Maternal love is considered the most unconditional form of love, yet mothers have been prepared to sacrifice their children, or to see them sacrificed, for a "noble" cause. Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs shows that, across cultures and historical eras, in times of great stress societies will channel all their resources, even maternal love and grief, toward a common cause. Suzanne Evans finds commonalities between the many images of war mothers - the Canadian Silver Cross mother, the ancient Jewish Maccabean mother of seven martyred sons, the mother of a Palestinian suicide bomber. She...

Running a kingdom is a lot like running a household. Or so says Suzanne Evans, who shares the story of her crazy yet brilliant year-long experiment: to "rule" one disobedient family using Machiavelli's masterwork The Prince.

A mother of four, Suzanne Evans is fed up with tantrums, misbehavior, and general household chaos. Desperate to get the upper hand, she turns to Machiavelli's famous sixteenth-century political treatise, The Prince, and wonders: Can Machiavelli's rules on warfare and statecraft be suc-cessfully applied to parenting?

Using The Prince as a guide, Evans...