Book picks similar to
On Friendship by Alexander Nehamas


philosophy
non-fiction
nonfiction
friendship

Stop the Fight!: An Illustrated Guide for Couples: How to Break Free from the 12 Most Common Arguments and Build a Relationship That Lasts


Michelle Brody - 2015
    In her 20 years of working with couples, clinical psychologist Michelle Brody found a way to make change simpler. Her secret: clear and lighthearted illustrations that help couples literally see what’s driving their battles and blocking their bond, so they can chart a course together to stop the fights.The Money Fight “You’re such a cheapskate!” “You spend way too much!”The Sex Fight “Not tonight. I’m not in the mood.” “You haven’t been in the mood since 1975!”The Parenting Differences Fight “You’re too overprotective!” “Is skydiving next?!”Stop the Fight! includes more than 300 illustrations to help couples unlock the destructive cycles that drive the birthday fight, the difficult relatives fight, and other familiar battles. Going beyond common relationship advice, the tools in Stop the Fight! will help you understand the big picture and create lifelong change.

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First


Frank Trentmann - 2015
    In this monumental study, acclaimed historian Frank Trentmann unfolds the extraordinary history that has shaped our material world, from late Ming China, Renaissance Italy and the British empire to the present. Astonishingly wide-ranging and richly detailed, Empire of Things explores how we have come to live with so much more, how this changed the course of history, and the global challenges we face as a result.

Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy


Susan Neiman - 2002
    It challenges our hope that things make sense. For 18th-century Europeans, the Lisbon earthquake was manifest evil. Now we view evil as a matter of human cruelty, Auschwitz as its extreme incarnation.Examining our understanding of evil from the Inquisition to contemporary terrorism, Neiman explores who we've become in the three centuries since the early Enlightenment. In the process, she rewrites the history of modern thought and points philosophy back to the questions that originally animated it. Whether expressed in theological or secular terms, evil poses a problem about the world's intelligibility. It confronts philosophy with fundamental questions: Can there be meaning in a world where innocents suffer? Can belief in divine power or progress survive a cataloging of evil? Is evil profound or banal?Neiman argues that these questions impelled modern philosophy. Traditional philosophers from Leibniz to Hegel sought to defend the Creator of a world containing evil. Inevitably, their efforts--combined with those of more literary figures like Pope, Voltaire and the Marquis de Sade--eroded belief in God's benevolence, power & relevance, until Nietzsche claimed He'd been murdered. They also yielded the distinction between natural and moral evil that we now take for granted. Neiman turns to consider philosophy's response to the Holocaust as a final moral evil, concluding that two basic stances run through modern thought. One, from Rousseau to Arendt, insists that morality demands we make evil intelligible. The other, from Voltaire to Adorno, insists that morality demands that we don't.Beautifully written and thoroughly engaging, this book tells the history of modern philosophy as an attempt to come to terms with evil. It reintroduces philosophy to anyone interested in questions of life and death, good and evil, suffering and sense.

Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth and Hunger for a Faith


Studs Terkel - 2000
    . . . Terkel’s interviews may not allay fears about death. But reading them certainly encourages life while we have it.”–The New York TimesWhether it’s Working or The Great War, the legendary oral histories of Studs Terkel have offered indispensable insights into all areas of American life. Now, at eighty-eight, the Pulitzer Prize winner creates his most important work on a subject few can comfortably discuss: death.Here, in the voices of people both esteemed and unknown, are wise words, meaningful memories, and compassionate predictions about the experience of life’s end–and what may come after. A grad student explains how her two-year coma convinced her of the existence of reincarnation . . . A Hiroshima survivor reconciles her painful memories with the stoicism of her Japanese culture . . . Actress Uta Hagan expresses how her art is her religion and will be her legacy . . . Oscar-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler relives his World War II ordeal, after a torpedo left him in a lifeboat among injured and dying comrades . . . An AIDS counselor reveals why healthy gay men may require the most crucial psychological help . . . and a retired firefighter admits he “never felt so alive” as when he was doing his dangerous job.From the sheer physical facts to the emotional realities to spiritual speculations, all aspects of death are openly expressed in this wonderful work, the stirring culmination of Studs Terkel’s brilliant career.

How to Watch TV News


Neil Postman - 1991
    Postman and Powers warn that anyone who relies exclusively on TV for a knowledge of the world is making a serious mistake and suggest ways to intelligently evaluate TV news shows.

The Art of Loving


Erich Fromm - 1956
    As with every art, love demands practice and concentration, as well as genuine insight and understanding.In his classic work, The Art of Loving, renowned psychoanalyst and social philosopher Erich Fromm explores love in all its aspects—not only romantic love, steeped in false conceptions and lofty expectations, but also brotherly love, erotic love, self-love, the love of God, and the love of parents for their children.

The Theory of Social and Economic Organization


Max Weber - 1947
    In this work originally published in German in 1920, Weber discusses the analytical methods of sociology and, at the same time, presents a devastating critique of prevailing sociological theory and of its universalist, determinist underpinnings. None of Weber's other writings offers the reader such a grasp of his theories; none displays so clearly his erudition, the scope of his interests, and his analytical powers.

Open Her: Activate 7 Masculine Powers to Arouse Your Woman's Love & Desire


Karen Brody - 2014
    Each archetype brings a power and a gift, a secret key to his woman’s love and desire. Open Her will inspire a man to love his masculinity and to know the power it holds to open a woman to ever deepening states of pleasure and love.

College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Co-eds, Then and Now


Lynn Peril - 2006
    College was a place where women found self-esteem, and yet images in popular culture reflected a lingering distrust of the educated woman. Thus such lofty cultural expressions as Sex Kittens Go to College (1960) and a raft of naughty pictorials in men’s magazines.As in Pink Think, Lynn Peril combines women’s history and popular culture—peppered with delightful examples of femoribilia from the turn of the twentieth century through the 1970s—in an intelligent and witty study of the college girl, the first woman to take that socially controversial step toward educational equity.

Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government


Christopher H. Achen - 2016
    They demonstrate that voters even those who are well informed and politically engaged mostly choose parties and candidates on the basis of social identities and partisan loyalties, not political issues. They also show that voters adjust their policy views and even their perceptions of basic matters of fact to match those loyalties. When parties are roughly evenly matched, elections often turn on irrelevant or misleading considerations such as economic spurts or downturns beyond the incumbents' control; the outcomes are essentially random. Thus, voters do not control the course of public policy, even indirectly.Achen and Bartels argue that democratic theory needs to be founded on identity groups and political parties, not on the preferences of individual voters. "Democracy for Realists" provides a powerful challenge to conventional thinking, pointing the way toward a fundamentally different understanding of the realities and potential of democratic government."

Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale


Catherine Orenstein - 2002
    Beginning with its first publication as a cautionary tale on the perils of seduction, written in reaction to the licentiousness of the court of Louis XIV, Orenstein traces the many lives the tale has lived since then, from its appearance in modern advertisements for cosmetics and automobiles, the inspiration it brought to poets such as Anne Sexton, and its starring role in pornographic films. In Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked, Red appears as seductress, hapless victim, riot grrrrl, femme fatale, and even she-wolf, as Orenstein shows how through centuries of different guises, the story has served as a barometer of social and sexual mores pertaining to women. Full of fascinating history, generous wit, and intelligent analysis, Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked proves that the story of one young girl's trip through the woods continues to be one of our most compelling modern myths.

Practical Ethics


Peter Singer - 1979
    For this second edition the author has revised all the existing chapters, added two new ones, and updated the bibliography. He has also added an appendix describing some of the deep misunderstanding of and consequent violent reaction to the book in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland where the book has tested the limits of freedom of speech. The focus of the book is the application of ethics to difficult and controversial social questions.

A Theory of Justice


John Rawls - 1971
    The author has now revised the original edition to clear up a number of difficulties he and others have found in the original book.Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition - justice as fairness - and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal persons. "Each person," writes Rawls, "possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override." Advancing the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Lincoln, Rawls's theory is as powerful today as it was when first published.

The Echo of Greece


Edith Hamilton - 1957
    The course that Athens followed can be to us not only a record of old unhappy far-off things but a blueprint of what may happen again.'

Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory


Peter Barry - 1995
    This new and expanded third edition continues to offer students and readers the best one-volume introduction to the field.The bewildering variety of approaches, theorists and technical language is lucidly and expertly unraveled. Unlike many books which assume certain positions about the critics and the theories they represent, Peter Barry allows readers to develop their own ideas once first principles and concepts have been grasped.