Here, for a change, is a fish tale that actually does honor to the author. In fact The Old Man and the Sea revived Ernest Hemingway's career, which was foundering under the weight of such postwar stinkers as Across the River and into the Trees. It also led directly to his receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1954 (an award Hemingway gladly accepted, desp...more
Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a new American cultural phenomenon--one that is at odds with our heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern, secular knowledge and science. With mordant wit, she surveys an anti-rationalist landscape extending from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe ...more
The dramatic first-person account of life inside an ultra-fundamentalist American religious sect, and one woman’s courageous flight to freedom with her eight children.When she was eighteen years old, Carolyn Jessop was coerced into an arranged marriage with a total stranger: a man thirty-two years her senior. Merril Jessop already had three wives...more
In J.M. Coetzee's eighth novel, Paul Rayment is a photographer whose life seems to be taking several turns for the worse: at 60 years old, he's alone in the world, and he has just lost his leg in an accident. Unexpectedly, he finds himself falling in love with his maternal and comforting nurse, a Croatian woman named Marijana. And then another woma...more
In this memoir, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board recalls his long life and career, telling how he got to his exalted position, the many historic events he witnessed and participated in, and the perspective it has given him on the globalized economy. Arguably the most listened to, if not the most powerful, unelected official in the A...more
At the heart of this 1930 novel is the Bundren familys bizarre journey to Jefferson to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Faulkner lets each family member--including Addie--and others along the way tell their private responses to Addie's life.
Inheriting the mantle of revolutionary biologist from Darwin, Watson, and Crick, Richard Dawkins forced an enormous change in the way we see ourselves and the world with the publication of The Selfish Gene. Suppose, instead of thinking about organisms using genes to reproduce themselves, as we had since Mendel's work was rediscovered, we turn it a...more
Most of us would be lucky to be able to express ourselves in writing half as well as David Sedaris does in Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. But on top of his skills with the written word, the author also has substantial gifts as a performer, as he proves on the audio version of the book. But while the CD or cassette version of this collecti...more
Though the "Revised Edition of A Theory of Justice", published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition. This reissue makes the first edition once again available for scholars and serious students of Rawls's work.
In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from "the good fight," For Whom the Bell Tolls. The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the moun...more