The laws of thermodynamics drive everything that happens in the universe. From the sudden expansion of a cloud of gas to the cooling of hot metal--everything is moved or restrained by four simple laws. Written by Peter Atkins, one of the world's...
From a single cell--a fertilized egg--comes an elephant, a fly, or a human. How does this astonishing feat happen? How does the egg "know" what to become? How does it divide into the different cells, the separate tissues, the brain, the...
Why do we need sleep? What is sleep? What happens when we don't get enough? This Very Short Introduction addresses the biological and psychological aspects of sleep, providing a basic understanding of what sleep is and how it is measured, a look at...
Beginning with a discussion of familiar images of the French Revolution, garnered from Dickens, Baroness Orczy, and Tolstoy, as well as the legends of let them eat cake, and tricolours, Doyle leads the reader to the realization that we are still...
Perhaps nowhere else has literature been as conscious a collective endeavor as in China, and China's survival over three thousand years may owe more to its literary traditions than to its political history. This Very Short Introduction tells the...
With his well-known idiosyncrasies and aphoristic style, Friedrich Nietzsche is always bracing and provocative, and temptingly easy to dip into. Michael Tanner's introduction to the philosopher's life and work examines the numerous ambiguities...
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed such fervent investigations of the natural world that the period has been called the "Scientific Revolution." New ideas and discoveries not only redefined what human beings believed, knew, and could...
This book explores the lands of the ancient Near East from around 3200 BCE to 539 BCE. The earth-shaking changes that marked this era include such fundamental inventions as the wheel and the plow and intellectual feats such as the inventions of...
Rather than presenting a conventional chronology of Russian literature, Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction explores the place and importance in Russian culture of all types of literature. How and when did a Russian national literature...
When Europeans first arrived in North America, between five and eight million indigenous people were already living there. But how did they come to be here? What were their agricultural, spiritual, and hunting practices? How did their societies...