Download or read book The Sympathy of Things written by Lars Spuybroek and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-04-21 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'If there is one thing we can learn from John Ruskin, it is that each age must find its own way to beauty' writes Lars Spuybroek in The Sympathy of Things, his ground-breaking work which proposes a radical new aesthetics for the digital era. Spuybroek argues that we must 'undo' the twentieth century and learn to understand the aesthetic insights of the nineteenth-century art critic John Ruskin, from which he distils pointers for the contemporary age. Linking philosophy, design, and the digital, with art history, architecture, and craft, Spuybroek explores the romantic notion of 'sympathy', a core concept in Ruskin's aesthetics, re-evaluating it as the driving force of the twenty-first century aesthetic experience. For Ruskin, beauty always comprises variation, imperfection and fragility, three concepts that wholly disappeared from our mindsets during the twentieth century, but which Spuybroek argues to be central to contemporary aesthetics and design. Revised throughout, and a new foreword by philosopher Brian Massumi, this is a new edition of a seminal work which has drawn praise from fields as diverse as digital architecture and speculative realism, and will continue to be influential as it wrests Ruskin's ideas out of the Victorian era and reconstructs them for the modern age.
Download or read book Sympathy of Things written by Lars Spuybroek and published by V2_ publishing. This book was released on 2011 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We have to find our way back to beauty," writes Lars Spuybroek in the introduction to The Sympathy of Things. In this book Spuybroek argues that we must "undo" the twentieth century - the age in which the sublime turned from an art category into a technical reality. This leads him to the aesthetical insights of the nineteenth-century English art critic John Ruskin, from which he distils pointers for our time. In The Sympathy of Things, the old romantic notion of sympathy, a core concept in Ruskin's aesthetics, is re-evaluated as the driving force of the aesthetic experience. For Ruskin, beauty always comprises variation, imperfection and fragility, three concepts that wholly disappeared from our mindsets during the twentieth century. Spuybroek addresses the five central dual themes of Ruskin in turn: the Gothic and work, ornament and matter, sympathy and abstraction, the picturesque and time, ecology and design. He wrests each of these themes from the Victorian era and compares them with the related ideas of later aestheticians and philosophers like William James and Bruno Latour.
Download or read book The Comfort of Things written by Daniel Miller and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-24 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do we know about ordinary people in our towns and cities, about what really matters to them and how they organize their lives today? This book visits an ordinary street and looks into thirty households. It reveals the aspirations and frustrations, the tragedies and accomplishments that are played out behind the doors. It focuses on the things that matter to these people, which quite often turn out to be material things – their house, the dog, their music, the Christmas decorations. These are the means by which they express who they have become, and relationships to objects turn out to be central to their relationships with other people – children, lovers, brothers and friends. If this is a typical street in a modern city like London, then what kind of society is this? It’s not a community, nor a neighbourhood, nor is it a collection of isolated individuals. It isn’t dominated by the family. We assume that social life is corrupted by materialism, made superficial and individualistic by a surfeit of consumer goods, but this is misleading. If the street isn’t any of these things, then what is it? This brilliant and revealing portrayal of a street in modern London, written by one the most prominent anthropologists, shows how much is to be gained when we stop lamenting what we think we used to be and focus instead on what we are now becoming. It reveals the forms by which ordinary people make sense of their lives, and the ways in which objects become our companions in the daily struggle to make life meaningful.
Download or read book Sympathy written by Eric Schliesser and published by Oxford Philosophical Concepts. This book was released on 2015 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a historical overview of some of the most significant attempts to come to grips with sympathy in Western thought from Plato to experimental economics. The contributors are leading scholars in philosophy, classics, history, economics, comparative literature, and political science.
Download or read book Grace and Gravity written by Lars Spuybroek and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-11-26 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we live well? The first sentence of Grace and Gravity raises the fundamental question that constantly occupies our minds-and of all those who lived before us. Paradoxically, the impossibility of answering this question opens up the very room needed to find ways of living well. It is the gap where all disciplines fall short, where architecture does not fit its inhabitants, where economy is not based on shortage, where religion cannot be explained by its followers, and where technology works far beyond its own principles. According to Lars Spuybroek, the prize-winning former architect, this marks the point where the “paradoxical machine” of grace reveals its powers, a point where we “cannot say if we are moving or being moved”. Following the trail of grace leads him to a new form of analysis that transcends the age-old opposition between appearances and technology. Linking up a dazzling and often delightful variety of sources-monkeys, paintings, lamp posts, octopuses, tattoos, bleeding fingers, rose windows, robots, smart phones, spirits, saints, and fossils-with profound meditations on living, death, consciousness, and existence, Grace and Gravity offers an eye-opening provocation to a wide range of art historians, architects, theologians, anthropologists, artists, media theorists and philosophers.
Download or read book All the Ugly and Wonderful Things written by Bryn Greenwood and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2016-08-09 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: - A New York Times and USA Today bestseller - Book of the Month Club 2016 Book of the Year - Second Place Goodreads Best Fiction of 2016 A beautiful and provocative love story between two unlikely people and the hard-won relationship that elevates them above the Midwestern meth lab backdrop of their lives. As the daughter of a drug dealer, Wavy knows not to trust people, not even her own parents. It's safer to keep her mouth shut and stay out of sight. Struggling to raise her little brother, Donal, eight-year-old Wavy is the only responsible adult around. Obsessed with the constellations, she finds peace in the starry night sky above the fields behind her house, until one night her star gazing causes an accident. After witnessing his motorcycle wreck, she forms an unusual friendship with one of her father's thugs, Kellen, a tattooed ex-con with a heart of gold. By the time Wavy is a teenager, her relationship with Kellen is the only tender thing in a brutal world of addicts and debauchery. When tragedy rips Wavy's family apart, a well-meaning aunt steps in, and what is beautiful to Wavy looks ugly under the scrutiny of the outside world. A powerful novel you won’t soon forget, Bryn Greenwood's All the Ugly and Wonderful Things challenges all we know and believe about love. 31 Books Bringing the Heat this Summer —Bustle Top Ten Hottest Reads of 2016 —New York Daily News Best Books of 2016 —St. Louis Post Dispatch
Download or read book Sweet Tea and Sympathy written by Molly Harper and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-11-21 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From beloved author Molly Harper comes the first novel in the contemporary romance series, Southern Eclectic, about a big-city party planner who finds true love in a small Georgia town. Nestled on the shore of Lake Sackett, Georgia is the McCready Family Funeral Home and Bait Shop. (What, you have a problem with one-stop shopping?) Two McCready brothers started two separate businesses in the same building back in 1928, and now it’s become one big family affair. And true to form in small Southern towns, family business becomes everybody’s business. Margot Cary has spent her life immersed in everything Lake Sackett is not. As an elite event planner, Margot’s rubbed elbows with the cream of Chicago society, and made elegance and glamour her business. She’s riding high until one event goes tragically, spectacularly wrong. Now she’s blackballed by the gala set and in dire need of a fresh start—and apparently the McCreadys are in need of an event planner with a tarnished reputation. As Margot finds her footing in a town where everybody knows not only your name, but what you had for dinner last Saturday night and what you’ll wear to church on Sunday morning, she grudgingly has to admit that there are some things Lake Sackett does better than Chicago—including the dating prospects. Elementary school principal Kyle Archer is a fellow fish-out-of-water who volunteers to show Margot the picture-postcard side of Southern living. The two of them hit it off, but not everybody is happy to see an outsider snapping up one of the town's most eligible gentleman. Will Margot reel in her handsome fish, or will she have to release her latest catch?
Download or read book American Sympathy written by Caleb Crain and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A friend in history,” Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “looks like some premature soul.” And in the history of friendship in early America, Caleb Crain sees the soul of the nation’s literature. In a sensitive analysis that weaves together literary criticism and historical narrative, Crain describes the strong friendships between men that supported and inspired some of America’s greatest writing--the Gothic novels of Charles Brockden Brown, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the novels of Herman Melville. He traces the genealogy of these friendships through a series of stories. A dapper English spy inspires a Quaker boy to run away from home. Three Philadelphia gentlemen conduct a romance through diaries and letters in the 1780s. Flighty teenager Charles Brockden Brown metamorphoses into a horror novelist by treating his friends as his literary guinea pigs. Emerson exchanges glances with a Harvard classmate but sacrifices his crush on the altar of literature--a decision Margaret Fuller invites him to reconsider two decades later. Throughout this engaging book, Crain demonstrates the many ways in which the struggle to commit feelings to paper informed the shape and texture of American literature.
Download or read book Good Book written by David Plotz and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-02-20 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Hilarious. . . . It’s Cliff Notes for Scripture—screenplay by Plotz, story by God. . . . In the end, though, the book is made by the spirit of the writer.” — The New York Times Book Review “Like the Bible itself, Good Book contains multitudes—it is by turns thought-provoking, funny, enlightening and moving.” — A. J. Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically “Plotz is a genius writer.” — Franklin Foer, author of How Soccer Explains the World A whip-smart, laugh-out-loud tour through the most important book in the world, a book most people have never read: the Bible.
Download or read book Sympathy for the Devil written by Howard Marks and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Detective Catrin Price returns to Cardiff after 12 years of self-imposed exile she is determined to lay to rest the ghosts of her unhappy past. Then her ex-boyfriend Rhys, once a promising young policeman but now a washed-up junkie, is found dead on one of her first nights on patrol. The official verdict is an accidental overdose, but Cat is convinced that there is something more to his death, something that will explain why the man who saved her life was so unwilling to save his own. Rhys had always been haunted by the mysterious disappearance of Owen Face, the troubled lead singer of rock band Seerland, who was last seen at a notorious suicide spot. No body was ever found and when Cat joins forces with one of Rhys' former colleagues, now a wealthy business man obsessed with all things Seerland-related, they begin to wonder whether the rumours that Face is still alive may be true. But when Cat is stalked by a meancing figure with a striking resemblance to a serial rapist Rhys famously put away, she begins to realise her life may also be in danger.
Download or read book Unforgettable written by Scott Simon and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-03-31 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I'm getting a life's lesson about grace from my mother in the ICU. We never stop learning from our mothers, do we?" UNFORGETTABLE is a son's spirited, affecting, and inspiring tribute to his remarkable mother and the love between parent and child. When NPR's Scott Simon began tweeting from his mother's hospital room in July 2013, he didn't know that his missives would soon spread well beyond his 1.2 million Twitter followers. Squeezing the magnitude of his final days with her into 140-character updates, Simon's evocative and moving meditations spread virally. Over the course of a few days, Simon chronicled his mother's death and reminisced about her life, revealing her humor and strength, and celebrating familial love. UNFORGETTABLE, expands on those famous tweets to create a memoir that is rich, deeply affecting, heart-wrenching, and exhilarating. His mother was a glamorous woman of the Mad Men–era; she worked in nightclubs, modeled, dated mobsters and movie stars, and was a brave single parent to young Scott Simon. Spending their last days together in a hospital ICU, mother and son reflect on their lifetime's worth of memories, recounting stories laced with humor and exemplifying resilience. UNFORGETTABLE is not only one man's rich and moving tribute to his mother's colorful life and graceful death, it is also a powerful portrayal of the universal bond between mother and child.
Download or read book Stuff written by Randy O. Frost and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2010-04-20 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestseller. “Gripping . . . By turns fascinating and heartbreaking . . . Stuff invites readers to reevaluate their desire for things.”—Boston Globe “Amazing . . . utterly engrossing . . . Read it.”—The Washington Post Book World What possesses someone to save every scrap of paper that’s ever come into his home? What compulsions drive a person to sacrifice her marriage or career for an accumulation of seemingly useless things? Randy Frost and Gail Steketee were the first to study hoarding when they began their work a decade ago. They didn’t expect that they would end up treating hundreds of patients and fielding thousands of calls from the families of hoarders. Their vivid case studies (reminiscent of Oliver Sacks) in Stuff show how you can identify a hoarder—piles on sofas and beds that make the furniture useless, houses that can be navigated only by following small paths called goat trails, vast piles of paper that the hoarders “churn” but never discard, even collections of animals and garbage—and illuminate the pull that possessions exert over all of us. Whether we’re savers, collectors, or compulsive cleaners, very few of us are in fact free of the impulses that drive hoarders to extremes. “Authoritative, haunting, and mysterious. It is also intensely, not to say compulsively readable.”—Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize-winning author “Fascinating . . . a good mix of cultural and psychological theories on hoarding.”—Newsweek “Pioneering researchers offer a superb overview of a complex disorder that interferes with the lives of more than six-million Americans . . . An absorbing, gripping, important report.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Download or read book The Source of All Things written by Reinhard Friedl and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2021-08-24 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the tradition of Henry Marsh’s Do No Harm, Reinhard Friedl's The Source of All Things is a heart surgeon’s personal investigation of the human heart, moving from his riveting clinical experiences to a more poetic understanding of its workings. The heart is our most important organ. Yet despite that it has not changed since the appearance of Homo sapiens 300,000 years ago, it is also our most mysterious. In most human cultures, it is seen as the source of love, sympathy, joy, courage, strength and wisdom. What if the heart could answer questions neurosciences can’t begin to? Having witnessed the extraordinary complexity and unpredictability of human hearts in the operating theatre—each one individual, like a fingerprint—heart surgeon Reinhard Friedl looked again at this “primitive pump” to reconcile it with his experiences from thousands of heart operations. In this book, he presents findings from various scientific disciplines, such as secret connections of the heart and brain and their influence on emotions and consciousness. He reveals the miracle that is the heart that we speak about so often yet is strangely foreign to many human beings. Full of compelling patient stories, The Source of All Things ends with a plea: that we recognize the heart’s wisdom and adopt a more heart-centered way of living, leading to greater health and more joy.
Download or read book The Library of Lost Things written by Laura Taylor Namey and published by Harlequin. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fangirl meets Jane Austen in this deeply heartfelt love story about hiding the worst parts of ourselves, and the people who love us anyway. “How could I open that door and let him see the messiest part of me?” From the moment she first learned to read, literary genius Darcy Wells has spent most of her time living in the worlds of her books. There, she can avoid the crushing reality of her mother’s hoarding and pretend her life is simply ordinary. But then Asher Fleet, a former teen pilot with an unexpectedly shattered future, walks into the bookstore where she works…and straight into her heart. For the first time in her life, Darcy can’t seem to find the right words. Fairy tales are one thing, but real love makes her want to hide behind her carefully constructed ink-and-paper wall. Still, after spending her whole life keeping people out, something about Asher makes Darcy want to open up. But securing her own happily-ever-after will mean she’ll need to stop hiding and start living her own truth—even if it’s messy. “A lovely tale for bookish readers that will give them all the feels.” —Kirkus
Download or read book Sympathy written by Olivia Sudjic and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Packed with tension, pathos, and vitality . . . This is a potent first novel from a formidable talent.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune “The best fictional account I’ve read of the way the internet has shaped our inner lives.” — Guardian (UK) At twenty-three Alice Hare, a loner, arrives in New York with only the vaguest of plans: to find a city to call home. Instead she discovers the online profile of a Japanese writer called Mizuko Himura, whose stories blur the line between autobiography and fiction. Alice becomes infatuated with Mizuko from afar, convinced this stranger’s life holds a mirror to her own. Realities multiply as Alice closes in on her “internet twin,” staging a chance encounter and inserting herself into his orbit. When Mizuko disappears, Alice is alone and adrift again. Tortured by her silence, Alice uses the only tool at her disposal, writing herself back into Mizuko’s story, with disastrous consequences. “A smart and lyrical evocation of that murky emotional terrain between our online and offline selves.” — Vice (UK) “At once a riveting mystery and a literary tour de force, Sympathy had me spellbound from the first page to the last.” — Emily Gould, author of Friendship
Download or read book Rememberings written by Sinéad O'Connor and published by Houghton Mifflin. This book was released on 2021 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed, controversial singer-songwriter Sinéad O'Connor comes a revelatory memoir of her fraught childhood, musical triumphs, fearless activism, and of the enduring power of song. Blessed with a singular voice and a fiery temperament, Sinéad O'Connor rose to massive fame in the late 1980s and 1990s with a string of gold records. By the time she was twenty, she was world famous--living a rock star life out loud. From her trademark shaved head to her 1992 appearance on Saturday Night Live when she tore up Pope John Paul II's photograph, Sinéad has fascinated and outraged millions. In Rememberings, O'Connor recounts her painful tale of growing up in Dublin in a dysfunctional, abusive household. Inspired by a brother's Bob Dylan records, she escaped into music. She relates her early forays with local Irish bands; we see Sinéad completing her first album while eight months pregnant, hanging with Rastas in the East Village, and soaring to unimaginable popularity with her cover of Prince's "Nothing Compares 2U." Intimate, replete with candid anecdotes and told in a singular form true to her unconventional career, Sinéad's memoir is a remarkable chronicle of an enduring and influential artist.
Download or read book The War for Kindness written by Jamil Zaki and published by Crown Publishing Group (NY). This book was released on 2019 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A Stanford psychologist offers a bold new understanding of empathy, revealing it to be a skill, not a fixed trait, and showing, through science and stories, how we can all become more empathetic"--
