Like Birds? Like books? Then you’ll LIKE our first book giveaway for the New Year: The Princeton Encyclopedia of Birds edited by Christopher Perrins.

The Princeton Encyclopedia of Birds is the definitive one-volume reference–an essential guide for amateur bird enthusiasts and professional ornithologists alike.

• Covers all the bird families of the world
• Describes form and function, distribution, diet, social behavior, breeding biology, and conservation and status
• Features more than 1,000 spectacular color photos and illustrations
• Includes “Factfile” panels with color distribution maps and scale drawings for at-a-glance reference
• Explores special topics in depth
• Written by leading biologists and conservationists

“Packed with photos, illustrations, and lively text that comfortably bridges the gap between a child’s reference tool and a doctoral thesis.”–Scott Kirkwood, National Parks Magazine

Anyone who LIKES us on Facebook is automatically entered in each of our weekly book giveaways. Not a PUP follower yet, then click the “Like” button located after our name, Princeton University Press, at the top of PUP’s Facebook page. Once you LIKE us, you are automatically entered in our FB weekly book giveaways.

The Princeton Encyclopedia of Birds edited by Christopher Perrins

From a Swedish hotel made of ice to the enigma of UFOs, from a tragedy on Lake Minnetonka to the gold mine of cyberpornography, The Princeton Reader brings together more than 90 favorite essays by 75 distinguished writers. This collection of nonfiction pieces by journalists who have held the Ferris/McGraw/Robbins professorships at Princeton University offers a feast of ideas, emotions, and experiences–political and personal, light-hearted and comic, serious and controversial–for anyone to dip into, contemplate, and enjoy.

The volume includes a plethora of topics from the environment, terrorism, education, sports, politics, and music to profiles of memorable figures and riveting stories of survival. These important essays reflect the high-quality work found in today’s major newspapers, magazines, broadcast media, and websites.

The book’s contributors include such outstanding writers as:

• Ken Armstrong of the Seattle Times
• Jill Abramson, Jim Dwyer, and Walt Bogdanich of the New York Times
• Evan Thomas of Newsweek
• Joel Achenbach and Marc Fisher of the Washington Post
• Nancy Gibbs of Time
• Jane Mayer, John McPhee, Alex Ross and John Seabrook of the New Yorker
• Alexander Wolff, senior writer at Sports Illustrated
• Michael Dobbs, formerly of Washington Post, now a Cold War historian and author
• Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times‘ Beijing Bureau Chief
• James V. Grimaldi, Washington Post, Pulitzer prize-winner
• Roberta Oster Sachs, formerly ABC, CBS, and NBC news and Emmy Award winner, now University of Richmond School of Law
• Joel Stein, columnist and a regular contributor to Time
• Claudia Roth Pierpont, staff writer at New Yorker
• Greil Marcus, music and culture critic, author, has been a columnist for the New York Times, The Believer

For a complete listing, visit:
http://press.princeton.edu/TOCs/c9322.html

The perfect collection for anyone who enjoys compelling narratives, The Princeton Reader contains a depth and breadth of nonfiction that will inspire, provoke, and endure.

John McPhee’s many books include Annals of the Former World, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. Carol Rigolot is executive director of the Humanities Council at Princeton University.

We invite you to read chapter one online:
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s9322.pdf

The Princeton Reader:
Contemporary Essays by Writers and Journalists at Princeton University
Edited by John McPhee & Carol Rigolot

Here is the definitive new edition of the hugely popular collection of Einstein quotations that has sold tens of thousands of copies worldwide and been translated into twenty-five languages.

The Ultimate Quotable Einstein features 400 additional quotes, bringing the total to roughly 1,600 in all. This ultimate edition includes new sections–”On and to Children,” “On Race and Prejudice,” and “Einstein’s Verses: A Small Selection”–as well as a chronology of Einstein’s life and accomplishments, Freeman Dyson’s authoritative foreword, and new commentary by Alice Calaprice.

In The Ultimate Quotable Einstein, readers will also find quotes by others about Einstein along with quotes attributed to him. Every quotation in this informative and entertaining collection is fully documented, and Calaprice has carefully selected new photographs and cartoons to introduce each section.

We invite you to take a look at chapter one online:
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s9268.pdf

Finally a calculus book you can pick up and actually read! Developed especially for students who are motivated to earn an “A” but only score average grades on exams, the Calculus Lifesaver has all the essentials you need to master calculus.

This week’s book giveaway is for all the back-to-school students who have calculus this term or for those of you who just can’t get enough of calculus: The Calculus Lifesaver: All the Tools You Need to Excel at Calculus by Adrian Banner. All of our Facebook followers are automatically entered to win.

“This is an engaging read. Each page engenders at least one smile, often a chuckle, occasionally a belly laugh.”–Charles R. MacCler, author of Honors Calculus

Check out the video page for The Calculus Lifesaver where you can access streaming and downloadable videos of lectures given by the author, Adrian Banner. Most of the examples come from The Calculus Lifesaver.

Timothy Gowers, editor of The Princeton Companion to Mathematics, is mentioned in today’s New York Times article “Step 1: Post Elusive Proof. Step 2: Watch Fireworks”. In an account of a recent attempt to solve what is known as the “P versus NP problem”—one of the most important unsolved problems in theoretical computer science and all of mathematics –reporter John Markoff explores how online collaboration, including analysis and commentary on blogs and wikis, is changing the way science is practiced. Gowers created the Polymath Project in 2009 to encourage collaborative mathematical research projects (see http://polymathprojects.org/about/ for more details).

The Princeton Companion to Mathematics explains the P versus NP problem in articles IV.20 (Computational Complexity, this is an excerpt from the larger article) and V.24 (The P versus NP Problem).

A Dictionary of 20th-Century Communism is the first book of its kind to appear since the end of the Cold War, this indispensable reference provides encyclopedic coverage of communism and its impact throughout the world in the 20th century. With the opening of archives in former communist states, scholars have found new material that has expanded and sometimes altered the understanding of communism as an ideological and political force. A Dictionary of 20th-Century Communism brings this scholarship to students, teachers, and scholars in related fields. In more than 400 concise entries, the book explains what communism was, the forms it took, and the enormous role it played in world history from the Russian Revolution through the collapse of the Soviet Union and beyond.

View samples from the book at:
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9143.html

Do you know what a “fellow traveler” is? Or which event did Albert Schlesinger, Jr., describe as “the most dangerous moment of the Cold War”? Take the quiz to find out.
http://press.princeton.edu/releases/pons_quiz_9143b.pdf

For more information about topics in the book, features and a list of contributors, please visit:

A Dictionary of 20th-Century Communism
Edited by Silvio Pons & Robert Service

Silvio Pons is professor of eastern European history at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and director of the Gramsci Institute Foundation in Rome. His books include The Soviet Union and Europe in the Cold War, 1943–1953 and Stalin and the Inevitable War, 1936–1941. Robert Service teaches Russian history at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Comrades!: A History of World Communism and A History of Twentieth-Century Russia, as well as biographies of Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky.

Michael Kazin, editor of our pathbreaking new reference book The PRINCETON ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN POLITICAL HISTORY, did a Q&A with CNN.com today on the intriguing recent survey that uncovered that 86% of Americans think their government is broken.  Check out the Q&A here.  The good news?  81% of Americans think it can be fixed.

We are extremely pleased and thrilled to see our collaboration with the esteemed international news and commentary provider Project Syndicate and our new book THE PRINCETON ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE WORLD ECONOMY go live on their website.  They bring some of the world’s most distinguished voices to a global community that includes 431 leading newspapers in 150 countries. 

Together with the great folks at Project Syndicate, we’ve created a “Princeton Encyclopedia of the World Economy ” feature that appears on their homepage.  Click on the Wiki to find out the answer to the word of the day–or Terms of Trade!

Inside Higher Ed is expanding the number of blogs they publish and we’re pleased that one of our authors, Mary W. George, recently launched Keywords From a Librarian.

The blog, according to George, is written, “not from the dead, but from the depths, that murky blob marked library on your campus map, that innocent but somehow chilling link on your institution’s home page, that awkward corner of uncertainty in your otherwise confident professional psyche.”

In the introductory post, George solicits library research assignments “that don’t seem to be working.” In addition to analyzing these assignments, she promises the blog will contain “general musings on what it means to be an information seeker in today’s world; consideration of library research concepts and tools that deserve more attention in the curriculum; responses to some of the Frequently UNasked Questions researchers, especially novices, have about how academic libraries function or about how one discovers ‘what’s out there’; and occasional exhortations.”

The blog is a natural extension of George’s professional work as acting head of reference and senior reference librarian at Princeton University Library and also complements her recently published book The Elements of Library Research: What Every Student Needs to Know.

Self-described “Enlightenment junkie” and economics expert Diane Coyle featured a discussion of books and bucks with Press Director Peter Dougherty on the new Enlightened Economist blog this past Friday.  As more publishers are moving their reference titles to the Web, Coyle wondered (and Dougherty explained) why Princeton is increasing the number of physical reference titles in its list, using the recently released Princeton Encyclopedia of the World Economy edited by Kenneth Reinert and Ramkishen Rajan as something of a case study.

Read the post here to learn more about how the new encyclopedia came to be, what a stolen book might say about the state of the economy, and why the reference reader is due for a comeback.