Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Social science

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest 1997

by Anne Fadiman

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction

When three-month-old Lia Lee Arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which...

That Used to Be Us

by Thomas L. Friedman & Michael Mandelbaum

America is in trouble. We face four major challenges on which our future depends, and we are failing to meet them—and if we delay any longer, soon it will be too late for us to pass along the American dream...

On Rumors

by Cass R. Sunstein

Many of us are being misled. Claiming to know the “pals” of presidential aspirants, dark secrets about public officials, and hidden causes of the current economic crisis, those who spread rumors know precisely...

On Wheels

by Michael Holroyd

From the bestselling author of A Book of Secrets, a brisk, charming, illustrated account of a motoring life

As a child, Michael Holroyd spent his best hours in his family’s cramped garage, which contained...

The Upcycle

by Michael Braungart, William McDonough & President Bill Clinton

From the authors of Cradle to Cradle, we learn what’s next: The Upcycle

The Upcycle is the eagerly awaited follow-up to Cradle to Cradle, one of the most consequential ecological manifestoes of our time....

Picking Up

by Robin Nagle

America’s largest city generates garbage in torrents—11,000 tons from households each day on average. But New Yorkers don’t give it much attention. They leave their trash on the curb or drop it in a...

The Rule of the Clan

by Mark S. Weiner

A revealing look at the role kin-based societies have played throughout history and around the world

A lively, wide-ranging meditation on human development that offers surprising lessons for the future of modern...

This Is Running for Your Life

by Michelle Orange

Michelle Orange uses the lens of pop culture to decode the defining characteristics of our media-drenched times

In This Is Running for Your Life, Michelle Orange takes us from Beirut to Hawaii to her grandmother’s...

If the War Goes On . . .

by Hermann Hesse

One of the most astonishing aspects of Hesse's career is the clear-sightedness and consistency of his political views, his passionate espousal of pacifism and internationalism from the start of World War I to...

Missing Out

by Adam Phillips

A transformative book about the lives we wish we had and what they can teach us about who we are

All of us lead two parallel lives: the one we are actively living, and the one we feel we should have had...

Sidewalk

Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest 1999

by Mitchell Duneier, Hakim Hasan & Ovie Carter

An exceptional ethnography marked by clarity and candor, Sidewalk takes us into the socio-cultural environment of those who, though often seen as threatening or unseemly, work day after day on “the blocks”...

The Dialectic of Sex

by Shulamith Firestone

“No one can understand how feminism has evolved without reading this radical, inflammatory second-wave landmark.” —Naomi Wolf

Originally published in 1970, when Shulamith Firestone was just twenty-five...

Walkable City

by Jeff Speck

Jeff Speck has dedicated his career to determining what makes cities thrive. And he has boiled it down to one key factor: walkability.

     The very idea of a modern metropolis evokes visions of bustling...

Against the Grain

by Richard Manning

In this provocative, wide-ranging book, Richard Manning offers a dramatically revisionist view of recent human evolution, beginning with the vast increase in brain size that set us apart from our primate relatives...

Food's Frontier

by Richard Manning

An eye-opening look at how the world will feed itself in the coming decades

By now it is clear that the techniques of the first "Green Revolution" that averted mass starvation a generation ago --pesticides, chemical...

The Women

by Hilton Als

A New York Times Notable Book

Daring and fiercely original, The Women is at once a memoir, a psychological study, a sociopolitical manifesto, and an incisive adventure in literary criticism. It is conceived as...

Critical Mass

by Philip Ball

Are there any "laws of nature" that influence the ways in which humans behave and organize themselves? In the seventeenth century, tired of the civil war ravaging England, Thomas Hobbes decided that he would...

My American Revolution

by Robert Sullivan

Americans tend to think of the Revolution as a Massachusetts-based event orchestrated by Virginians, but in fact the war took place mostly in the Middle Colonies—in New York and New Jersey and the parts of...

Blood and Belonging

Lionel Gelber Prize 1994

by Michael Ignatieff

Until the end of the Cold War, the politics of national identity was confined to isolated incidents of ethnics strife and civil war in distant countries. Now, with the collapse of Communist regimes across Europe...

Manifesta [10th Anniversary Edition]

by Jennifer Baumgardner & Amy Richards

In the year 2000, girl culture was clearly ascendant. From Lilith Fair to Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the WNBA, it seemed that female pride was the order of the day. Yet feminism was also at a crossroads; “girl...