics of slavery in sixty-six societies over time. Slavery is shown to be a parasitic relationship between master and slave, invariably entailing the violent domination of a natally alienated, or socially dead, person.

Where do human societies come from? The drive to answer this question took on a new urgency in the nineteenth century, when a generation of archaeologists began to look beyond the bible for the origins of different cultures and civilizations. Zelia Nuttall threw herself into the study of Aztec customs and cosmology, eager to use the tools of the emerging science of anthropology to prove that modern Mexico was built over the ruins of ancient civilizations.

The air conditioner is often hailed as one of the modern world's greatest inventions—yet nearly as often blamed for global disaster. It has changed everything from architecture to people's food habits; saved countless lives, and caused countless deaths. First appearing in 1902, when Willis Carrier, an engineer barely out of college, developed the "Apparatus for Treating Air," everyone assumed it would instantly change the world. But the story of air conditioning and its rise to ubiquity is far from simple.

The last decade has seen an explosion of urban beekeeping in the US, Canada, and Europe, a well-intentioned response to perceived threats to the global honey bee population. Many thousands of people have taken up this seemingly environmentally friendly hobby, tending backyard and rooftop hives (or paying a company to do so) and encouraging honey bees to make honey and pollinate flowers. What could be wrong with that? Quite a lot, in fact. In The Honey Trap, scientist and author Dana Church demonstrates that despite reports to the contrary, honey bees are nowhere near extinction.

On a warm summer evening in 1991, seventeen-year-old Julia Parker was murdered in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York. An area known for an exorbitant level of violence and crime, East New York had come to be known as the Killing Fields. In the six months after Julia Parker’s death, 62 more people were murdered in the same area. In the early 1990s, murder rates in the neighborhood climbed to the highest in NYPD history. East New York was dying. But how did this once thriving, diverse, family neighborhood fall into such ruin?