Emerging from the thought-provoking discussions and correspondence Simone Weil had with the Reverend Father Perrin, this classic collection of essays contains the renowned philosopher and social activist's most profound meditations on the relationship of human life to the realm of the transcendent. An enduring masterwork and "one of the most neglected resources of our century" (Adrienne Rich), Waiting for God will continue to influence spiritual and political thought for centuries to come.
The Development of an Extraordinary SpeciesWe human beings share 98 percent of our genes with chimpanzees. Yet humans are the dominant species on the planet -- having founded civilizations and religions, developed intricate and diverse forms of communication, learned science, built cities, and created breathtaking works of art -- while chimps remain animals concerned primarily with the basic necessities of survival. What is it about that two percent difference in DNA that has created such a divergence between evolutionary cousins? In this fascinating, provocative, passionate, funny, endlessly entertaining work, renowned Pulitzer Prize?winning author and scientist Jared Diamond explores how the extraordinary human animal, in a remarkably short time, developed the capacity to rule the world . . . and the means to irrevocably destroy it.
The Classic Bestseller that has Changed the Lives of Millions"Extraordinary. Harris has helped millions find the freedom to change, liberate their adult effectiveness, and achieve joyful intimacy with others." --Los Angeles TimesTransactional analysis delineates three ego-states (Parent, Adult and Child) as the basis for the content and quality of interpersonal communication. "Happy childhood" notwithstanding, says Harris, most of us are living out the not OK feelings of a defenseless child wholly dependent on others (parents) for stroking and caring. At some stage early in our lives we adopt a "position" about ourselves and others that determines how we feel about everything we do. And for a huge portion of the population, that position is "I'm Not OK-You're OK." This negative "life position," shared by successful and unsuccessful people alike, contaminates our rational adult capabilities, leaving us vulnerable to inappropriate, emotional reactions of our child and uncritically learned behavior programmed into our parent. By exploring the structure of our personalities and understanding old decisions, Harris believes we can find the freedom to change our lives.
A highly original approach from best selling author Thomas Moore, restoring sex to its rightful place in the human psyche as an experience of the soul. In The Soul of Sex, Thomas Moore at last restores sex to its rightful place in the human psyche. Describing sex as an experience of the soul, Thomas Moore here brings out the fully human side of sex - the roles of fantasy, desire, meaning, and morality - and draws on religion, mythology art, literature, and film to show how sex is one of the most profound mysteries of life. While finding spirituality inherent in sex, Moore also explores how spiritual values can sometimes wound our sexuality. Blending rather than opposing spirituality and sexuality, The Soul of Sex offers a fresh, livable way of becoming more deeply sexual and loving in all areas of life.
"Funny, touching and infused with wonder, as all love stories should be." --San Francisco ExaminerThe iconic tale of love and loss that has touched the hearts of millions, Love Story has become one of the most adored novels of our time. It has sold more than twenty-one million copies worldwide and became a blockbuster film starring Ryan O'Neal and Ali McGraw. It is the story that told the world, "Love means never having to say you're sorry." This special anniversary edition includes an introduction by the author's daughter, Francesca Segal.This is the story of Oliver Barrett IV, a rich jock from a stuffy WASP family on his way to a Harvard degree and a career in law, and Jenny Cavilleri, a wisecracking working-class beauty studying music at Radcliffe.Opposites in nearly every way, Oliver and Jenny are kindred spirits from vastly different worlds. Their attraction to each other is immediate and powerful, and together they share a love that defies everything.This is their story--a story of two young people and a love so uncompromising it will bring joy to your heart and tears to your eyes.
Based on a true story, this gorgeous novel follows the fortunes of three Berliners caught up in an art scandal--involving newly discovered van Goghs--that rocks Germany amid the Nazis' rise to power.In the turbulent years between the wars, nothing in Berlin is quite what it seems. Not for Emmeline, a wayward young artist freewheeling wildly through the city in search of meaning. Not for Julius, an eminent art connoisseur who finds it easier to love paintings than people. And most definitely not for Frank, a Jewish lawyer who must find a way to protect his family and his principles as the Nazis begin their rise to power. But the greatest enigma of them all is Matthias, the mercurial art dealer who connects them all. Charming and ambitious, he will provoke a scandal--involving newly discovered paintings by Vincent van Gogh--that turns all of their lives upside down. Inspired by true events, this brilliant, humane novel peels back the cherished illusions that sustain us to reveal the truths beneath. A book about beauty and justice, vanity and self-delusion, it asks: Do we see only what we want to see? Even in the full light of the sun?
From a member of Parliament and best-selling author of The Places in Between, an exploration of the Marches--the borderland between England and Scotland--and the political turmoil and vivid lives that created it.In The Places in Between, Rory Stewart walked some of the most dangerous borderlands in the world. Now he travels with his eighty-nine-year-old father--a comical, wily, courageous, and infuriating former British intelligence officer--along the border they call home.On Stewart's four-hundred-mile walk across a magnificent natural landscape, he sleeps on mountain ridges and in housing projects, in hostels and farmhouses. With every fresh encounter--from an Afghanistan veteran based on Hadrian's Wall to a shepherd who still counts his flock in sixth-century words--Stewart uncovers more about the forgotten peoples and languages of a vanished country, now crushed between England and Scotland.Stewart and his father are drawn into unsettling reflections on landscape, their parallel careers in the bygone British Empire and Iraq, and the past, present, and uncertain future of the United Kingdom. This is a profound reflection on family, landscape, and history by a powerful and original writer.“An unforgettable tale.¿ -- National Geographic¿The miracle of The Marches is not so much the treks Stewart describes, pulling in all possible relevant history, as the monument that emerges to his beloved father.¿ -- New York Times Book Review
In ways both glaringly obvious and deeply hidden, thousands, even millions, of miles are embedded in everything we eat, sell, buy, drive, and touch. The capacity to transport a big-screen TV, a vital medicine, or a coffee cup from a factory in Shanghai to a port in California, then on to your local store or front door may be humanity's most towering achievement. Yet the same system delivers grinding commutes, a death every fifteen minutes, an ER trip every thirteen seconds, and crumbling, overloaded roads, rails, and bridges we can no longer afford to make or fix.Acclaimed journalist Edward Humes unpacks the epic amount of transportation included in a day in the life of a modern American family as he constructs a transportation detective story that reveals the surprising triumphs behind every trip we take and every click we make. Door to Door offers a glimpse of a possible future transformed by such new efficiencies as ride-sharing and robots, while examining a very real present where transportation is one of the few big things individuals can change?where personal choices can have a profound impact as that fork in the road fast approaches.
A #1 UK bestseller, The Versions of Us is a dazzling novel about the ways the smallest decisions give shape to our lives, charting a single relationship through three possible futures.What if you had said yes? Some moments can change your life forever. Have you ever wondered, what if . . .?A man is walking down a country lane. A woman, cycling toward him, swerves to avoid a dog. On that moment, their future hinges. There are three possible outcomes, three small decisions that could determine the rest of their life.Eva and Jim are nineteen and students at Cambridge when their paths first cross in 1958. And then there is David, Eva's then-lover, an ambitious actor who loves Eva deeply. The Versions of Us follows the three different courses their lives could take following this first meeting. Lives filled with love, betrayal, ambition--but through it all is a deep connection that endures whatever fate might throw at them.The Versions of Us explores the idea that there are moments when our lives might have turned out differently, the tiny factors or decisions that could determine our fate, and the precarious nature of the foundations upon which we build our lives. It is also a story about the nature of love and how it grows, changes, and evolves as we go through the vagaries of life.
In this remarkable memoir, Svetlana Alliluyeva reveals her struggle to break completely from the world of Communism and the legacy of her notorious father ?Joseph Stalin? by defecting from the USSR to the United States.Only One Year begins on December 19, 1966, as Alliluyeva leaves Russia for India, on a one-month visa, in the custody of a staff member of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It ends on December 19, 1967, in Princeton, New Jersey, as she and two American friends toast to her new life.Why would a woman flee the only world she has ever known? Brutally honest and moving, Only One Year is the personal story of a dictator's daughter who, trapped behind the Iron Curtain, made the drastic decision to defect. And now?nearly fifty years after its initial publication?Alliluyeva's compelling narrative of suffering, sacrifice, and subterfuge becomes all the more poignant becauseher escape ultimately did not bring her the freedom she so desperately sought.
The essays in The Other Serious examine the signature phenomena of our moment: the way our lives contradict themselves, how exaggeration and excess seep into our collective subconscious, why gender is becoming more complicated rather than less, and how we interact with the material things that surround us. It is a book about the delicacy and bluntness of American life, about how pop culture sticks its finger deep into the ethical dilemmas of our time, and how to negotiate between the old and the new, the high and the low, the global and the local, the sacred and the profane. At the heart of these reflections lies a central question: What should you do when you don't know what to do?Taken together, these essays comprise a guide for the overhaul of ?the administrativersity? of contemporary American life, a bureaucratic prison where the brain needn't work anymore. These pieces investigate the writer's own way of thinking?putting forth new ideas, questioning them, and urging the reader to adopt the same spirit of critical reexamination.
The acclaimed author of Time Warped tackles the very latest research in the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and biology to provide a fresh, fascinating, and thought-provoking look at our relationship with money.A day doesn't go by without money coming into our interactions. But how much do we really understand it? We know we need money. We tend to want more of it. But why do we behave so strangely with it? And why does it have such a hold on us?Claudia Hammond delves into the surprising psychology of money to show us that our relationship with the stuff is more complex than we might think. Exploring the latest research in psychology, neuroscience, biology, and behavioral economics, she also reveals some simple and effective tricks that will help you think about, use, and save money better?from how being grumpy helps if you don't want to be ripped off to why you should opt for the more expensive pain relief, from how to shop for a new laptop to why you should never offer to pay your friends for favors.An eye-opening and entertaining investigation into the power money holds over us, Mind Over Money will change the way you view the cash in your wallet and the figures in your bank account forever.
A literary exploration that asks seeks to answer the question: Have I lived the life I intended?Jesse Browner, a novelist with a full-time job at the United Nations, has written a book reminiscent of the Talking Heads classic song "Once in a Lifetime." Based on an essay he wrote for Poets and Writers Magazine, Browner asks hard questions about life choices, about the tendency to believe there is a parallel life that might have been more fulfilling or more free. He wonders: Is the true artist made by single-minded devotion to his craft? Do we compromise our dreams in service to responsibilities to family and jobs?These questions prompted Browner to take a hard look at himself and the evolution that brought him to this moment of existential doubt. In How Did I Get Here? he divides his adult life into five distinct phases--ambition, love, work, fulfillment, and serenity. Sketching portraits of himself at every stage, he looks for idiosyncrasies, commonalities, and clues--signposts that lead him to today. He also draws on the lives of others, from Franz Kafka to his sister to indie rocker Elliott Smith, in search of understanding. What he finds in his courageous quest is bravely honest and inspiring, touching on what it means to live a life with intention and meaning.
Set in a logging town on the lawless Pacific coast of Washington State at the turn of the twentieth century, a spellbinding novel of fate and redemption--told with a muscular lyricism and filled with a cast of characters Shakespearean in scope--in which the lives of an ill-fated family are at the mercy of violent social and historical forces that tear them apart.Keen to make his fortune, Jacob Ellstrom, armed with his medical kit and new wife, Nell, lands in The Harbor--a mud-filled, raucous coastal town teeming with rough trade pioneers, sawmill laborers, sailors, and prostitutes. But Jacob is not a doctor, and a botched delivery exposes his ruse, driving him onto the streets in a plunge towards alcoholism. Alone, Nell scrambles to keep herself and their young son, Duncan, safe in this dangerous world. When a tentative reunion between the couple--in the company of Duncan and Jacob's malicious brother, Matius--results in tragedy, Jacob must flee town to elude being charged with murder.Years later, the wild and reckless Duncan seems to be yet another of The Harbor's hoodlums. His only salvation is his overwhelming love for Teresa Boyerton, the daughter of the town's largest mill owner. But disaster will befall the lovers with heartbreaking consequences.And across town, Bellhouse, a union boss and criminal rabble-rouser, sits at the helm of The Harbor's seedy underbelly, perpetuating a cycle of greed and violence. His thug Tartan directs his pack of thieves, pimps, and murderers, and conceals an incendiary secret involving Duncan's mother. As time passes, a string of calamitous events sends these characters hurtling towards each other in an epic collision that will shake the town to its core.
In this powerful memoir, bestselling author Alison Pick (nominated for the Man Booker Prize) channels Karen Armstrong and Anne Lamott as she explains the shocking family secret that eventually led to her mid-life conversion to Judaism--exploring powerful, provocative questions about family, faith, and the burdens of inheritance.Alison Pick grew up in a tight-knit Christian family who went to church regularly and ate pork chops on Christmas Eve. But as a teenager, she stumbled into a remarkable family secret: her paternal grandparents, with whom she was very close, fled to Canada from the Czech Republic at the start of WWII because they were Jewish. But other members of her family hesitated to emigrate, and they paid the ultimate price for their choice when they were sent to Auschwitz.Haunted by the Holocaust, Alison's grandparents established themselves in their new lives as Christians. Not even Alison's father knew of his parents' past until he visited the Jewish cemetery in Prague as an adult. This atmosphere of shame and secrecy dogged Alison's journey into adulthood, and by her early thirties she had fallen into a crippling depression.Drowning in a sense of emptiness, she felt drawn to the Jewish community, and found inspiration for her international bestseller Far to Go in her family's harrowing past. Eventually she came to realize that her true path forward lay in reclaiming her history and identity as a Jew. Alison began attending classes about the conversion process and found a rabbi who would sponsor her participation. But the process was far from easy as old wounds were opened, and all of her relationships were tested.Profound, insightful, honest--and masterfully written--Between Gods forces us to reexamine our beliefs and the extent to which they define us.
Winner of the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prizeshort-listed for the DSC Prize for South Asian LiteratureA fascinating and intricate novel-in-stories, this stunning debut explores the complicated lives of ordinary people whose fates unexpectedly converge after a deadly bomb blast at a train station in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city.Comrade Sukhansaz, an old communist poet, is harassed on a bus full of college students minutes before a fatal bomb blast. His son, a wealthy, middle-aged businessman, yearns for his own estranged child. A young man, Sadeq, has a dead-end job snatching cars from people who have defaulted on their bank loans, while his girlfriend spins tales for her young brother to conceal her own heartbreak. An ambulance driver picking up the bodies after the blast has a shocking encounter with two strange-looking men whom nobody else seems to notice. And in the midst of it all, a solitary writer, tormented with grief for his dead father and his decimated city, struggles to find words.Elegantly weaving together these voices into a striking portrait of a city and its people, The Scatter Here Is Too Great is a tale as vibrant and varied in its characters, passions, and idiosyncrasies as the city itself.
Winner of the VCU Cabell First Novelist AwardWinner of the American Library Association's Sophie Brody MedalFinalist for the National Jewish Book AwardA singularly talented writer makes his literary debut with this provocative, soulful, and sometimes hilarious story of a failed journalist asked to do the unthinkable: Forge Holocaust-restitution claims for old Russian Jews in Brooklyn, New York.Yevgeny Gelman, grandfather of Slava Gelman, ?didn't suffer in the exact way? he needs to have suffered to qualify for the restitution the German government has been paying out to Holocaust survivors. But suffer he has?as a Jew in the war; as a second-class citizen in the USSR; as an immigrant to America. So? Isn't his grandson a ?writer??High-minded Slava wants to put all this immigrant scraping behind him. Only the American Dream is not panning out for him?Century, the legendary magazine where he works as a researcher, wants nothing greater from him. Slava wants to be a correct, blameless American?but he wants to be a lionized writer even more.Slava's turn as the Forger of South Brooklyn teaches him that not every fact is the truth, and not every lie a falsehood. It takes more than law-abiding to become an American; it takes the same self-reinvention in which his people excel. Intoxicated and unmoored by his inventions, Slava risks exposure. Cornered, he commits an irrevocable act that finally grants him a sense of home in America, but not before collecting a price from his family.A Replacement Life is a dark, moving, and beautifully written novel about family, honor, and justice.
"These essays gather up Rome and hold it before us, bristling and dense and dreamlike, with every scene drenched in the sound of fountains, of leaping and falling water." -- The New Yorker"Perhaps the finest book ever to be written about a city." -- New York TimesBringing to life the legendary city's beauty and magic in all its many facets, Eleanor Clark's masterful collection of vignettes, Rome and a Villa, has transported readers for generations.In 1947 a young American woman named Eleanor Clark went to Rome on a Guggenheim fellowship to write a novel. But instead of a novel, Clark created a series of sketches of Roman life written mostly between 1948 and 1951. Wandering the streets of this legendary city, Eleanor fell under Rome's spell--its pace of life, the wry outlook of its men and women, its magnificent history and breathtaking contribution to world culture. Rome is life itself--a sensuous, hectic, chaotic, and utterly fascinating blend of the comic and the tragic. Clark highlights Roman art and architecture, including Hadrian's Villa--an enormous, unfinished palace--as a prism to view the city and its history, and offers a lovely portrait of the Cimitero acattolico--long known as the Protestant cemetery--where Keats, Shelley, and other foreign notables rest.
Equal parts freedom fighter and statesman, Nelson Mandela bestrode the world stage for the past three decades, building a legacy that places him in the pantheon of history's most exemplary leaders.As a foreign correspondent based in South Africa, author John Carlin had unique access to Mandela during the post-apartheid years when Mandela faced his most daunting obstacles and achieved his greatest triumphs. Carlin witnessed history as Mandela was released from prison after twenty-seven years and ultimately ascended to the presidency of his strife-torn country.Drawing on exclusive conversations with Mandela and countless interviews with people who were close to him, Carlin has crafted an account of a man who was neither saint nor superman. Mandela's seismic political victories were won at the cost of much personal unhappiness and disappointment.Knowing Mandela offers an intimate understanding of one of the most towering and remarkable figures of our age.
On November 28, 1979, squadron commander and Navy pilot Peter Rodrick died when his plane crashed in the Indian Ocean, leaving behind a family that included his thirteen-year-old son, Stephen. In The Magical Stranger, Stephen Rodrick explores the life and death of the man who indelibly shaped his life, even as he remained a mystery: brilliant but unknowable, sacred but absent, a born leader who gave his son little direction.To better understand his father and his own experience growing up without him, Rodrick spends nearly two years with his father's former squadron. His travels take him around the world, from Okinawa and Hawaii to Bahrain and the Persian Gulf. As he learns more about his father, he also uncovers the layers of these sailors' lives: their brides and girlfriends, friendships, dreams, and disappointments. The journey doesn't end until November 28, 2013, when Rodrick's first son is born 34 years to the day after his father's mishap.A penetrating, thoughtful blend of memoir and reportage, The Magical Stranger is a moving reflection on the meaning of service and the power of a father's legacy.
After decades of service and years of watching her family's troubles splashed across the tabloids, Britain's Queen is beginning to feel her age. An unexpected opportunity offers her relief: an impromptu visit to a place that holds happy memories?the former royal yacht, Britannia, now moored near Edinburgh. Hidden beneath a skull-emblazoned hoodie, the limber Elizabeth (thank goodness for yoga) walks out of Buckingham Palace and heads for King's Cross to catch a train to Scotland. But a colorful cast of royal attendants has discovered her missing. In uneasy alliance a lady-in-waiting, a butler, an equerry, a girl from the stables, a dresser, and a clerk from the shop that supplies Her Majesty's cheese set out to bring her back before her absence becomes a national scandal.Comic and poignant, fast-paced and clever, Mrs Queen Takes the Train tweaks the pomp of the monarchy, going beneath its rigid formality to reveal the human heart of the woman at its center.
Bishop's unforgettable chronicle of the movements of Lincoln and his assassin during every moment of the fateful day of April 14, 1865.
A Far Piece to Canaan is a warm and nostalgic novel from an unexpected source: Sam Halpern, whose salty paternal wisdom made Justin Halpern's Sh*t My Dad Says a phenomenal bestseller.Inspired by Sam Halpern's childhood in rural Kentucky, A Far Piece to Canaan tells the story of Samuel Zelinsky, a celebrated but troubled former professor who reluctantly returns after his wife's death to the Kentucky hills where he lived as a child to reconnect with long-buried memories and make good on a forgotten promise.A tale of superstition, secrets, and heroism in the postwar South, A Far Piece to Canaan: A Novel of Friendship and Redemption is the surprising and moving debut of a gifted storyteller.
Exploring the development of humankindbetween the Old World and the New?from15,000 BC to AD 1500?the acclaimed authorof Ideas and The German Genius offers agroundbreaking new understandingof human history.Why did Asia and Europe develop far earlierthan the Americas? What were thefactors that accelerated?or impeded?development? How did the experiences of OldWorld inhabitants differ from their New Worldcounterparts?and what factors influenced thosedifferences?In this fascinating and erudite history, PeterWatson ponders these questions central to thehuman story. By 15,000 BC, humans had migratedfrom northeastern Asia across the frozen Beringland bridge to the Americas. When the worldwarmed up and the last Ice Age came to an end,the Bering Strait refilled with water, dividingAmerica from Eurasia. This division?with twogreat populations on Earth, each unaware of theother?continued until Christopher Columbusvoyaged to the New World in the fifteenth century.The Great Divide compares the developmentof humankind in the Old World and the Newbetween 15,000 BC and AD 1500. Watson identifiesthree major differences between the twoworlds?climate, domesticable mammals, andhallucinogenic plants?that combined to producevery different trajectories of civilization in thetwo hemispheres. Combining the most up-to-dateknowledge in archaeology, anthropology, geology,meteorology, cosmology, and mythology, thisunprecedented, masterful study offers uniquelyrevealing insight into what it means to be human.
Want to impress the hot stranger at the bar who asks for your take on Infinite Jest? Dying to shut up the blowhard in front of you who's pontificating on Cormac McCarthy's ?recurring road narratives?? Having difficulty keeping Francine Prose and Annie Proulx straight? For all those overwhelmed readers who need to get a firm grip on the relentless onslaught of must-read books to stay on top of the inevitable conversations that swirl around them, Lauren Leto's Judging a Book by Its Lover is manna from literary heaven! A hilarious send-up of?and inspired homage to?the passionate and peculiar world of book culture, this guide to literary debate leaves no reader or author unscathed, at once adoring and skewering everyone from Jonathan Franzen to Ayn Rand to Dostoyevsky and the people who read them.
Exploring the fascinating stories of more than a dozen authorial impostors across several centuries and cultures, Carmela Ciuraru plumbs the creative process and the darker, often crippling aspects of fame.Only through the protective guise of Lewis Carroll could a shy, half-deaf Victorian mathematician at Oxford feel free to let his imagination run wild. The "three weird sisters" from Yorkshire?the Brontës?produced instant bestsellers that transformed them into literary icons, yet they wrote under the cloak of male authorship. Bored by her aristocratic milieu, a cigar-smoking, cross-dressing baroness rejected the rules of propriety by having sexual liaisons with men and women alike, publishing novels and plays under the name George Sand. Highly accessible and engaging, these provocative stories reveal the complex motives of writers who harbored secret identities?sometimes playfully, sometimes with terrible anguish and tragic consequences. Part detective story, part exposé, part literary history, Nom de Plume is an absorbing psychological meditation on identity and creativity.
A New Yorker Best Book of the YearIn the dying days of a brutal civil war in Bangladesh, Sohail Haque stumbles upon an abandoned building. Inside he finds a young woman whose story will haunt him for a lifetime to come.Almost a decade later, Sohail's sister, Maya, returns home after a long absence to find her beloved brother transformed. While Maya has stuck to her revolutionary ideals, Sohail has shunned his old life to become a charismatic religious leader. And when Sohail decides to send his son to a madrasa, the conflict between brother and sister comes to a devastating climax. The Good Muslim is an epic story about faith, family, the rise of religious fundamentalism, and the long shadow of war from prizewinning Bangladeshi novelist Tahmima Anam.
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