International Education

The Education of an Idealist traces Power’s extraordinary journey, from Irish immigrant to human rights activist to United States Ambassador to the United Nations. Power began her career as a war correspondent and as a vocal critic of US foreign policy, and then put her ideals into practice while working with Obama in the Senate, on the campaign trail, and throughout his presidency. Power’s perspective on government is unique, as she takes us from the streets of war-torn Bosnia to the Situation Room and out into the world of high-stakes diplomacy.

In July 1995, San Jose Mercury-News reporter Gary Webb found the Big One - the blockbuster story every journalist secretly dreams about - without even looking for it. A simple phone call concerning an unexceptional pending drug trial turned into a massive conspiracy involving the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, L.A. and Bay Area crack cocaine dealers, and the Central Intelligence Agency.

In his 1807 work Phenomenology of Spirit, G. W. F. Hegel introduced the world to his philosophical system. His most influential work - and the culmination of the German Idealist movement begun in the late 18th century as a response to the works of Immanuel Kant - the book remains one of the undisputed classics of Western thought.

Issues of human rights and freedoms always inflame passions, and John Rawls's A Theory of Justice will do the same. Published in 1971, it links the idea of social justice to a basic sense of fairness that recognizes human rights and freedoms. Controversially, though, it also accepts differences in the distribution of goods and services - as long as they benefit the worst off in society.

Negativity is a normal part of life. Nobody can be positive all that time because life isn’t always going to be perfect. That said, sometimes negativity infiltrates our minds and bodies and never leaves. A good day can be ruined by your mind dwelling on something stupid that happened years ago. You sit for hours ruminating over it, and before you realize it, you have wasted a great day. We’ve all had experiences like that, and they suck.

Gordon W. Allport's 1954 book The Nature of Prejudice helped mold the ways in which psychologists investigate prejudice. But the American's work reached further than that, also helping to shape society as a whole and making a substantial contribution to the US Civil Rights Movement, as well as to the country's anti-discrimination and anti-segregation laws of the 1950s and 1960s.

First published in 1651, Leviathan drove important discussions about where kings get their authority to rule and what those kings must, in turn, do for their people. This is known as the "social contract". Thomas Hobbes wrote the book while exiled from his native England following the English Civil War that unseated King Charles I. In the face of England's radical - if temporary - rejection of its monarchy, Hobbes wanted to explain why it was important to have a strong central government, which in his time meant having a sovereign at its head.

David Graeber's 2011 book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, seeks to overturn hundreds of years of economic theory, specifically the idea that people have a natural inclination to trade with each other and that the concept of money developed spontaneously to overcome the inefficiencies of a bartering system. The US-born social activist uses his training as an anthropologist to trace the histories of money and of debt and reaches the conclusion that money was in fact created by the state as a means of exploiting the poor.

American author Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's 1996 work, Hitler's Willing Executioners, is one of the most controversial history books of modern times. While most historians have sought to explain the horror of the Holocaust by focusing on Nazi leaders and their ideologies, Goldhagen set out to investigate whether ordinary Germans enthusiastically embraced their goals. His conclusion: "eliminationist anti-Semitism" - a genocidal hatred of Jews unique to Germany - caused the Holocaust.

Michel Foucault had already written extensively about medicine, madness, and prisons. But in the latter days of his career, he turned to the subject of sexuality, planning six volumes on the subject. He completed three before dying of an AIDS-related illness in 1984. Foucault's History of Sexuality Vol. 1 is a study of the evolution of cultural ideas about sex in the West since the end of the 17th century. Volume two looked at attitudes toward sex in ancient Greece; volume three investigated sex in ancient Rome.

How do those in power exercise that power over a state's citizens? French thinker Michel Foucault's 1975 work Discipline and Punish looks to answer this question by investigating the prison system. Foucault does not believe that the modern-day system developed out of reformers' humanitarian concerns. He argues that prison both created and then became part of a bigger system of surveillance that extends throughout society.

Can the Subaltern Speak? is a classic of postcolonial studies, the discipline that examines the impact of colonial control on countries that gained their independence from European powers from the 1940s onwards. The essay, written in 1988 by Calcutta-born scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, argues that a core problem for the poorest and most marginalized in society (the subalterns) is that they have no platform to express their concerns, and no voice to affect policy debates or demand a fairer share.

English historian Christopher Hill turned thinking about the English Civil Wars (1642-51) on its head when he published The World Turned Upside Down in 1972. Instead of focusing on power struggles in the upper echelons of English society - on the battle between the monarchy and would-be republicans - Hill looked to develop "history from below", investigating the lives of ordinary people, the way they saw society, and their political hopes for the future.

First published in 1973, Albert Bandura's Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis is a groundbreaking work that helped lay the foundations of the discipline of social psychology. Much of what we now know about the influences of the early childhood environment on delinquency and anti-social behavior can be traced back to Bandura's work. In the book, he uses the subject of aggression to demonstrate and explore the usefulness of what is called social learning theory.

US-born historian of Europe Timothy Snyder first published Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin in 2010. In it, he argues that previous accounts of World War II have kept Nazi and Soviet crimes unduly separate, with much more attention paid to Adolf Hitler's atrocities than Joseph Stalin's. Snyder's view is that a definitive history of the period must depict the suffering of all of the conflict's victims.

Austrian-born economist Friedrich Hayek's 1944 work, The Road to Serfdom, analyzes the ways in which excessive government planning can erode democracy. Published while World War II still raged, the work draws influential parallels between the totalitarianism of both socialism and Nazism and increasing control exerted by Western democracies.

Published in 1961, the year of Frantz Fanon's death, The Wretched of the Earth is both a powerful analysis of the psychological effects of colonization and a rallying cry for violent uprising and independence. The book rejects colonial assumptions that the people of colonized countries need to be guided by their European colonizers because they are somehow less evolved or civilized. Fanon argues that violence is justified to purge colonialism not just from the countries themselves, but from the very souls of their inhabitants.

First available in 1689, John Locke's Two Treatises of Government is considered one of the most important works ever written on the foundations of government. Published anonymously, it argues against the popular idea at the time that monarchs have a God-given right to rule. Instead Locke proposes that sovereignty - supreme authority - ultimately resides with the people.

Are you tired of wasting your time and energy worrying all the time? Do you see the irrationality of constant worrying, but you can't seem to stop doing it? Are you ready to learn how to deal with anxiety and depression without taking drugs? This audiobook will walk you through precisely why, how, and what you need to do to stop worrying and start living your life. Though stress is an inseparable part of our lives, we can easily manage it using simple strategies and techniques. All we need is the willingness to learn these techniques and the ability to take action.

Why do we want to justify our decisions, even if they appear to be irrational? The answer lies in cognitive dissonance, the mental discomfort we experience when we hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time. In A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, first published in 1957, American social psychologist Leon Festinger investigates the problem. Festinger puts forward the idea that we have developed mechanisms to try to deal with the stress brought on by cognitive dissonance.