検索キーワード： "Kindle Singles" 社会科学

Best-selling author Frank Delaney deconstructs the Vampire myth through the ages, and shows us how Stoker’s 1897 novel, one of the most widely read books of all time, heightened the allure of sex, the glamour of blood, and the defeat of death in a way that continues to pulse - and faster than ever - on the page and on the screen.

Anders Behring Breivik killed more people in his twin terror attack in Norway last year than any lone gunman ever had in peacetime before him. When he was arrested, he claimed to act on behalf of the Knights Templar, a militant network sworn to protect Europe from Islam. But Norwegian police could find no evidence such a group existed.

Business. Violence. Concerns about profits. Questions of conscience. This is the untold story of the dealings between a US tire giant and Liberia’s Charles Taylor, the man who would become the first head of state convicted of crimes against humanity since the Nazi era.

There's a college affordability crisis happening in the US right now. Tuition rates have soared, while increases in blue collar wages have slowed to a crawl. This adds up to a painful realization for lower-income young people desperately hoping to go to college: there's no way to pay for it. Bobbi Dempsey shares her brutally honest first-person account of the struggle to pay for her children's and her own education on a working-class salary.

Five soldiers injured in the same 2009 bomb blast are a case study in a new epidemic among America's troops, who are grappling with a combination of concussion and post-traumatic stress disorder.

It was called Freedom Summer, and they came to Mississippi by the hundreds, white and black, young and old. Their aim was elemental: secure the right to vote for blacks in the state. The hurdle they'd face would be daunting. Follow a reporter as she journeys to Mississippi and encounters the echoes of family and the struggle for civil rights.

If we judge the West by the state of its families, the West is sick. Millions of children barely see their parents, or for only a few minutes a day. One in two families break down, for better or worse. The casualties throng the family courts. Our maladjusted system has made the ideal of 'mom' and 'dad' - i.e. a loving, constant, adult presence in a child's infancy - a rarity. To speak of the 'maternal instinct' still elicits scorn or embarrassment from some feminists, who continue to mock 'holy motherhood'.

At the edge of Houston sits a community like no other: 65 petite, pastel houses inhabited by survivors of Hurricane Katrina and built by one of the most famous people in the world, Oprah Winfrey. The community, funded with $10 million of Oprah's money just a few months after Katrina, is made up of 65 families picked by nonprofit Habitat for Humanity. All pay around $400 a month in mortgage to live there. The houses are nearly identical. Angel Lane is not only a place, but an idea.

Joan Boice, a retired school teacher afflicted with dementia, hoped to hang on to her dignity and safety when she checked into Emerald Hills, a facility run by America’s largest assisted living company. What she and her family got was an introduction to what many think is the country’s next great health crisis.

Alexanderplatz has long survived as the symbol of a city burdened by its ruinous past. In 2012, twenty-year-old Jonny K. was beaten to death on this infamous Berlin square - and Germany's first multicultural murder brought another shock to a country that’s seen its share. Before the trial, the question of guilt already had an ideological slant: Was Alexanderplatz itself to blame? Was the socialist architecture? The brutality of capitalism?

One afternoon in the late 1970s, deep in the labyrinthine interior of a massive Gothic tower in New Haven, an unsuspecting employee of Yale University opened a long-locked room in the Payne Whitney Gymnasium and stumbled upon something shocking and disturbing. Shocking, because what he found was an enormous cache of nude photographs, thousands and thousands of photographs of young men in front, side, and rear poses. Disturbing, because the photos looked like the record of a bizarre body-piercing ritual.

In a pulls-no-punches essay intended to provoke rational discussion, Stephen King sets down his thoughts about gun violence in America. Anger and grief in the wake of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School are palpable in this urgent piece of writing, but no less remarkable are King's keen thoughtfulness and composure as he explores the contours of the gun-control issue and constructs his argument for what can and should be done.

Marriage is the institution through which our lives are defined: We are married, divorced, single, or widowed. It gives shape to our family relationships. Through marriage, we have access to the words for the closest connections in our lives, such as aunts and uncles, grandparents and step-children. Marriage is an internationally recognized institution that eases international travel and work for spouses. It formalizes a union using traditions we have built up and treasure.

There is an underground telephone network in this country. Al Gilbertson, creator of the "blue box", discovered it the very day news of his own arrest hit the papers. That evening his phone began ringing. Phone phreaks from Seattle, from Florida, from New York, from San Jose, and from Los Angeles began calling him and telling him about the phone-phreak network. He'd get a call from a phone phreak who'd say nothing but, "Hang up and call this number".

In December 2012, the violent gang rape of a young Indian woman in Delhi shocked the world. India was a country of booming modernisation twinned with centuries-old cultural riches. Was the cruelty of the assault indicative of something profoundly disturbing lurking beneath the surface? Sunny Hundal's arresting exploration of how Indian society treats its women argues exactly this. As a country, India has a disproportionate amount of men to women. They are financial and often social burdens upon their parents.

By 2050, nearly 115 million people in the world will have Alzheimer's or some other form of dementia. But when our memories fade, what do we become - a shadow of our old selves or somebody new? After losing her grandmother to Alzheimer's, writer Anu Silfverberg travels to see the future of dementia care. In the Netherlands, a new kind of care home lets patients live in their own pasts. Here, you'll find gated gardens and a pub for the demented along with a stylized class system designed by a team of consultants.

Comic-Con International is the world capital of fandom. Every year 130,000 people flock to San Diego for a five-day marathon of Hollywood star power, sensory overload, gigantic shopping bags, grand feats of imagination, tacky nostalgia, very long lines, and people dressed up as Princess Leia. It's the place where people who love the fantastic side of culture go to express that love and where the companies that want to sell them fantasies in every possible medium try desperately to woo them.

Between 1929 and 1974, more than 7,600 North Carolinians were sterilized, sometimes without informed consent and frequently under coercion. The victims, poor men and women from around the state, were never compensated for losing the ability to conceive children. Nearly 40 years later, during a rancorous 2013 legislative session in which severe restrictions on abortion, voting rights and funding for public education were passed, the state got another chance to right one of its most shameful acts.

Banning gay propaganda can backfire. Spectacularly. In the 1980s, when the UK Government of Margaret Thatcher outlawed the "promotion" of homosexuality, gays were still semi-criminal. As well as immoral, ridiculous, disgusting, diseased, and after your kids. Since then, however, UK gays have been promoted more rapidly and giddily than almost any persecuted, despised group in history. In just a generation or so they have achieved legal equality, civil rights, and even respectability. Today they are gay married by the Conservative Prime Minister, no less. Homosexuality has joined the golf club.

The use of the term "evil" has become controversial. Many are reluctant to apply it at all - even to Adolph Hitler (psychological adjustment problems, you see). And while it is true that the word has been recurrently misused, if we abandon the idea that it is possible to commit a knowingly evil act, we must abandon our belief in free will. Consider the case of "Psycho-Cabbie"....