Civilization

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Sapiens comes the groundbreaking story of how information networks have made, and unmade, our world.

A groundbreaking narrative that explores the ways in which biology and history have shaped our understanding of what it means to be “human”.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs and Steel examines the rise of civilization and the issues its development has raised throughout history....

Yuval Noah Harari returns with an original, compelling, and provocative book, turning his focus toward humanity's future and our quest to upgrade humans into gods....

A lively and engaging narrative history showing the common threads in the cultures that gave birth to our own....

A riveting and authoritative history of the single most important event in English history: The Norman Conquest....

A New York Times-bestselling historian charts how and why societies from ancient Greece to the modern era chose to utterly destroy their foes, and warns that similar wars of obliteration are possible in our time....

This audiobook tells the gripping story of what happened after the Bronze Age collapsed—why some civilizations endured, why some gave way to new ones, and why some disappeared forever.

Here in a single volume is the entire, unabridged recording of Gibbon's masterpiece....

This audiobook narrated by acclaimed archaeologist and best-selling author Eric Cline offers a breathtaking account of how the collapse of an ancient civilized world ushered in the first Dark Ages....

The epic history of the crossroads of the world - the meeting place of East and West and the birthplace of civilization....

The Emperor of All Maladies reveals the many faces of an iconic, shape-shifting disease that is the defining plague of our generation....

Based on the podcast with over one hundred million downloads, Fall of Civilizations brilliantly explores how a range of ancient societies rose to power and sophistication, and how they tipped over into collapse.

Providing an insider's look into the decades of research behind Zecharia Sitchin's complete works as well as an in-depth overview of his theories, this collection includes carefully selected chapters from the Earth Chronicles series....

A fascinating excursion into the history behind the place we call home....

From New York Times bestselling author of The Mosquito, the incredible story of how the horse shaped human history....

An award-winning Oxford history professor overturns the way the West thinks about itself, tracing its innovations and traditions to societies from all over the world and making the case that the West is, and always has been, truly global.

If there is one belief that has united the left and the right, psychologists and philosophers, ancient thinkers and modern ones, it is the tacit assumption that humans are bad. It's a notion that drives newspaper headlines and guides the laws that shape our lives....

From the author of The Emperor of All Maladies, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and The Gene, a #1 New York Times bestseller, comes his most spectacular book yet, an exploration of medicine and our radical new ability to manipulate cells....

Ed Conway embarks on an epic journey across continents, cultures, and epochs to reveal the underpinnings of modern life on Earth—traveling from the sweltering depths of the deepest mine in Europe to spotless silicon chip factories in Taiwan to the eerie green pools where lithium originates....

Life is getting better at an accelerating rate. The pessimists insist that we will reach a turning point and things will get worse. But they have been saying this for 200 years....

The author explores how climate change, the population explosion, and political discord create the conditions for the collapse of civilization....

Mukherjee animates the quest to understand human heredity and its surprising influence on our lives, personalities, identities, fates, and choices....

In this, the first prose history in European civilization, Herodotus describes the growth of the Persian Empire with force, authority, and style....

In 1519 Magellan and his fleet of five ships set sail from Seville, Spain, to discover a water route to the fabled Spice Islands in Indonesia, where the most sought-after commodities flourished....

For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions, and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI—a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. For all that we have accomplished, why are we so self-destructive? Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has shaped us, and our world.

In How the World Made the West, Josephine Quinn poses perhaps the most significant challenge ever to the “civilizational thinking” regarding the origins of Western culture—that is, the idea that civilizations arose separately and distinctly from one another. Rather, she locates the roots of the modern West in everything from the law codes of Babylon, Assyrian irrigation, and the Phoenician art of sail to Indian literature, Arabic scholarship, and the metalworking riders of the Steppe, to name just a few examples.

Putting the games in the context of Rome's rise and dramatic fall, Mannix captures all the history, planning, and savage pageantry that went into creating the first spectator sports. But as Rome begin to fall in the fifth century, so did the games, devolving into nothing more than pointless massacres. In the end, millions of humans and animals were sacrificed in barbaric displays. What were once ceremonies given in honor of gods met an inglorious fate, yet they still captivate the imagination of people today.

The study of ancient Greece has been central to Western conceptions of history since the Renaissance. The Muse of History traces the shifting patterns of this preoccupation in the last three centuries, in which successive generations have reinterpreted the Greeks in the light of their contemporary worlds.

What makes us moral beings? How do we decide what is good and what is evil? And has it always been that way? Hanno Sauer's sweeping new history of humanity, covering five million years of our universal moral values, comes at a crucial moment of crisis for those values, and helps to explain how they arose—and why we need them. Modern societies are in crisis: a shared universal morality seems to be a thing of the past. Hanno Sauer explains why this appearance is deceptive: in fact, there are universal values that all people share.