Books published by Beacon Press

First published in Germany in 1946 as Trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen: Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager ( Saying yes to life in spite of everything: a psychologist experiences the Concentration Camp ). First English-language edition published as From Death-Camp to Existe...ntialism: A Psychiatrist's Path to a New Therapy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959).
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What science has gotten so shamefully wrong about women, and the fight, by both female and male scientists, to rewrite what we thought we knew For hundreds of years it was common sense: women were the inferior sex. Their bodies were weaker, their minds feebler, their role subserv...ient. No less a scientist than Charles Darwin asserted that women were at a lower stage of evolution, and for decades, scientists--most of them male, of course--claimed to find evidence to support this. Whether looking at intelligence or emotion, cognition or behavior, science has continued to tell us that men and women are fundamentally different. Biologists claim that women are better suited to raising families or are, more gently, uniquely empathetic. Men, on the other hand, continue to be described as excelling at tasks that require logic, spatial reasoning, and motor skills. But a huge wave of research is now revealing an alternative version of what we thought we knew. The new woman revealed by this scientific data is as strong, strategic, and smart as anyone else. In Inferior, acclaimed science writer Angela Saini weaves together a fascinating--and sorely necessary--new science of women. As Saini takes readers on a journey to uncover science's failure to understand women, she finds that we're still living with the legacy of an establishment that's just beginning to recover from centuries of entrenched exclusion and prejudice. Sexist assumptions are stubbornly persistent: even in recent years, researchers have insisted that women are choosy and monogamous while men are naturally promiscuous, or that the way men's and women's brains are wired confirms long-discredited gender stereotypes. As Saini reveals, however, groundbreaking research is finally rediscovering women's bodies and minds. Inferior investigates the gender wars in biology, psychology, and anthropology, and delves into cutting-edge scientific studies to uncover a fascinating new portrait of women's brains, bodies, and role i
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An entirely fresh take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that examines the life-shaping reverberations of wars and ongoing tensions upon the everyday lives of families in Jerusalem. A secular, diaspora Jew, Lis Harris grew up with the knowledge of the historical wrongs done to ...Jews. In adulthood, she developed a growing awareness of the wrongs they in turn had done to the Palestinian people. It gave her an intense desire to understand how the Israelis' history led them to where they are now. However, she found that top-down political accounts and insider assessments made the lives of those most affected seem like chess pieces. What she wanted was to register the effects of the country's seemingly never-ending conflict on the lives of successive generations. Shuttling back and forth over ten years between East and West Jerusalem, Harris got to know two families: the Israeli Pinczowers/Ezrahis and the Palestinian Abuleils. She came to know members of each family young and old, religious and secular, male and female. As they shared their histories with her, she looked at how each family survived the losses and dislocations that defined their lives; how, in a region where war and its threat were part of the very air they breathed, they gave children hope for their future; and how the adults' understanding of the conflict evolved over time. Combined with a decade of historical research and political analysis, Harris creates a living portrait of one of the most complicated and controversial conflicts of our time.
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Who says women don't go to war? From Vikings and African queens to cross-dressing military doctors and WWII Russian fighter pilots, these are the stories of women for whom battle was not a metaphor. The woman warrior is always cast as an anomaly--Joan of Arc, not GI Jane. But wom...en, it turns out, have always gone to war. In this fascinating and lively world history, Pamela Toler not only introduces us to women who took up arms, she also shows why they did it and what happened when they stepped out of their traditional female roles to take on other identities. These are the stories of women who fought because they wanted to, because they had to, or because they could. Among the warriors you'll meet are: * Tomyris, ruler of the Massagetae, who killed Cyrus the Great of Persia when he sought to invade her lands * The West African ruler Amina of Hausa, who led her warriors in a campaign of territorial expansion for more than 30 years * Boudica, who led the Celtic tribes of Britain into a massive rebellion against the Roman Empire to avenge the rapes of her daughters * The Trung sisters, Trung Trac and Trung Nhi, who led an untrained army of 80,000 troops to drive the Chinese empire out of Vietnam * The Joshigun, a group of 30 combat-trained Japanese women who fought against the forces of the Meiji emperor in the late 19th century * Lakshmi Bai, Rani of Jhansi, who was regarded as the bravest and best military leader in the 1857 Indian Mutiny against British rule * Maria Bochkareva, who commanded Russia's first all-female battalion--the First Women's Battalion of Death--during WWII * Buffalo Calf Road Woman, the Cheyenne warrior who knocked General Custer off his horse at the Battle of Little Bighorn * Juana Azurduy de Padilla, a mestiza warrior who fought in at least 16 major battles against colonizers of Latin America and who is a national hero in Bolivia and Argentina today * And many more spanning from ancient times through the 20th century. By considering the ways i
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The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who... once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire. In An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them. Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples' history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative.
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