Open Book Publishers

"This book is intended to help students prepare for entrance examinations in mathematics and scientific subjects, including STEP (Sixth Term Examination Papers). STEP examinations are used by Cambridge colleges as the basis for conditional offers in mathematics and sometimes in other mathematics-related subjects. They are also used by Warwick University, and many other mathematics departments recommend that their applicants practice on past papers...

"Existing textbooks on international relations treat history in a cursory fashion and perpetuate a Euro-centric perspective. This textbook pioneers a new approach by historicizing the material traditionally taught in International Relations courses, and by explicitly focusing on non-European cases, debates and issues. The volume is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on the international systems that traditionally existed in Europe, East...

"While current economic theory focuses on prices and games, this book models economic settings where harmony is established through one of the following societal conventions: 1. A power relation according to which stronger agents are able to force weaker ones to do things against their will. 2. A norm that categorizes actions as permissible or forbidden. 3. A status relation over alternatives which limits each agent's choices. 4. Systematic biases...

"Gábor Lövei's scientific communication course for students and scientists explores the intricacies involved in publishing primary scientific papers, and has been taught in more than twenty countries. Writing and Publishing Scientific Papers is the distillation of Lövei's lecture notes and experience gathered over two decades; it is the coursebook many have been waiting for. The book's three main sections correspond with the three main stages...

"Feliks Volkhovskii (1846-1914) was a significant figure in the Russian revolutionary movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He lived through pivotal changes ranging from the rise of 'nihilism' in the 1860s and the growth of populism in the 1870s, through to the creation of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in the early 1900s. Imprisoned three times before he turned thirty, he spent ten years in Siberian exile before fleeing abroad...

"Are humans violent or peaceful by nature? We are both. In this ambitious and wide-ranging book, Agner Fog presents a ground-breaking new argument that explains the existence of differently organised societies using evolutionary theory. It combines natural sciences and social sciences in a way that is rarely seen. According to a concept called regality theory, people show a preference for authoritarianism and strong leadership in times of war or collective...

"Mou Zongsan is arguably the most important Chinese philosopher of the twentieth century. This work delves into the philosopher's exploration of self and subjectivity, setting Mou Zongsan's theories against Western paradigms. Mou contrasts Western 'horizontal' model, based on the separation of subject and object, and aimed at cognitive enhancement, with the 'vertical' view dominant in the Confucian and Daoist tradition. The vertical model has, at...

"For his fifteenth-century followers, Jesus was everywhere - from baptism to bloodcults to bowling. This sweeping and unconventional investigation looks at Jesus across one hundred forty years of social, cultural, and intellectual history. Mystics married him, Renaissance artists painted him in three dimensions, Muslim poets praised his life-giving breath, and Christopher ("Christ-bearing") Columbus brought the symbol of his cross to the Americas....

"In this elementary textbook, Philip S. Peek draws on his twenty-five years of teaching experience to present the ancient Greek language in an imaginative and accessible way that promotes creativity, deep learning, and diversity. The course is built on three pillars: memory, analysis, and logic. Readers memorize the top 250 most frequently occurring ancient Greek words, the essential word endings, the eight parts of speech, and the grammatical concepts...

"From Goethe to Gundolf: Essays on German Literature and Culture is a collection of Roger Paulin's groundbreaking essays, spanning the last forty years. The work represents his major research interests of Romanticism and the reception of Shakespeare in Germany, but also explores a broader range of themes, from poetry and the public memorialization of poets to fairy stories - all meticulously researched, yet highly accessible. As a comprehensive examination...