From the acclaimed author of The Drowning People (“A literary sensation” — The New York Times Book Review) and Natural Elements (“A magnum opus” — The New Yorker ), an opulent, romantic coming-of-age drama set at the height of Europe’s belle époque, written in the grand tradition with a lightness of touch that is wholly modern and original. The novel opens in Amsterdam...(展开全部)

'The adventures of adolescence had taught Piet Barol that he was extremely attractive to most women and to many men. He was old enough to be pragmatic about this advantage...' It is 1907. The belle epoque is in full swing. Piet Barol has escaped the drabness of the provinces for the grandest mansion in Amsterdam. As tutor to the son of Europe's wealthiest hotelier, he learns ...(展开全部)

'The adventures of adolescence had taught Piet Barol that he was extremely attractive to most women and to many men. He was old enough to be pragmatic about this advantage...' Piet Barol is an alluring and intelligent young man who has escaped his drab existence, living with his father in the university town of Leiden, and moved to Amsterdam to take up a job at a stunning mans...(展开全部)

A cutting-edge exploration of the ancient roots of goodness in civilization, arguing that our genes have shaped societies for our welfare and that, in a feedback loop stretching back many thousands of years, societies have shaped, and are still shaping, our genes today. For too long, the scientific community has been overly focused on the dark side of our biological heritage: o...(展开全部)

For most Americans, candy is an uneasy pleasure, eaten with side helpings of guilt and worry. Yet candy accounts for only 6 percent of the added sugar in the American diet. And at least it’s honest about what it is—a processed food, eaten for pleasure, with no particular nutritional benefit. So why is candy considered especially harmful, when it’s not so different from the othe...(展开全部)

Fanny Hill, shrouded in controversy for most of its more than 250-year life, and banned from publication in the United States until 1966, was once considered immoral and without literary merit, even earning its author a jail sentence for obscenity. The tale of a naïve young prostitute in bawdy eighteenth-century London who slowly rises to respectability, the novel–and it...(展开全部)

Computers have changed since 1981, when Tracy Kidder memorably recorded the drama, comedy, and excitement of one companys efforts to bring a new microcomputer to market. What has not changed is the feverish pace of the high-tech industry, the go-for-broke approach to business that has caused so many computer companies to win big (or go belly up), and the cult of pursuing mind-b...(展开全部)

Computers have changed since 1981, when Tracy Kidder memorably recorded the drama, comedy, and excitement of one companys efforts to bring a new microcomputer to market. What has not changed is the feverish pace of the high-tech industry, the go-for-broke approach to business that has caused so many computer companies to win big (or go belly up), and the cult of pursuing mind-b...(展开全部)

Do survival instincts have anything to do with our architectural choices - our liking for a certain room, a special stairway, a plaza in a particular city? In this engaging study Grant Hildebrand discusses ways in which architectural forms emulate some archetypal settings that humans have found appealing - and useful to survival - from ancient times to the present. Speculating ...(展开全部)

A yet-untranslated essay collection on the importance of critical thought, from one of the foremost Chinese intellectuals of the 1990s. Wang Xiaobo’s Pleasure of Thinking is an essay collection as riotous as it is contemplative. Between rollicking anecdotes about living between the East and West and serious musings on the intellectual situations at home and abroad, Xiaobo exami...(展开全部)