Download or read book Confessions of a Hapless Hedonist written by Ernest Kolowrat and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-09-03 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CONFESSIONS OF A HAPLESS HEDONISTAn Inconvenient Discovery about the Meaning of PleasureConfessions of a Hapless Hedonist is a lighthearted first-hand account about the seductive perils of our time. Ranging over a century of intimate foibles and world events, it is the true story of an outlandish family forced to abandon a life of wealth and privilege in Europe after World War II, and start anew in the United States. Within the framework of this transition played out on both sides of the Atlantic is the drama of the narrator's devotion to the unbridled pursuit of pleasure - and his wrenching discovery of a more subtle but no less compelling imperative. Endowed with a sensual predisposition from early childhood, the narrator is far too ready to subordinate personal and professional integrity to his hedonistic quest. As he is increasingly able to partake of the bounties offered by living in the United States - this Garden of Eden that has no forbidden trees - he also becomes increasingly aware of the less heralded consequences for him and millions of others of his ilk. "Are we doomed always to live in a world where we suffered and died because there wasn't enough," he reflects ruefully, "or in a world where we suffered and died because we failed to learn how to handle plenitude?" Confessions of a Hapless Hedonist sparkles with the colorful characters of the narrator's relatives: his father, transformed by his adopted country from Mr. Count to a salesman of Exercycles; his sister Manya, a proselytizing charismatic Christian married to a hotelier on Cape Cod; his aunt Issten, exiled years ago to a penurious existence in a dilapidated chateau in France after engaging in an extra-marital affair with a noted American black to create a more compassionate world; Albrecht, Issten's long-suffering son laboring quixotically in his privileged retreat in the Austrian Tyrol to save humanity from its excesses; and Princess Stephanie, Albrecht's enchanting daughter whose relentless quest for romantic love leaves even her unconventional grandmother, Issten, aghast. There is also God, whether in the guise of the stern but just Yahweh of Abraham or Manya's gentle, ever-forgiving Jesus Christ. Beyond its distinctive autobiographical story line, Confessions of a Hapless Hedonist is an uncontrived morality tale that offers a mirror for those who would subscribe to the popular mantra of our day, "You only go around once; so grab all the pleasures you can!" The unabashed abandon of the book's first part, In Quest of Pleasure, and the emotional immediacy of the second part, In Quest of Redemption, combine to reflect the mounting clash between the unconstrained desires of our materialistic civilization and the reactive dictates of fundamentalism. The global scope of Confessions of a Hapless Hedonist implicitly offers a palatable alternative and should serve as a spiritual "red alert" at this critical juncture in history."The author has succeeded in reaching a depth of feeling and expression that few writers even know about, much less arrive at."- Lewis H. Lapham Editor, Harper's Magazine"Tender, funny, touching and true - a unique page-turner."- Stephen Birmingham Author, Our Crowd
Download or read book Eating of the Forbidden Fruit written by Ernest Kolowrat and published by Createspace Independent Pub. This book was released on 2012-11-06 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ranging over a century of intimate foibles and world events, "Eating of the Forbidden Fruit" is a lighthearted, firsthand account by an unwitting victim of the seductive perils of our time. The action revolves around Albrecht, a tradition-bound Austrian nobleman, and those who cause him woe: his mother Istenne, whose idealized antics scandalized Europe decades ago; his daughter, Princess Stephanie, whose worldly mischief is creating no less of a contemporary stir; and his cousin, the narrator, whose Americanized ways offend every tenet of Albrecht's existence. Underlying the action is Albrecht's conviction that humanity's unbridled ways can still have the same incalculable consequences in our day as the loss of Paradise by Adam and Eve. Whether set in a dilapidated château at the foot of the Pyrenees, in a burgundy-red studio on Manhattan's Upper East Side, or at an ocean-side cottage in Laguna Beach, "Eating of the Forbidden Fruit" carries a special message for those seeking to maximize their share of pleasures in life.Some names and details in this firsthand account have been changed for reasons of privacy; other details have been adjusted to tell the story in a limited space. The resulting tableau nevertheless reflects the essence of what took place."Kolowrat's combination of European and American sensibilities speaks in a frank voice to audiences on both sides of the Atlantic."– Alice Pistkova, Prague Post"A unique page-turner."– Stephen Birmingham, Author "Our Crowd" Part One: The Perfect Universe Let me start by introducing my much older cousin, a peculiar sort, you may well think, as I once did. Secluded in his modest castle at the foot of the Tyrolean Alps, this courtly, silver-haired gentleman is fervently trying to save the universe. He labors endless hours, filling lined yellow sheets with penciled numbers, sheet after sheet after sheet. Albrecht is his name, and though still of reasonably sound body and mind, he claims to have been assigned this task by God. There isn't much time, according to Albrecht's calculations. Humanity's wasteful, self-indulgent ways are threatening the firmament – its myriad stars and planets and moons clustered in uncounted constellations and galaxies. Albrecht believes he is about to prove what he has suspected since his youth: that the world's excessive consumption of electricity for frivolous goals is creating too many used up, dead electrons. Accumulating in unseen vast piles, these dead electrons have already slowed the spin of the earth in measurable ways, or so his figures indicate, and eventually could disrupt the harmonious paths of even the most distant celestial spheres. It is this irreversible universal chaos that my fatherly cousin is striving to prevent. Albrecht is not out to save the human race. He gave up on that years ago and regards the prosperous masses of the industrialized world with a strained tolerance. Especially those overfed tourists from neighboring Bavaria who park their ostentatious cars just outside the open gates of his Schloss and have no qualms about wandering in. Traipsing around Albrecht's castle as if it were a public monument, they point their emblem-festooned walking sticks at architectural details here and there, even at the windows beyond which my cousin is grappling with his sacred task. How plainly these people exemplify the corruption by Lucifer of God's greatest handiwork, Albrecht thinks; how obviously hell bent on destroying themselves they are by perpetuating in an infinite variety of ways the sin of Adam and Eve and wantonly devising still more pleasurable ways! Albrecht isn't about to make any effort to redeem them from their fate, even if he could, because they have only themselves to blame.As for himself, he isn't worried. In any terminal disaster on earth there would be pockets of survivors, made up of those deserving God's grace for having led dutiful lives.
Download or read book Endpapers written by Alexander Wolff and published by Atlantic Monthly Press. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A powerfully told story of family, honor, love, and truth . . . the beautiful and haunting stories told in this book transcend policy and politics.” —Beto O’Rourke A literary gem researched over a year the author spent living in Berlin, Endpapers excavates the extraordinary histories of the author’s grandfather and father: the renowned publisher Kurt Wolff, dubbed “perhaps the twentieth century’s most discriminating publisher” by the New York Times Book Review, and his son Niko, who fought in the Wehrmacht during World War II before coming to America. Born in Bonn into a highly cultured German-Jewish family, Kurt became a publisher at twenty-three, setting up his own firm and publishing Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, Karl Kraus, and many other authors whose books would soon be burned by the Nazis. After fleeing Germany in 1933, Kurt and his second wife, Helen, founded Pantheon Books in a small Greenwich Village apartment. Pantheon would soon take its own place in literary history with the publication of Nobel laureate Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago, and as the conduit that brought major European works to the States. But Kurt’s taciturn son Niko, offspring of his first marriage to Elisabeth Merck, was left behind in Germany, where despite his Jewish heritage he served the Nazis on two fronts. As Alexander Wolff visits dusty archives and meets distant relatives, he discovers secrets that never made it to the land of fresh starts, including the connection between Hitler and the family pharmaceutical firm E. Merck. With surprising revelations from never-before-published family letters, diaries, and photographs, Endpapers is a moving and intimate family story, weaving a literary tapestry of the perils, triumphs, and secrets of history and exile.
Download or read book Roland Hayes written by Christopher A. Brooks and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2014-12-22 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “gripping, sensitive” biography of the trailblazing singer who carved a path for African American artists including Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson (The Atlanta Voice). Performing in a country rife with racism and segregation, the tenor Roland Hayes was the first African American man to reach international fame as a concert performer. He became one of the few artists in the world who could sell out Town Hall, Carnegie Hall, Symphony Hall, and Covent Garden. Performing the African American spirituals he was raised on, his voice was marked with a unique sonority which easily navigated French, German, and Italian art songs. A multiculturalist both on and off the stage, he counted among his friends George Washington Carver, Eleanor Roosevelt, Ezra Pound, Pearl Buck, Dwight Eisenhower, and Langston Hughes. This “substantial and well-documented” biography spans the history of Hayes’s life and career and the legacy he left behind as a musician and a champion of African American rights (BBC Music Magazine). It is an authentic, panoramic portrait of a man who was as complex as the music he performed. “Like many generations of celebrated African American concert artists, I am an inheritor of the legacy left by the great Roland Hayes. Yet, we hardly know his name today. With this long overdue book, the oversight is now remedied.” —Lawrence Brownlee, Metropolitan Opera “A wonderful journey through Hayes’ performances, racial plight and acceptance.” —Examiner.com
Download or read book Confessions of a Small Press Hedonist written by Kurt Nimmo and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Confessions of a Self proclaimed Hedonist written by Sara Ryan and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Visions and Revisions written by John Cowper Powys and published by . This book was released on 1915 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Revolution of Everyday Life written by Raoul Vaneigem and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2012-10-05 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published just months before the May 1968 upheavals in France, Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life offered a lyrical and aphoristic critique of the “society of the spectacle” from the point of view of individual experience. Whereas Debord’s masterful analysis of the new historical conditions that triggered the uprisings of the 1960s armed the revolutionaries of the time with theory, Vaneigem’s book described their feelings of desperation directly, and armed them with “formulations capable of firing point-blank on our enemies.” “I realise,” writes Vaneigem in his introduction, “that I have given subjective will an easy time in this book, but let no one reproach me for this without first considering the extent to which the objective conditions of the contemporary world advance the cause of subjectivity day after day.” Vaneigem names and defines the alienating features of everyday life in consumer society: survival rather than life, the call to sacrifice, the cultivation of false needs, the dictatorship of the commodity, subjection to social roles, and above all the replacement of God by the Economy. And in the second part of his book, “Reversal of Perspective,” he explores the countervailing impulses that, in true dialectical fashion, persist within the deepest alienation: creativity, spontaneity, poetry, and the path from isolation to communication and participation. For “To desire a different life is already that life in the making.” And “fulfillment is expressed in the singular but conjugated in the plural.” The present English translation was first published by Rebel Press of London in 1983. This new edition of The Revolution of Everyday Life has been reviewed and corrected by the translator and contains a new preface addressed to English-language readers by Raoul Vaneigem. The book is the first of several translations of works by Raoul Vaneigem that PM Press plans to publish in uniform volumes. Vaneigem’s classic work is to be followed by The Knight, the Lady, the Devil, and Death (2003) and The Inhumanity of Religion (2000).
Download or read book The Ethics of Identity written by Kwame Anthony Appiah and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-28 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, sexuality: in the past couple of decades, a great deal of attention has been paid to such collective identities. They clamor for recognition and respect, sometimes at the expense of other things we value. But to what extent do "identities" constrain our freedom, our ability to make an individual life, and to what extent do they enable our individuality? In this beautifully written work, renowned philosopher and African Studies scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah draws on thinkers through the ages and across the globe to explore such questions. The Ethics of Identity takes seriously both the claims of individuality—the task of making a life—and the claims of identity, these large and often abstract social categories through which we define ourselves. What sort of life one should lead is a subject that has preoccupied moral and political thinkers from Aristotle to Mill. Here, Appiah develops an account of ethics, in just this venerable sense—but an account that connects moral obligations with collective allegiances, our individuality with our identities. As he observes, the question who we are has always been linked to the question what we are. Adopting a broadly interdisciplinary perspective, Appiah takes aim at the clichés and received ideas amid which talk of identity so often founders. Is "culture" a good? For that matter, does the concept of culture really explain anything? Is diversity of value in itself? Are moral obligations the only kind there are? Has the rhetoric of "human rights" been overstretched? In the end, Appiah's arguments make it harder to think of the world as divided between the West and the Rest; between locals and cosmopolitans; between Us and Them. The result is a new vision of liberal humanism—one that can accommodate the vagaries and variety that make us human.
Download or read book Jorge Luis Borges in Context written by Robin Fiddian and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-31 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) is Argentina's most celebrated author. This volume brings together for the first time the numerous contexts in which he lived and worked; from the history of the Borges family and that of modern Argentina, through two world wars, to events including the Cuban Revolution, military dictatorship, and the Falklands War. Borges' distinctive responses to the Western tradition, Cervantes and Shakespeare, Kafka, and the European avant garde are explored, along with his appraisals of Sarmiento, gauchesque literature and other strands of the Argentine cultural tradition. Borges' polemical stance on Catholic integralism in early twentieth-century Argentina is accounted for, whilst chapters on Buddhism, Judaism and landmarks of Persian literature illustrate Borges's engagement with the East. Finally, his legacy is visible in the literatures of the Americas, in European countries such as Italy and Portugal, and in the novels of J. M. Coetzee, representing the Global South.
Download or read book At Large and at Small written by Anne Fadiman and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2008-11-06 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Butterflies, ice-cream, writing at night, playing word games...in this witty, intimate and delicious book Anne Fadiman ruminates on her passions, both literary and everyday. From mourning the demise of letter-writing to revealing a monumental crush on Charles Lamb, from Balzac's coffee addiction to making ice-cream from Liquid Nitrogen, she draws us into a world of hedonistic pleasures and literary delights. This is the perfect book for life's ardent obsessives.
Download or read book Hotchkiss written by Ernest Kolowrat and published by New Amsterdam Books. This book was released on 1998-05-01 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How has the Hotchkiss School managed to accommodate a hundred years of unprecedented change—a century during which horse-and-buggy trails have become less familiar than the fiery trails of space-bound vehicles, and Victorian propriety has yielded to unabashed self-expression? The short answer—carefully; certainly not without considerable tension and the constant need to mediate between the forces of tradition and innovation. Oh yes, also by following the golden rule: do not disturb the cherished memories of alumni—and, more recently, of alumnae as well.
Download or read book Wordsworth and the Enlightenment Idea of Pleasure written by Rowan Boyson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-11 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The surprising idea of pleasure as communal provides a new way of understanding Wordsworth's poetry and the Enlightenment's critical legacy.
Download or read book Virtual Futures written by Joan Broadhurst Dixon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-07-20 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Virtual Futures explores the ideas that the future lies in its ability to articulate the consequences of an increasingly synthetic and virtual world. New technologies like cyberspace, the internet, and Chaos theory are often discussed in the context of technology and its potential to liberate or in terms of technophobia. This collection examines both these ideas while also charting a new and controversial route through contemporary discourses on technology; a path that discusses the material evolution and the erotic relation between humans and machines. Virtual Futures brings together diverse fields such as cyberfeminism, materialist philosophy, postmodern fiction, computing culture and performance art, with essays by Sadie Plant, Stelarc and Manuel de Landa (to name a few). The collection heralds the death of humanism and the ride of posthuman pragmatism. The contested zone of debate throughout these essays is the notion of the posthuman, or the possibility of the cyborg as the free human. Viewed by some writers as a threat to human life and humanism itself, others in the collection describe the posthuman as a critical perspective that anticipates the next step in evolution: the integration or synthesis of humans and machines, organic life and technology. This view of technology and information is heavily influenced by Anglo American literature, especially cyberpunk, Pynchon and Ballard, as well as the materialist philosophies of Freud, Deleuze, and Haraway, Virtual Futures provides analyses by both established theorists and the most innovative new voices working in conjunction between the arts and contemporary technology.
Download or read book Some Diversions of a Man of Letters written by Edmund Gosse and published by London : Heinemann. This book was released on 1920 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Sketch written by and published by . This book was released on 1901 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Best British Short Stories of 1922 written by Various and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-09-04 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Best British Short Stories of 1922" by Various. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
