Journalist Alex Harney shows how China is able to offer such amazingly low prices to the rest of the world. What she has discovered is a brutal world in which intense pricing pressure from Western companies combines with corruption and a lack of transparency to exact an unseen toll in human misery and environmental damage. Despite a decade of monitoring, foreign businessmen all too often have no idea of the conditions under which goods they buy are...

From the New York Times-bestselling author of Where Good Ideas Come From and Everything Bad Is Good for You, a new look at the power and legacy of great ideas. In this illustrated volume, the author explores the history of innovation over centuries, tracing the development of six key technologies (refrigeration, clocks, lenses, water purification, recorded sound, and artificial light) from their creation by hobbyists, amateurs, and entrepreneurs to...

In The Broken Village, Daniel R. Reichman tells the story of a remote village in Honduras that transformed almost overnight from a sleepy coffee-growing community to a hotbed of undocumented migration to and from the United States. The small village-called here by the pseudonym La Quebrada-was once home to a thriving coffee economy. Recently, it has become dependent on migrants working in distant places like Long Island and South Dakota, who live...

Explores the nature of human relationships, finding that humans are "wired to connect," and bringing together the latest research in biology and neuroscience to reveal how one's daily encounters shape the brain and affect the body. "Humans have a built-in bias toward empathy, cooperation and altruism, provided we develop the social intelligence to nurure these capabilities in ourselves and others.

"In this revolutionary book, renowned physician Gabor Maté eloquently dissects how in Western countries that pride themselves on their healthcare systems, chronic illness and general ill health are on the rise. Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug; more than half take two. In Canada, every fifth person has high blood pressure. In Europe, hypertension is diagnosed in more than 30 percent of the population. And everywhere,...

Climate change is here and capitalism is implicated: it's programmed to privilege profit and growth over human communities and the living earth. We need to change this system-and we need to do it now. Six Capitals charts the rise of four movements designed to overthrow capitalism, as we know it: multi-capital accounting, for society, nature, and profit; the push for a new corporation legally bound to benefit nature and society while making a profit;...

Running down “do-gooders” has become a popular pastime in recent years. Journalists and academics alike have lampooned and criticized philanthropists and big donors for their charitable activities, which are often characterized as a means of self-aggrandisement or tax evasion. Yet, it is widely acknowledged that philanthropy—from the establishment of Carnegie libraries in the nineteenth century to the recent global health interventions of the...

Government bureaucracies across the globe have become increasingly attuned in recent years to cultural diversity within their populations. Using culture as a category to process people and dispense services, however, can create its own problems and unintended consequences. In No Family Is an Island, a comparative ethnography of Samoan migrants living in the United States and New Zealand, Ilana Gershon investigates how and when the categories "cultural"...

Contains excerpts from letters, diaries, and memoirs by soldiers, women, loyalists, pacifists, Native Americans, and African Americans concerning events in the American Revolution.

These days, we all have too much to do and too little time. This book is about how technology has changed our lives and what we can do about it. What happened to the promise that technology would give us more leisure time? Instead, we are working harder and for longer hours than we did fifteen years ago, squeezed and scattered and stressed to the point of burnout. We are trying to cope with a constantly accelerating pace brought about by cutbacks...