Suggested Book of the Week 23

Check these books out below by Albert-László Barabási, Robert Gray Dodge Professor of Network Science, Evarist Giné, University of Connecticut and Richard Nickl, University of Cambridge, George G M James, Guyanese historian and author and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, American historian, writer and feminist.

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Network Science

Network Science

Networks are everywhere, from the Internet, to social networks, and the genetic networks that determine our biological existence. Illustrated throughout in full colour, this pioneering textbook, spanning a wide range of topics from physics to computer science, engineering, economics and the social sciences, introduces network science to an interdisciplinary audience...
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Mathematical Foundations of Infinite-Dimensional Statistical Models
 

Mathematical Foundations of
Infinite-Dimensional Statistical Models

In nonparametric and high-dimensional statistical models, the classical Gauss-Fisher-Le Cam theory of the optimality of maximum likelihood estimators and Bayesian posterior inference does not apply, and new foundations and ideas have been developed in the past several decades. This book gives a coherent account of the statistical theory in infinite-dimensional parameter spaces. The mathematical foundations include self-contained 'mini-courses' on the theory of Gaussian and empirical processes, on approximation and wavelet theory, and on the basic theory of function spaces. The theory of statistical inference in such models...
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Stolen Legacy: The Egyptian Origins of Western Philosophy

Stolen Legacy: The Egyptian Origins of
Western Philosophy

The term Greek philosophy, to begin with a misnomer, for there is no such philosophy in existence. The ancient Egyptians had developed a very complex religious system, called the Mysteries, which was also the first system of salvation. As such, it regarded the human body as a prison house of the soul, which could be liberated from its bodily impediments, through the disciples of the Arts and Sciences, and advanced form the level of a mortal to that of a God. This was the notion of the summon bonum or greatest good, to which all men must aspire, and it also became the basis of all ethical concepts. The Egyptian Mystery was also a Secret Order, and membership was gained by initiation and a pledge to secrecy. The teaching was graded and delivered orally to the neophyte: and under these circumstances of secrecy, the Egyptians developed secret systems of writing and teaching, and forbade their Initiates from writing what they had learned. After nearly five thousand years of prohibition against the Greeks, they were permitted to enter Egypt for the purpose of their education. First through the Persian invasion and secondly through the invasion of Alexander the Great. From the sixth century B.C. therefore to the death of Aristotle (322 B.C.) the Greeks made the best of their chance to learn all they could about Egyptian culture; most students received instructions directly from the Egyptian Priests, but after the invasion by Alexander the Great, the Royal temples and libraries were plundered and pillaged, and Aristotle’s school converted the library at Alexandria into a research center. There is no wonder then, that the production of the unusually large number of books ascribed to Aristotle has proved a physical impossibility, for any single man within a lifetime. 
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An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States  

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
(ReVisioning American History)

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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Source: Cambridge University Press and Ancient Origins