Indigo, Crystal, and Rainbow Children


Doreen Virtue - 2005
    In this informative and entertaining live lecture captured on a two-CD program, Doreen Virtue discusses natural and spiritual methods to help the Indigo, Crystal, and Rainbow Children live happier lives.      Since the 1970s, parents and schoolteachers have noticed that children are becoming increasingly more sensitive, aware, and psychic. The first generation of the new children were the Indigos, followed in the 1990s by the Crystal Children. Now, the new Rainbow Children are starting to emerge. Doreen discusses the characteristics of the Indigos, Crystals, and Rainbows, and describes their souls' purpose and the beautiful messages they have for all of us.

Cruel Optimism


Lauren Berlant - 2011
    Offering bold new ways of conceiving the present, Lauren Berlant describes the cruel optimism that has prevailed since the 1980s, as the social-democratic promise of the postwar period in the United States and Europe has retracted. People have remained attached to unachievable fantasies of the good life—with its promises of upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and durable intimacy—despite evidence that liberal-capitalist societies can no longer be counted on to provide opportunities for individuals to make their lives “add up to something.”Arguing that the historical present is perceived affectively before it is understood in any other way, Berlant traces affective and aesthetic responses to the dramas of adjustment that unfold amid talk of precarity, contingency, and crisis. She suggests that our stretched-out present is characterized by new modes of temporality, and she explains why trauma theory—with its focus on reactions to the exceptional event that shatters the ordinary—is not useful for understanding the ways that people adjust over time, once crisis itself has become ordinary. Cruel Optimism is a remarkable affective history of the present.

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason


Michel Foucault - 1961
    Librarian note: an alternate cover for this edition can be found here.Michel Foucault examines the archeology of madness in the West from 1500 to 1800 – from the late Middle Ages, when insanity was still considered part of everyday life and fools and lunatics walked the streets freely, to the time when such people began to be considered a threat, asylums were first built, and walls were erected between the “insane” and the rest of humanity.

Everything Changes: Help for Families of Newly Recovering Addicts


Beverly Conyers - 2009
    This includes loved ones, family, and friends beginning the journey of recovery. This resource can help you understand how to help them thrive.A compassionate, user-friendly handbook for family and friends navigating the many challenges that come with a loved one's new-found sobriety. A relative or friend has finally taken those tentative first steps toward sobriety. With the relief of this life-changing course of action comes a new and difficult set of challenges for recovering addicts and those who love them. Family members and friends often find themselves unsure of how to weather such a dramatic turn, as the rules and routines of their relationships no longer pertain. Everything Changes assuages fears and uncertainty by teaching loved ones of newly recovering addicts how to navigate the often-tumultuous early months of recovery. Beverly Conyers, author of the acclaimed Addict in the Family, again shares the hope and knowledge that she gained as a parent of a recovering addict by focusing on the aftermath of addiction. She outlines the physical and psychological changes that recovering addicts go through, and offers practical tools to help family members and friends: build a fresh, rewarding relationship with the addict be supportive without setting themselves up for disappointment avoid enabling destructive behavior set and maintain boundaries cope with relapse deal with the practicalities of sober living, such as helping the addict find a job and deal with the stigma of addiction.

Art as Experience


John Dewey - 1934
    Based on John Dewey's lectures on esthetics, delivered as the first William James Lecturer at Harvard in 1932, Art as Experience has grown to be considered internationally as the most distinguished work ever written by an American on the formal structure and characteristic effects of all the arts: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature.

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.

Eros the Bittersweet


Anne Carson - 1986
    Beginning with: "It was Sappho who first called eros 'bittersweet.' No one who has been in love disputes her. What does the word mean?", Carson examines her subject from numerous points of view and styles, transcending the constraints of the scholarly exercise for an evocative and lyrical meditation in the tradition of William Carlos William's Spring and All and William H. Gass's On Being Blue.

The Good Research Guide


Martyn Denscombe - 1998
    This edition has been updated to account for recent developments in the field such as: The emergence of mixed methods approaches Increased use of internet research More frequent use of methods such as triangulation and focus groups Developments in research ethics Written for anyone undertaking a small-scale research project, either as part of an academic course or as part of their professional development, this book provides: A clear, straightforward introduction to data collection methods and data analysis Explanations of the key decisions researchers need to take, with practical advice on how to make appropriate decisions Essential checklists to guide good practice This book is perfect for the first-time researcher looking for guidance on the issues they should consider and traps they should avoid when embarking on a social research project.

A Rulebook for Arguments


Anthony Weston - 1986
    Readers familiar with the previous edition will find a text that retains all the features that make Rulebook ideally suited for use as a supplementary course book -- including its modest price and compact size. Unlike most textbooks on argumentative writing, Rulebook is organised around specific rules, illustrated and explained soundly and briefly. It is not a textbook, but a rulebook, whose goal is to help students get on with writing a paper or assessing an argument.

The Queer Art of Failure


J. Jack Halberstam - 2011
    Judith Halberstam proposes “low theory” as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a willingness to fail and to lose one’s way, to pursue difficult questions about complicity, and to find counterintuitive forms of resistance. Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. She pays particular attention to animated children’s films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson


Camille Paglia - 1990
    It ultimately challenges the cultural assumptions of both conservatives and traditional liberals. 47 photographs.

Matter and Memory


Henri Bergson - 1896
    Henry Bergson (1859-1941) was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1927. His works include Time & Free Will, An Introduction to Metaphysics, Creative Evolution & The Creative Mind.

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future


James Bridle - 2018
    Underlying this trend is a single idea: the belief that our existence is understandable through computation, and more data is enough to help us build a better world.   In actual fact, we are lost in a sea of information, increasingly divided by fundamentalism, simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics. Meanwhile, those in power use our lack of understanding to further their own interests. Despite the accessibility of information, we’re living in a new Dark Age.   From rogue financial systems to shopping algorithms, from artificial intelligence to state secrecy, we no longer understand how our world is governed or presented to us. The media is filled with unverifiable speculation, much of it generated by anonymous software, while companies dominate their employees through surveillance and the threat of automation.   In his brilliant new work, leading artist and writer James Bridle excavates the limits of technology and how it aids our understanding of the world. Surveying the history of art, technology, and information systems, he explores the dark clouds that gather over our dreams of the digital sublime.

The Society of the Spectacle


Guy Debord - 1967
    From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960s up to the present, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism and everyday life in the late twentieth century. Now finally available in a superb English translation approved by the author, Debord's text remains as crucial as ever for understanding the contemporary effects of power, which are increasingly inseparable from the new virtual worlds of our rapidly changing image/information culture.

The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy


David Graeber - 2013
    He then jets forward to the nineteenth century, where systems we can easily recognize as modern bureaucracies come into being. In some areas of life—like with the modern postal systems of Germany and France—these bureaucracies have brought tremendous efficiencies to modern life. But Graeber argues that there is a much darker side to modern bureaucracy that is rarely ever discussed. Indeed, in our own “utopia of rules,” freedom and technological innovation are often the casualties of systems that we only faintly understand.Provocative and timely, the book is a powerful look and history of bureaucracy over the ages and its power in shaping the world of ideas.