Showing titles in Essays

Die Expertin für nachhaltige Landwirtschaft Heide Hoffmann von der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin war in der ganzen Welt zu Hause. Ihre Dienstreisen waren oft abenteuerlich, weil sie vor allem in Gegenden führten, in die Touristen nicht kommen. Auch die Begegnung mit Einheimischen ist auf Dienstreisen intensiver, weil man mit Kollegen der betreffenden Ländern zusammenarbeitet. Seit 1991, als für die Autorin nach dem Ende der DDR das freie Reisen möglich war, hat sie Tagebuch über ihre Eindrücke und Erlebnisse in den verschiedensten Ländern auf allen Kontinenten geführt.

In diesen frühesten Veröffentlichungen des Begründers der Anthroposophie wird der Versuch unternommen, aus den naturwissenschaftlichen Schriften Goethes diejenigen epistemologischen und wissenschaftstheoretischen Prinzipien herauszuarbeiten, die den Goethe'schen Arbeiten auf diesem Feld unausgesprochen zugrunde liegen. Im Lichte der Steiner'schen Deutung erscheinen Goethes Beiträge zur Naturwissenschaft als zukunftweisende Ansätze eines wissenschaftsmethodisch und philosophisch fundierten und zugleich tief spirituellen Zugangs zum Verständnis des Lebendigen.

Written with equal parts candor and lyricism, Pam Houston illuminates the interconnected histories of abortion in the United States and in her own life during the decades when Roe v. Wade was the law of the land. Houston guides us through the shifting landscapes of politics, the law, and self-determination in a country where access to medical care and the power to determine your own destiny are increasingly—and once again—dependent on geography and circumstance.

Papeles falsos, primer libro de Valeria Luiselli, está compuesto por una serie de ensayos narrativos de temas diversos, donde la constante es el registro de la original mirada de la autora, siempre presta a encontrar detalles o conexiones entre ideas de muy diverso orden, ecos de un pensamiento que por fuerza obliga al lector a repensar. La escondida tumba de Brodsky en Venecia; la inclasificable y elusiva saudade portuguesa.

In September of 2022, twenty-five years after Leonard Peltier received a life sentence for the murder of two FBI agents, the Democratic National Committee unanimously passed a resolution urging President Joe Biden to release him. Peltier has affirmed his innocence ever since his sentencing in 1977—his case was made fully and famously in Peter Matthiessen’s best-selling In the Spirit of Crazy Horse—and many remain convinced he was wrongly convicted. A wise and unsettling book, Prison Writings is both memoir and manifesto, chronicling Peltier’s life in Leavenworth Prison in Kansas.

From acclaimed author Ursula K. Le Guin, and with an introduction by Karen Joy Fowler, a collection of thoughts - always adroit, often acerbic - on aging, belief, the state of literature, and the state of the nation. Ursula K. Le Guin has taken listeners to imaginary worlds for decades. Now she's in the last great frontier of life, old age, and exploring new literary territory: the blog, a forum where her voice - sharp, witty, as compassionate as it is critical - shines. No Time to Spare collects the best of Ursula's blog, presenting perfectly crystallized dispatches on what matters.

The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his groundbreaking podcast, John Green reviews different facets of the human-centred planet - from the QWERTY keyboard and Staphylococcus aureus to the Taco Bell breakfast menu - on a five-star scale.

Have you ever seen something that wasn't really there? Heard someone call your name in an empty house? Sensed someone following you and turned around to find nothing? Dr Oliver Sacks weaves together stories of his patients and of his own mind-altering experiences to illuminate what hallucinations tell us about the organisation and structure of our brains, how they have influenced every culture's folklore and art and why the potential for hallucination is present in us all, a vital part of the human condition.

Self Help was published in 1859 by Samuel Smiles. It has been called "the bible of mid-Victorian liberalism". Self Help sold 20,000 copies within one year of its publication. By the time of Smiles' death in 1904, it had sold over a quarter of a million. Self-Help elevated Smiles to celebrity status; almost overnight, he became a leading pundit and much-consulted guru.

In an age of confusion, fear, and loss, Hanif Abdurraqib's is a voice that matters. Whether he's attending a Bruce Springsteen concert the day after visiting Michael Brown's grave, or discussing public displays of affection at a Carly Rae Jepsen show, he writes with a poignancy that resonates profoundly. In essays that have been published by the New York Times, MTV, and Pitchfork, among others—Abdurraqib uses music and culture as a lens through which to view our world so that we might better understand ourselves, and in so doing proves himself a bellwether for our times.

Anthony Bourdain chases the fumigation truck in Bergen County, New Jersey. Dave Eggers tells it straight: Illinois is Number 1. Louise Erdrich loses her bikini top in North Dakota. Jonathan Franzen gets waylaid by New York's publicist...and personal attorney...and historian...and geologist. John Hodgman explains why there is no such thing as a "Massachusettsean."

Harold Bloom explores our Western literary tradition by concentrating on the works of twenty-six authors central to the Canon. He argues against ideology in literary criticism; he laments the loss of intellectual and aesthetic standards; he deplores multiculturalism, Marxism, feminism, neoconservatism, Afrocentrism, and the New Historicism. Insisting instead upon "the autonomy of aesthetic," Bloom places Shakespeare at the center of the Western Canon.....

Claudia Rankine's bold new audiobook recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in 21st-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV - everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive.

On 18th February 1895, the Marquess of Queensberry left a visiting card at the Albemarle Club on which he had written: "To Oscar Wilde posing as a sodomite." The accusation led to a series of three trials and the imprisonment of Wilde. This compelling dramatic recreation has been carefully compiled from the original trial transcripts.

Karan Johar is synonymous with success, panache, quick wit, and outspokenness, which sometimes inadvertently creates controversy and makes headlines. KJo, as he is popularly called, has been a much-loved Bollywood film director, producer, actor, and discoverer of new talent. But who is the man behind the icon we all know? Honest, heart-warming and insightful, An Unsuitable Boy is both the story of the life of an exceptional filmmaker at the peak of his powers and of an equally extraordinary human being who shows you how to survive and succeed in life.

In her latest forays into the American scene, Joan Didion covers ground from Washington to Los Angeles, from a TV producer's gargantuan "manor" to the racial battlefields of New York's criminal courts. At each stop she uncovers the mythic narratives that elude other observers: Didion tells us about the fantasies the media construct around crime victims and presidential candidates; she gives us new interpretations of the stories of Nancy Reagan and Patty Hearst; she charts America's rollercoaster ride through evanescent booms and hard times that won't go away.

In the 1960s and early '70s, the most prominent, vocal cultural movement was the New Left: a movement that condemned America and everything it stood for: individualism, material wealth, science, technology, capitalism.

Mit den Erinnerungen eines Europäers hat Stefan Zweig seine persönliche, zugleich eine der besten Analysen der Jahrzehnte zwischen dem ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert und dem 2. Weltkrieg verfasst.

In this extraordinary audiobook, Dr. Oliver Sacks recounts the stories of patients struggling to adapt to often bizarre worlds of neurological disorder. Here are people who can no longer recognise everyday objects or those they love; who are stricken with violent tics or shout involuntary obscenities, and yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. If inconceivably strange, these brilliant tales illuminate what it means to be human.

Esmé Weijun Wang was officially diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder in 2013, although the hallucinations and psychotic episodes had started years before that. In the midst of a high functioning life at Yale, Stanford and the literary world, she would find herself floored by an overwhelming terror that 'spread like blood', or convinced that she was dead, or that her friends were robots, or spiders were eating holes in her brain.