QUANTUM: EINSTEIN, BOHR, AND THE GREAT DEBATE ABOUT THE NATURE OF REALITY by Manjit Kumar

Quantum theory is weird. As Niels Bohr said, if you weren’t shocked by quantum theory, you didn’t really understand it. For most people, quantum theory is synonymous with mysterious, impenetrable science. And in fact for many years it was equally baffling for scientists themselves. In this tour de force of science history, Manjit Kumar gives a dramatic and superbly written account of this fundamental scientific revolution, focusing on the central conflict between Einstein and Bohr over the nature of reality and the soul of science.

This revelatory book takes a close look at the golden age of physics, the brilliant young minds at its core—and how an idea ignited the greatest intellectual debate of the twentieth century.

As a fairly innumerate non-scientist, I am perversely drawn to books about maths and science and usually abandon them with ignorance intact. However, Quantum by Manjit Kumar … is so well written that I now feel I’ve more or less got particle physics sussed. Quantum transcends genre—it is historical, scientific, biographical, philosophical. The Guardian

Kumar is an accomplished writer who knows how to separate the excitement of the chase from the sometimes impenetrable mathematics. Financial Times

Lively....a wide-ranging account, written for readers who are curious about the theory but what to sidestep its mathematical complexities....fascinating. The New York Times Book Review

DENG XIAOPING AND THE MAKING OF MODERN CHINA by Richard Evans

Evans, a former British ambassador to China, has penned a noteworthy biography of the most significant Chinese political leader of the post-Mao era. Since Deng Xiaoping's life literally parallels the course of modern Chinese history, this chronicle also provides a blueprint for comprehending the often arcane complexities of twentieth-century China. One of the original members of Mao's revolutionary cadre, Deng tenaciously survived civil strife, the Japanese invasion, the legendary Long March, and the purges of the Cultural Revolution, emerging as the preeminent national leader after the death of Mao. Renowned as the architect of contemporary China's amazingly successful economic development program, Deng is also credited with reintroducing a radically refashioned China into the eager embrace of the international community. Highly recommended for Asian studies collections. Booklist

ДЭН СЯОПИН И ЕГО ВРЕМЯ. В. Н. Усов

Книга известного российского китаиста-историка В.Н.Усова "Дэн Сяопин и
его время" является первым, самым полным и объективным в России
оригинальным исследованием биографии видного китайского революционера
и выдающегося политического деятеля. На богатом фактическом материале,
часто неизвестном широкому кругу читателей, включая новые архивные
источники и литературу, в книге подробно рассказывается о жизни и
деятельности китайского архитектора реформ на фоне эпохи и трагических
перемен происходящих как в его судьбе, так и в жизни страны. Со
страниц книги Дэн Сяопин предстает не только умным и умелым политиком,
но и живым человеком, со всеми его достоинствами и недостатками.

ОСНОВНЫЕ ВОПРОСЫ СОВРЕМЕННОГО КИТАЯ. Дэн Сяопин

Во вступительной речи на XII съезде КПК Дэн Сяопин указал на необходимость "сочетать всеобщую истину марксизма с конкретной реальностью страны, идти собственным путем и строить социализм с китайской спецификой...". К этой же теме он неоднократно возвращался и в последующие годы, говоря о коренных задачах в период строительства
социализма, о формировании социалистической духовной культуры, о реформе хозяйственной системы и политической структуры, внешней политике КНР, об идее "одно государство - два строя" и других проблемах.

В настоящем сборнике сфокусированы основные взгляды автора относительно строительства социализма с китайской спецификой. Красной нитью проходит мысль, что, твердо придерживаясь четырех основных принципов социализма, надо решительно выступать против буржуазной идеологии. В экономике же неуклонно проводить курс на реформу и расширение внешних сношений. Как указывает автор, четыре модернизации,
которые сейчас осуществляются в Китае,- это социалистические модернизации. Они включают не только реформу хозяйственной системы, но и перестройку политической- структуры.

АПОЛОГИЯ МАТЕМАТИКИ. Владимир Успенский

Премия «Просветитель» 2010

В этот сборник вошли статьи разных лет российского математика и лингвиста Владимира Андреевича Успенского, ученика великого Колмогорова, существенно переработанные и дополненные. Очерчивая место математики в современной культуре, автор пытается прояснить для читателей-нематематиков некоторые основные понятия и проблемы "царицы наук".

Успенский транслирует несколько важных мыслей: что математика — не просто набор формул, а часть духовной культуры, что «математические идеи способны вызывать эмоции, сравнимые с теми, что вызывают литературные произведения, музыка, архитектура», что математика существует не только для пользы, но и для красоты, что у математики есть этический аспект и что математика «позволяет осмыслить те свойства, которые открыты другими науками. Более того, она позволяет сделать более понятными некоторые такие свойства, какие трудно себе представить, она объясняет, как такое может быть» (например, конечность Вселенной). Вдолбить все это в головы тех, кого в школе тошнило от математики, непросто, поэтому Успенский пользует­ся всеми
средствами из арсенала профессионального популяризатора: пишет от «я», апеллирует к собственному опыту, объясняет теоремы, не упуская курьезные моменты из биографии математиков, смакует не только факты, но и заблуждения, и когда ему приходится выбирать между точностью и понятностью, отдает предпочтение последней.

Это чрезвычайно концентрирован­ная книга, в которой помимо общих ­рассуждений о природе математики ­об­наруживается нечто вроде повторения школьного курса — но как бы «для взрослых», с примерами из литературы, ­фи­лософии и повседневной жизни. Здесь есть отдельные главы о теореме Пифагора и теореме Ферма, краткий очерк геометрии
Лобачевского и основ топологии, ­емкие замечания о проблеме пресловутой «квадратуры круга», а также достаточно подробное разъяснение того, ­какую именно «проблему на миллион ­долларов» решил математик Григорий Перельман. Вообще, история математи­ки — некоторым образом конек Успенского: он травит байки о «ферматистах», рассказывает анекдоты об академике Колмогорове и позволяет себе несколь­ко кратких экскурсов в историю советской математики, иногда мемуарного ­характера. - Афиша

SUPREME POWER: FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT VS. THE SUPREME COURT. Jeff Shesol

Supreme Power is an extraordinary book that rings with relevance for our time. One of the most eloquent historians of his generation, Jeff Shesol has a deep understanding of the presidency, and the interplay of politics, personalities, and principles, all of which he brings to life in this rich, remarkable book. Full of surprises and new insights—each rendered in clear and confident prose – this book is
about more than FDR’s plan to pack the Court. It’s about America’s enduring struggle to reconcile our founders’ ideals with conflicting challenges in our constant pursuit to build a more perfect union. (President Bill Clinton )

Once in a generation a groundbreaking book comes along to provide a major reinterpretation of a familiar historical event. Shesol tells the story of FDR's court packing plan as it has never been told before. This is a stunning work of history. (Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of No Ordinary Time and Team of Rivals)

With insight and more than occasional humor, Shesol covers all aspects of the controversy, deftly explaining the issues at stake in a variety of legal opinions and shrewdly analyzing the intra-Court dynamics. (Kirkus Reviews)

Supreme Power is by far the most detailed—and most riveting—account of this extraordinary event.... an impressive and engaging book—an excellent work of narrative history. It is deeply researched and beautifully written. (The New York Times Book Review)

ЛЕВ ТОЛСТОЙ. БЕГСТВО ИЗ РАЯ. Павел Басинский

Премия «Большая книга» 2010

Ровно 100 лет назад в Ясной Поляне произошло событие, которое потрясло весь мир. Восьмидесятидвухлетний писатель граф Л.Н.Толстой ночью, тайно бежал из своего дома в неизвестном направлении. С тех пор обстоятельства ухода и смерти великого старца породили множество мифов и легенд... Известный писатель и журналист Павел Басинский на основании строго документального материала, в том числе архивного, предлагает не свою версию этого события, а его живую реконструкцию. Шаг за шагом вы можете проследить всю жизнь и уход Льва Толстого, разобраться в причинах его семейной драмы и тайнах подписания им духовного завещания.

У ревизиониста Басинского получилась крайне удачная, отвечающая самым высоким критериям научно-популярной литературы компиляция сведений из источников — компиляция, которая переросла в оригинальный текст. Это детальная хроника жизни Толстого, исследованная со всех возможных сторон. Не только история эксцентричного умирания — но полноценная биография, рассказанная через сюжет об уходе, с подробными флешбэками. Ревизия отношений Толстого и церкви. Люди, населявшие дом Толстых, приживалы и частые гости. Социальная сеть, внутри которой жил поздний Толстой. Финансовая сторона жизни. История брака. Экономика Ясной Поляны. Был ли уход сложной формой самоубийства? Был ли Толстой «женофобом»? Был ли Толстой латентным гомосексуалистом? Что произошло с толстовским завещанием? У автора хорошее «чувство Толстого», его толкования текстов глубоки и вызывают доверие; у него есть вкус на
курье­зы, он проявляет интерес не только к тому, что то или иное событие значило, но и к бытовой стороне, в частности, к «логистике» странного похода. Соблюдая баланс «изнанки» и лицевой стороны, Басинский не злоупотребляет первым — и не стесняется показывать вторую. Он уверен, что — несмотря на общераспространенное мнение,
будто «Толстой ушел, чтобы умереть со своим народом», — Толстой ушел не чтобы умереть, а чтобы НЕ умереть. Несмотря на масштабы фигуры своего героя — «русский Будда», — автор имеет смелость не только следовать за ним, но и рассуждать о нем критически, не стесняясь называть вещи своими именами. - Афиша

CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS. THE POET IN HIS LABORATORY By Patrick Wilcken

NYT book of the Times

The definitive account of the life, work, and legacy of Claude Lévi-Strauss, father of modern anthropology and one of the postwar era's most influential thinkers. When Claude Lévi-Strauss passed away last October at age 100, France celebrated the life and contributions of not only a preeminent anthropologist, but also one of the defining intellectuals of the twentieth century. Just as Freud had shaken up the antiquarian discipline of psychiatry, so had Lévi-Strauss revolutionized anthropology, transforming it from the colonial era study of "exotic" tribes to one consumed with fundamental questions about the nature of humanity and civilization itself.

Remarkably, there has never been a biography in English of the enigmatic Claude Lévi-Strauss. Drawing on a welter of original research and interviews with the anthropologist, Patrick Wilcken's Claude Lévi-Strauss fills this void. In rich detail, Wilcken re-creates Lévi-Strauss's peripatetic life: his groundbreaking fieldwork in some of the remotest reaches of the Amazon in the 1930s; his years as a Jew in Nazi- occupied France and as an émigré in wartime New York; and his return to Paris in the late 1940s, where he clashed with Jean-Paul Sartre and fundamentally influenced fellow postwar thinkers from Jacques Lacan to Michel Foucault and Roland
Barthes. It was in France that structuralism, the school of thought he founded, first took hold, creating waves far beyond the field of anthropology. In his heyday, Lévi-Strauss was both a hero to contemporary intellectuals and an international celebrity.

In Claude Lévi-Strauss, Wilcken gives the reader a fascinating intellectual tour of the anthropologist's landmark works: Tristes Tropiques, a literary meditation on his travels and fieldwork; The Savage Mind, which showed that "primitive" people are driven by the same intellectual curiosities as their Western counterparts; and
finally his monumental four-volume Mythologiques, a study of the universal structures of native mythology in the Americas. In the years that Lévi-Strauss published these pioneering works, Wilcken observes, tribal societies seemed to hold the answers to the most profound questions about the human mind. Following the great anthropologist from São Paulo to the Brazilian interior, and from New York to Paris,
Patrick Wilcken's Claude Lévi- Strauss is both an evocative journey and an intellectual biography of one of the twentieth-century's most influential minds.

PERON: A BIOGRAPHY. Joseph A. Page

Latin America has produced no more remarkable or enduring political figure than Juan Peron. Born to modest circumstances in 1895 and trained in the military, he rose to power during a period of political uncertainty in Argentina. A shrewd opportunist who understood the needs and aspirations of the country's workers, Peron rode their votes to the presidency and then increased their share of the nation's wealth. But he also destroyed the independence of their unions and suppressed dissent. Ousted in a coup in 1955, he wandered about Latin America and finally settled in Spain, where he masterminded an astonishing political comeback that climaxed in his reelection as
president in 1973.

Joseph Page's engrossing biography is based upon interviews on 3 continents, never-before inspected Argentine and U.S. government documents and exhaustive research, Page's book spans Peron's formative years; his arrest and dramatic rescue by the 'descamisados' (workers) in 1945; his relationship with the now-mythic Evita; the violence and mysterious murders that punctuated his career; his tragic legacy,
personified by his third wife, Isabel, who assumed the presidency after his death under the influence of a Rasputin-like astrologer; and the continuing appeal of Peronism in Argentina. Page's study of Argentine-American relations is particularly penetrating, esp. in its description of the struggle between Peron and U.S. ambassador Spruille Braden.

Random House; 1st edition (July 12, 1983)
ISBN-13: 978-0394522975

BEING WRONG: ADVENTURES IN THE MARGIN OF ERROR by Kathryn Schulz

In the spirit of Blink and Predictably Irrational (but with a large helping of erudition), journalist Schulz casts a fresh and irreverent eye upon the profound meanings behind our most ordinary behaviors—in this instance, how we make mistakes, how we behave when we find we have been wrong, and how our errors change us. [I]t is ultimately wrongness, not rightness, that can teach us who we are, she asserts.

Schulz writes with such lucidity and wit that her philosophical enquiry becomes a page-turner. She deftly incorporates Wittgenstein, Descartes, and Freud, along with an array of contemporary social scientists and even a spin with Shakespeare and Keats. There's heavy stuff here, but no heavy-handedness. Being wrong encompasses the
cataclysmic (economic collapse) and the commonplace (leaving a laptop in front of the window before the storm). Being wrong may lead to fun (playing with and understanding optical illusions) or futility (the Millerite expectation of the Rapture in 1844). Being wrong can be transformative, and Schultz writes, I encourage us to see error as a gift in itself, a rich and irreplaceable source of humor, art,
illumination, individuality, and change—an apt description of her engrossing study. Publishers Weekly

“A funny and philosophical meditation on why error is mostly a humane, courageous and extremely desirable human trait. [Schulz] flies high in the intellectual skies, leaving beautiful sunlit contrails....It’s lovely to watch this idea warm in Ms. Schulz’s hands.” New York Times

Guardian first book award longlist

TROTSKY: A BIOGRAPHY by Robert Service

Robert Service completes his masterful trilogy on the founding figures of the Soviet Union in an eagerly anticipated, authoritative biography of Leon Trotsky.

Trotsky is perhaps the most intriguing and, given his prominence, the most understudied of the Soviet revolutionaries. Using new archival sources including family letters, party and military correspondence, confidential speeches, and medical records, Service offers new insights into Trotsky. He discusses Trotsky’s fractious relations with the leaders he was trying to bring into a unified party before 1914; his attempt to disguise his political closeness to Stalin; and his
role in the early 1920s as the progenitor of political and cultural Stalinism.

Trotsky evinced a surprisingly glacial and schematic approach to making revolution. Service recounts Trotsky’s role in the botched German revolution of 1923; his willingness to subject Europe to a Red Army invasion in the 1920s; and his assumption that peasants could easily be pushed onto collective farms. Service also sheds light on Trotsky’s character and personality: his difficulties with his
Jewish background, the development of his oratorical skills and his preference for writing over politicking, his inept handling of political factions and coldness toward associates, and his aversion to assuming personal power.

Although Trotsky’s followers clung to the stubborn view of him as a pure revolutionary and a powerful intellect unjustly hounded into exile by Stalin, the reality is very different. This illuminating portrait of the man and his legacy sets the record straight.

A New Yorker Reviewers’ Favorite Nonfiction Book of 2009
An Independent Best History Book of 2009

STALIN: A BIOGRAPHY. by Robert Service

Here is a life-and-times biography in the grand style: deeply researched, well written, brimming with interpretations. Oxford historian Service, author of an acclaimed biography of Lenin, provides the most complete portrait available of the Soviet ruler, from his early, troubled years in a small town in Georgia to the pinnacle of power in the Kremlin. Most previous biographers have depicted Stalin
as a plodding figure whose only distinguishing characteristic was brutality. But Service describes a man who was intelligent and hardworking, who learned from experience and who played an important role in the Russian revolutionary movement. On so many of the complex issues of Soviet history—including Stalin's rise to power within the Communist Party, the policy shift to forced collectivization, the
Great Terror and the prosecution of the war against Nazi Germany—Service provides lucid accounts based on his own research and the most recent scholarship. Stalin was the key figure behind every major development from the mid-1920s onward. He based his policy decisions on his understanding of Marxism-Leninism and on a hardheaded, realistic assessment of his own often uneasy position and of the Soviet Union's relatively weak standing in the world. By providing such a rich and complex portrait of the dictator and the Soviet system, Service humanizes Stalin without ever diminishing the extent of the atrocities he unleashed upon the Soviet population. 47
b&w photos, 4 maps. Publishers Weekly

LENIN: A BIOGRAPHY by Robert Service

The wonder of this particular account is that Service succeeds in explaining how Lenin came to [his] determined confidence and the complex and ultimately tragic circumstances that led to the triumph of his ambitions...The most significant contribution of this book is the wealth of personal information that makes Lenin a far more accessible, if not appealing, individual...Such details make Lenin all the more human and so all the more vivid and frightening...Service never allows his narrative to slip into sentimentality or forgets whom he is dealing with. Wall Street Journal

The most authoritative and well-rounded biography of Lenin yet written--and the one that is, in its quiet way, the most horrifying. Oxford historian Service (A History of Twentieth Century Russia) makes good use of Party and Presidential archives that were previously closed to historians. The portrait that emerges therefore has many
elements that were either altogether unknown or have only recently emerged...An important study that goes far in tracing the roots of the dire legacy Communism bequeathed to the third of mankind unfortunate enough to have suffered its rule. Kirkus Reviews

A comprehensive and intimate biography of the Russian revolutionary. Washington Post