Best of
Humanities

1981

The Reenchantment of the World


Morris Berman - 1981
    Focusing on the rise of the mechanistic idea that we can know the natural world only by distancing ourselves from it, Berman shows how science acquired its controlling position in the consciousness of the West. He analyzes the holistic, animistic tradition--destroyed in the wake of Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--which viewed man as a participant in the cosmos, not as an isolated observer. Arguing that the holistic world view must be revived in some credible form before we destroy our society and our environment, he explores the possibilities for a consciousness appropriate to the modern era. Ecological rather than animistic, this new world view would be grounded in the real and intimate connection between man and nature.

Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 3: From Modernity to Modernism (Towards a Metaphilosophy of Daily Life)


Henri Lefebvre - 1981
    A historian and sociologist, Lefebvre developed his ideas over seven decades through intellectual confrontation with figures as diverse as Bergson, Breton, Sartre, Debord and Althusser.Written at the birth of postwar consumerism, though only now translated into English, the Critique is a book of enormous range and subtlety. Lefebvre takes as his starting point and guide the “trivial” details of quotidian experience: an experience colonized by the commodity, shadowed by inauthenticity, yet which remains the only source of resistance and change. Whether he is exploring the commercialization of sex or the disappearance of rural festivities, analyzing Hegel or Charlie Chaplin, Lefebvre always returns to the ubiquity of alienation, the necessity of revolt. This is an enduringly radical text, untimely today only in its intransigence and optimism.This third volume of the Critique of Everyday Life completes Lefebvre’s monumental project. It seeks to shed light on changes inscribed within everyday life, and at the same time to reveal certain virtualities of the everyday, taking into account the crisis of modernity but also the decisive assertion of technological modernism.

Comprehensive Asian Fighting Arts


Donn F. Draeger - 1981
    In Asia they developed to a degree of effectiveness probably unsurpassed elsewhere in the world. This book explains the relationships between fighting arts, assesses their strengths and weaknesses, and presents new material about hitherto unknown fighting methods. Written by two of the best-known and most widely published authorities in the field, it covers fighting methods and techniques found in eleven Asian countries-fighting techniques that range from the artful Chinese tai-chi and Burmese bando to Japanese jujutsu and the lethal pentjak-silat of Indonesia.Documentation of these has been supplemented with a wealth of fascinating anecdotes. The reader learns of the daring exploits of the Japanese ninja, of Gama, perhaps the greatest of the great Indian wrestlers, of the Indonesian "trance" fighters-and hundreds of other tales that serve to illustrate some of the most deadly fighting systems that the world has known.The volume is illustrated with over two hundred photographs and drawings, many of them depicting combat styles and techniques that have never been seen in the West.

Abraham Lincoln: The Man & His Faith


Frederick Owen - 1981
    Lincoln's own words and the accounts of those who knew him weave an unforgettable narrative of the life and faith of this often-quoted American, whose influence has endured for years.

The Growth of American Thought


Merle Curti - 1981
    With his elaboration of the complex interrelationships between the growth of American thought and the whole American social milieu, Curti creates not only an intellectual history, but a social history of American thought.