The End of Oil is a "geologic cautionary tale for a complacent world accustomed to reliable infusions of cheap energy." The book centers around one irrefutable fact: the global supply of oil is being depleted at an alarming rate.

Which energy sources will replace oil, who will control them, and how disruptive to the current world order the transition from one system to the next will be are just a few of the big questions that Paul Roberts attempts to answer in this timely book.

The idea that we might be robots is no longer the stuff of science fiction; many esteemed scientists now believe that humans are merely the hosts for two replicators (genes and memes) that have no interest in us except as conduits for replication.

Accepting and now forcefully responding to this decentering and disturbing idea, Keith Stanovich here provides the tools for the "robot's rebellion."

Some have claimed that "War is too important to be left to the generals," but what about the business executives?

Corporations now sell skills and services that until recently only state militaries possessed. Their products range from trained commando teams to strategic advice from generals.

Private corporations working for profit now sway the course of national and international conflict.

In this sequel to the acclaimed Damned Lies and Statistics, Joel Best continues his straightforward, lively, and humorous account of how statistics are produced, used, and misused by everyone from researchers to journalists.

Underlining the importance of critical thinking in all matters numerical, Best illustrates his points with examples of good and bad statistics about such contemporary concerns as school shootings, fatal hospital errors, bullying, teen suicides, deaths at the World Trade Center, college ratings, the risks of divorce, racial profiling, and fatalities caused by falling coconuts.

More Damned Lies and Statistics encourages all of us to think in a more sophisticated and skeptical manner about how statistics are used to promote causes, create fear, and advance particular points of view.

The United States is facing a health crisis of epidemic proportions: children are gaining weight younger and faster than ever before.

With the prospect of becoming the most obese generation of adults in history, they are already turning up with an alarming assortment of "grown-up" maladies, from type 2 diabetes to high blood pressure. This book takes a clear-eyed look at what's behind the statistics and diagnoses, and what can be done about the major health crisis among American children.

To this day, the perception persists that China was a civilization defeated by imperialist Britain's most desirable trade commodity, opium -- a drug that turned the Chinese into cadaverous addicts in the iron grip of dependence.

Britain, in an effort to reverse the damage caused by opium addiction, launched its own version of the "war on drugs," which lasted roughly sixty years, from 1880 to World War II and the beginning of Chinese communism.

Virtually every American alive has at some point consumed at least one, and very likely more, consciousness altering drug. Even those who actively eschew alcohol, tobacco, and coffee cannot easily avoid the full range of psychoactive substances pervading the culture.

With many children now taking Ritalin for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, professional athletes relying on androstenidione to bulk up, and the chronically depressed resorting to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors such as Prozac, the early twenty-first century appears no less rife with drugs than previous periods.

From Britain's nineteenth-century Opium Wars in China to the activities of Colombia's drug cartels and their suppression by US-backed military forces today, conflicts over narcotics have justified imperial expansion, global capitalism, and state violence, even as they have also fueled the movement of goods and labor around the world.

In Drug Wars, cultural critic Curtis Marez examines two hundred years of writings, graphic works, films, and music that both demonize and celebrate the commerce in cocaine, marijuana, and opium, providing a bold interdisciplinary exploration of drugs in the popular imagination.

The sights, sounds, and smells of life on the streets and in the houses of eighteenth-century Paris rise from the pages of this marvelously anecdotal chronicle of a perpetually alluring city during one hundred years of extraordinary social and cultural change.

An excellent general history as well as an innovative synthesis of new research, The Making of Revolutionary Paris combines vivid portraits of individual lives, accounts of social trends, and analyses of significant events as it explores the evolution of Parisian society during the eighteenth century and reveals the city's pivotal role in shaping the French Revolution.