Download or read book Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler s Ninth Symphony written by Lewis Thomas and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1995-05-01 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This magnificent collection of essays by scientist and National Book Award-winning writer Lewis Thomas remains startlingly relevant for today’s world. Luminous, witty, and provocative, the essays address such topics as “The Attic of the Brain,” “Falsity and Failure,” “Altruism,” and the effects the federal government’s virtual abandonment of support for basic scientific research will have on medicine and science. Profoundly and powerfully, Thomas questions the folly of nuclear weaponry, showing that the brainpower and money spent on this endeavor are needed much more urgently for the basic science we have abandoned—and that even medicine’s most advanced procedures would be useless or insufficient in the face of the smallest nuclear detonation. And in the title essay, he addresses himself with terrifying poignancy to the question of what it is like to be young in the nuclear age. “If Wordsworth had gone to medical school, he might have produced something very like the essays of Lewis Thomas.”—TIME “No one better exemplifies what modern medicine can be than Lewis Thomas.”—The New York Times Book Review

Download or read book The Lives of a Cell written by Lewis Thomas and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1978-02-23 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elegant, suggestive, and clarifying, Lewis Thomas's profoundly humane vision explores the world around us and examines the complex interdependence of all things. Extending beyond the usual limitations of biological science and into a vast and wondrous world of hidden relationships, this provocative book explores in personal, poetic essays to topics such as computers, germs, language, music, death, insects, and medicine. Lewis Thomas writes, "Once you have become permanently startled, as I am, by the realization that we are a social species, you tend to keep an eye out for the pieces of evidence that this is, by and large, good for us."

Download or read book The Youngest Science written by Lewis Thomas and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1995-05-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the 1920s when he watched his father, a general practitioner who made housecalls and wrote his prescriptions in Latin, to his days in medical school and beyond, Lewis Thomas saw medicine evolve from an art into a sophisticated science. The Youngest Science is Dr. Thomas's account of his life in the medical profession and an inquiry into what medicine is all about--the youngest science, but one rich in possibility and promise. He chronicles his training in Boston and New York, his war career in the South Pacific, his most impassioned research projects, his work as an administrator in hospitals and medical schools, and even his experiences as a patient. Along the way, Thomas explores the complex relationships between research and practice, between words and meanings, between human error and human accomplishment, More than a magnificent autobiography, The Youngest Science is also a celebration and a warning--about the nature of medicine and about the future life of our planet.

Download or read book Zeno s Paradox written by Joseph Mazur and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-03-25 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fascinating story of an ancient riddle and what it reveals about the nature of time and space Three millennia ago, the Greek philosopher Zeno constructed a series of logical paradoxes to prove that motion is impossible. Today, these paradoxes remain on the cutting edge of our investigations into the fabric of space and time. Zeno's Paradox uses the motion paradox as a jumping-off point for an exploration of the twenty-five-hundred-year quest to uncover the true nature of the universe. From Galileo to Einstein to Stephen Hawking, some of the greatest minds in history have tackled the problem and made spectacular breakthroughs, but through it all, the paradox of motion remains.

Download or read book Scales to Scalpels written by Lisa Wong and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Simon & Schuster eBook. Simon & Schuster has a great book for every reader.

Download or read book The Medusa and the Snail written by Lewis Thomas and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The medusa is a tiny jellyfish that lives on the ventral surface of a sea slug found in the Bay of Naples. Readers will find themselves caught up in the fate of the medusa and the snail as a metaphor for eternal issues of life and death as Lewis Thomas further extends the exploration of man and his world begun in The Lives of a Cell. Among the treasures in this magnificent book are essays on the human genius for making mistakes, on disease and natural death, on cloning, on warts, and on Montaigne, as well as an assessment of medical science and health care. In these essays and others, Thomas once again conveys his observations of the scientific world in prose marked by wonder and wit.

Download or read book Et Cetera Et Cetera written by Lewis Thomas and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the best writiers of short essays in English.--Newsweek

Download or read book Gustav Mahler s Symphonic Landscapes written by Thomas Peattie and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-06 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study Thomas Peattie offers a new account of Mahler's symphonies by considering the composer's reinvention of the genre in light of his career as a conductor and more broadly in terms of his sustained engagement with the musical, theatrical, and aesthetic traditions of the Austrian fin de siècle. Drawing on the ideas of landscape, mobility, and theatricality, Peattie creates a richly interdisciplinary framework that reveals the uniqueness of Mahler's symphonic idiom and its radical attitude toward the presentation and ordering of musical events. The book goes on to identify a fundamental tension between the music's episodic nature and its often-noted narrative impulse and suggests that Mahler's symphonic dramaturgy can be understood as a form of abstract theatre.

Download or read book Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews written by Paula Fredriksen and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-11-07 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paula Fredriksen, renowned historian and author of From Christ to Jesus, begins this inquiry into the historic Jesus with a fact that may be the only undisputed thing we know about him: his crucifixion. Rome reserved this means of execution particularly for political insurrectionists; and the Roman charge posted at the head of the cross indicted Jesus for claiming to be King of the Jews. To reconstruct the Jesus who provoked this punishment, Fredriksen takes us into the religious worlds, Jewish and pagan, of Mediterranean antiquity, through the labyrinth of Galilean and Judean politics, and on into the ancient narratives of Paul's letters, the gospels, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Josephus' histories. The result is a profound contribution both to our understanding of the social and religious contexts within which Jesus of Nazareth moved, and to our appreciation of the mission and message that ended in the proclamation of Jesus as Messiah.

Download or read book Tower of Babylon written by Ted Chiang and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-05-04 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection Together with a crew of other miners and cart-pullers, Hillalum is recruited to climb the Tower of Babylon and unearth what lies beyond the vault of heaven. During his journey, Hillalum discovers entire civilizations of tower-dwellers on the tower—there are those who live inside the mists of clouds, those who raise their vegetables above the sun, and those who have spent their lives under the oppressive weight of an endless, white stratum at the top of the universe. “Tower of Babylon” is a rare gem—a winner of the prestigious Nebula award, the first story Ted Chiang ever published, and the brilliant opening piece to Chiang’s much-lauded first collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, which is soon to be a major motion picture starring Amy Adams. An ebook short.

Download or read book Mahler in Context written by Charles Youmans and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-19 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mahler in Context explores the institutions, artists, thinkers, cultural movements, socio-political conditions, and personal relationships that shaped Mahler's creative output. Focusing on the contexts surrounding the artist, the collection provides a sense of the complex crosscurrents against which Mahler was reacting as conductor, composer, and human being. Topics explored include his youth and training, performing career, creative activity, spiritual and philosophical influences, and his reception after his death. Together, this collection of specially commissioned essays offers a wide-ranging investigation of the ecology surrounding Mahler as a composer and a fuller appreciation of the topics that occupied his mind as he conceived his works. Readers will benefit from engagement with lesser known dimensions of Mahler's life. Through this broader contextual approach, this book will serve as a valuable and unique resource for students, scholars, and a general readership.

Download or read book After Mahler written by Stephen Downes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-19 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The music of Gustav Mahler repeatedly engages with Romantic notions of redemption. This is expressed in a range of gestures and procedures, shifting between affirmative fulfilment and pessimistic negation. In this groundbreaking study, Stephen Downes explores the relationship of this aspect of Mahler's music to the output of Benjamin Britten, Kurt Weill and Hans Werner Henze. Their initial admiration was notably dissonant with the prevailing Zeitgeist – Britten in 1930s England, Weill in 1920s Germany and Henze in 1950s Germany and Italy. Downes argues that Mahler's music struck a profound chord with them because of the powerful manner in which it raises and intensifies dystopian and utopian complexes and probes the question of fulfilment or redemption, an ambition manifest in ambiguous tonal, temporal and formal processes. Comparisons of the ways in which this topic is evoked facilitate new interpretative insights into the music of these four major composers.

Download or read book Symphony No 9 In Full Score written by Gustav Mahler and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2013-07-02 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Landmark of 20th-century symphonic writing, notable for innovation, poetic drama, inspired music. Full orchestral score is reprinted here from authoritative Universal-Edition, Vienna, 1912. New glossary of German terms.

Download or read book The Secret Life of Literature written by Lisa Zunshine and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-03-15 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative account that brings together cognitive science, ethnography, and literary history to examine patterns of “mindreading” in a wide range of literary works. For over four thousand years, writers have been experimenting with what cognitive scientists call “mindreading”: constantly devising new social contexts for making their audiences imagine complex mental states of characters and narrators. In The Secret Life of Literature, Lisa Zunshine uncovers these mindreading patterns, which have, until now, remained invisible to both readers and critics, in works ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Invisible Man. Bringing together cognitive science, ethnography, and literary studies, this engaging book transforms our understanding of literary history. Central to Zunshine’s argument is the exploration of mental states “embedded” within each other, as, for instance, when Ellison’s Invisible Man is aware of how his white Communist Party comrades pretend not to understand what he means, when they want to reassert their position of power. Paying special attention to how race, class, and gender inform literary embedments, Zunshine contrasts this dynamic with real-life patterns studied by cognitive and social psychologists. She also considers community-specific mindreading values and looks at the rise and migration of embedment patterns across genres and national literary traditions, noting particularly the use of deception, eavesdropping, and shame as plot devices. Finally, she investigates mindreading in children’s literature. Stories for children geared toward different stages of development, she shows, provide cultural scaffolding for initiating young readers into a long-term engagement with the secret life of literature.

Download or read book The Colossus of Maroussi written by Henry Miller and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2010-05-18 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henry Miller’s landmark travel book, now reissued in a new edition, is ready to be stuffed into any vagabond’s backpack. Like the ancient colossus that stood over the harbor of Rhodes, Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi stands as a seminal classic in travel literature. It has preceded the footsteps of prominent travel writers such as Pico Iyer and Rolf Potts. The book Miller would later cite as his favorite began with a young woman’s seductive description of Greece. Miller headed out with his friend Lawrence Durrell to explore the Grecian countryside: a flock of sheep nearly tramples the two as they lie naked on a beach; the Greek poet Katsmbalis, the “colossus” of Miller’s book, stirs every rooster within earshot of the Acropolis with his own loud crowing; cold hard-boiled eggs are warmed in a village’s single stove, and they stay in hotels that “have seen better days, but which have an aroma of the past.”

Download or read book New Medical Devices written by Institute of Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 1988-01-01 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past 50 years the development of a wide range of medical devices has improved the quality of people's lives and revolutionized the prevention and treatment of disease, but it also has contributed to the high cost of health care. Issues that shape the invention of new medical devices and affect their introduction and use are explored in this volume. The authors examine the role of federal support, the decision-making process behind private funding, the need for reforms in regulation and product liability, the effects of the medical payment system, and other critical topics relevant to the development of new devices.

Download or read book Thomas Ad s Full of Noises written by Thomas Adès and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2012-10-16 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Composer, conductor, and pianist, Thomas Adès is one of the most diversely talented musical figures of his generation. His music is performed by great opera companies, symphony orchestras, chamber groups, and music festivals throughout the world. But Adès has resisted public discussion of the creative process behind his musical compositions. Until now, the interior experience that has fired the spectrum of his work—from his first opera, Powder Her Face, to his masterpiece The Tempest and his acclaimed orchestral works Asyla and Tevot—has largely remained unexplained. Here, in spirited, intimate, and, at times, contentious conversations with the distinguished music critic Tom Service, Adès opens up about his work. "For Adès, whose literary and artistic sensibilities are nearly as refined and virtuosic as his musical instincts," writes Service, "inhabiting the different territory of words rather than notes offers a chance to search out new creative correspondences, to open doors—a phrase he often uses—into new ways of thinking in and about music." The phrase "full of noises," from Caliban's speech in The Tempest, refers both to the sounds "swirling around" Adès's head that are transmuted into music and to the vast array of his musical influences—from Sephardic folk music, to 1980s electronica, to Adès's passion for Beethoven and Janácek and his equally visceral dislike of Wagner. It also suggests "the creative friction" essential to any authentic dialogue. As readers of these "wilfully brilliant" conversations will quickly discover, Thomas Adès: Full of Noises brings us into the "revelatory kaleidoscope" of Adès's world.