Sophie Taeuber-Arp was a quiet innovator whose fame has too often been yoked to that of her husband, Jean Arp. Over time, however, she has slowly come to be seen as one of the foremost abstract artists and designers of the twentieth century. The Swis...

Research into biography has historically focused almost wholly on the lives of people in the wealthier nations of the Global North. This book corrects that with a focus on the biographical histories of people – seen as part of larger groups or collec...

German-Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) fled from the Nazis to New York in 1941, and during the next thirty years in America she wrote her best-known and most influential works, such as "The Human Condition", "The Origins of Tot...

Brilliantly uniting the personal and the critical, "French Lessons" is a powerful autobiographical experiment. It tells the story of an American woman escaping into the French language and of a scholar and teacher coming to grips with her history of...

As the space age got underway in the wake of Sputnik, one of the earliest areas of science to take advantage of the new observational opportunities it afforded was the study of climate and weather. This book tells the story of Finnish-American educat...

On August 21, 1978, a year before his seventieth birthday, Samuel Steward (1909-1993) sat down at his typewriter in Berkeley, California, and began to compose a remarkable autobiography. No one but his closest friends knew the many different identiti...

Rene Descartes is best known as the man who coined the phrase "I think, therefore I am". But though he is remembered most as a thinker, Descartes, the man, was no disembodied mind, theorizing at great remove from the worldly affairs and concerns of h...

Every book has a story of its own, a path leading from the initial idea that sparked it to its emergence into the world in published form. No two books follow quite the same path, but all are shaped by a similar array of market forces and writing  cr...

On February 6, 2003, Anjum Zamarud Habib, a young political activist from Kashmir, was arrested in Delhi, convicted under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, and sentenced to five years in Delhi's notorious Tihar jail. Her crime? Being in the wrong plac...

German-born Gerhard (Gershom) Scholem (1897-1982), the preeminent scholar of Jewish mysticism, delved into the historical analysis of kabbalistic literature from late antiquity to the twentieth century. His writings traverse Jewish historiography, Zi...