Packing up his enormous, 35,000‑volume personal library, choosing which books to keep, store, or cast out, Manguel found himself in deep reverie on the nature of relationships between books and readers, books and collectors, order and disorder, memory and reading. In this poignant and personal reevaluation of his life as a reader, the author illuminates the highly personal art of reading and affirms the vital role of public libraries.   Manguel’s musings range widely, from delightful reflections on the idiosyncrasies of book lovers to deeper analyses of historic and catastrophic book events, including the burning of ancient Alexandria’s library and contemporary library lootings at the hands of ISIS. With insight and passion, the author underscores the universal centrality of books and their unique importance to a democratic, civilized, and engaged society.

    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.

    Written with a diamond-sharp precision that lends it an eerie power, it tells the story of Renee's long sojourn in what she calls the "Land of Enlightenment" or "The Country of Tibet," and of her gradual and painstaking return to "wonderful reality." Renee moves in and out of hospitals, sometimes able to eat only tea and spinach, or apples and spinach, because "'The System' forbade anything else." She regresses to a state resembling infancy, and she experiences intense despair, although she always describes her experiences with a pitiless and remarkable calm, as though she has observed herself from a great distance. And all the while she is sustained by the attention and understanding of her analyst, Maguerite Sechehaye, who has contributed an illuminating Afterward to her story. This harrowing and unforgettable work is a classic in the literature of mental illness.

    These were the concerns of Socrates, who spent his days in the ancient Athenian marketplace asking awkward questions, disconcerting the people he met by showing them how little they genuinely understood. This engaging book introduces the great thinkers in Western philosophy and explores their most compelling ideas about the world and how best to live in it.In forty brief chapters, Nigel Warburton guides us on a chronological tour of the major ideas in the history of philosophy. He provides interesting and often quirky stories of the lives and deaths of thought-provoking philosophers from Socrates, who chose to die by hemlock poisoning rather than live on without the freedom to think for himself, to Peter Singer, who asks the disquieting philosophical and ethical questions that haunt our own times.Warburton not only makes philosophy accessible, he offers inspiration to think, argue, reason, and ask in the tradition of Socrates. A Little History of Philosophy presents the grand sweep of humanity's search for philosophical understanding and invites all to join in the discussion.

    The masterly essay on Tolstoy's view of history, in which Sir Isaiah underlines a fundamental distinction between those people (foxes) who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things and those (hedgehogs) who relate everything to a central, all-embracing system.

    How does Jane Goodall’s relationship with her dog Rusty inform her thinking about our relationship to other species? Which time and place would Jared Diamond most prefer to live in, in light of his work on the role of chance in history? What does driving a sports car have to do with Steven Weinberg’s quest for the “theory of everything”? Physicist and journalist Stefan Klein’s intimate conversations with nineteen of the world’s best-known scientists (including three Nobel Laureates) let us listen in as they talk about their paradigm-changing work—and how it is deeply rooted in their daily lives. • Cosmologist Martin Rees on the beginning and end of the world • Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins on egoism and selflessness • Neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran on consciousness • Molecular biologist Elizabeth Blackburn on aging • Philosopher Peter Singer on morality • Physician and social scientist Nicholas Christakis on human relationships • Biochemist Craig Venter on the human genome • Chemist and poet Roald Hoffmann on beauty

    Why do we recognize patterns? Is there such a thing as positive stress? Are we genetically programmed to be in conflict with each other? Those are just some of the 150 questions that the world's best scientific minds answer with elegant simplicity.With contributions from Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, Nassim Taleb, Brian Eno, Steven Pinker, and more, everything is explained in fun, uncomplicated terms that make the most complex concepts easy to comprehend.

    At the same time it's a demonstration of the practical application of these principles to the conduct of everyday relationships & the organization of personal life. Based upon a year's lectures to audiences at the People's Institute in Vienna, the book pointd out how the mistaken behavior of individuals affects social & communal harmony; to teach individuals to recognize their mistakes; & finally, to show them how they may effect a harmonious adjustment to communal life. Adler felt that mistakes in business or in science were costly & deplorable, but mistakes in the conduct of life are often dangerous to life itself. This book is dedicated by the author in his preface to the task of illuminating progress toward a better understanding of human nature.

    An entertaining, insightful history of the men who've held the office, from the division between Jefferson and Hamilton through Bill Clinton's campaign for national health care.

    Buckley made a confession to Corey Robin. Capitalism is "boring," said the founding father of the American right. "Devoting your life to it," as conservatives do, "is horrifying if only because it's so repetitious. It's like sex." With this unlikely conversation began Robin's decade-long foray into the conservative mind. What is conservatism, and what's truly at stake for its proponents? If capitalism bores them, what excites them?Tracing conservatism back to its roots in the reaction against the French Revolution, Robin argues that the right is fundamentally inspired by a hostility to emancipating the lower orders. Some conservatives endorse the free market, others oppose it. Some criticize the state, others celebrate it. Underlying these differences is the impulse to defend power and privilege against movements demanding freedom and equality.Despite their opposition to these movements, conservatives favor a dynamic conception of politics and society--one that involves self-transformation, violence, and war. They are also highly adaptive to new challenges and circumstances. This partiality to violence and capacity for reinvention has been critical to their success.Written by a keen, highly regarded observer of the contemporary political scene, The Reactionary Mind ranges widely, from Edmund Burke to Antonin Scalia, from John C. Calhoun to Ayn Rand. It advances the notion that all rightwing ideologies, from the eighteenth century through today, are historical improvisations on a theme: the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.

    Lacan for Beginners introduces readers to a largely chronological development of Lacan's theories and their relation to clinical practice.

    J Adbul Kalam’s speeches in his post presidency years. Drawn from Dr Kalam’s addresses to parliaments, universities, schools and other institutions in India and abroad, they include his ideas on science, nation building, poverty, compassion and self-confidence.Dr Kalam draws on the lives of stalwarts such as Marie Curie, Dr Vikram Sarabhai to encourage and inspire his young readers. Through these speeches, he shares many valuable lessons in humility, resilience, and determination and leads children to think, grow and evolve.A project very close to his heart, Dr Kalam’s last book for children is a road map for every child to pursue their dreams, to be the best they can be, leading to the realisation of a better India.

    In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his ground-breaking, critically acclaimed podcast, John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet - from the QWERTY keyboard and Halley's Comet to Penguins of Madagascar - on a five-star scale.Complex and rich with detail, the Anthropocene's reviews have been praised as 'observations that double as exercises in memoiristic empathy', with over 10 million lifetime downloads. John Green's gift for storytelling shines throughout this artfully curated collection about the shared human experience; it includes beloved essays along with six all-new pieces exclusive to the book.

    Drawing readers into the imaginative world of William Blake, Frye succeeded in making Blake's voice and vision intelligible to the wider public. Distinguished by its range of reference, elegance of expression, comprehensiveness of coverage, coherence of argument, and sympathy to its subject, Fearful Symmetry was immediately recognized as a landmark of Blake criticism. Fifty years later, it is still recognized as having ensured the acceptance of Blake as a canonical poet by permanently dispelling the widespread notion that he was the mad creator of an incomprehensible private symbolism.For this new edition, the text has been revised and corrected in accordance with the principles of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye series. Frye's original annotation has been supplemented with references to currently standard editions of Blake and others, and many new notes have been provided, identifying quotations, allusions, and cultural references. An introduction by Ian Singer provides biographical and critical context for the book, an overview of its contents, and an account of its reception.

    When Walter Kaufmann wrote it in the immediate aftermath of World War II, most scholars outside Germany viewed Nietzsche as part madman, part proto-Nazi, and almost wholly unphilosophical. Kaufmann rehabilitated Nietzsche nearly single-handedly, presenting his works as one of the great achievements of Western philosophy.Responding to the powerful myths and countermyths that had sprung up around Nietzsche, Kaufmann offered a patient, evenhanded account of his life and works, and of the uses and abuses to which subsequent generations had put his ideas. Without ignoring or downplaying the ugliness of many of Nietzsche's proclamations, he set them in the context of his work as a whole and of the counterexamples yielded by a responsible reading of his books. More positively, he presented Nietzsche's ideas about power as one of the great accomplishments of modern philosophy, arguing that his conception of the will to power was not a crude apology for ruthless self-assertion but must be linked to Nietzsche's equally profound ideas about sublimation. He also presented Nietzsche as a pioneer of modern psychology and argued that a key to understanding his overall philosophy is to see it as a reaction against Christianity.Many scholars in the past half century have taken issue with some of Kaufmann's interpretations, but the book ranks as one of the most influential accounts ever written of any major Western thinker.