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Welcome to Basic Books
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Surfaces and Essences
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Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking
Analogy is the core of all thinking. This is the simple but unorthodox premise that Pulitzer Prize-winning author Douglas Hofstadter and French psychologist Emmanuel Sander defend in their new work. Hofstadter has been grappling with the mysteries of human thought for over thirty years. Now, with his trademark wit and special talent for making complex ideas vivid, he has partnered with Sander to put forth a highly novel perspective on cognition. We are constantly faced with a swirling and intermingling multitude of ill-defined situations. Our brain's job is to try to make sense of this unpredictable, swarming chaos of stimuli. How does it do so? The ceaseless hail of input triggers analogies galore, helping us to pinpoint the essence of what is going on. Often this means the spontaneous evocation of words, sometimes idioms, sometimes the triggering of nameless, long-buried memories. Analogy-making, far from happening at rare intervals, occurs at all moments, defining thinking from top to toe, from the tiniest and most fleeting thoughts to the most creative scientific insights. Like Godel, Escher, Bach before it, Surfaces and Essences will profoundly enrich our understanding of our own minds. ...
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Shadow Warrior
William Egan Colby and the CIA
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Randall B. Woods
Eminent historian Randall B. Woods chronicles the life of William Colby, the World War II commando turned CIA director who revealed the enormous promise and devastating failures of American intelligence.
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Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor
The Forging of American Independence, 1774-1776
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Richard R. Beeman
From a renowned scholar of the American Revolution, the dramatic story of how the Continental Congress transformed America from a colony into a republic.
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Europe
The Struggle for Supremacy, from 1453 to the Present
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Brendan Simms
A sweeping history of Europe since 1453, showing how the struggle over the continent’s rich central territory has shaped the world we live in today.
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July 1914
Countdown to War
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Sean McMeekin
A prize-winning historian presents a compelling new narrative of the outbreak of World War I, showing how Russian belligerence and French duplicity shaped the march to war.
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Evangelical Catholicism
Deep Reform in the 21st-Century Church
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George Weigel
A bestselling, preeminent scholar of modern Catholicism presents a stark yet hopeful appraisal of the current state of the Catholic Church and its options for future reform.
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Theoretical Minimum
What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics
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Leonard Susskind, George Hrabovsky
In a step beyond “popular science,” a string theorist and a citizen scientist teach the amateur what it really takes to hack physics
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