Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre


Walter Kaufmann - 1956
    This volume provides basic writings of Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Rilke, Kafka, Ortega, Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus, including some not previously translated, along with an invaluable introductory essay by Walter Kaufmann.

In the Little World: A True Story of Dwarfs, Love, and Trouble


John H. Richardson - 2001
    Kopits takes me into an examining room and leans against the stainless steel bench and asks me what I'm writing about this time. When I tell him what I saw in Australia, he immediately starts to nod. "This is a great subject," he says. Then he stops, as if caught by the subject himself.I wait.After a moment, he continues. "What you are looking into is the abyss. This takes you to the very heart of a human being, to the deepest aspect of the soul.He gives me one of his solemn looks. "Because the thing is, you have to confront yourself."(from In the Little World) In 1997, almost by accident, John H. Richardson found himself sharing a hotel with more than a thousand dwarfs. Over the course of a single week, he witnessed love and anger, fear and bravery, arrogance and humility, even a bizarre romantic deception -- the entire spectrum of human emotion in one concentrated dose. But at the end of the week, he discovered that leaving the "Little World" wasn't as simple as checking out of a hotel. In fact, his journey would last a full two years.At a time when bigger often seems synonymous with better, and physical beauty serves as currency, the world of dwarfs usually passes beneath our notice. Now, in this groundbreaking work, awardwinning author John H. Richardson brings the Little World into focus.He introduces us to characters like a saintly but obsessed doctor and a mother who sacrifices her family to save her dwarf daughter. He follows two dwarf lovers from first meeting through the struggle to overcome their fear and shame and find the confidence to love each other. He becomes personally involved in a tangled and often confrontational friendship with a female dwarf. Through these stories and musings ranging from classic theories of beauty to the history of the disability movement to postmodern theories of difference, Richardson presents a world that is a skewed reflection of our own -- and offers us a glimpse into the essential human condition.

If You Love It, It Will Grow: A Guide To Healthy, Beautiful Natural Hair


Phoenyx Austin - 2012
    Phoenyx Austin, a physician and natural hair guru, we now have a fabulous book that explains how to grow and maintain healthy and longer afro-textured hair. And with a head of gorgeous natural hair herself, Dr. Phoenyx proves that she's not only talking the talk, she's walking the walk!In this book, you will learn:• How afro-textured hair grows and why it's unique from other hair types • How to stop hair breakage and hair loss that plagues many women with afro-textured hair • How to best use nutrition and other health-based principles to maximize hair growth potential • How to develop a life-long and flexible hair regimen based in holistic hair care • How to leverage the power of Ayurveda, an ancient form of alternative medicine that has helped women grow beautiful hair for thousands of years In truth, If You Love It, It Will Grow is more than a book, it's a philosophy! There is a great interconnectedness between how women feel about their hair and how they feel about themselves. Growing healthy, longer and beautiful natural hair is absolutely within your reach. It's all about giving your hair what it needs- that extra bit of TLC. If You Love It, It Will Grow! Praise for Dr. Phoenyx Austin "If You Love It, It Will Grow isn't simply a clever title...it's the truth! I hope that you enjoy If You Love It, It Will Grow as much as I have and that Dr. Phoenyx's expert advice is as good to your afro-textured hair as it has been to mine!" - Jamilah Lemieux. Editor, EBONY.com “A wonderful addition to natural hair and I highly recommend that you check it out!” Natural Chica (aka Mae)

The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences


Michel Foucault - 1966
    The result is nothing less than an archaeology of the sciences that unearths old patterns of meaning and reveals the shocking arbitrariness of our received truths.In the work that established him as the most important French thinker since Sartre, Michel Foucault offers startling evidence that “man”—man as a subject of scientific knowledge—is at best a recent invention, the result of a fundamental mutation in our culture.

Jog on Journal: A Practical Guide to Getting Up and Running


Bella Mackie - 2019
    But through her inspiring personal story and realistic approach she’s already inspired thousands of men and women to manage their mental health through exercise. In this journal, Bella takes you on a journey from the sofa to the open road, helping you to:• Gain a new awareness of mental health problems such as anxiety and depression• Cope with side effects such as panic attacks and intrusive thoughts• Learn and memorise calming strategies such as breathing exercises• Build a checklist of everything you need to start running• Develop a regular running schedule, with realistic targets• Use exercise to gain confidence and manage mental health problemsPacked with insights from athletes and psychologists and step-by-step achievable goals, The Jog On Journal has everything you need to get you up and running.

Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction


Jonathan D. Culler - 1997
    Jonathan Culler, an extremely lucid commentator and much admired in the field of literary theory, offers discerning insights into such theories as the nature of language and meaning, and whether literature is a form of self-expression or a method of appeal to an audience. Concise yet thorough, Literary Theory also outlines the ideas behind a number of different schools: deconstruction, semiotics, postcolonial theory, and structuralism, among others. From topics such as literature and social identity to poetry, poetics, and rhetoric, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction is a welcome guide for anyone interested in the importance of literature and the debates surrounding it.About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.

Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair


Sarah Schulman - 2016
    Illuminating the difference between Conflict and Abuse, Schulman directly addresses our contemporary culture of scapegoating. This deep, brave, and bold work reveals how punishment replaces personal and collective self-criticism, and shows why difference is so often used to justify cruelty and shunning. Rooting the problem of escalation in negative group relationships, Schulman illuminates the ways cliques, communities, families, and religious, racial, and national groups bond through the refusal to change their self-concept. She illustrates how Supremacy behavior and Traumatized behavior resemble each other, through a shared inability to tolerate difference.This important and sure to be controversial book illuminates such contemporary and historical issues of personal, racial, and geo-political difference as tools of escalation towards injustice, exclusion, and punishment, whether the objects of dehumanization are other individuals in our families or communities, people with HIV, African Americans, or Palestinians. Conflict Is Not Abuse is a searing rejection of the cultural phenomenon of blame, cruelty, and scapegoating, and how those in positions of power exacerbate and manipulate fear of the "other" to achieve their goals.Sarah Schulman is a novelist, nonfiction writer, playwright, screenwriter, journalist and AIDS historian, and the author of eighteen books. A Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellow, Sarah is a Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island. Her novels published by Arsenal include Rat Bohemia, Empathy, After Delores, and The Mere Future. She lives in New York.

The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses


Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí - 1997
    A work that rethinks gender as a Western construction, The Invention of Women offers a new way of understanding both Yoruban and Western cultures. Author Oyeronke Oyewumi reveals an ideology of biological determinism at the heart of Western social categories-the idea that biology provides the rationale for organizing the social world. And yet, she writes, the concept of OC woman, OCO central to this ideology and to Western gender discourses, simply did not exist in Yorubaland, where the body was not the basis of social roles. Oyewumi traces the misapplication of Western, body-oriented concepts of gender through the history of gender discourses in Yoruba studies. Her analysis shows the paradoxical nature of two fundamental assumptions of feminist theory: that gender is socially constructed and that the subordination of women is universal. The Invention of Women demonstrates, to the contrary, that gender was not constructed in old Yoruba society, and that social organization was determined by relative age. A meticulous historical and epistemological account of an African culture on its own terms, this book makes a persuasive argument for a cultural, context-dependent interpretation of social reality. It calls for a reconception of gender discourse and the categories on which such study relies. More than that, the book lays bare the hidden assumptions in the ways these different cultures think. A truly comparative sociology of an African culture and the Western tradition, it will change the way African studies and gender studies proceed. "

Where Freedom Starts: Sex, Power, Violence, #MeToo


Verso - 2018
    How do we define violence? How do we discuss and experience sex? Who gets to tell stories of sexual assault, and who gets to be heard? How impoverished is our language for describing the intersection of power, desire, and violence? What is the relationship between individual struggles and collective protest? What do we do with the abusers? In short, this moment has recalled a much older question: how do we get free?In this collection of new and previously published writings, leading activists, feminists, scholars, and writers describe the shape of the problem, chart the forms refusal has taken, and outline possible solutions. Importantly, they also describe the longer histories of organizing against sexual violence that the #MeToo moment obscures—among working women, women of color, undocumented women, imprisoned women, poor women, among those who don’t conform to traditional gender roles—and discern from these practices a freedom that is more than notional, but embodied and uncompromising.Contributors include Tarana Burke and Elizabeth Adetiba, Lauren Berlant, Tithi Bhattacharya, Stephanie Coontz and Hope Reese, Estelle Freedman, Melissa Gira Grant, Linda Gordon, Jessie Kindig, Laura Kipnis, Victoria Law, Maricruz Ladino and Gabriel Thompson, Magally A. Miranda Alcázar, Liz Mason-Deese, Danielle McGuire, Larissa Pham, Alex N. Press, Jane Ward, and Terrion L. Williamson.

Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming: The NIPCC Report on Scientific Consensus


Craig D. Idso - 2015
    This claim is not only false, but its presence in the debate is an insult to science." With these words, the authors begin a detailed analysis of one of the most controversial topics of the day. The authors make a compelling case against claims of a scientific consensus. The purported proof of such a consensus consists of sloppy research by nonscientists, college students, and a highly partisan Australian blogger. Surveys of climate scientists, even those heavily biased in favor of climate alarmism, find extensive disagreement on the underlying science and doubts about its reliability. The authors point to four reasons why scientists disagree about global warming: a conflict among scientists in different and often competing disciplines; fundamental scientific uncertainties concerning how the global climate responds to the human presence; failure of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to provide objective guidance to the complex science; and bias among researchers. The authors offer a succinct summary of the real science of climate change based on their previously published comprehensive review of climate science in a volume titled Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science. They recommend that policymakers resist pressure from lobby groups to silence scientists who question the authority of the IPCC to claim to speak for climate science. More than 50,000 copies of the first edition were sold or given away in five months to elected officials, civic and business leaders, scientists, and other opinion leaders. The response from the science community and experts on climate change has been overwhelmingly positive. To meet demand for more copies, we have produced this second revised edition. Changes include a foreword by Marita Noon, at the time executive director of Energy Makes America Great, Inc. Some of the discussion in Chapter 1 has been revised and expanded thanks to feedback from readers of the first edition. Graphs in Chapters 4, 5, and 6 are now full color, and new graphs have been added.

A Guide to Wine


Julian Curry - 2003
    However rich and complex the subject of wine may be, he insists it is also hugely rewarding and great fun. Curry's informative and entertaining program begins with a description of work in vineyard and cellar. It outlines the many choices faced-by grape-grower and winemaker, resulting in the variety of different styles of wine produced. It continues with wine's journey from winery to gullet, with advice on cellaring, buying, serving, food-matching and tasting. It then moves on to thumbnail sketches of the grape varieties most commonly used, their natural habitats and related styles of wine. And it continues with a lengthy section devoted to all major wine regions, in the Old World and the New. Written and recorded especially for Naxos AudioBooks, and enhanced by the music of Beethoven, De Falla, Godard, Gershwin, Granados, Mascagni, Offenbach, Paterson, Piazzolla, Rossini, Strauss and Verdi, A Guide to Wine is the perfect gift for wine aficionados and those with just a passing interest in the subject alike!

Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge


Edward O. Wilson - 1998
    In Consilience  (a word that originally meant "jumping together"), Edward O. Wilson renews the Enlightenment's search for a unified theory of knowledge in disciplines that range from physics to biology, the social sciences and the humanities.Using the natural sciences as his model, Wilson forges dramatic links between fields. He explores the chemistry of the mind and the genetic bases of culture. He postulates the biological principles underlying works of art from cave-drawings to Lolita. Presenting the latest findings in prose of wonderful clarity and oratorical eloquence, and synthesizing it into a dazzling whole, Consilience is science in the path-clearing traditions of Newton, Einstein, and Richard Feynman.

Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny


Kate Manne - 2017
    What is misogyny, exactly? Who deserves to be called a misogynist? How does misogyny contrast with sexism, and why is it prone to persist--or increase--even when sexist gender roles are waning? This book is an exploration of misogyny in public life and politics, by the moral philosopher and writer Kate Manne. It argues that misogyny should not be understood primarily in terms of the hatred or hostility some men feel toward women generally. Rather, it's primarily about controlling, policing, punishing, and exiling the "bad" women who challenge male dominance. And it's compatible with rewarding "the good ones," and singling out other women to serve as warnings to those who are out of order. It's also common for women to serve as scapegoats, be burned as witches, and treated as pariahs.Manne examines recent and current events such as the Isla Vista killings by Elliot Rodger, the case of the convicted serial rapist Daniel Holtzclaw, who preyed on African-American women as a police officer in Oklahoma City, Rush Limbaugh's diatribe against Sandra Fluke, and the "misogyny speech" of Julia Gillard, then Prime Minister of Australia, which went viral on YouTube. The book shows how these events, among others, set the stage for the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Not only was the misogyny leveled against Hillary Clinton predictable in both quantity and quality, Manne argues it was predictable that many people would be prepared to forgive and forget Donald Trump's history of sexual assault and harassment. For this, Manne argues, is misogyny's oft-overlooked and equally pernicious underbelly: exonerating or showing "himpathy" for the comparatively privileged men who dominate, threaten, and silence women.

Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism


Laurie Penny - 2011
    Our societies are saturated with images of unreal, idealised female beauty whilst real female bodies and the women who inhabit them are alienated from their own personal and political potential. Under modern capitalism, women are both consumers and consumed: Meat Market offers strategies for resisting this gory cycle of consumption, exposing how the trade in female flesh extends into every part of women's political selfhood.

How to Read and Why


Harold Bloom - 2000
    For more than forty years, Bloom has transformed college students into lifelong readers with his unrivaled love for literature. Now, at a time when faster and easier electronic media threatens to eclipse the practice of reading, Bloom draws on his experience as critic, teacher, and prolific reader to plumb the great books for their sustaining wisdom. Shedding all polemic, Bloom addresses the solitary reader, who, he urges, should read for the purest of all reasons: to discover and augment the self. His ultimate faith in the restorative power of literature resonates on every page of this infinitely rewarding and important book.