The wish to understand mental suffering is universal and requires an appreciation for its history. Since Biblical times, humans have understood madness, or other deviations from normal mental functioning, in diverse and unique ways.

Tim Brady’s book His Father’s Son: The Life of General Ted Roosevelt, Jr. (NAL, 2017) is not just the biography of the eldest son and namesake of America’s 26th president, but an account of a life that was adventurous…

As described by Dovid Katz, Yiddish is an extraordinarily multifaceted language: a language that is at once acclaimed as sacred and dismissed as deficient, profoundly connected to centuries of religious and cultural history yet marketed superficially,

Zombifying a Nation: Race, Gender and the Haitian Loas on Screen (McFarland, 2016) dwells on the intersections of memory, history, and cultural production in both Africa and the African diaspora. The figure of the zombie that entered the…

Kevin Smokler’s new book, Brat Pack America: A Love Letter to 80s Teen Movies (Rare Bird Books, 2016)is what everyone in their 40s who loved watching movies as they were growing up wants it to be. In Brat Pack America…

Psychological and philosophical theories of the emotions tend to take the adult emotional repertoire as the paradigm case for understanding the emotions. From this standpoint, the emotions are usually distinguished into two categories: the basic emotio...

Timothy Sandefur’s new book, The Permission Society: How the Ruling Class Turns Our Freedoms into Privileges and What We Can Do About It (Encounter Books, 2016) is an argument against the restrictions on individual liberty by local, state and federal…

Forsyth County, Georgia, at the turn of the twentieth century was home to a large African American community that included ministers and teachers, farmers and field hands, tradesmen, servants, and children. In 1912,

Projit Bihari Mukharji’s new book explores the power of small, non-spectacular, and everyday technologies as motors or catalysts of change in the history of science and medicine. Focusing on practices of Ayurveda in British Bengal between about 1870-...

Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins are the authors of Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats (Oxford University Press, 2016). Grossmann is director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social research and associate...