The Ethics of Ambiguity


Simone de Beauvoir - 1947
    A leading exponent of French existentialism, her work complements, though it is independent of, that of her great friend Jean-Paul Sartre. In "The Ethics of Ambiguity," Madame de Beauvoir penetrates at once to the core ethical problems of modern man: what shall he do, how shall he go about making values, in the face of this awareness of the absurdity of his existence? She forces the reader to face the absurdity of the human condition, and then, having done so, proceeds to develop a dialectic of ambiguity which will enable him not to master the chaos, but to create with it.

Cheats, Cons, Swindles, and Tricks


Brian Brushwood - 2000
    As seen on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno (twice!) as well as 2 dozen other TV programs, Brian's now the host of the popular online series "Scam School," (downloaded over 1 million times a month, and named by iTunes as a "top video podcast" of 2008 and 2009). ...And THIS is the book that started it all.With 57 killer tricks (and 8 bonus scams), any one of these tricks could win you the cost of a free drink or more... and yet your investment will be LESS THAN 2 CENTS PER TRICK!Short enough to digest in an evening, yet powerful enough to score you free drinks for the rest of your life... "Cheats, Cons, Swindles and Tricks" could be the single best investment of 99 cents you'll ever make.

City Dharma: Keeping Your Cool in the Chaos


Arthur Jeon - 2004
    But it doesn't have to be this way. In City Dharma, Arthur Jeon suggests that it’s not what happens to us, but how we react to events and thoughts that causes most of our suffering.City Dharma is the essential guide for everyone living in the accelerated world most of us call home. Offering smart, practical ways to overcome daily stresses and the crazy-making reactivity of our own minds, Jeon explores the most challenging aspects of modern urban and suburban life, including:Another Day, Another DollarAvoid Working StiffnessWalking Down a Dark AlleyAwareness and Violence Sex and the City DharmaSeeking Love vs. Expressing LoveScaring Ourselves to DeathTranscending Media NegativityRoad RageDealing with Mad Max Within and WithoutDrawing wisdom from the ancient Eastern teachings of Advaita Vedanta and filled with engaging stories, City Dharma offers a new way of seeing the world--one that is based on connection rather than separation, direct experience rather than belief, and love instead of fear.From the Hardcover edition.

Nursing Theorists and Their Work


Martha Raile Alligood - 2009
    Nursing Theorists and Their Work, 9th Edition provides you with an in-depth look at 39 theorists of historical, international, and significant importance. This new edition has been updated with an improved writing style, added case studies, critical thinking activities, and in-depth objective critiques of nursing theories that help bridge the gap between theory and application. In addition, the six levels of abstraction (philosophy, conceptual models, grand theory, theory, middle-range theory, and future of nursing theory) are graphically depicted throughout the book to help you understand the context of the various theories.

Life in the Skies: Everything You Want to Know about Flying


Lim Khoy Hing - 2013
    Complemented with more than 40 full-colour personal illustrations of the Captain, Life in the Skies will be a valuable and useful guide for air travellers and budding-pilots alike!Captain Lim Khoy Hing is an ex-airline pilot who is passionate about flying, having worked all his life high above the clouds since leaving college. Prior to his retirement from flag-carrier Malaysia Airlines, he was fortunate enough to fly the latest fly-by-wire planes such as the Boeing 777 and Airbus A320, A330 and A340. He has logged a total of 25,500 flying hours, or about 20 trips to the moon and back. Capt. Lim started his flying career in the Royal Malaysian Air Force, having been trained by the Royal Air Force in the United Kingdom in 1967. He served for about 12 years in the service before joining Malaysia Airlines and finished his career with the carrier AirAsia before retiring in 2011.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock)


Slavoj ŽižekAlenka Zupančič - 1988
    Starting from the premise that ‘everything has meaning’, the films’ ostensible narrative content and formal procedures are analysed to reveal a rich proliferation of ideological and psychical mechanisms at work. But Hitchcock is here to lure the reader into ‘serious’ Marxist and Lacanian considerations on the construction of meaning. Timely, provocative and original, this is sure to become a landmark of Hitchcock studies.

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists


Joan Copjec - 1994
    Ordinarily, these discourses only cross paths long enough for historicists to charge psychoanalysis with an indifference to history, but here psychoanalysis, via Lacan, goes on the offensive. Refusing to cede historicity to the historicists, Copjec makes a case for the superiority of Lacan's explanation of historical process, its generative principles, and its complex functionings.

Stoicism for Inner Peace


Einzelgänger - 2021
    Equanimity or ‘inner peace’ is a prerequisite for being a happy and flourishing person according to Stoic philosophy. Therefore, it’s no surprise that ancient Stoic texts contain invaluable wisdom on how to calm the mind. The challenge, however, is to find and translate this wisdom in a way that’s simple and comprehensible in our modern context, while still maintaining its profundity.

The World of Perception


Maurice Merleau-Ponty - 2002
    Translated here into English for the first time, they offer a lucid and concise insight into one of the great philosophical minds of the twentieth-century.These lectures explore themes central not only to Merleau-Ponty's philosophy but phenomenology as a whole. He begins by rejecting the idea - inherited from Descartes and influential within science - that perception is unreliable and prone to distort the world around us. Merleau-Ponty instead argues that perception is inseparable from our senses and it is how we make sense of the world.Merleau-Ponty explores this guiding theme through a brilliant series of reflections on science, space, our relationships with others, animal life and art. Throughout, he argues that perception is never something learned and then applied to the world. As creatures with embodied minds, he reminds us that we are born perceiving and share with other animals and infants a state of constant, raw, unpredictable contact with the world. He provides vivid examples with the help of Kafka, animal behaviour and above all modern art, particularly the work of Cezanne.A thought-provoking and crystalline exploration of consciousness and the senses, The World of Perception is essential reading for anyone interested in the work of Merleau-Ponty, twentieth-century philosophy and art.

Ways of Seeing


John Berger - 1972
    First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the (London) Sunday Times critic commented: "This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings . . . he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures." By now he has."Berger has the ability to cut right through the mystification of the professional art critics . . . He is a liberator of images: and once we have allowed the paintings to work on us directly, we are in a much better position to make a meaningful evaluation" —Peter Fuller, Arts Review"The influence of the series and the book . . . was enormous . . . It opened up for general attention to areas of cultural study that are now commonplace" —Geoff Dyer in Ways of TellingWinner of the 1972 Booker Prize for his novel, G., John Peter Berger (born November 5th, 1926) is an art critic, painter and author of many novels including A Painter of Our Time, From A to X and Bento’s Sketchbook.

The Mass Psychology of Fascism


Wilhelm Reich - 1933
    "Fascism is only the organized political expression of the structure of the average man's character. It is the basic emotional civilization and its mechanistic-mystical conception of life."Responsibility for the elimination of fascism thus results with the masses of average people who might otherwise support and champion it.

Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-century French Hermaphrodite


Herculine Barbin - 1978
    Herculine was designated female at birth. A pious girl in a Catholic orphanage, a bewildered adolescent enchanted by the ripening bodies of classmates, a passionate lover of a schoolmistress, she's suddenly reclassified as male. Alone & desolate, he commits suicide, aged 30, in a miserable Paris attic. Here's a lost voice of the sexual past in an erotic diary. Provocative, articulate, eerily prescient as she imagines her corpse under the probing instruments of scientists, Herculine brings a disturbing perspective to our notions of sexuality. Foucault, who discovered these memoirs in the archives of the French Department of Public Hygiene, presents them with the graphic medical descriptions of Herculine's body before & after death. In a striking contrast, a painfully confused young person & the doctors who examine her try to sort out the nature of masculine & feminine at the dawn of the age of modern sexuality. "Herculine Barbin can be savored like a libertine novel. The ingenousness of Herculine, the passionate yet equivocal tenderness which thrusts her into the arms, even into the beds, of her companions, gives these pages a charm strangely erotic...Michel Foucault has a genius for bringing to light texts & reviving destinies outside the ordinary."--Le Monde, 7/1978

On the Heights of Despair


Emil M. Cioran - 1933
    It also presents Cioran as a connoisseur of apocalypse, a theoretician of despair, for whom writing and philosophy both share the "lyrical virtues" that alone lead to a metaphysical revelation."No modern writer twists the knife with Cioran's dexterity. . . . His writing . . . is informed with the bitterness of genuine compassion."—Bill Marx, Boston Phoenix"The dark, existential despair of Romanian philosopher Cioran's short meditations is paradoxically bracing and life-affirming. . . . Puts him in the company of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard."—Publishers Weekly, starred review"This is self-pity as epigram, the sort of dyspeptic pronouncement that gets most people kicked out of bed but that has kept Mr. Cioran going for the rest of his life."—Judith Shulevitz, New York Times Book Review

Steel Toes: A Novel


Eddie Little - 2001
    Little writes about the world he used to inhabit, a place filled with drugs, crime and danger at every turn. His electrifying prose brings to life the rough, raw, and seedy life of Boston's underworld where corruption lies at the heart of every deception.Bobbie is a young criminal prodigy. Living in Boston he's approached by a mysterious Greek on behalf of an anonymous shipping tycoon, who wants to commission a theft. The Fogg museum is the target; a collection of ancient Greek coins the score. Everything goes fine with the burglary, but with easy street just around the corner Bobbie's life takes an unexpected twist and his big score evaporates. With his life on the line, Bobbie must learn who he can trust when trusting anyone can make you lose everything. Steel Toes is as close to reality as fiction can get. Little draws you in with his knife sharp writing, his authentic and unflinching characters and plot as tight and strong as the hold of addiction.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind


Julian Jaynes - 1976
    The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion -- and indeed our future.