Download or read book We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think written by Shirley Hazzard and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-05 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spanning the 1960s to the 2000s, these nonfiction writings showcase Shirley Hazzard's extensive thinking on global politics, international relations, the history and fraught present of Western literary culture, and postwar life in Europe and Asia. They add essential clarity to the themes that dominate her award-winning fiction and expand the intellectual registers in which her writings work. Hazzard writes about her employment at the United Nations and the institution's manifold failings. She shares her personal experience with the aftermath of the Hiroshima atomic bombing and the nature of life in late-1940s Hong Kong. She speaks to the decline of the hero as a public figure in Western literature and affirms the ongoing power of fiction to console, inspire, and direct human life, despite—or maybe because of—the world's disheartening realities. Cementing Hazzard's place as one of the twentieth century's sharpest and most versatile thinkers, this collection also encapsulates for readers the critical events defining postwar letters, thought, and politics.

Download or read book Here the People Rule written by Edward Banfield and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-07 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most of the essays in this volume have appeared in scholarly journals or in books edited by others. A few are published here for the first time. None has been taken from one of my books. A would-be reader would have to go to much trouble to find them; that is the reason for bringing them together. Collections of essays are frequently miscellanies. This one is not. Except for the final two chapters, all deal with some aspect of the American political system. Some have to do with the structure and functioning of the federal system, others with the nature of publi(}-and incidentally other-organization, and still others with the causes and supposed cures of the social problems that government is nowadays expected to solve or cope with. The two final chapters are about the relationship between economics and political science; for lack of a better term they may be methodological.

Download or read book Sometimes I Think About It written by Stephen Elliott and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essay collection by a writer who “may be writing under . . . the influence of genius” (Vanity Fair) In Sometimes I Think About It, Stephen Elliott gathers personal essays, reportage, and profiles written over fifteen years to tell a powerful story about outsiders and underdogs. Moving from the self to the civic, the book begins with a series of essays that trace Elliott’s childhood with an abusive and erratic father, his life on the streets as a teenager, and his growing interest in cross-dressing and masochism. These stories, which range from a comic portrait of a week spent hosting his younger brother to a brutal depiction of depression, provide a context for the essays that follow. Stepping out into the world, Elliott tells of a man who loses his family in a rock slide in Southern California, explores the vexing realities of life in Palestine, and paints a chilling picture of a young man caught in the prison-industrial complex. The last section, “The Business of America Is Business,” shows Elliott’s abiding interest in the spectacle of money in America, from pop music to pornography to publishing, and it concludes with an off-kilter account of the tech industry’s assault on West Los Angeles. Building on the extraordinary storytelling that characterized his breakout book, The Adderall Diaries, Elliott’s search for dignity and happiness leads him to tell with great sympathy the stories of those who are broken and seek to be whole.

Download or read book 101 Essays written by DiAnn Gilbertson and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2021-09-13 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her second compilation of published writing, Brianna Wiest explores pursuing purpose over passion, embracing negative thinking, seeing the wisdom in daily routine, and becoming aware of the cognitive biases that are creating the way you see your life. This book contains never before seen pieces as well as some of Brianna's most popular essays, all of which just might leave you thinking: this idea changed my life.

Download or read book This I Believe written by Ernst Friedrich Schumacher and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Years after his death, the ideas of E.F. Schumacher still resonate through the environmental movement. With deep spiritual vision and rejection of Western materialism and economic exploitation, Schumacher saw the need to give societies, communities and individuals practical tools for change. He is best known for his book Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, which became an international best-seller. Both activist and philosopher, his concerns included economics, energy, farming, industry and the inner life of human beings. He was for many years Chief Economist to the Coal Board, and latterly Chairman of the Soil Association; he also originated the concept of intermediate technology. His enduring influence has been recognised by the setting up in 1992 of Schumacher College, an international college for ecological and spiritual values, and the Schumacher Society, which was established in 1977.

Download or read book Why I Write written by George Orwell and published by Renard Press Ltd. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 15 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. He also discusses what he sees as the ‘four great motives for writing’ – ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell’s mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer’s oeuvre. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times

Download or read book Self to Self written by J. David Velleman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-01-26 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays by philosopher J. David Velleman on personal identity, autonomy, and moral emotions is united by an overarching thesis that there is no single entity denoted by 'the self', as well as themes from Kantian ethics and Velleman's work in the philosophy of action.

Download or read book Hope Is a Decision written by Daisaku Ikeda and published by Middleway Press. This book was released on 2017-05-01 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we remain optimistic when the world seems to be falling apart around us? In these intimate essays, the author leads the reader on an inspirational journey to find answers and hope in troubled times. The book includes incisive commentaries on terrorism, good and evil, and aging and death that provide a new perspective on approaching the world with hope. The lyrical reflections on poetry and friendship highlight how such spiritual pursuits are the wellsprings of hope in dark times. Each essay suggests ways in which anyone can connect their personal search for strength, wisdom, and hope to the collective desire to bring about a just, humane, and caring society.

Download or read book Visions and Ecstasies written by H.D. and published by David Zwirner Books. This book was released on 2019-11-26 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: H.D’s writing continues to inspire generations of readers. Bringing together a number of never-before-published essays, this new collection of H.D.’s writings introduces her compelling perspectives on art, myth, and the creative process. While H.D. is best known for her elemental poetry, which draws heavily on the imagery of natural and ancient worlds, her critical writings remain a largely underexplored and unpublished part of her oeuvre. Crucial to understanding both the formative contexts surrounding her departure from Imagism following the First World War and her own remarkable creative vision, Notes on Thought and Vision, written in 1918, is one of the central works in this collection. H.D. guides her reader to the untamed shores of the Scilly Isles, where we hear of powerful, transformative experiences and of her intense relationship with the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci. The accompanying essays, many published here for the first time, help color H.D.’s astute critical engagement with the past, from the city of Athens and the poetry of ancient Greece. Like Letters to a Young Painter (2017), also published in the ekphrasis series, this collection is essential reading for anyone interested in the creative process.

Download or read book The Hall of Uselessness written by Simon Leys and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2013-07-30 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An NYRB Classics Original Simon Leys is a Renaissance man for the era of globalization. A distinguished scholar of classical Chinese art and literature and one of the first Westerners to recognize the appalling toll of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Leys also writes with unfailing intelligence, seriousness, and bite about European art, literature, history, and politics and is an unflinching observer of the way we live now. The Hall of Uselessness is the most extensive collection of Leys’s essays to be published to date. In it, he addresses subjects ranging from the Chinese attitude to the past to the mysteries of Belgium and Belgitude; offers portraits of André Gide and Zhou Enlai; takes on Roland Barthes and Christopher Hitchens; broods on the Cambodian genocide; reflects on the spell of the sea; and writes with keen appreciation about writers as different as Victor Hugo, Evelyn Waugh, and Georges Simenon. Throughout, The Hall of Uselessness is marked with the deep knowledge, skeptical intelligence, and passionate conviction that have made Simon Leys one of the most powerful essayists of our time.

Download or read book Is God Happy written by Leszek Kolakowski and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2013-02-05 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The late Leszek Kolakowski was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. A prominent anticommunist writer, Kolakowski was also a deeply humanistic thinker, and his meditations on society, religion, morality, and culture stand alongside his political writings as commentaries on intellectual—and everyday—life in the twentieth century. Kolakowski’s extraordinary empathy, humor, and erudition are on full display in Is God Happy?, the first collection of his work to be published since his death in 2009. Accessible and wide ranging, these essays—many of them translated into English for the first time—testify to the remarkable scope of Kolakowski’s work. From a provocative and deeply felt critique of Marxist ideology to the witty and self-effacing “In Praise of Unpunctuality” to a rigorous analysis of Erasmus’ model of Christianity and the future of religion, these essays distill Kolakowski’s lifelong engagement with the eternal problems of philosophy and some of the most vital questions of our age.

Download or read book Fifty Essays written by George Orwell and published by epubli. This book was released on 2021-01-09 with total page 739 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Fifty Essays" is a collection of 50 essays by George Orwell. Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. Included in this collection: - The Spike (1931) - A Hanging (1931) - Bookshop Memories (1936) - Shooting an Elephant (1936) - Down the Mine (1937) - North and South (1937) - Spilling the Spanish Beans (1937) - Marrakech (1939) - Boys' Weeklies and Frank Richards's Reply (1940) - Charles Dickens (1940) - Charles Reade (1940) - Inside the Whale (1940) - The Art of Donald McGill (1941) - The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941) - Wells, Hitler and the World State (1941) - Looking Back on the Spanish War (1942) - Rudyard Kipling (1942) - Mark Twain—The Licensed Jester (1943) - Poetry and the Microphone (1943) - W B Yeats (1943) - Arthur Koestler (1944) - Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali (1944) - Raffles and Miss Blandish (1944) - Antisemitism in Britain (1945) - Freedom of the Park (1945) - Future of a Ruined Germany (1945) - Good Bad Books (1945) - In Defence Of P. G. Wodehouse (1945) - Nonsense Poetry (1945) - Notes on Nationalism (1945) - Revenge is Sour (1945) - The Sporting Spirit (1945) - You and the Atomic Bomb (1945) - A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray (1946) - A Nice Cup of Tea (1946) - Books vs. Cigarettes (1946) - Confessions of a Book Reviewer (1946) - Decline of the English Murder (1946) - How the Poor Die (1946) - James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution (1946) - Pleasure Spots (1946) - Politics and the English Language (1946) - Politics vs. Literature: an Examination of Gulliver's Travels (1946) - Riding Down from Bangor (1946) - Some Thoughts on the Common Toad (1946) - The Prevention of Literature (1946) - Why I Write (1946) - Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool (1947) - Such, Such were the Joys (1947) - Writers and Leviathan (1948) - Reflections on Gandhi (1949)

Download or read book Dilemmas and Connections written by Charles Taylor and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-07 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are, always, more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in oneÕs philosophyÑand in these essays Charles Taylor turns to those things not fully imagined or avenues not wholly explored in his epochal A Secular Age. Here Taylor talks in detail about thinkers who are his allies and interlocutors, such as Iris Murdoch, Alasdair MacIntyre, Robert Brandom, and Paul Celan. He offers major contributions to social theory, expanding on the issues of nationalism, democratic exclusionism, religious mobilizations, and modernity. And he delves even more deeply into themes taken up in A Secular Age: the continuity of religion from the past into the future; the nature of the secular; the folly of hoping to live by Òreason aloneÓ; and the perils of moralism. He also speculates on how irrationality emerges from the heart of rationality itself, and why violence breaks out again and again. In A Secular Age, Taylor more evidently foregrounded his Catholic faith, and there are several essays here that further explore that faith. Overall, this is a hopeful book, showing how, while acknowledging the force of religion and the persistence of violence and folly, we nonetheless have the power to move forward once we have given up the brittle pretensions of a narrow rationalism.

Download or read book Upstream written by Mary Oliver and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of O, The Oprah Magazine’s Ten Best Books of the Year The New York Times bestselling collection of essays from beloved poet, Mary Oliver. “There's hardly a page in my copy of Upstream that isn't folded down or underlined and scribbled on, so charged is Oliver's language . . .” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air “Uniting essays from Oliver’s previous books and elsewhere, this gem of a collection offers a compelling synthesis of the poet’s thoughts on the natural, spiritual and artistic worlds . . .” —The New York Times “In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.” So begins Upstream, a collection of essays in which revered poet Mary Oliver reflects on her willingness, as a young child and as an adult, to lose herself within the beauty and mysteries of both the natural world and the world of literature. Emphasizing the significance of her childhood “friend” Walt Whitman, through whose work she first understood that a poem is a temple, “a place to enter, and in which to feel,” and who encouraged her to vanish into the world of her writing, Oliver meditates on the forces that allowed her to create a life for herself out of work and love. As she writes, “I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.” Upstream follows Oliver as she contemplates the pleasure of artistic labor, her boundless curiosity for the flora and fauna that surround her, and the responsibility she has inherited from Shelley, Wordsworth, Emerson, Poe, and Frost, the great thinkers and writers of the past, to live thoughtfully, intelligently, and to observe with passion. Throughout this collection, Oliver positions not just herself upstream but us as well as she encourages us all to keep moving, to lose ourselves in the awe of the unknown, and to give power and time to the creative and whimsical urges that live within us.

Download or read book Less Than One written by Joseph Brodsky and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1986 with total page 517 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes essays on Russian writers, Western poets, politics, and the author's native city, Leningrad.

Download or read book I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts written by Mark Dery and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2012-03-29 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author explores the darkest corners of the American psyche--including the sexual fantasies of Star Trek fans, the hidden agendas of IQ tests, the homoerotic subtext of professional football, the poetic aspects of spam email and much more.

Download or read book Science Curriculum and Liberal Education written by Joseph J. Schwab and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1978 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is a liberal education and what part can science play in it? How should we think about the task of developing a curriculum? How should educational research conceive of its goals? Joseph Schwab's essays on these questions have influenced education internationally for more than twenty-five years. Schwab participated in what Daniel Bell has described as the "most thoroughgoing experiment in general education in any college in the United States," the College of the University of Chicago during the thirties, forties, and fifties. He played a central role in the curriculum reform movement of the sixties, and his extraordinary command of science, the philosophy of science, and traditional and modern views of liberal education found expression in these exceptionally thoughtful essays.