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"The election happened," remembers Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, then deputy secretary of the Department of Energy. "And then there was radio silence." Across all departments, similar stories were playing out: Trump appointees were few and far between; those that did show up were shockingly uninformed about the functions of their new workplace. Some even threw away the briefing books that had been prepared for them. Michael Lewis's brilliant narrative takes us into the engine rooms of a government under attack by its own leaders. In Agriculture the funding of vital programs like food stamps and school lunches is being slashed. Commerce may not have enough staff to conduct the 2020 Census properly. Over at Energy, where international nuclear risk is managed, it's not clear there will be enough inspectors to track and locate black market uranium before terrorists do. Lewis finds the linchpins of the system-those public servants whose knowledge, dedication, and proactivity keep the machinery running. And he asks them what keeps them up at night.

Readers of his essays in Natural History magazine recognise Neil deGrasse Tyson's talent for guiding them through the mysteries of the cosmos with clarity and enthusiasm. Here, Tyson compiles his favourite essays across a myriad of topics. The title essay introduces readers to the physics of black holes by explaining the gory details of what would happen to your body if you fell into one. "Holy Wars" examines the needless friction between science and religion in the context of historical conflicts. And "Hollywood Nights" assails the movie industry's feeble efforts to get its night skies right.

In the wake of the financial crisis and the Great Recession, economics seems anything but a science. In this sharp, masterfully argued book, Dani Rodrik, a leading critic from within, takes a close look at economics to examine when it falls short and when it works, to give a surprisingly upbeat account of the discipline. Drawing on the history of the field and his deep experience as a practitioner, Rodrik argues that economics can be a powerful tool that improves the world but only when economists abandon universal theories and focus on getting the context right. Economics Rules argues that the discipline's much-derided mathematical models are its true strength. Models are the tools that make economics a science. Too often, however, economists mistake a model for the model that applies everywhere and at all times. In six chapters that trace his discipline from Adam Smith to present-day work on globalization, Rodrik shows how diverse situations call for different models. Each model tells a partial story about how the world works. These stories offer wide-ranging, and sometimes contradictory, lessons just as children s fables offer diverse morals. Whether the question concerns the rise of global inequality, the consequences of free trade, or the value of deficit spending, Rodrik explains how using the right models can deliver valuable new insights about social reality and public policy. Beyond the science, economics requires the craft to apply suitable models to the context. The 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers challenged many economists' deepest assumptions about free markets. Rodrik reveals that economists' model toolkit is much richer than these free-market models. With pragmatic model selection, economists can develop successful antipoverty programs in Mexico, growth strategies in Africa, and intelligent remedies for domestic inequality. At once a forceful critique and defense of the discipline, Economics Rules charts a path toward a more humble but more effective science.

US foreign policy is undergoing a dire transformation, forever changing America's place in the world. Institutions of diplomacy and development are bleeding out after deep budget cuts; the diplomats who make America's deals and protect its citizens around the world are walking out in droves. Offices across the State Department sit empty, while abroad the military-industrial complex has assumed the work once undertaken by peacemakers. We're becoming a nation that shoots first and asks questions later. In an astonishing journey from the corridors of power in Washington, DC, to some of the most remote and dangerous places on earth-Afghanistan, Somalia, and North Korea among them-acclaimed investigative journalist Ronan Farrow illuminates one of the most consequential and poorly understood changes in American history. His firsthand experience as a former State Department official affords a personal look at some of the last standard bearers of traditional statecraft, including Richard Holbrooke, who made peace in Bosnia and died while trying to do so in Afghanistan. Drawing on newly unearthed documents, and richly informed by rare interviews with warlords, whistle-blowers, and policymakers-including every living former secretary of state from Henry Kissinger to Hillary Clinton to Rex Tillerson-War on Peace makes a powerful case for an endangered profession. Diplomacy, Farrow argues, has declined after decades of political cowardice, shortsightedness, and outright malice-but it may just offer America a way out of a world at war.

Like the "funny, brilliant, bawdy" (The New Yorker) "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" this book's many stories-some funny, others intensely moving-display Richard P. Feynman's unquenchable thirst for adventure and unparalleled ability to recount important moments from his life. Here we meet Feynman's first wife, Arlene, who taught him of love's irreducible mystery as she lay dying in a hospital bed while he worked on the atomic bomb at nearby Los Alamos. We listen to the fascinating narrative of the investigation into the space shuttle Challenger's explosion in 1986 and relive the moment when Feynman revealed the disaster's cause through an elegant experiment: dropping a ring of rubber into a glass of cold water and pulling it out, misshapen. In "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century lets us see the man behind the genius.

In the years surrounding the Second World War, a serendipitous confluence of events created a healthy balance between the market and the polity-between the engine of capitalism and the egalitarian ideals of democracy. Yet, from the 1970s on, a power shift occurred in which financial regulations were rolled back, taxes were cut, inequality worsened and disheartened voters turned to far-right, faux populism. Robert Kuttner lays out the events that led to the post-war miracle and charts its dissolution all the way to Trump, Brexit and the tenuous state of the EU. He asks whether today's poisonous alliance of reckless finance and ultra-nationalism is inevitable, and whether democracy can find a way to survive.

In 2011, while the Muslim world was consumed with the Arab Spring, Osama bin Laden saw an opportunity: "the next stage," he declared, "will be the reinstating of the rule of the caliphate." Within weeks, he was shot by a US Navy SEAL. Now, the group's affiliates have swollen and Islamic State-al-Qaeda's most brutal spinoff to date-proclaims itself the reborn caliphate bin Laden foretold. Ali Soufan dissects bin Laden's brand of jihadi terrorism, revealing how these organisations were formed, how they operate, their strengths and their weaknesses. "Revealing and timely" (The New York Times), Anatomy of Terror lays bare the psychology and inner workings of al-Qaeda, IS and their spawn, and shows how the spread of terror can be stopped.

For centuries, poets and philosophers extolled the benefits of a walk in the woods: Beethoven drew inspiration from rocks and trees; Wordsworth composed while walking over the heath; Nikola Tesla conceived the electric motor while visiting a park. From forest paths in Korea to islands in Finland to eucalyptus groves in California, Florence Williams investigates the science at the confluence of environment, mood, health and creativity. Delving into new research, she uncovers the powers of the natural world to improve health, promote reflection and innovation, and strengthen our relationships. As our lives shift indoors, these ideas-and the answers they yield-are more urgent than ever.

An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four, and five other strangers?each summoned in different ways by trees?are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent’s few remaining acres of virgin forest. In his twelfth novel, National Book Award winner Richard Powers delivers a sweeping, impassioned novel of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of?and paean to?the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond, exploring the essential conflict on this planet: the one taking place between humans and nonhumans. There is a world alongside ours?vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe. The Overstory is a book for all readers who despair of humanity’s self-imposed separation from the rest of creation and who hope for the transformative, regenerating possibility of a homecoming. If the trees of this earth could speak, what would they tell us? "Listen. There’s something you need to hear."

The Alps have seen the march of armies, the flow of pilgrims and Crusaders, the feats of mountaineers and the dreams of engineers-and some 14 million people live among their peaks today. In The Alps, Stephen O'Shea takes readers up and down these majestic mountains, journeying through their 500-mile arc across France, Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Germany, Austria and Slovenia. He explores the reality behind Hannibal's crossing; he reveals how the Alps have influenced culture from Frankenstein to Heidi and The Sound of Music; and he visits the spot of Sherlock Holmes's death scene, the bloody site of the Italians' retreat in the First World War and Hitler's notorious Eagle's Nest. Throughout, O'Shea records his adventures with the watch makers, salt miners, cable-car operators and yodelers who define the Alps today.

Neil Gaiman, long inspired by ancient mythology in creating the fantastical realms of his fiction, presents a bravura rendition of the Norse gods and their world from their origin though their upheaval in Ragnarok. In Norse Mythology, Gaiman stays true to the myths in envisioning the major Norse pantheon: Odin, the highest of the high, wise, daring, and cunning; Thor, Odin's son, incredibly strong yet not the wisest of gods; and Loki-son of a giant-blood brother to Odin and a trickster and unsurpassable manipulator. Gaiman fashions these primeval stories into a novelistic arc that begins with the genesis of the legendary nine worlds and delves into the exploits of deities, dwarfs, and giants. Through Gaiman's deft and witty prose, these gods emerge with their fiercely competitive natures, their susceptibility to being duped and to duping others, and their tendency to let passion ignite their actions, making these long-ago myths breathe pungent life again.

Peter Hayes has been teaching Holocaust studies for decades and Why? grows out of the questions he's encountered from his students. Despite the outpouring of books, films, memorials, museums and courses devoted to the subject, a coherent explanation of why such carnage erupted still eludes people. Numerous myths have sprouted, many to console us that things could have gone differently if only some person or entity had acted more bravely or wisely; others cast new blame on favourite or surprising villains or even on historians. Why? dispels many legends and debunks the most prevalent ones, including the claim that the Holocaust never happened. Hayes brings scholarly wisdom to bear on popular views of the history, challenging some of the most prominent interpretations and arguing that the convergence of multiple forces at a particular moment resulted in this catastrophe.

A poignant meditation on our modern predicament: the rise, once again, of barbarism in the midst of mass democracy. Thomas Mann and Albert Camus understood something many political scientists still find difficult to fathom. Deprived of any coherent theory, fascism is characterised by its politics of resentment, stirring up of anger and fear, xenophobia, need for scapegoats, and by its hatred of the life of the mind. Combining history and philosophy, Rob Riemen eloquently explores the global return of fascism, disguised in the false promises of freedom and greatness. Riemen's response to the spiritual crisis of our age is a moving story about the universal meaning of European humanism, with its values of truth, justice, beauty and love for life as the origin of a democratic civilisation. To Fight Against This Age is for those who want to understand and change the world in which they live.

Psychology is the study of our behaviour, of the ways our minds make sense of the world around us. It is a serious endeavour because we value scientific knowledge, for what it tells us about the world but also for what it reveals about our place in the world. Yet, as Grady Klein and Danny Oppenheimer point out, the study of human experience is comical. Split into three sections, "Making Sense of the World", "Making Sense of Ourselves" and "Making Sense of Others", the book gives observations on perception, stress, language, emotions, cognition and more with cartoons to bring them to life. Our experiences blundering through the world are perfect cartoon fodder, and Klein and Oppenheimer are the perfect team to bring that whimsy to its most logical format.

hen it was first published, Globalization and Its Discontents quickly became a bestseller and a touchstone in the globalization debate. Renowned economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz argued that the International Monetary Fund and other major institutions put the interests of Wall Street and other corporate interests ahead of the developing nations they were supposedly helping, leading to political unrest and rampant inequality. Since then, globalization has continued to be mismanaged and has left a trail of disaffected citizens in its wake. Discontent with globalization is no longer a problem just for developing nations, as made clear by Donald Trump's election to the presidency. Stiglitz's powerful and prescient messages remain essential reading. "Accessible, provocative, and highly readable."-New York Times "This book is everyone's guide to the misgovernment of globalization. Stiglitz explains it here in plain and compelling language." -James K. Galbraith, University of Texas at Austin

Fascinated by our pervasive fear of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty set out to discover how other cultures care for the dead. From Here to Eternity is an immersive global journey that introduces compelling, powerful rituals almost entirely unknown in America. In rural Indonesia, she watches a man clean and dress his grandfather's mummified body, which has resided in the family home for two years. In La Paz, she meets Bolivian natitas (cigarette-smoking, wish-granting human skulls), and in Tokyo she encounters the Japanese kotsuage ceremony, in which relatives use chopsticks to pluck their loved-ones' bones from cremation ashes. With boundless curiosity and gallows humor, Doughty vividly describes decomposed bodies and investigates the world's funerary history. She introduces deathcare innovators researching body composting and green burial, and examines how varied traditions, from Mexico's Dias de los Muertos to Zoroastrian sky burial help us see our own death customs in a new light. Doughty contends that the American funeral industry sells a particular-and, upon close inspection, peculiar-set of "respectful" rites: bodies are whisked to a mortuary, pumped full of chemicals, and entombed in concrete. She argues that our expensive, impersonal system fosters a corrosive fear of death that hinders our ability to cope and mourn. By comparing customs, she demonstrates that mourners everywhere respond best when they help care for the deceased, and have space to participate in the process. Exquisitely illustrated by artist Landis Blair, From Here to Eternity is an adventure into the morbid unknown, a story about the many fascinating ways people everywhere have confronted the very human challenge of mortality.