Download or read book Bonfire of the Verities written by Michael Lieberman and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-15 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Res ipsa loquitor—the thing speaks for itself—as the lawyers say. But does it? Not in Michael Lieberman’s new book of poems, Bonfire of the Verities. What speaks here is doubt and the commitment to cast aside the apparent truths we all accumulate. Those verities are what are tossed onto Lieberman's bonfire: It is here I heap the platitudes I cannot keep. He grounds his struggle precisely: The coordinates of the country of doubt are 29º, 45’ N / 95º, 21’ W, which are those of Houston, his adopted city. It is an unusual poet who is willing to pare away belief and accept that truths—received or earned—must be discarded as we face the unknowable mystery. In the end what Lieberman wrests from the void is the recognition that there is no ultimate choice but dissolution: This fire burns in me— it cannot set me free it leaves me ash, not tree. And yet ash is both residue and tree, offering the possibility that dissolution is a kind of redemption.
Download or read book Night Sweats How Moral Philosophy Failed written by Michael Bernhart and published by Hough Publishing. This book was released on 2019-02-14 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this, the final volume in the Max Brown Tetralogy (+1), Sally and Max Brown encounter the inconveniences that accompany advancing age: declining health, concern over diminished appeal, a loss of optimism – and sometimes hope. These challenges pale, however, when they go in pursuit of the most ruthless and unprincipled criminals on earth: recruiters and surgeons who harvest and sell human organs. Set against the backdrop of honor crimes against women, Sally and Max fight to stay alive and protect the victims of honor crimes from further attack. The action takes place in Switzerland and Jordan. Sally, for the first time in the series, is a co-narrator.
Download or read book Surpassing Wonder written by Donald H. Akenson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2001-09-29 with total page 678 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elegant and inventive, Surpassing Wonder uncovers how the ancient Hebrew scriptures, the Christian New Testament, and the Talmuds of the Rabbis are related and how, collectively, they make up the core of Western consciousness. Donald Harman Akenson provides an incisive critique of how religious scholars have distorted the holy books and argues that it was actually the inventor of the Hebrew scriptures who shaped our concept of narrative history—thereby founding Western culture.
Download or read book Some Dark Fire written by Michael Lieberman and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2023-04-05 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Lieberman’s Some Dark Fire, New and Selected Poems is a generous sampling of an exceptional poet’s mature work, written over almost thirty years—since Lieberman moved to Houston in 1988. His poems offer a perspective on our world that is in turn celebratory, somber, joyous, dark, tender, and, most of all, doubt-plagued. He offers no easy answers, but his questions will enrich and reward the reader. This deeply felt book is the work of a gifted poet and research physician at the height of his powers. Lucky Every heart conceals a few small secrets or, if full of amplitude and plenty, large ones. I begin with a green bough, forsythia— supple and yellow with flower. I end there—not because I am impoverished, but because I have it all.
Download or read book Bonfire of Illusions written by Alex Callinicos and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Something dramatic happened in the late summer and autumn of 2008. The post-Cold War world came to an abrupt end. This was the result of two conjoined crises. First, in its brief war with Georgia in August 2008, Russia asserted its military power to halt the expansion of NATO to its very borders. Secondly, on 15 September 2008 the Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed. This precipitated a severe financial crash and helped to push the world economy into the worst slump since the 1930s. Both crises marked a severe setback for the global power of the United States, which had driven NATO expansion and forced through the liberalization of financial markets. More broadly they challenged the consensus that had reigned since the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989 that a US-orchestrated liberal capitalist order could offer the world peace and prosperity. Already badly damaged by the Iraq debacle, this consensus has now suffered potentially fatal blows. In Bonfire of Illusions Alex Callinicos explores these twin crises. He traces the credit crunch that developed in 2007-8 to a much more protracted crisis of overaccumulation and profitability that has gripped global capitalism since the late 1960s. He also confronts the interaction between economic and geopolitical events, highlighting the new assertiveness of nation-states and analysing the tense, complex relationship of interdependence and conflict that binds together the US and China. Finally, in response to the revelation that the market is not the solution to the world's problems, Callinicos reviews the prospects for alternatives to capitalism.
Download or read book The Houstiliad written by Michael Lieberman and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this savage yet beautiful book length poem Michael Lieberman captures the rage of men in modern society. He reimagines the characters of Homer's Iliad, recasts them, and sets them in conflict in today's Houston. Unflinching is its descriptions of violence, The Houstiliad implicitly contrasts the rage of Homer's Achilles which was specific and focused with the free-floating rage of contemporary men. Though unsparing in its descriptions, Lieberman's portrait is leavened by lovely lyric passages, reflection, and humor. For those who care about the complicated role of men in modern society this book is revelatory without promising an easy path to redemption or honor. Achilles' wrath is where our tale begins then spools out venom and men's mortal sins. It's tempered true yet riffs on Homer's style, suffused with guile, grit, and mordant wile. * * * Men savage men in violent travails though in the end it's humor that prevails.
Download or read book The Lobsterman s Daughter written by Michael Lieberman and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-15 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Lobsterman's Daughter is a tale of murder and deceit in five generations of a Maine family, the Markhams. The story's narrator, Henrietta Markham, is a recent Harvard graduate, who submits an early version as her honors thesis and claims her work is an actual history of her family. She tells the story in her own voice and the conjured voices of her relatives, both living and dead. After graduation, in Barcelona she faces her own deceit in omitting her sins from the chronicle and adds a journal that documents her bizarre attempts at expiation and atonement. Markham sends the new version back to her advisor and asks that it be published as her final word on her family's history. In an epilogue Lieberman's author struggles unsuccessfully to regain control of a narrator who is at once incorrigible and essential. Ultimately the novel asks us to consider our capacity for evil, what it means to atone, and where forgiveness and grace reside.
Download or read book Rethinking Ethical Foreign Policy written by David Chandler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-11-28 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new volume moves beyond the limits of current debate to show how today’s foreign policy is increasingly about values rather than interests and why ethics are now playing a central role. Rather than counterposing interests and ethics, trying to find ‘hidden agendas’ or emphasizing the double-standards at play in ethical foreign policy, this book brings together leading international theorists, and a variety of stimulating approaches, to develop a critical understanding of the rise of ethical foreign policy, and to analyze the limits of ethical policy-making on its own terms. They deal with the limits of ‘ethical foreign policy’ both in the light of the internal dynamic of these policies themselves, and with regard to the often unintended consequences of policies designed to better the world. This book also shows how the transformation of both the domestic and the international spheres of politics means that ethics has become a rallying point for non-state actors and experts who gather around values and norms in order to force institutions to justify their behavior. This process results from different structural changes and the transformation of the international system, the individualization of Western societies and the growing importance of expertise in the justification of decisions in risk adverse societies. It leads to a transformation of norms and to a redefinition of a global ethical framework that needs to be clarified. This book will be of great interest to all students and researchers of foreign policy formation, politics and international relations.
Download or read book Arabs written by Tim Mackintosh-Smith and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 681 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A riveting, comprehensive history of the Arab peoples and tribes that explores the role of language as a cultural touchstone This kaleidoscopic book covers almost 3,000 years of Arab history and shines a light on the footloose Arab peoples and tribes who conquered lands and disseminated their language and culture over vast distances. Tracing this process to the origins of the Arabic language, rather than the advent of Islam, Tim Mackintosh-Smith begins his narrative more than a thousand years before Muhammad and focuses on how Arabic, both spoken and written, has functioned as a vital source of shared cultural identity over the millennia. Mackintosh-Smith reveals how linguistic developments--from pre-Islamic poetry to the growth of script, Muhammad's use of writing, and the later problems of printing Arabic--have helped and hindered the progress of Arab history, and investigates how, even in today's politically fractured post-Arab Spring environment, Arabic itself is still a source of unity and disunity.
Download or read book Standards written by Lawrence Busch and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2013-08-16 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation into standards, the invisible infrastructures of our technical, moral, social, and physical worlds. Standards are the means by which we construct realities. There are established standards for professional accreditation, the environment, consumer products, animal welfare, the acceptable stress for highway bridges, healthcare, education—for almost everything. We are surrounded by a vast array of standards, many of which we take for granted but each of which has been and continues to be the subject of intense negotiation. In this book, Lawrence Busch investigates standards as “recipes for reality.” Standards, he argues, shape not only the physical world around us but also our social lives and even our selves. Busch shows how standards are intimately connected to power—that they often serve to empower some and disempower others. He outlines the history of formal standards and describes how modern science came to be associated with the moral-technical project of standardization of both people and things. Busch suggests guidelines for developing fair, equitable, and effective standards. Taking a uniquely integrated and comprehensive view of the subject, Busch shows how standards for people and things are inextricably linked, how standards are always layered (even if often addressed serially), and how standards are simultaneously technical, social, moral, legal, and ontological devices.
Download or read book The Poetics of Insecurity written by Johannes Voelz and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Poetics of Insecurity explores how American literary writers forged a cultural imaginary in which insecurity acts as an enlivening force.
Download or read book The Financial Imaginary written by Alison Shonkwiler and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2017-02-14 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the world has been reshaped since the 1970s by neoliberalism and globalization, increasing financial abstraction has presented a new political urgency for contemporary writers. Globalized finance, the return to Gilded Age levels of inequality, and the emergence of new technologies pose a similar challenge to the one faced by American social realists a century ago: making the virtualization of capitalism legible within the conventions of the realist novel. In The Financial Imaginary, Alison Shonkwiler reads texts by Richard Powers, Don DeLillo, Jane Smiley, Teddy Wayne, and Mohsin Hamid to examine how fiction confronts the formal and representational mystifications of the economic. As Shonkwiler shows, these contemporary writers navigate the social, moral, and class preoccupations of American “economic fiction” (as shaped by such writers as William Dean Howells, Henry James, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser), even as they probe the novel’s inadequacies to tell the story of an increasingly abstract world system. Drawing a connection from historical and theoretical accounts of financialization to the formal contours of contemporary fiction, The Financial Imaginary examines the persistent yet vexed relationship between financial representation and the demands of literary realism. It argues that the novel is essential to understanding our relation to the mystifications of abstraction past and present.
Download or read book Women of Harvard Square written by Michael Lieberman and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-15 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The women of Harvard Square are smart, sassy, and sexy. There's Agnes, who with her boyfriend Maynard provides the inspiration for her best friend Diana’s new play that turns into a steamy, boundary-bending sendup. As for Agnes and Diana, don't even try to imagine their shenanigans. You'll want to meet Agnes's grandmother Abigail, who at eighty-seven is still feisty and more than a little naughty—and Adriana, her daughter and Agnes’s mother, who receives a shocking gift from her old Radcliffe roommate. That’s Olympia, the award-winning novelist, who gets the scare of her life when she decides to set her new novel in Pittsburgh and visits. Did I mention Beverly, the long, tall Texan who came to Harvard for college and never left—and never left Texas behind? Oh, and Henrietta, whose imagination is so outrageous and dark that she will soon get her own novel. What the women of Harvard Square are saying about Mike Lieberman: Agnes Lubeck: “Mike Lieberman is a master.” Diana Endicott: “I’m on board with what he has done. This guy gets it.” Beverly Ardmore: “He’s nothing but a pimp. It’s all the more outrageous because we're both Texans.” Abigail Lubeck: “I thought I would be only an old person, Agnes’s creaky grandmother. But he gave me a great role to play, and you know what? He threw in a vibrator as well. He knows how to honor older women.” Henrietta Markham: “Mike Lieberman gave me more than I deserve. He gave me motive and opportunity as the crime folks say—and with them sex and, well . . . I’ll let you read The Women of Harvard Square.”
Download or read book Don DeLillo after the Millennium written by Jacqueline A. Zubeck and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2020-07-06 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Don DeLillo after the Millennium: Currents and Currencies examines all the author’s work published in the 21st century: The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, Falling Man, Point Omega, and Zero K, the plays Love-Lies-Bleeding and The Word for Snow, and the short stories in The Angel Esmeralda. What topic doesn’t DeLillo tackle? Cyber-capital and currency markets, ontology and intelligence, global warming and cryogenics, Don DeLillo continues to ponder the significance of present cultural currents and to anticipate the waves of the future. Performance art and ethics, drama and euthanasia, space studies and the constrictions of time, DeLillo perspicaciously reads our culture, giving voice to the rhythms of our vernacular and diction. Rich and resonant, his work is so multifaceted in its attention that it accommodates a wide variety of critical approaches while its fine and filigreed prose commends him to a poetic appreciation as well. Don DeLillo after the Millennium brings together an international cast of scholars who examine DeLillo’s work from many critical perspectives, exploring the astonishing output of an author who continues to tell our stories and show us ourselves.
Download or read book Saint Saul written by Donald Harman Akenson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2002-06-20 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a lively and provocative account of what we can learn about Jesus by reading the letters of Paul, providing fresh new insights into both Jesus and Paul. The author painstakingly recreates the world of Christ, a time rich with ideas, prophets, factions, priests, savants and god-drunk fanatics. He insistently stresses throughout the Jewishness of Jesus (e.g., referring to Jesus and Paul as Yeshua and Saul, as they were then known). Equally important, he dismisses the traditional method of searching for facts about Jesus by looking for parallels among the four Gospels; they were handed down to us as a unit by a later generation, he argues. Saul, although he did not know Yeshua personally, knew his most important followers and wrote immediately after Yeshua's death. His teachings were approved (though sometimes reluctantly) by Yeshua's brothers and other early leaders.
Download or read book Systemic Risk written by Prasanna Gai and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-28 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book applies some of the lessons from network disciplines - such as ecology, epidemiology, and engineering - to study and measure how small probability events can lead to contagion and banking crises on a global scale.
Download or read book The bonefire of the verities written by Xavier Desmaison and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
