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At his death in 2010, the Anglo-American analytic philosopher John Haugeland left an unfinished manuscript summarizing his life-long engagement with Heidegger’s Being and Time. As illuminating as it is iconoclastic, Dasein Disclosed is not just Haugeland’s Heidegger—this sweeping reevaluation is a major contribution to philosophy in its own right.

In the bloodiest conflict Europe had ever experienced, Amalia Elisabeth fought to save her tiny German state, her Calvinist church, and her children’s inheritance. Tryntje Helfferich reveals how this embattled ruler used diplomacy to play the European powers against one another, while raising one of the continent’s most effective fighting forces.

Recognized as modern China’s preeminent man of letters, Lu Xun (1881–1936) is revered as the nation’s conscience, a writer comparable to Shakespeare or Tolstoy. Gloria Davies’s vivid portrait gives readers a better sense of this influential author by situating the man Mao Zedong hailed as “the sage of modern China” in his turbulent time and place.

A leading interpreter of modernity argues that our culture of limitless self-fulfillment is making millions mentally ill. Training her analytic eye on manic depression and schizophrenia, Liah Greenfeld, in the culminating volume of her trilogy on nationalism, traces these dysfunctions to society’s overburdening demands for self-realization.

As Protestantism expanded across the Atlantic, most evangelists were not Anglo-Americans but were members of the groups that missionaries were trying to convert. Native Apostles reveals the way Native Americans, Africans, and black slaves redefined Christianity and addressed the challenges of slavery, dispossession, and European settlement.

The People’s Bank of China surpasses the Federal Reserve as the world’s biggest central bank. In the first comprehensive account of the evolution of central banking and monetary policy in reform China, Stephen Bell and Hui Feng show how the PBC’s authority grew from a Leninist party-state that once jealously guarded its control.

In an era of skyrocketing tuition and concern over whether college is “worth it,” Paying for the Party is an indispensable contribution to the dialogue assessing the state of American higher education. A powerful exposé of unmet obligations and misplaced priorities, it explains in detail why so many leave college with so little to show for it.

A Physics World Top Ten Book of 2010Steven Weinberg, considered by many to be the preeminent theoretical physicist alive today, continues the wide-ranging reflections that have also earned him a reputation as, in the words of New York Times reporter James Glanz, "e;a powerful writer of prose that can illuminate-and sting."e;

Hartog tells the heartbreaking stories of how families fought over the work of caring for the elderly, and its compensation, in a time before pensions, Social Security, and nursing homes filled this gap. As an explosive economy drew the young away from home, we see how the elderly used promises of inheritance to keep children at their side.

A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year A New Republic Best Book of the YearFinalist, National Jewish Book AwardSir Moses Montefiore (1784-1885) was the preeminent Jewish figure of the nineteenth century-and one of the first truly global celebrities. His story, told here in full for the first time, is a remarkable and illuminating tale.

One Quarter of Humanity presents evidence about historical and contemporary Chinese population behavior that overturns much of the received wisdom about the differences between China and the West. James Lee and Wang Feng argue that there has been effective regulation of population growth in China through a variety of practices that depressed marital fertility to levels far below European standards, and through the widespread practices of infanticide and abortion. These practices and other distinctive features of the Chinese demographic and social system, they argue, led to a different demographic transition in China from the one that took place in the West.

No historical event has left as deep an imprint on America's collective memory as the Civil War. In the war's aftermath, Americans had to embrace and cast off a traumatic past. David Blight explores the perilous path of remembering and forgetting, and reveals its tragic costs to race relations and America's national reunion.

Mountaineering has served as a metaphor for civilization triumphant. A fascinating study of the first ascents of the major Alpine peaks and Mt. Everest, The Summits of Modern Man reveals the significance of our encounters with the world's most forbidding heights and how difficult it is to imagine nature in terms other than conquest and domination.

There is more to the story of mass incarceration than civil rights backlash politics. It is also a religious story. Aaron Griffith points to the key role played by evangelical Christians, who worked for conversion of prisoners and pushed an anticrime agenda that, while ostensibly colorblind, exacerbated racial inequality in the justice system.

Economists say there is a limit to what we gain by buying consumer goods. Americans say they want to work less. Yet we continue toiling away and use the proceeds to buy, buy, buy. Why? Stephen Rosenberg offers a novel theory, arguing that workers have learned to treat goods as stores of potential free time, legitimating endless wage work.

It is no wonder literary criticism is so sullen. It is too philosophical, too much indebted to the dour Walter Benjamin, wedded to aestheticized helplessness. Lit crit needs new inspirations: the sober cheer of Wallace Stevens; the loving eye of Rembrandt; romance, melodrama, and wit. Let there be more poetry, Paul Bove says, and less cynicism.

Kamandaki's influential The Essence of Politics redefined political thought in early medieval India. Its lessons range from the finer points of military strategy and economic policy to the moral qualities of effective rulers. The Sanskrit text, presented here in the Devanagari script, accompanies a new English prose translation.

In 1499, Milan was an independent state with a stable government. But over the next thirty years, it descended into chaos amid the Italian Wars. John Gagne details Milan's social and political breakdown. The Renaissance may have been the cradle of the modern nation-state, but it was also a time when sophisticated sovereigns collapsed.

Under French rule, majority Muslim Algeria became one of the world's largest wine producers. Owen White explores the impact of the wine industry on what was France's most important possession-and on the Algerians for whom grapevines became a hated symbol of colonial exploitation.

John Christopoulos provides a comprehensive account of abortion in early modern Italy. Bringing together medical, religious, and legal perspectives, he explores the meanings of a practice that was officially banned yet widely practiced and generally tolerated, demonstrating that Italy was hardly a haven for Catholic anti-abortion absolutism.

The romance Lilavai, an early ninth-century poem attributed to Kouhala, is a complexly woven narrative of love and fate centered on three young women: Lilavai, princess of today's Sri Lanka, and her cousins Mahanumai and Kuvalaavali. A new edition of the Prakrit text, presented in the Devanagari script, accompanies a new English prose translation.

The Joy of Playing, the Joy of Thinking brings together two sensitive minds in an exhilarating conversation on the arts. Charles Rosen, concert pianist and pioneering musicologist, and writer Catherine Temerson range widely-from musical aesthetics to tales of the great composers, the development of modernism, and the need to play.

The push for federal gun reform is foundering. Ian Ayres and Fredrick Vars look instead to libertarian ideas that can survive judicial review. Individuals can renounce gun-ownership rights, which prevents suicide. Citizens should be able to petition for confiscation from unlawful possessors. While Congress and the courts argue, lives can be saved.

Having served as a Senior Economist on the President's Council of Economic Advisors with responsibility for health care policy during both the Bush and Clinton administrations, Glied provides a compelling analysis of the current health care crisis and offers a new framework for reform.

Physicians were essential to the Manhattan Project, keeping participants and Americans near test sites safe from radiation. But they also downplayed the risks when military exigency demanded. James Nolan tells the story of these conflicted healers, who used their medical authority to enable the most lethal form of warfare humanity has yet devised.

Geoffrey Galt Harpham argues that scholars play a unique role in liberal society, manifesting in refined form the freedoms it guarantees and demanding that it make good on those same guarantees. Far from ivory-tower intellectuals, scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Linda Nochlin undertake the radical social act of questioning received wisdom.

Trexler brings a new perspective to religious spectacle in an engrossing exploration of the annual passion play at Iztapalapa, the largest and poorest borough of Mexico City. After tracing the history of European passion theater, Trexler examines the process by which representations of the passion were established in the Americas.