Why Healthy Sleep is Key for Academic Achievement
By Arianna Huffington, author of The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night At A Time (Harmony, April 2016)
There is more and more evidence of how sleep deprivation is affecting students, both their physical and mental health and their ability to learn. At the same time, we are living in a golden age of sleep science, revealing all the ways in which sleep plays a vital role in our decision making, emotional intelligence, cognitive function, and creativity – in other words, the building blocks of a great education. This science is already being applied, as many schools have seen positive results from pushing back start times. (more…)
Learn the History of One City, through One Special Life
By George Weigel, author of City of Saints: A Pilgrimage To John Paul II’s KRAKóW (Image, October 2015)
Request a complimentary examination copy: email rhacademic@penguinrandomhouse.com with your name, college and course information.
There are many ways to learn a city, but learning it through the life of one of its greatest sons may be as good an introduction as any. Especially when the city is historic, beautiful Kraków, and the son is Karol Wojtyła, who would become Pope St. John Paul II.
Wojtyła spent exactly forty years in Krakow, as student, priest, university lecturer and chaplain, and archbishop. Between 1938 and 1978, the drama of the city he called “my beloved Kraków” worked its way into the texture of his mind and soul: Kraków’s love of freedom; Kraków’s tolerance and civility; Kraków’s life as an artistic and intellectual center; Kraków as a city of saints. When he was called from Kraków to Rome by the conclave that elected him pope, Wojtyła took that Cracovian experience with him. And then, as Pope John Paul II, he used the best of Kraków’s history and culture to bend the curve of the future in a more humane direction, using distinctively Cracovian themes and tools to lead the revolution of conscience that would eventually breach the Berlin Wall and end the division of Europe. (more…)
“Genius” Grant Winner Matthew Desmond on Eviction, Poverty and Profit in the American City
By Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Crown, March 2016)
Request an advanced reader’s copy: email rhacademic@penguinrandomhouse.com with your name, college and course information.
I began this project because I wanted to write a different kind of book about poverty in America. Instead of focusing exclusively on poor people or poor places, I began searching for a process that involved poor and well-off people alike. Eviction—the forced removal of families from their homes—was such a process. Little did I know, at the outset, how immense this problem was, or how devastating its consequences. (more…)
Free Reader Copies of The Full Catastrophe: Travels Among the New Greek Ruins by James Angelos Available
Over the last three years, tiny Greece, normally associated with ancient philosophers and marble ruins, whitewashed island villages and cerulean seas, has repeatedly brought world financial markets into panic and has cast the 60-year project of cultivating European unity into question. In The Full Catastrophe, journalist James Angelos makes sense of these two images of Greece and explains how and why Greece became the corrupt, socially fractious and bankrupt nation it is today. With vivid narratives and engaging reporting, he brings to life some of the causes of the country’s financial collapse, and examines the changes emerging in its aftermath.
The Full Catastrophe was published on June 6th, 2015. Please email rhacademic@penguinrandomhouse with your name, college and course information to request a complimentary copy.
Click here to read to about the book in The New York Times Book Review
Free Advance Reader Copies of Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder Now Available
In this deeply researched and profoundly original book, Yale University history professor and historian Timothy Snyder has written a history of extermination and survival, an explanation of an unprecedented crime of the twentieth century that might serve as a precedent in the twenty-first. It tells the story of the Holocaust based on an array of new archival sources from eastern Europe and the voices of Jewish survivors to present the mass murder of the Jews in comprehensible historical terms–and thus all the more terrifyingly.
Black Earth is scheduled to be released on September 8th, 2015. Please email rhacademic@penguinrandomhouse.com with your name, college and course information to request a complimentary advance reader copy.
Click here to read about Professor Snyder’s Andrew Carnegie Fellowship award.
How to “Create Value in the World” with Zero to One
By Blake Masters, co-author of Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (Crown Business, September 2014)
What important truth do very few people agree with you on? It sounds like an easy question. It isn’t. Wrestle with it for a few moments and you may be tempted to give up, but don’t. Every great business—indeed, every way in which the future will be different and better than the present—is rooted in a good answer to this question. Contrarian truths may be hard to find, but in a world in which so much of what we do is to simply repeat what’s been done before, creating new value means thinking from first principles, not following the crowd. (more…)
Measuring the Progress of Women with The XX Factor
This semester, students taking “Social Scientific Perspectives on the Family and the Market”, a History course at the Catholic University of America, read Alison Wolf’s The XX Factor as a core text for the class. In the book, English economist and journalist Alison Wolf examines why educated women are now working longer hours and how feminism has actually created a less equal world. Professor Jerry Z. Muller, who incorporated the book into his curriculum, remarked that the book “not only draws together research from a wide range of social sciences, but combines it with well-grounded speculation and sound judgment.” To read an excerpt from the book, click here.
Alison Wolf is an academic and writer living in London. She is currently the Sir Roy Griffiths Professor of Public Sector Management at King’s College, London. She also advises the UK government on education policy.
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Philosophy Department Uncovers the Source Of Spontaneity With Trying Not To Try
This spring, more than 35 students in North Central College’s introduction to philosophy course will use Edward Slingerland’s Trying Not to Try. The book, which blends Eastern thought and cutting-edge science to explain why we find spontaneity so elusive, will support students as they learn the tenants of philosophy. Although the text goes on-sale in March, complimentary advanced reader copies (ARCs) are available by request here.
Author Edward Slingerland was educated at Princeton, Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley. He currently is a Professor of Asian Studies and Canada Research Chair in Chinese Thought and Embodied Cognition at the University of British Columbia.
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The Broken Spears: UC Irvine Anthropology Course Tackles The Conquest of Mexico
The Origins of Global Interdependence, an anthropology class at the University of California at Irvine, will be using Michuel Leon-Portilla’s The Broken Spears during the fall 2013 semester. Examining the Aztec perspective of the Conquest of Mexico, Leon-Portilla’s book expands the Conquests history to include the voices of the indigenous peoples, and includes accounts from native Aztec descendants across the centuries. All 300 students enrolled will be required to read the book.
The Broken Spears, called “[a] moving and powerful account” by the Los Angeles Times, will allow UC Irvine students to bear witness to the extraordinary vitality of oral tradition.
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The 300-pound Gorilla in the Room: University of Arizona Philosophy Class Selects The Invisible Gorilla
The University of Arizona has selected The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons as a required text for their Philosphy Department’s Logic & Critical Thinking Course. Based on the authors’ “Gorillas in Our Midst” study, The Invisible Gorilla highlights the work of Chabris and Simons, as well as other researchers, as they investigate attention, perception, memory, and reasoning. The authors ultimately show students how and why the perception of the mind is often at fault.
Both Chabris and Simons, have received PhDs from Harvard and Cornell respectively.
“A fascinating look at little-known illusions that greatly affect our daily lives…offers surprising insights into just how clueless we are about how our minds work and how we experience the world…Bound to have wide popular appeal.”—Kirkus Reviews
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