Download or read book From The Mind Of Critic 2016 written by BRYAN RADZIN and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2017-07-10 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the second of many collections "From the Mind Of Critic." The short essays can be flipped through randomly, or read in succession. They run the gamut of human emotions from love, to hate, to fear. Along with a healthy dose of politics, humanism, unity and accountability, this collection hopefully will stir the pot just enough to start conversations. If we could simply talk to each other like human beings, we'll find that many of our generational issues can be solved easier than we thought. Emotions soften, when we realize we agree on a lot more than we disagree once the fog lifts.
Download or read book Pond written by Claire-Louise Bennett and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-07-12 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A sharp, funny, and eccentric debut … Pond makes the case for Bennett as an innovative writer of real talent. … [It]reminds us that small things have great depths.”–New York Times Book Review "Dazzling…exquisitely written and daring ." –O, the Oprah Magazine Immediately upon its publication in Ireland, Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut began to attract attention well beyond the expectations of the tiny Irish press that published it. A deceptively slender volume, it captures with utterly mesmerizing virtuosity the interior reality of its unnamed protagonist, a young woman living a singular and mostly solitary existence on the outskirts of a small coastal village. Sidestepping the usual conventions of narrative, it focuses on the details of her daily experience—from the best way to eat porridge or bananas to an encounter with cows—rendered sometimes in story-length, story-like stretches of narrative, sometimes in fragments no longer than a page, but always suffused with the hypersaturated, almost synesthetic intensity of the physical world that we remember from childhood. The effect is of character refracted and ventriloquized by environment, catching as it bounces her longings, frustrations, and disappointments—the ending of an affair, or the ambivalent beginning with a new lover. As the narrator’s persona emerges in all its eccentricity, sometimes painfully and often hilariously, we cannot help but see mirrored there our own fraught desires and limitations, and our own fugitive desire, despite everything, to be known. Shimmering and unusual, Pond demands to be devoured in a single sitting that will linger long after the last page.
Download or read book Gone with the Mind written by Mark Leyner and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2016-03-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The blazingly inventive fictional autobiography of Mark Leyner, one of America's "rare, true original voices" (Gary Shteyngart) Dizzyingly brilliant, raucously funny, and painfully honest, GONE WITH THE MIND is the story of Mark Leyner's life, told as only Mark Leyner can tell it. In this utterly unconventional novel-or is it a memoir?-Leyner gives a reading in the food court of a New Jersey shopping mall. The "audience" consists of Mark's mother and some stray Panda Express employees, who ask a handful of questions. The action takes place entirely at the food court, but the territory covered in these pages has no bounds. A joyride of autobiography, cultural critique, DIY philosophy, biopolitics, video games, demagoguery, and the most intimate confessions, GONE WITH THE MIND is both a soulful reckoning with mortality and the tender story of the relationship between a complicated mother and an even more complicated son. At once nostalgic and acidic, deeply humane and completely surreal, GONE WITH THE MIND is a work of pure, hilarious genius.
Download or read book They All Saw a Cat written by Brendan Wenzel and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2016-08-30 with total page 45 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They All Saw A Cat — New York Times bestseller and 2017 Caldecott Medal and Honor Book The cat walked through the world, with its whiskers, ears, and paws . . . In this glorious celebration of observation, curiosity, and imagination, Brendan Wenzel shows us the many lives of one cat, and how perspective shapes what we see. When you see a cat, what do you see? If you and your child liked The Girl Who Drank the Moon, Finding Winnie, and Radiant Child — you'll love They All Saw A Cat "An ingenious idea, gorgeously realized." —Shelf Awareness, starred review "Both simple and ingenious in concept, Wenzel's book feels like a game changer." —The Huffington Post
Download or read book My Cousin My Gastroenterologist written by Mark Leyner and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-03-28 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Welcome to Mark Leyner's America, where you can order gallium arsenide sushi at a roadside diner, get loaded on a cocktail of growth hormones and anabolic steroids, and support your habit by appearing on TV game shows. Welcome to a wildly post-Einsteinian fictional universe where the locals include a speech pathologist with a waterbug fetish, a kamikaze airline pilot, and the lead singer for Brazil's most notoriously nihilistic samba band.
Download or read book The Shipwrecked Mind written by Mark Lilla and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2016-09-06 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We don’t understand the reactionary mind. As a result, argues Mark Lilla in this timely book, the ideas and passions that shape today’s political dramas are unintelligible to us. The reactionary is anything but a conservative. He is as radical and modern a figure as the revolutionary, someone shipwrecked in the rapidly changing present, and suffering from nostalgia for an idealized past and an apocalyptic fear that history is rushing toward catastrophe. And like the revolutionary his political engagements are motivated by highly developed ideas. Lilla begins with three twentieth-century philosophers—Franz Rosenzweig, Eric Voegelin, and Leo Strauss—who attributed the problems of modern society to a break in the history of ideas and promoted a return to earlier modes of thought. He then examines the enduring power of grand historical narratives of betrayal to shape political outlooks since the French Revolution, and shows how these narratives are employed in the writings of Europe’s right-wing cultural pessimists and Maoist neocommunists, American theoconservatives fantasizing about the harmony of medieval Catholic society and radical Islamists seeking to restore a vanished Muslim caliphate. The revolutionary spirit that inspired political movements across the world for two centuries may have died out. But the spirit of reaction that rose to meet it has survived and is proving just as formidable a historical force. We live in an age when the tragicomic nostalgia of Don Quixote for a lost golden age has been transformed into a potent and sometimes deadly weapon. Mark Lilla helps us to understand why.
Download or read book God s Battle Plan for the Mind written by David W. Saxton and published by Reformation Heritage Books. This book was released on 2015-01-13 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the seventeenth century, English Puritan pastors often encouraged their congregations in the spiritual discipline of meditating on God and His Word. Today, however, much of evangelicalism is either ignorant of or turned off to the idea of meditation. In God’s Battle Plan for the Mind , pastor David Saxton seeks to convince God’s people of the absolute necessity for personal meditation and motivate them to begin this work themselves. But he has not done this alone. Rather, he has labored through numerous Puritan works in order to bring together the best of their insights on meditation. Standing on the shoulders of these giants, Saxton teaches us how to meditate on divine truth and gives valuable guidance about how to rightly pattern our thinking throughout the day. With the rich experiential theology of the Puritans, this book lays out a course for enjoying true meditation on God’s Word. Table of Contents: 1. The Importance of Recovering the Joyful Habit of Biblical Meditation 2. Unbiblical Forms of Meditation 3. Defining Biblical Meditation 4. Occasional Meditation 5. Deliberate Meditation 6. The Practice of Meditation 7. Important Occasions for Meditation 8. Choosing Subjects for Meditation 9. The Reasons for Meditation 10. The Benefits of Meditation 11. The Enemies of Meditation 12. Getting Started: Beginning the Habit of Meditation Conclusion: Thoughts on Meditation and Personal Godliness
Download or read book The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind written by Barbara K. Lipska and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the tradition of My Stroke of Insight and Brain on Fire, this powerful memoir recounts Barbara Lipska's deadly brain cancer and explains its unforgettable lessons about the brain and mind. Neuroscientist Lipska was diagnosed early in 2015 with metastatic melanoma in her brain's frontal lobe. As the cancer progressed and was treated, she experienced behavioral and cognitive symptoms connected to a range of mental disorders, including dementia and her professional specialty, schizophrenia. Lipska's family and associates were alarmed by the changes in her behavior, which she failed to acknowledge herself. Gradually, after a course of immunotherapy, Lipska returned to normal functioning, amazingly recalled her experience, and through her knowledge of neuroscience identified the ways in which her brain changed during treatment. Lipska admits her condition was unusual; after recovery she was able to return to her research and resume her athletic training and compete in a triathalon. Most patients with similar brain cancers rarely survive to describe their ordeal. Lipska's memoir, coauthored with journalist Elaine McArdle, shows that strength and courage but also an encouraging support network are vital to recovery.
Download or read book Wired to Create written by Scott Barry Kaufman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-12-27 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is it possible to make sense of something as elusive as creativity? Based on psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman’s groundbreaking research and Carolyn Gregoire’s popular article in the Huffington Post, Wired to Create offers a glimpse inside the “messy minds” of highly creative people. Revealing the latest findings in neuroscience and psychology, along with engaging examples of artists and innovators throughout history, the book shines a light on the practices and habits of mind that promote creative thinking. Kaufman and Gregoire untangle a series of paradoxes— like mindfulness and daydreaming, seriousness and play, openness and sensitivity, and solitude and collaboration – to show that it is by embracing our own contradictions that we are able to tap into our deepest creativity. Each chapter explores one of the ten attributes and habits of highly creative people: Imaginative Play * Passion * Daydreaming * Solitude * Intuition * Openness to Experience * Mindfulness * Sensitivity * Turning Adversity into Advantage * Thinking Differently With insights from the work and lives of Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Marcel Proust, David Foster Wallace, Thomas Edison, Josephine Baker, John Lennon, Michael Jackson, musician Thom Yorke, chess champion Josh Waitzkin, video-game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, and many other creative luminaries, Wired to Create helps us better understand creativity – and shows us how to enrich this essential aspect of our lives.
Download or read book Cure written by Jo Marchant and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2016-01-27 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rigorous, sceptical, deeply reported look at the new science behind the mind's extraordinary ability to heal the body. Have you ever felt a surge of adrenaline after narrowly avoiding an accident? Salivated at the sight (or thought) of a sour lemon? Felt turned on just from hearing your partner's voice? If so, then you've experienced how dramatically the workings of your mind can affect your body. Yet while we accept that stress or anxiety can damage our health, the idea of 'healing thoughts' was long ago hijacked by New Age gurus and spiritual healers. Recently, however, serious scientists from a range of fields have been uncovering evidence that our thoughts, emotions, and beliefs can ease pain, heal wounds, fend off infection and heart disease, even slow the progression of AIDS and some cancers. In Cure, award-winning science writer Jo Marchant travels the world to meet the physicians, patients and researchers on the cutting edge of this new world of medicine. We learn how meditation protects against depression and dementia, how social connections increase life expectancy, and how patients who feel cared for recover from surgery faster. We meet Iraq war veterans who are using a virtual arctic world to treat their burns and children whose ADHD is kept under control with half the normal dose of medication. We watch as a transplant patient uses the smell of lavender to calm his hostile immune system and an Olympic runner shaves vital seconds off his time through mind-power alone. Drawing on the very latest research, Marchant explores the vast potential of the mind's ability to heal, acknowledges its limitations, and explains how we can make use of the findings in our own lives. ‘A thought-provoking exploration of how the mind affects the body and can be harnessed to help treat physical illness, by an award-winning science journalist.’ Best Books of 2016, Australian Financial Review ‘A thought-provoking exploration.’ Best Books of 2016, Economist
Download or read book Andy Clark and His Critics written by Matteo Colombo and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Andy Clark is a leading philosopher of cognitive science, whose work has had an extraordinary impact throughout philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and robotics. His monographs have led the way for new research programs in the philosophy of mind and cognition: Microcognition (1989) and Associative Engines (1993) introduced the philosophical community to connectionist research and the novel issues it raised; Being There (1997) showed the relevance of embodiment, dynamical systems theory, and minimal computation frameworks for the study of the mind; Natural Born Cyborgs (OUP 2003) presented an accessible development of embodied and embedded approaches to understanding human nature and cognition; Supersizing the Mind (OUP 2008) developed this yet further along with the famous "Extended Mind" hypothesis; and Surfing Uncertainty (OUP 2017) presents a framework for uniting perception, action, and the embodied mind. In Andy Clark and His Critics, a range of high-profile researchers in philosophy of mind, philosophy of cognitive science, and empirical cognitive science, critically engage with Clark's work across the themes of: Extended, Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, and Affective Minds; Natural Born Cyborgs; and Perception, Action, and Prediction. Daniel Dennett provides a foreword on the significance of Clark's work, and Clark replies to each section of the book, thus advancing current literature with original contributions that will form the basis for new discussions, debates and directions in the discipline.
Download or read book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind written by Julian Jaynes and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2000-08-15 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry
Download or read book The Bitter Side of Sweet written by Tara Sullivan and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For fans of Linda Sue Park and A Long Way Gone, two young boys must escape a life of slavery in modern-day Ivory Coast Fifteen-year-old Amadou counts the things that matter. For two years what has mattered are the number of cacao pods he and his younger brother, Seydou, can chop down in a day. The higher the number the safer they are. The higher the number the closer they are to paying off their debt and returning home. Maybe. The problem is Amadou doesn’t know how much he and Seydou owe, and the bosses won’t tell him. The boys only wanted to make money to help their impoverished family, instead they were tricked into forced labor on a plantation in the Ivory Coast. With no hope of escape, all they can do is try their best to stay alive—until Khadija comes into their lives. She’s the first girl who’s ever come to camp, and she’s a wild thing. She fights bravely every day, attempting escape again and again, reminding Amadou what it means to be free. But finally, the bosses break her, and what happens next to the brother he has always tried to protect almost breaks Amadou. The three band together as family and try just once more to escape. Inspired by true-to-life events happening right now, The Bitter Side of Sweet is an exquisitely written tour de force not to be missed. “A gripping and painful portrait of modern-day child slavery in the cacao plantations of the Ivory Coast.”—The Wall Street Journal “A tender, harrowing story of family, friendship, and the pursuit of freedom.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
Download or read book Flora Ulysses written by Kate DiCamillo and published by Candlewick Press. This book was released on 2013-09-24 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rescuing a squirrel after an accident involving a vacuum cleaner, comic-reading cynic Flora Belle Buckman is astonished when the squirrel, Ulysses, demonstrates astonishing powers of strength and flight after being revived. By the Newbery Medal-winning author of The Tale of Despereaux.
Download or read book The Last Samurai written by Helen DeWitt and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Called “remarkable” (The Wall Street Journal) and “an ambitious, colossal debut novel” (Publishers Weekly), Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai is back in print at last Helen DeWitt’s 2000 debut, The Last Samurai, was “destined to become a cult classic” (Miramax). The enterprising publisher sold the rights in twenty countries, so “Why not just, ‘destined to become a classic?’” (Garth Risk Hallberg) And why must cultists tell the uninitiated it has nothing to do with Tom Cruise? Sibylla, an American-at-Oxford turned loose on London, finds herself trapped as a single mother after a misguided one-night stand. High-minded principles of child-rearing work disastrously well. J. S. Mill (taught Greek at three) and Yo Yo Ma (Bach at two) claimed the methods would work with any child; when these succeed with the boy Ludo, he causes havoc at school and is home again in a month. (Is he a prodigy, a genius? Readers looking over Ludo’s shoulder find themselves easily reading Greek and more.) Lacking male role models for a fatherless boy, Sibylla turns to endless replays of Kurosawa’s masterpiece Seven Samurai. But Ludo is obsessed with the one thing he wants and doesn’t know: his father’s name. At eleven, inspired by his own take on the classic film, he sets out on a secret quest for the father he never knew. He’ll be punched, sliced, and threatened with retribution. He may not live to see twelve. Or he may find a real samurai and save a mother who thinks boredom a fate worse than death.
Download or read book Other Minds The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life written by Peter Godfrey-Smith and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2017-03-09 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BBC R4 Book of the Week ‘Brilliant’ Guardian ‘Fascinating and often delightful’ The Times What if intelligent life on Earth evolved not once, but twice? The octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. What can we learn from the encounter?
Download or read book The Age of Em written by Robin Hanson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robots may one day rule the world, but what is a robot-ruled Earth like? Many think that the first truly smart robots will be brain emulations or "ems." Robin Hanson draws on decades of expertise in economics, physics, and computer science to paint a detailed picture of this next great era in human (and machine) evolution - the age of em.
