Books like From time immemorial by Peters, Joan

Jared Diamond explains how geography, biology, and human ingenuity shaped the world’s unequal societies in his Pulitzer‑winning study of civilization and social evolution.

A groundbreaking exploration of the past that fundamentally transforms our understanding of human history.

Francis Fukuyama traces how diverse societies have arrived at their present political arrangements, exploring the historical and comparative routes that shape modern states.

A Harvard evolutionary biologist presents an engaging discussion of how the human body has evolved over millions of years, examining how an increasing disparity between the needs of Stone Age bodies and the realities of the modern world are fueling a paradox of greater longevity and chronic disease.

The Israeli novelist David Grossman's impassioned account of what he observed on the West Bank in early 1987 - not only the misery of the Palestinian refugees and their deep-seated hatred of the Israelis but also the cost of occupation for both occupier and occupied - is an intimate and urgent moral report on one of the great tragedies of our time. The Yellow Wind caused a sensation upon its original publication. Now with a new introduction by the author, it is essential reading for anyone who seeks a deeper understanding of Israel today.

Overview: Our early ancestors lived in small groups and worked actively to preserve social equality. As they created larger societies, however, inequality rose, and by 2500 BCE truly egalitarian societies were on the wane. In The Creation of Inequality, Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus demonstrate that this development was not simply the result of population increase, food surplus, or the accumulation of valuables. Instead, inequality resulted from conscious manipulation of the unique social logic that lies at the core of every human group. A few societies allowed talented and ambitious individuals to rise in prestige while still preventing them from becoming a hereditary elite. But many others made high rank hereditary, by manipulating debts, genealogies, and sacred lore. At certain moments in history, intense competition among leaders of high rank gave rise to despotic kingdoms and empires in the Near East, Egypt, Africa, Mexico, Peru, and the Pacific. Drawing on their vast knowledge of both living and prehistoric social groups, Flannery and Marcus describe the changes in logic that create larger and more hierarchical societies, and they argue persuasively that many kinds of inequality can be overcome by reversing these changes, rather than by violence.

This book indicts the British administration of Palestine for its anti-Semitism and hostility toward the local people. Ziff includes anecdotes of particular incidents of discrimination by British officials as well as analysis of the economic and other policies of that government.