Download or read book Lost in Thought written by Zena Hitz and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-24 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An invitation to readers from every walk of life to rediscover the impractical splendors of a life of learning In an overloaded, superficial, technological world, in which almost everything and everybody is judged by its usefulness, where can we turn for escape, lasting pleasure, contemplation, or connection to others? While many forms of leisure meet these needs, Zena Hitz writes, few experiences are so fulfilling as the inner life, whether that of a bookworm, an amateur astronomer, a birdwatcher, or someone who takes a deep interest in one of countless other subjects. Drawing on inspiring examples, from Socrates and Augustine to Malcolm X and Elena Ferrante, and from films to Hitz's own experiences as someone who walked away from elite university life in search of greater fulfillment, Lost in Thought is a passionate and timely reminder that a rich life is a life rich in thought. Today, when even the humanities are often defended only for their economic or political usefulness, Hitz says our intellectual lives are valuable not despite but because of their practical uselessness. And while anyone can have an intellectual life, she encourages academics in particular to get back in touch with the desire to learn for its own sake, and calls on universities to return to the person-to-person transmission of the habits of mind and heart that bring out the best in us. Reminding us of who we once were and who we might become, Lost in Thought is a moving account of why renewing our inner lives is fundamental to preserving our humanity.

Download or read book Hidden Pleasures written by Brenda Jackson and published by Kimani Press. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All she has to do is be his lover for a week… And when the man is gorgeous Galen Steele, what woman could possibly say no? Brittany Thrasher has her own hidden motives for accepting Galen's proposal. Only the savvy businesswoman draws the line at actually falling for the sexy playboy. Even if he is the incredible lover of her most taboo fantasies…. The moment their paths crossed again at an auction, Galen knew Brittany was special. If she wants the house he just won so badly, how far is she willing to go to get it? That's when the Phoenix entrepreneur makes her an offer he fully expects her to refuse. But once their passion heats up, the bidding really begins. And Galen will uncover Brittany's secret. Because this determined man of Steele isn't about to let the woman of his dreams get away….

Download or read book The Hidden Pleasures of Life written by Theodore Zeldin and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2015-05-21 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of a search for a new art of living. How can one escape from work colleagues who are bores and from organisations that thrive on stress? What new priorities can people give to their private lives? When the romantic ideal is disappointing, how else can affections be cultivated? If only a few can become rich, what substitute is there for dropping out? If religions and nations disagree, what other outcomes are possible beyond strife or doubt? Where there is too little freedom, what is the alternative to rebellion? When so much is unpredictable, what can replace ambition? Questions include: What is the great adventure of our time? What is a wasted life? How can people lose their illusions about themselves? What alternatives are there to being a rebel? What can the poor tell the rich? What could the rich tell the poor? How many ways of committing suicide are there? How can an unbeliever understand a believer? How can a religion change? How can prejudices be overcome? How can one think about the future, without trying to predict it or worrying about it? Is ridicule the most effective form of non-violent protest? How does one acquire a sense of humour? What stops people feeling completely at home in their own country? How many nations can one love at the same time? Why do so many people feel unappreciated, unloved and not fully alive? How else might women and men treat one another? What can replace the shortage of soul-mates? Is another kind of sexual revolution achievable? What can artists aim for beyond self-expression? What is more interesting than becoming a leader? What is the point of working so hard? Are there more amusing ways of earning a living? What else can one do in a hotel? What more can the young ask of their elders? Is remaining young at heart enough to avoid becoming old? What is worth knowing? What does it mean to be alive? Where can one find nourishment for the mind?

Download or read book Secret Pleasures written by Thea Devine and published by Kensington Books. This book was released on 2000 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forced into a marriage of convenience with a dissolute older lord, beautiful, innocent Lady Genelle Tisne has little knowledge of true passion. When she finds herself the prime suspect in the murder of her husband, she hires enigmatic private investigator Rulan Roak and is swept into a secret world of forbidden temptations and sensual abandon where every seduction has its pleasures and its price.

Download or read book Canyon Hidden Pleasures written by Brenda Jackson and published by Harlequin. This book was released on 2013-07-30 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW Westmoreland story! From New York Times bestselling author BRENDA JACKSON Years ago, Canyon Westmoreland wasn't ready to settle down. But when Keisha Ashford returns to town with a two-year-old son, everything changes—except for the blazing attraction he still feels for Keisha. This time around, nothing will stop Canyon from claiming what is his—his woman and his child!

Download or read book Texas Tycoon Hidden Pleasures written by Diana Palmer and published by Harlequin. This book was released on 2023-06-27 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BESTSELLING AUTHOR COLLECTION Reader-favorite romances in collectible volumes from our bestselling authors. Texas Tycoon by New York Times bestselling author Diana Palmer Matt Caldwell must be the hardest-hearted man in the Lone Star State. The last thing he wants to do is open up to a woman and risk getting hurt…until his beautiful new assistant walks through the office door. Leslie Murray is on the run and in need of a protector, stat—her new boss just might be up for the job. But when Leslie suddenly finds herself in Matt's strong arms, she wonders if she could be the one to knock down the bachelor's protective walls and finally bring love to this long, tall Texan. FREE BONUS STORY INCLUDED IN THIS VOLUME! Hidden Pleasures by New York Times bestselling author Brenda Jackson The moment their paths crossed again at an auction, Galen Steele knew Brittany Thrasher was special. If she wants the house he just won so badly, how far is she willing to go to get it? That's when the Phoenix entrepreneur makes her an offer he fully expects her to refuse. All she has to do is be his lover for a week…

Download or read book Hidden Pleasures Business Adult Romance Complete Series written by Lucia Jordan and published by Wild Hearts Romance. This book was released on 2021-11-23 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While Madeline tries to resist Liam, the world of pleasure he offers might just be too tempting to ignore… If real estate broker Madeline Swift wants to keep her job, she needs to make a sale and she needs to make it fast. So when a new client is in the market to buy a property, they’re assigned to the disheartened and severely unoptimistic Madeline who comes face to face with the man on whom her job now depends – Liam Benedict. But Liam is no stranger to Madeline. The boy she had been infatuated with as a sophomore in college is now a man who’s nothing like what she remembered. He’s older, more sophisticated, gorgeous and impossibly hotter with a new cool, calm authoritativeness that excites and intimidates her at the same time. Liam knows exactly who Madeline is, and plans to seduce her into a world of sensual exploration that she had been too naïve for all those years ago. The question is—is Madeline now ready for everything that Liam has in store?

Download or read book Small Pleasures written by Clare Chambers and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the best tradition of Tessa Hadley, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ann Patchett—an astonishing, keenly observed period piece about an ordinary British woman in the 1950s whose dutiful life takes a sudden turn into a pitched battle between propriety and unexpected passion. "With wit and dry humor...quietly affecting in unexpected ways. Chambers' language is beautiful, achieving what only the most skilled writers can: big pleasure wrought from small details."--The New York Times LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 1957: Jean Swinney is a feature writer on a local paper in the southeast suburbs of London. Clever but with limited career opportunities and on the brink of forty, Jean lives a dreary existence that includes caring for her demanding widowed mother, who rarely leaves the house. It’s a small life with little joy and no likelihood of escape. That all changes when a young woman, Gretchen Tilbury, contacts the paper to claim that her daughter is the result of a virgin birth. Jean seizes onto the bizarre story and sets out to discover whether Gretchen is a miracle or a fraud. But the more Jean investigates, the more her life becomes strangely (and not unpleasantly) intertwined with that of the Tilburys, including Gretchen’s gentle and thoughtful husband Howard, who mostly believes his wife, and their quirky and charming daughter Margaret, who becomes a sort of surrogate child for Jean. Gretchen, too, becomes a much-needed friend in an otherwise empty social life. Jean cannot bring herself to discard what seems like her one chance at happiness, even as the story that she is researching starts to send dark ripples across all their lives…with unimaginable consequences. Both a mystery and a love story, Small Pleasures is a literary tour-de-force in the style of The Remains of the Day, about conflict between personal fulfillment and duty; a novel that celebrates the beauty and potential for joy in all things plain and unfashionable.

Download or read book An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures written by Clarice Lispector and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2022-05-03 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback, a romantic love story by the great Brazilian writer Lóri, a primary school teacher, is isolated and nervous, comfortable with children but unable to connect to adults. When she meets Ulisses, a professor of philosophy, an opportunity opens: a chance to escape the shipwreck of introspection and embrace the love, including the sexual love, of a man. Her attempt, as Sheila Heti writes in her afterword, is not only “to love and to be loved,” but also “to be worthy of life itself.” Published in 1968, An Apprenticeship is Clarice Lispector’s attempt to reinvent herself following the exhausting effort of her metaphysical masterpiece The Passion According to G. H. Here, in this unconventional love story, she explores the ways in which people try to bridge the gaps between them, and the result, unusual in her work, surprised many readers and became a bestseller. Some appreciated its accessibility; others denounced it as sexist or superficial. To both admirers and critics, the olympian Clarice gave a typically elliptical answer: “I humanized myself,” she said. “The book reflects that.”

Download or read book How Pleasure Works The New Science of Why We Like What We Like written by Paul Bloom and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2010-06-14 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Engaging, evocative. . . . [Bloom] is a supple, clear writer, and his parade of counterintuitive claims about pleasure is beguiling.”—NPR Why is an artistic masterpiece worth millions more than a convincing forgery? Pleasure works in mysterious ways, as Paul Bloom reveals in this investigation of what we desire and why. Drawing on a wealth of surprising studies, Bloom investigates pleasures noble and seamy, lofty and mundane, to reveal that our enjoyment of a given thing is determined not by what we can see and touch but by our beliefs about that thing’s history, origin, and deeper nature.

Download or read book Eye of My Heart written by Barbara Graham and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-04-07 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This compilation of 28 original essays by noted journalists, novelists, and essayists--each one a grandmother--delves into what it means to be a grandmother today.

Download or read book Secret Pleasures written by Jessica AngelKnight and published by Dorrance Publishing. This book was released on 2022-04-06 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Secret Pleasures: A Chronicle of Unhappy Endings By: Jessica Angelknight A collection of stories written with humor, frustration, and sarcasm, Jessica’s tales are written with the intention to both create and destroy something beautiful. Following the journey of a young woman, we watch as she tries to escape the outcome of choices other people have made for her and her plight for freedom.

Download or read book The Pleasure Trap written by Douglas J. Lisle and published by Book Publishing Company. This book was released on 2007-09-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors offer unique insights into the factors that make us susceptible to dietary and lifestyle excesses, and present ways to restore the biological processes designed by nature to keep us running at maximum efficiency and vitality. A wake-up call to even the most health conscious people, The Pleasure Trap boldy challenges conventional wisdom about sickness and unhappiness in today's contemporary culture, and offers groundbreaking solutions for achieving change. Authors Douglas Lisel, Ph.D., and Alan Goldhamer, D.C., provide a fascinating new perspective on how modern life can turn so many smart, savvy people into the unwitting saboteurs of their own well-being. Inspired by stunning original research, comprehensive clinical studies, and their successes with thousands of patients, the authors construct a new paradigm for the psychology of health, offering fresh hope for anyone stuck in a self-destructive rut. Integrating principals of evolutionary biology with trailblazing, proactive strategies for well

Download or read book Images in the Dark written by Raymond Murray and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fully revised and updated edition reviews over 3000 films and videos. As a companion to gay and lesbian cinema, it also covers homosexual directors, gay characters and plots, sympathetic film-makers and gay icons.

Download or read book Hidden Gold written by Harvey McKinnon and published by Bonus Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2003-11 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fun and new innovative Bible bindings for kids ages 8 and up. New! Innovative! Fun! Perfect for kids on the go, the Sili-Flex Bible, NIV contains the full text of the bestselling New International Version with a cool new squishy binding and portable compact size. Ideal for home, school, or church use, the Sili-Flex Bible, NIV is small enough to fit into almost any backpack or bag. Features include: Fun, new "squishy" binding with two removable enclosure tabs that can be applied to other areas of the cover for added fun Complete text of the New International Version (NIV) translation of the Bible Words of Christ in red Ribbon marker

Download or read book The Hidden Wound written by Wendell Berry and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2010-04-28 with total page 91 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An impassioned, thoughtful, and fearless essay on the effects of racism on the American identity by one of our country’s most humane literary voices. Acclaimed as “one of the most humane, honest, liberating works of our time” (The Village Voice), The Hidden Wound is a book-length essay about racism and the damage it has done to the identity of our country. Through Berry’s personal experience, he explains how remaining passive in the face of the struggle of racism further corrodes America’s great potential. In a quiet and observant manner, Berry opens up about how his attempt to discuss racism is rooted in the hope that someday the historical wound will begin to heal. Pulitzer prize-winning author Larry McMurtry calls this “a profound, passionate, crucial piece of writing . . . Few readers, and I think, no writers will be able to read it without a small pulse of triumph at the temples: the strange, almost communal sense of triumph one feels when someone has written truly well . . . The statement it makes is intricate and beautiful, sad but strong.” “Mr. Berry is a sophisticated, philosophical poet in the line descending from Emerson and Thoreau." ―The Baltimore Sun "[Berry’s poems] shine with the gentle wisdom of a craftsman who has thought deeply about the paradoxical strangeness and wonder of life." ―The Christian Science Monitor "Wendell Berry is one of those rare individuals who speaks to us always of responsibility, of the individual cultivation of an active and aware participation in the arts of life." ―The Bloomsbury Review “[Berry’s] poems, novels and essays . . . are probably the most sustained contemporary articulation of America’s agrarian, Jeffersonian ideal.” ―Publishers Weekly

Download or read book Chasing Her Fetishes written by K. K. Foster and published by . This book was released on 2019-08-19 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bound by love, friendship, and steaming sexual fetishes, two Bi-Sexual Female Psychiatrist Criminal Profilers, use their education and experience to track down a Serial Rapist and Killer. Using their own personal disorders against other disorders, to fight crime and chase their own fetishes, they trade ideas and pleasure off each other while tracking the Killer, and satisfy their desires for each other and their long relationship. With one of them married with young children and clinging to her faith, and OCD, and the other clinging to her carefree promiscuous bipolar lifestyle, their romance struggles to hold onto each other as individual fetishes begin to change. Struggling with her physical and mental scars from a rape in college, Julian hides her Disorders by creating a Psychological method with Andrea to create a stronger work personality, named Jordan. Jordan is to meet the needs of her team, protect Julian from her fears, and let the submissive Julian maintain her faith and fetishes with her husband, Noah. Only Rachael wants her back in that role for her, like she was in college. Struggling with desires, and her faith limiting her pleasure, Julian suffers inside with her personalities to find ways to satisfy the fetishes she has enjoyed in the past and kept hidden from her husband. Believing she is a real Angel, as well as her husband, she is obligated to be responsible for his seed, and be fruitful and multiply, and both have become an obsession as she struggles to get her other fetishes fulfilled. Andrea creates a strong personality, Rachael, but uses her to be the bad girl she has always been, only now Andrea can chase all the fetishes she wants, as Rachael, and not feel guilty about it. Designed to protect Andrea from the memories of her sexual abusive, and very religious father, she lets Rachael explore her fetishes for her, but 'Daddy Issues' are not far behind.Now with personalities trying to work personalities to gain sexual favors, and chase more of their fetishes, the Women begin to work against each other as one pulls toward her husband for a desperate sexual act to cleanse her soul of the stain left by her Rapist, and the other uses her Psychiatry skills to plant false memories, and still chase down the nasty Stiff'em Killer and keep their love for each other from falling apart.