Discover books that make people, society and history easier to understand.
Explore our most popular social science books, ranked by community activity, ratings and reading interest.
Helpful when you want biographies, context and books that explain the world around you. If you are looking for social science, this category is a strong place to browse next.
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Carlo Rovelli
Carlo Rovelli explains why physics does not know time as we experience it: no shared present, no direction except through entropy. Short cha... (Automatically generated book description)
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Henrik Fexeus
Henrik Fexeus, a Swedish communication expert, explains how to read body language, interpret nonverbal signals, and use psychology-based tec... (Automatically generated book description)
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Eric Klinenberg
Eric Klinenberg shows through libraries, swimming pools and parks that the places where strangers meet decide the cohesion of a society, and... (Automatically generated book description)
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Michael Gross
Michael Gross tells the history of a single New York apartment building on Park Avenue and of the families who lived there, as a social hist... (Automatically generated book description)
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Jaron Lanier
Jaron Lanier tells the history of virtual reality, which he helped invent, mixed with his own life: childhood in New Mexico, Silicon Valley,... (Automatically generated book description)
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Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D.
Jean Shinoda Bolen maps patterns in womens lives onto seven Greek goddesses and uses them as a frame of interpretation. From the Jungian sch... (Automatically generated book description)
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George Lipsitz
George Lipsitz shows that wealth differences in the United States arose not only from prejudice but from law and lending: whiteness as an in... (Automatically generated book description)
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Sally Denton
Sally Denton unpicks a Kentucky case in which police officers, politicians and drug smugglers were the same people. It came apart after a pl... (Automatically generated book description)
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Sebastian Junger
Sebastian Junger walked the railway lines across the United States with friends over a year, asking what freedom costs and who can afford it... (Automatically generated book description)
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Henry Jenkins
Henry Jenkins describes how content spreads across media and how audiences write themselves into it, from fan forums to brands that turn it ... (Automatically generated book description)
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Eric Klinenberg
Over seven hundred people died in the Chicago heat wave of 1995. Eric Klinenberg shows that what decided it was not temperature but neighbou... (Automatically generated book description)
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Andrés Reséndez
Andres Resendez shows that the enslavement of indigenous people in the Americas lasted longer and took in more people than long assumed, and... (Automatically generated book description)
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Jean Shinoda Bolen
Jean Shinoda Bolen extends her approach to the second half of life, mapping it onto thirteen goddesses as a frame for women growing older. (Automatically generated book description)
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Bruce Schneier
Bruce Schneier examines why societies work at all when cheating pays, and where trust, rules and technology take over from one another. (Automatically generated book description)
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Kelly Weill
Kelly Weill investigates the flat earth movement: who takes part, how recommendation algorithms brought them together, and why arguments rar... (Automatically generated book description)
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Richard L Currier
Richard Currier tells human history through eight technologies, from tools through fire to the digital, and asks how far they have shaped us... (Automatically generated book description)
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Kevin R. Grazier
Scientists examine the world of the Frank Herbert novel Dune: the ecology of a desert planet, sandworms, the water cycle and the effect of t... (Automatically generated book description)
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Tony Schwartz
Tony Schwartz, advertising man and sound archivist, explains communication not as transmission but as striking what is already in the listen... (Automatically generated book description)
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David Eagleman
David Eagleman explains how far the brain rebuilds itself: after injury, when learning new skills, even when given entirely new senses. With... (Automatically generated book description)
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Gary Hoppenstand
A lively introduction to the theories and methods of popular culture studies: from story papers and penny dreadfuls through to social media ... (Automatically generated book description)
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Arlie Hochschild
Arlie Hochschild spent three years inside an American corporation and found that many employees would rather be at the office than at home. ... (Automatically generated book description)
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Richard E Nisbett
Richard E. Nisbett and Dov Cohen show why violence is distributed differently in the American South than in the North, and trace it to a cul... (Automatically generated book description)
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Peter Hall
Peter Halls history of twentieth-century urban planning: the ideas, the buildings, and the social problems from which both arose. (Automatically generated book description)
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Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D.
Jean Shinoda Bolen assigns women to seven Greek goddesses and turns that into a tool for self-description. An anniversary edition after thir... (Automatically generated book description)
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Patrick E. McGovern
Patrick McGovern follows the trail of wine back to the Stone Age, using chemistry on potsherds rather than legends. (Automatically generated book description)
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W. Warren Wagar
W. Warren Wagar tells world history from 1995 to 2200 as a retrospective from the future: corporate rule, collapse, and a fresh start. (Automatically generated book description)
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Richard E. Nisbett
Richard E. Nisbett against the thesis that intelligence is inherited, with the evidence that environment and schooling change it measurably. (Automatically generated book description)
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Eric Klinenberg
Eric Klinenberg on the concentration of American local media in few hands, and on what disappears when the newsroom on the spot closes. (Automatically generated book description)
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Sandro Gaycken
A collected volume that examines the German surveillance debate beyond the usual polarization. Contributions analyze the structures of the i... (Automatically generated book description)
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Christoph Butterwegge
A critical introduction to neoliberalism: foundations, schools of thought, and consequences for the welfare state and democracy. Aimed at re... (Automatically generated book description)
