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  • Book cover of The Narrow Corridor

    From the winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Economics and the authors of the international bestseller Why Nations Fail "Why is it so difficult to develop and sustain liberal democracy? The best recent work on this subject comes from a remarkable pair of scholars, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. In their latest book, The Narrow Corridor, they have answered this question with great insight." —Fareed Zakaria, The Washington Post In Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson argued that countries rise and fall based not on culture, geography, or chance, but on the power of their institutions. In their new book, they build a new theory about liberty and how to achieve it, drawing a wealth of evidence from both current affairs and disparate threads of world history. Liberty is hardly the "natural" order of things. In most places and at most times, the strong have dominated the weak and human freedom has been quashed by force or by customs and norms. Either states have been too weak to protect individuals from these threats, or states have been too strong for people to protect themselves from despotism. Liberty emerges only when a delicate and precarious balance is struck between state and society. There is a Western myth that political liberty is a durable construct, arrived at by a process of "enlightenment." This static view is a fantasy, the authors argue. In reality, the corridor to liberty is narrow and stays open only via a fundamental and incessant struggle between state and society: The authors look to the American Civil Rights Movement, Europe’s early and recent history, the Zapotec civilization circa 500 BCE, and Lagos’s efforts to uproot corruption and institute government accountability to illustrate what it takes to get and stay in the corridor. But they also examine Chinese imperial history, colonialism in the Pacific, India’s caste system, Saudi Arabia’s suffocating cage of norms, and the “Paper Leviathan” of many Latin American and African nations to show how countries can drift away from it, and explain the feedback loops that make liberty harder to achieve. Today we are in the midst of a time of wrenching destabilization. We need liberty more than ever, and yet the corridor to liberty is becoming narrower and more treacherous. The danger on the horizon is not "just" the loss of our political freedom, however grim that is in itself; it is also the disintegration of the prosperity and safety that critically depend on liberty. The opposite of the corridor of liberty is the road to ruin.

  • Book cover of Promises to Keep

    A biography of baseball legend Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play in the major leagues, as told by his daughter.

  • Book cover of Why Nations Fail

    NEW YORK TIMES AND WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER • From two winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, “who have demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for a country’s prosperity” “A wildly ambitious work that hopscotches through history and around the world to answer the very big question of why some countries get rich and others don’t.”—The New York Times FINALIST: Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Financial Times, The Economist, BusinessWeek, Bloomberg, The Christian Science Monitor, The Plain Dealer Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? Is it culture, the weather, or geography that determines prosperity or poverty? As Why Nations Fail shows, none of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Drawing on fifteen years of original research, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is our man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or the lack of it). Korea, to take just one example, is a remarkably homogenous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest. The differences between the Koreas is due to the politics that created those two different institutional trajectories. Acemoglu and Robinson marshal extraordinary historical evidence from the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, the Soviet Union, the United States, and Africa to build a new theory of political economy with great relevance for the big questions of today, among them: • Will China’s economy continue to grow at such a high speed and ultimately overwhelm the West? • Are America’s best days behind it? Are we creating a vicious cycle that enriches and empowers a small minority? “This book will change the way people think about the wealth and poverty of nations . . . as ambitious as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel.”—BusinessWeek

  • Book cover of Science and Technology in the Industrial Revolution

    First Published in 1969. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

  • Book cover of Gilead

    In 1956, toward the end of his life, Reverend John Ames begins a letter to his young son, sharing the story of his life and explaining how his faith influenced his choices and actions.

  • Book cover of Physical Geography of the Holy Land
  • Book cover of Time for Life

    Is it possible that Americans have more free time than they did thirty years ago? While few may believe it, research based on careful records of how we actually spend our time shows that we average more than an hour more free time per day than in the 1960s. Time-use experts John P. Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey received national attention when their controversial findings were first published in 1997. Now the book is updated, with a new chapter that includes results of the 1995&–1997 data from the Americans' Use of Time Project. &“Time for Life, an outstanding work of scholarship that manages to be highly readable, demands the attention of everyone interested in what&’s happening in today&’s society.&” &—Edward Cornish, The Futurist &“Time for Life . . . is excellent fodder for lively classroom discussions, not only about family time use, but about the ontological and epistemological assumptions in the prevailing post-positivist paradigm of family science.&” &—Alan J. Hawkins and Jeffrey Hill, Journal of Marriage and the Family &“Regardless of where you stand on this issue, Robinson and Godbey's arguments and data make for very interesting reading and open a cultural window on American society. . . . This is a piece of scholarship that should be read and its conclusions contemplated by people well outside the readership of this journal. . . . Time for Life is good social science research that should appeal to a broad audience.&” &—Journal of Communication

  • Book cover of The Translator's Turn

    "Robinson's book is original and stimulating, and I suspect it will remain a provocative landmark in its field for some time to come." -- Steven Rendall, Philosophy and Literature

  • Book cover of Clinical Electrophysiology

    Organized by therapeutic goals, the Third Edition of this comprehensive textbook on electrotherapies provides a fundamental understanding of contemporary, evidence-based intervention and assessment procedures. The text takes a problem-oriented approach and recommends interventions consistent with both theory and the clinical efficacy of the intervention for specific, clearly identified clinical disorders. This edition has a new chapter on electrical stimulation and biofeedback for genitourinary dysfunction, including incontinence management in both women and men. All the intervention-based chapters have a new format that emphasizes evidence-based practice and practical application. Additional self-study questions are included in each chapter. NEW TO THIS EDITION: New chapter on Electrical Stimulation and Biofeedback for Genitourinary Dysfunction (Chapter 9) includes topics such as incontinence management in both women and men, and gives solid evidence to support or refute specific procedures. New organization Chapter on mechanisms of pain transmission and pain control with electrotherapy will be moved up to chapter 4 to make the first four chapters the theoretical basis for the clinical application chapters that follow. Chapter on electrophysiologic evaluation will become the last chapter (chapter 12) in order to enable students to meet core educational competencies. New chapter format for the intervention chapters (chapters 5-11) adds consistency and clarity to emphasize evidenced-based practice and practical application. Additional self-study questions are included in each chapter to enhance understanding of key concepts. New emphasis on evidence-based preferential practice patterns.

  • Book cover of Black Marxism

    Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition