 | |
| Parent company | Hachette Books |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1950 |
| Founder | Arthur Rosenthal [1] |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Headquarters location | New York, New York |
| Official website | www |
Basic Books is a book publisher founded in 1950 and located in New York, now an imprint of Hachette Book Group. It publishes books in the fields of psychology, philosophy, economics, science, politics, sociology, current affairs, and history.
Basic Books originated as a small, Greenwich Village–based book club marketed to psychoanalysts. Arthur Rosenthal took over the book club in 1950, and under his ownership it soon began producing original books, mostly in the behavioral sciences. Early successes included Ernest Jones’ The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, as well as works by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson. Irving Kristol joined Basic Books in 1960, and helped Basic to expand into the social sciences. Harper & Row purchased the company in 1969. [2]
In 1997, HarperCollins announced that it would merge Basic Books into its trade publishing program, effectively closing the imprint and ending its publishing of serious academic books. That same year, Basic was purchased by the newly created Perseus Books Group. [3] Perseus' publishing business was acquired by Hachette Book Group in 2016. [4] In 2018, Seal Press became an imprint of Basic. [5]
Basic's list of authors includes:
"There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom: An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics" was a lecture given by physicist Richard Feynman at the annual American Physical Society meeting at Caltech on December 29, 1959. Feynman considered the possibility of direct manipulation of individual atoms as a more powerful form of synthetic chemistry than those used at the time. Although versions of the talk were reprinted in a few popular magazines, it went largely unnoticed and did not inspire the conceptual beginnings of the field. Beginning in the 1980s, nanotechnology advocates cited it to establish the scientific credibility of their work.
Richard Phillips Feynman, ForMemRS was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as his work in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. For contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga.
Robert Nozick was an American philosopher. He held the Joseph Pellegrino University Professorship at Harvard University, and was president of the American Philosophical Association. He is best known for his books Philosophical Explanations (1981), which included his counterfactual theory of knowledge, and Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), a libertarian answer to John Rawls' A Theory of Justice (1971), in which Nozick also presented his own theory of utopia as one in which people can freely choose the rules of the society they enter into. His other work involved ethics, decision theory, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology. His final work before his death, Invariances (2001), introduced his theory of evolutionary cosmology, by which he argues invariances, and hence objectivity itself, emerged through evolution across possible worlds.
Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski was a Polish-American diplomat and political scientist. He served as a counselor to President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966 to 1968 and was President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor from 1977 to 1981. Brzezinski belonged to the realist school of international relations, standing in the geopolitical tradition of Halford Mackinder and Nicholas J. Spykman. Brzezinski was the primary organizer of The Trilateral Commission.
Thomas Sowell is an American economist and social theorist who is currently a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Addison-Wesley is a publisher of textbooks and computer literature. It is an imprint of Pearson PLC, a global publishing and education company. In addition to publishing books, Addison-Wesley also distributes its technical titles through the Safari Books Online e-reference service. Addison-Wesley's majority of sales derive from the United States (55%) and Europe (22%).
Michael Eric Dyson is an academic, author, preacher, and radio host. He is Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University. Described by Michael A. Fletcher as "a Princeton Ph.D. and a child of the streets who takes pains never to separate the two", Dyson has authored or edited more than twenty books dealing with subjects such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Marvin Gaye, Barack Obama, Nas's debut album Illmatic, Bill Cosby, Tupac Shakur and Hurricane Katrina.
Mika Emilie Leonia Brzezinski Scarborough is an American journalist, talk show host, liberal political commentator, and author who currently co-hosts MSNBC's weekday morning broadcast show Morning Joe. She was formerly a CBS News correspondent, and was their principal "Ground Zero" reporter during the morning of the September 11 attacks. In 2007 she joined MSNBC as an occasional anchor, and was subsequently chosen as co-host of Morning Joe, alongside Joe Scarborough. She and Scarborough were married on November 24, 2018, with Rep. Elijah Cummings serving as the officiant.
Richard Walter Wrangham is a British anthropologist and primatologist. His research and writing have involved ape behavior, human evolution, violence, and cooking.
Ingram Content Group is an American service provider to the book publishing industry, based in La Vergne, Tennessee. It is a subsidiary of Ingram Industries.
Hachette Book Group (HBG) is a publishing company owned by Hachette Livre, the largest publishing company in France, and the third largest trade and educational publisher in the world. Hachette Livre is a wholly owned subsidiary of Lagardère Group. HBG was formed when Hachette Livre purchased the Time Warner Book Group from Time Warner on March 31, 2006. Its headquarters are located at 1290 Avenue of the Americas, Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Hachette is considered one of the big-six publishing companies, along with Holtzbrinck/Macmillan, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Scholastic, and Simon & Schuster. In one year, HBG publishes approximately 1400+ adult books, 300 books for young readers, and 450 audio book titles. In 2016, the company had 214 books on the New York Times bestseller list, 44 of which reached No. 1.
Paul Halpern is an American Professor of Physics, and Fellow in the Humanities at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia.
Irvin David Yalom is an American existential psychiatrist who is emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, as well as author of both fiction and nonfiction.
Da Capo Press is an American publishing company with headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts. It is now an imprint of Hachette Books.
Jonathan David Haidt is an American social psychologist, Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business, and author. His main areas of study are the psychology of morality and the moral emotions.
Eric Jeffrey Topol is an American cardiologist, scientist, and author. He is the Founder and Director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, a Professor of Molecular Medicine at The Scripps Research Institute, and a Senior Consultant at the Division of Cardiovascular Diseases at Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, California. He is editor-in-chief of Medscape and theheart.org. He has published 3 bestseller books on the future of medicine.The Creative Destruction of Medicine (2010), The Patient Will See You Now (2015), and Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again (2019). He was also commissioned by the UK 2018-2019 to lead planning for the National Health Service's future workforce, integrating genomics, digital medicine, and artificial intelligence.
Perseus Books Group was an American publishing company founded in 1996 by investor Frank Pearl. It was named Publisher of the Year in 2007 by Publishers Weekly magazine for its role in taking on publishers formerly distributed by Publishers Group West and acquiring Avalon Publishing Group. After the death of Frank Pearl, Perseus was sold to Centre Lane Partners in 2015, a private equity firm. In April 2016, its name and publishing business was acquired by Hachette Book Group and its distribution business by Ingram Content Group.
Marilyn Yalom was a feminist author and historian. She was a senior scholar at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, and a professor of French. She served as the institute's director from 1984 to 1985.
Existential Psychotherapy is a book about existential psychotherapy by the American psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom, in which the author, addressing clinical practitioners, offers a brief and pragmatic introduction to European existential philosophy, as well as to existential approaches to psychotherapy. He presents his four ultimate concerns of life—death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness—and discusses developmental changes, psychopathology and psychotherapeutic strategies with regard to these four concerns.
The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure is a 2018 book by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. It is an expansion of a popular essay the two wrote for The Atlantic in 2015. Lukianoff and Haidt argue that overprotection is having a negative effect on university students and that the use of “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” does more harm than good.
