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Socrates Café: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy Christopher Phillips is a man on a mission: to revive the love of questions that Socrates inspired long ago in ancient Athens. Public Radio International has called him the “Johnny Appleseed of philosophy.” Motivated by charismatic optimism and passionate ideals, he has traveled around the country, gathering people to participate in Socrates Cafes in bookstores, senior centers, elementary schools and universities, and a prison. In this lively account of his travels, Phillips recalls what led him to start his itinerant program and recreates some of the most invigorating sessions. These philosophic exchanges reveal sometimes surprising, often profound reflections on the meaning of love, friendship, work, growing old, and more among Life’s Big Questions. An engaging blend of philosophy and storytelling, Socrates Café will inspire every curious mind to start asking questions and every reader to live more fully the examined life.
The Arithmetic of Life In The Arithmetic of Life, George Shaffner shares the essential wisdom inherent in equations as elementary as 1+1=2. For in the Information Age, numbers are the bottom line. If you and yours don’t have a handle on basic math, from your next raise in pay to the inevitable rise of inflation, your weekly family budget to your end of the national debt, your long-term return on education to your short-term risk of fatal error, then you may go down for the count. But don’t despair. Shaffner’s math parables can help you understand how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide your way to deeper and more numerate understanding. By applying the basic principles of mathematics to some of the most profound, troubling, and just plain puzzling questions of our time, Shaffner gives you real life math philosophy and lessons on how to think about numbers.
Banvard’s Folly The historical record crowns success. Those enshrined in its annals are men and women whose ideas, accomplishments, or personalities have dominated, endured, and most important of all, found champions. Paul Collins’s Banvard’s Folly is a different kind of book. Here are thirteen unforgettable portraits of forgotten people: men and women who might have claimed their share of renown but who, whether form ill timing, skulduggery, monomania, the tinge of madness, or plain bad luck, or perhaps some combination of them all, leapt straight from life into thankless obscurity. Among their number are scientists, artists, writers, entrepreneurs, and adventurers, from across the centuries and around the world. They hold in common the silenced aftermath of failure, the name that rings no bells.
The Walker’s Literary Companion If you love walking or hiking as much as you love reading, The Walker’s Literary Companion will bring endless hours of pleasure and inspiration. It is a gathering of all the best fiction, essays, and poetry on walking. It celebrates the beauty of athletic motion wedded with its spiritual and cerebral essence. Anyone who walks for pleasure or exercise, whether hiking in the Alps or strolling in the park, will be drawn to this infinitely rich tome. It explores how writing is like walking, and how walking shapes our thoughts. These strolls, rambles, wanderings, hikes, and journeys encompass the full range of bipedal travel. The walkers include Romantic solitaries, satirists, social outcasts, flaneurs, naturalists, and great writers who simply take pleasure in a walk.
To the Elephant Graveyard On India’s North-East frontier, a killer elephant is on the rampage, stalking Assam’s paddy-fields, murdering dozens of farmers, and leaving behind their mutilated, crushed bodies. Local forestry officials, powerless to stop the elephant, call in Dinesh Choudhury, one of India’s last licensed elephant hunters, and issue a warrant for the rogue’s destruction. Reading about the ensuing hunt in a Delhi newspaper, journalist Tarquin Hall flies to Assam to investigate, convinced that no elephant could be guilty of the grisly crimes of which it is accused. What Hall finds is that the Khasi tribe live intimately with the elephants. Here, elephants wrap their trunks lovingly around their masters’ shoulders, and signposts in villages tell where domesticated elephants should be hitched. Though it seems a world of peaceful coexistence between man and beast, Hall begins to see that the elephants are suffering, having lost their natural habitat. Hungry, confused, and left with very little forest to hide in, herds of elephants are slowly adapting to domestication, but many are resolute and furious.
Here: A Biography of the New American Continent The European conquerors who created New France, New Spain, and New England, thus sowing the seeds of Canada, Mexico, and the United States, shared the old world they all came from. Yet starting at roughly the same place the three counties that grew up on the North American continent created their own very different versions of a new world. For half a millennium, these three universes existed side by side, sometimes warring with each other, often times at peace, yet separated by boundaries and prejudices far stronger than any customs stations or border posts could ever be. Then, almost exactly 500 years after Columbus, the harsh reality of a rapidly changing economic order, combined with the ineluctable tug of our own past, began to profoundly transform the relationship among the three American nations. As a New York Times correspondent in Mexico and Canada during the last turbulent decade, the first ever to report from both ends of America, Anthony DePalma had a unique perspective from which to observe and to define the momentous dawning of this new uncertain season in American history. |
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Not Guilty: Twelve Black Men Speak Out on Law, Justice, and Life Not Guilty is an anthology of twelve original essays by some of America’s most influential young black male writers and critics dealing with how they see this country and how this country sees them. American society, past and present, has a contentious relationship with black men. The greatest evidence of this hostility is the use of racial profiling by law enforcement. Incidents involving Amadou Diallo, Patrick Dorismond, Rodney King, Abner Louima, and the New Jersey State Police all highlight this problem. With the Diallo case as a springboard for exploration, essays range from discussions on encounters with police to hesitating to purchase a luxury car for fear of police susupicion to historical examinations of race relations in the United States. The contributors, poets, journalists, lawyers, writers, and professors are as varied as the contents of their essays. Each presents an honest, personal, and erudite examination on life as a black man in America.
A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin How did the Soviet Union manage to govern a state composed of more than one hundred culturally, linguistically, and politically diverse peoples during its early years? Drawing on a wealth of materials from previously inaccessible regional, party, and state archives, this volume reveals the complex and contradictory nature of Soviet policies toward its multiethnic populace, from the early years of the Russian Revolution to the demise of Stalin. In their introductory essays, Ronald Suny and Terry martin explore the analytical category of empire within the contexts of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. Contributors then look at the implementation of the unique Soviet nationalities policy, addressing such topics as the contestation surrounding the formation of national territories, the role of Central Asian national elites in the new state, gender policy in Central Asia, Russification in schools, and attempts to create a Kazakh national proletariat.
Europe Divided 1559-1598 This book examines the hard lines of division in late sixteenth-century Europe, between a Protestant north and a Catholic South, between the rich, expanding economy of the West and the harsh poverty of the agrarian East. It was the period that saw the birth of the Dutch Republic, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the western repulse of the Ottoman Empire, the revival of the papacy and an authoritarian Calvinism. It was also the era of strong political personalities, of Philip II and powerful Hapsburg Spain, of Queen Elizabeth I and Catherine de Medici, of Henry IV and Montaigne.
The Interpretation of Dreams in Chinese Culture Dream analysts at the Chinese court are mentioned in historical sources dating from the second millennium B. C., while belief in portents, omens, and systems of prognostication have kept dream imagery and its interpretation very much in the mainstream of Chinese popular culture. This book, illustrated with woodblock prints from classical texts, presents an overview of the subject of dream interpretation in traditional China and an alphabetical compilation of Chinese dream images and their meanings. Perusing them offers extraordinary insights into a dynamic culture with ancient roots, and leads us to a deeper appreciation of goals and aspirations common to humanity, as well as the differences that derive form our cultural diversity.
Greek Nymphs: Myth, Cult, Lore Greek Nymphs: Myth, Cult, Lore is the first comprehensive study of the nymph in the ancient Greek world. Jennifer Larson examines nymphs as both religious and mythopoetic figures, tracing their development and significance in Greek culture form Homer through the Hellenistic period. Drawing upon a broad range of literary and archaeological evidence, the volume begins by addressing the basic problems of definition and taxonomy of nymphs. Subsequent chapters discuss sexually powerful nymphs in ancient and modern Greek folklore, the use of dolls repersenting nymphs in the socialization of girls, the phenomenon of nympholepsy, nymphs’ relations with other deities in the Greek pantheon, and nymphs’ role in mythic narratives of city-founding and colonization. Lavishly illustrated and accessibly written, Greek Nymphs is both a major contribution to classical studies and a captivating survey for general readers interested in mythology and ancient culture.
An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood In An Hour Before Daylight, Jimmy Carter, bestselling author of Living Faith and Sources of Strength, re-creates his Depression-era boyhood on aGeorgia farm before the civil rights movement forever changed it and the country. Carter writes about the powerful rhythms of countryside and community in a sharecropping economy, offering an unforgettable portrait of his father, a brilliant farmer and a strict segregationist who treated black workers with respect and fairness; his strong-willed and well-read mother; and the five other people who shaped his early life, three of whom were black. Carter’s clean and eloquent prose evokes a time when the cycles of life were predictable and simple and the rules were heartbreaking and complex. In his singular voice and with a novelist’s gift for detail, Jimmy Carter creates a sensitive portrait of an era that shaped the nation and recounts a classic, American story of enduring importance. |
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