![Crack - coming soon in audiobook!]()
September 17, 2019
Hear an excerpt from Crack, available October 10th, a shattering account of the crack cocaine years from award-winning American historian David Farber. Crack tells the story of the young men who bet their lives on the rewards of selling 'rock' cocaine, the people who gave themselves over to the crack pipe, and the often-merciless authorities who incarcerated legions of African Americans caught in the crack cocaine underworld. Based on interviews, archival research, judicial records, underground videos, and prison memoirs, Crack explains why, in a de-industrializing America in which market forces ruled and entrepreneurial risk-taking was celebrated, the crack industry was a lucrative enterprise for the 'Horatio Alger boys' of their place and time. These young, predominately African American entrepreneurs were profit-sharing partners in a deviant, criminal form of economic globalization. Hip Hop artists often celebrated their exploits but overwhelmingly, Americans - across racial lines -did not. Crack takes a hard look at the dark side of late twentieth-century capitalism.
For more information, visit cambridge.org/audiobooks.
August 28, 2019
What do the Mona Lisa, the light bulb, and a Lego brick have in common? The answer - intellectual property (IP) - may be surprising, because IP laws are all about us, but go mostly unrecognized. Senior Editor Matt Gallaway speaks with the co-editor of A History of Intellectual Property in 50 Objects, Claudy Op den Kamp, on why IP resonates throughout our culture now and the artistic and creative nature of the project.
A History of Intellectual Property in 50 Objects is available now.
May 30, 2019
Simon Harrison is a gesture studies researcher with interests ranging from the form and function of specific gestures (especially associated with negation) to the relationship between language, gesture and cognition in interactions. He is the author of The Impulse to Gesture (2018) and the forthcoming The Body Language Myth. In this podcast Simon discusses how body language is not a ‘separate’ language, how we use gestures in daily life and whether a body language expert can ever ‘switch off’.
The Impulse to Gesture: Where Language, Minds, and Bodies Intersect is available now.
![The Ape that Understood the Universe - available in audiobook!]()
May 20, 2019
The Ape that Understood the Universe is the story of the strangest animal in the world: the human animal. It opens with a question: How would an alien scientist view our species? What would it make of our sex differences, our sexual behavior, our child-rearing patterns, our moral codes, our religions, our languages, and science? The book tackles these issues by drawing on ideas from two major schools of thought: evolutionary psychology and cultural evolutionary theory. The guiding assumption is that humans are animals, and that like all animals, we evolved to pass on our genes. At some point, however, we also evolved the capacity for culture - and from that moment, culture began evolving in its own right. This transformed us from a mere ape into an ape capable of reshaping the planet, travelling to other worlds, and understanding the vast universe of which we're but a tiny, fleeting fragment. Hear an excerpt from The Ape that Understood the Universe, now available in audiobook and available from all major retailers. For more information, visit cambridge.org/audiobooks.
May 13, 2019
In 2017, the world watched as President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un traded personal insults and escalating threats of nuclear war amid unprecedented shows of military force. Former Pentagon insider and Korean security expert Van Jackson traces the origins of the first American nuclear crisis in the post-Cold War era, and explains the fragile, highly unpredictable way that it ended. Hear an excerpt from his book, On the Brink: Trump, Kim, and the Threat of Nuclear War, now available in audiobook and available from all major retailers. For more information, visit cambridge.org/audiobooks.
May 8, 2019
Former Google advertising strategist, now Oxford-trained philosopher James Williams launches a plea to society and to the tech industry to help ensure that the technology we all carry with us every day does not distract us from pursuing our true goals in life. Hear an excerpt from his book, Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy, soon to be available in audiobook and available from all major retailers. For more information, visit cambridge.org/audiobooks.
April 29, 2019
Taking account of the carbon footprint of food production and a growing global population, should we all go vegan? Mike Berners-Lee addresses this question in an excerpt from his new book, There is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years, soon to be available in audiobook and available from all major retailers. For more information, visit cambridge.org/audiobooks.
March 14, 2019
Ever since the collapse of the Third Reich, anxieties have persisted about Nazism's revival in the form of a Fourth Reich. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld joins Cambridge University Press Executive Publisher Michael Watson to discuss why it's valuable to think about how postwar German history could have been different and continued relevance of the term with the rise of authoritarian populism around the world.
The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present is available now.
March 4, 2019
What does a 21st century general look like? Cambridge publisher John Haslam and the author of Command: The Twenty-First-Century General Anthony King discuss this vital question and the transformation of military command over the past two decades.
Command: The Twenty-First-Century General is available now.
February 22, 2019
Martha S. Jones joins Cambridge editor Debbie Gershenowitz for a fascinating discussion about her research, and why birthright citizenship was a core movement in the evolution of American democracy. Professor Jones' book, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America, was named a finalist for the 2019 PROSE Award for best book in U.S./North American History by the American Association of Publishers.
Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America is available now.
