Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Description
"Set in Provence, London, and New York: a daughter's wonderfully evocative and witty memoir of her mother and stepfather--Dee Wells, the glamorous and rebellious American journalist, and A. J. Ayer, the celebrated and worldly Oxford philosopher--and the life they lived at the center of absolutely everything. Gully Wells takes us into the heart of London's liberated intellectual inner circle of the 1960s. Here are Alan Bennett, Isaiah Berlin, Iris...
Author
Language
English
Description
From the author of Composing a Life (first published in 1991 and still in print), an inspiring exploration of a new stage of the life cycle, “Adulthood II,” created by unprecedented levels of health, energy, time, and resources—of which we have barely begun to be fully conscious.
Mary Catherine Bateson sees aging today as an “improvisational art form calling for imagination and willingness to learn,” and in...
Mary Catherine Bateson sees aging today as an “improvisational art form calling for imagination and willingness to learn,” and in...
Author
Publisher
Penguin Press
Pub. Date
2019.
Language
English
Description
It is an axiom of American life that advantage should be earned through ability and effort. Even as the country divides itself at every turn, the meritocratic ideal - that social and economic rewards should follow achievement rather than breeding - reigns supreme. Both Democrats and Republicans insistently repeat meritocratic notions. Meritocracy cuts to the heart of who we are. It sustains the American dream. But what if, both up and down the social...
Author
Publisher
Basic Books
Pub. Date
2013.
Language
English
Description
"Intellectuals and Race is a radical book in the original sense of one that goes to the root of the problem. The role of intellectuals in racial strife is explored in an international context that puts the American experience in a wholly new light. The views of individual intellectuals have spanned the spectrum, but the views of intellectuals as a whole have tended to cluster. Indeed, these views have clustered at one end of the spectrum in the early...
Author
Publisher
Penguin Press
Pub. Date
2015.
Language
English
Description
"Today we associate liberal thought and politics with secularism. When we argue over whether the nation's founders meant to keep religion out of politics, the godless side is said to be liberal. But the role of religion in American politics has always been far more nuanced and complex than today's debates would suggest and closer to the heart of American intellectual life than is commonly understood. American democracy was intended by its creators...
Author
Publisher
Simon & Schuster
Pub. Date
2016.
Language
English
Description
"A provocative, intimate look at the evolution of America's political soul through the lives of six political figures--from Whittaker Chambers to Christopher Hitchens--who abandoned the left and joined the right. In Exit Right, Daniel Oppenheimer tells the stories of six major political figures whose journeys away from the left reshaped the contours of American politics in the twentieth century. By going deep into the minds of six apostates--Whittaker...
Author
Publisher
The New Press
Pub. Date
2017.
Language
English
Description
"As a nineteen-year-old undergraduate in 1947, Noam Chomsky was deeply affected by articles about the responsibility of intellectuals written by Dwight Macdonald, an editor of Partisan Review and then of Politics. Twenty years later, as the Vietnam War was escalating, Chomsky turned to the question himself, noting that "intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments" and to analyze their "often hidden intentions." Originally published...
Author
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Pub. Date
[2017]
Language
English
Description
"Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose campaign. They self-mockingly called the 19th Street row house in which they congregated the 'House of Truth,' playing off the lively dinner discussions with frequent guest (and neighbor) Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. about life's verities. Lippmann and Frankfurter were house-mates, and their frequent guests included not merely Holmes but Louis Brandeis, Herbert Hoover, Louis Croly--founder of the New Republic--and the...
Author
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Pub. Date
c2016.
Language
English
Description
"In 1952, John Cage shocked audiences with 4'33", his compositional ode to the ironic power of silence. From Cage's minimalism to Chris Burden's radical performance art two decades later (in one piece he had himself shot), the post-war American avant-garde shattered the divide between low and high art, between artist and audience. They changed the cultural landscape. Feast of Excess is an engaging and accessible portrait of 'The New Sensibility,'...
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