“Sister Miriam Joseph’s Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language remains, after more than half a century, an immensely valuable aid to serious students of the greatest of all writers. The book manife
“Where does happiness lie?” “What is the best life?” Aristotle ponders these abiding questions in his Nicomachean Ethics—a work which has profoundly influenced Western thinking on ethical matters. A b
His senses were hot, and so he yearned for spirituality, purity, and holiness---the invisible, which seemed to him spiritual, holy, and pure.Thus Thomas Mann introduces Moses in The Tables of the Law,
The Metalogicon, completed in 1159, is recognized as a landmark in the fields of philosophy, psychology, and education. Undertaken to defend the thorough study of the trivium against attack at the han
Philosopher Eva Brann describes the concept of doublethink/doubletalk as "a flanking approach toward comprehending a pervasively duplex world, a world that sometimes flashes fleeting signs of cov
December 21, 1963: Having served 20 years for a murder he didn't commit, "Moth" exits Central Sofia Prison anticipating his first night of freedom. Instead he steps into a new and alien world?the nigh
"Edith Bruck tells the story of the 'Lager' with the inherent strength of a wounded animal and in confronting the unbearable sadness of it closes the account and does not surrender to the void…Un
Francis Bacon's The Advancement of Learning (1605) is considered the first major philosophical book written in English. In it, Bacon is concerned with scientific learning: the current state of knowled
When Alfred Fatigay returns to his native London, he brings along his trustworthy pet chimpanzee Emily who, unbeknownst to Fatigay, has become civilized: literate, literary--and in love with Fatigay h
Since its first publication in 1567, Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid has had an enormous influence on English literature and poetry. This is the translation that Shakespeare knew, read, and borro
Since 1955, Dwike Mitchell and Willie Ruff have been performing, teaching, and sharing jazz with the country and the world. William Zinsser, best-selling author of On Writing Well, follows the duo to
"A serene, lucid, and stylish essay in intellectual autobiography that at the same time commemorates a vanished world."?The Times Literary SupplementFrom Berlin to Jerusalem portrays the dual dramas o
"Gershom Scholem is a historian who has remade the world. . . . He is coming to be seen as one of the greatest shapers of contemporary thought, possibly the boldest mind-adventurer of our generation."
“Susan Levenstein gives us a fascinating account of her life as an American doctor in the Eternal City, including an analysis of Italian healthcare that is both informed and terrifying. A must read fo
Brooke Allen first traveled to Syria in 2009, expecting it to be much as American news media routinely depicted ituan ultra-conservative Muslim society, a rogue nation committed to an anti-American st
"[A] thoughtful and lucid tale of love, companionship, and heartbreaking illness." ?Lydia DavisIn 2004 Rachel Hadas's husband, George Edwards, a composer and professor of music at Columbia University,
"John Stewart is a rare combination: an artist, an adventurer, a survivor of a prison camp, a great photographer, and a rambunctious, rollicking prose writer. He's has marvelous, unlikely experiences
In the Republic, Socrates seeks to convince Plato’s brother Glaucon that the just life of philosophy is preferable to the unjust life of tyranny. Jacob Howland’s Glaucon’s Fate argues that he fails. T
Reflecting on his experiences in the years after World War II, John Verney, author of Going to the Wars, came to recognize that what made them memorable was the unbought grace of life, revealed most s
"With its humor and its fancy and its wistfulness, [Desert Islands] is such a fountain of youth as no Ponce de Leon ever discovered." —New York Times"One of those cabinets of curiosities," Mich
