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A Fire In The Mind
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Book Synopsis Fire in the Mind by : George Johnson
Download or read book Fire in the Mind written by George Johnson and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-10-06 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are there really laws governing the universe? Or is the order we see a mere artifact of the way evolution wired the brain? And is what we call science only a set of myths in which quarks, DNA, and information fill the role once occupied by gods? These questions lie at the heart of George Johnson's audacious exploration of the border between science and religion, cosmic accident and timeless law. Northern New Mexico is home both to the most provocative new enterprises in quantum physics, information science, and the evolution of complexity and to the cosmologies of the Tewa Indians and the Catholic Penitentes. As it draws the reader into this landscape, juxtaposing the systems of belief that have taken root there, Fire in the Mind into a gripping intellectual adventure story that compels us to ask where science ends and religion begins. "A must for all those seriously interested in the key ideas at the frontier of scientific discourse."--Paul Davies
Book Synopsis Joseph Campbell: A Fire in the Mind by : Stephen Larsen
Download or read book Joseph Campbell: A Fire in the Mind written by Stephen Larsen and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2002-04-01 with total page 899 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fascinating biography that illuminates the man whose work changed modern culture • Gives a complete biographical view of Campbell's life and a personal perspective of who he was through the voices of his friends and colleagues • Written by two of Campbell's preeminent students with exclusive access to his notes and journals Joseph Campbell forged an approach to the study of myth and legend that made ancient traditions and beliefs immediate, relevant, and universal. His teachings and literary works, including The Masks of God, have shown that beneath the apparent themes of world mythology lie patterns that reveal the ways in which we all may encounter the great mysteries of existence: birth, growth, soul development, and death. Biographers Stephen and Robin Larsen, students and friends of Campbell for more than 20 years, weave a rich tapestry of stories and insights that catalogue both his personal and public triumphs.
Book Synopsis Fire in the Minds of Men by : James H. Billington
Download or read book Fire in the Minds of Men written by James H. Billington and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 1999 with total page 694 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the origins of a faith--perhaps the faith of the century. Modern revolutionaries are believers, no less committed and intense than were Christians or Muslims of an earlier era. What is new is the belief that a perfect secular order will emerge from forcible overthrow of traditional authority. This inherently implausible idea energized Europe in the nineteenth century, and became the most pronounced ideological export of the West to the rest of the world in the twentieth century. Billington is interested in revolutionaries--the innovative creators of a new tradition. His historical frame extends from the waning of the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century to the beginnings of the Russian Revolution in the early twentieth century. The theater was Europe of the industrial era; the main stage was the journalistic offices within great cities such as Paris, Berlin, London, and St. Petersburg. Billington claims with considerable evidence that revolutionary ideologies were shaped as much by the occultism and proto-romanticism of Germany as the critical rationalism of the French Enlightenment. The conversion of social theory to political practice was essentially the work of three Russian revolutions: in 1905, March 1917, and November 1917. Events in the outer rim of the European world brought discussions about revolution out of the school rooms and press rooms of Paris and Berlin into the halls of power. Despite his hard realism about the adverse practical consequences of revolutionary dogma, Billington appreciates the identity of its best sponsors, people who preached social justice transcending traditional national, ethnic, and gender boundaries. When this book originally appeared The New Republic hailed it as "remarkable, learned and lively," while The New Yorker noted that Billington "pays great attention to the lives and emotions of individuals and this makes his book absorbing." It is an invaluable work of history and contribution to our understanding of political life.
Book Synopsis Emerson by : Robert D. Richardson Jr.
Download or read book Emerson written by Robert D. Richardson Jr. and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2015-04-22 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recipient of the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most important figures in the history of American thought, religion, and literature. The vitality of his writings and the unsettling power of his example continue to influence us more than a hundred years after his death. Now Robert D. Richardson Jr. brings to life an Emerson very different from the old stereotype of the passionless Sage of Concord. Drawing on a vast amount of new material, including correspondence among the Emerson brothers, Richardson gives us a rewarding intellectual biography that is also a portrait of the whole man. These pages present a young suitor, a grief-stricken widower, an affectionate father, and a man with an abiding genius for friendship. The great spokesman for individualism and self-reliance turns out to have been a good neighbor, an activist citizen, a loyal brother. Here is an Emerson who knew how to laugh, who was self-doubting as well as self-reliant, and who became the greatest intellectual adventurer of his age. Richardson has, as much as possible, let Emerson speak for himself through his published works, his many journals and notebooks, his letters, his reported conversations. This is not merely a study of Emerson's writing and his influence on others; it is Emerson's life as he experienced it. We see the failed minister, the struggling writer, the political reformer, the poetic liberator. The Emerson of this book not only influenced Thoreau, Fuller, Whitman, Dickinson, and Frost, he also inspired Nietzsche, William James, Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Jorge Luis Borges. Emerson's timeliness is persistent and striking: his insistence that literature and science are not separate cultures, his emphasis on the worth of every individual, his respect for nature. Richardson gives careful attention to the enormous range of Emerson's readings—from Persian poets to George Sand—and to his many friendships and personal encounters—from Mary Moody Emerson to the Cherokee chiefs in Boston—evoking both the man and the times in which he lived. Throughout this book, Emerson's unquenchable vitality reaches across the decades, and his hold on us endures.
Book Synopsis Fire Monks by : Colleen Morton Busch
Download or read book Fire Monks written by Colleen Morton Busch and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-07-07 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "vivid" and "electrifying" true story of how five monks saved the oldest Zen Buddhist monastery in the United States from wildfire (San Francisco Chronicle). When a massive wildfire surrounded Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, five monks risked their lives to save it. A gripping narrative as well as a portrait of the Zen path and the ways of wildfire, Fire Monks reveals what it means to meet a crisis with full presence of mind. Zen master and author of the classic Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi established a monastery at Tassajara Hot Springs in 1967, drawn to the location's beauty, peace, and seclusion. Deep in the wilderness east of Big Sur, the center is connected to the outside world by a single unpaved road. The remoteness that makes it an oasis also makes it particularly vulnerable when disaster strikes. If fire entered the canyon, there would be no escape. More than two thousand wildfires, all started by a single lightning storm, blazed across the state of California in June 2008. With resources stretched thin, firefighters advised residents at Tassajara to evacuate early. Most did. A small crew stayed behind, preparing to protect the monastery when the fire arrived. But nothing could have prepared them for what came next. A treacherous shift in weather conditions prompted a final order to evacuate everyone, including all firefighters. As they caravanned up the road, five senior monks made the risky decision to turn back. Relying on their Zen training, they were able to remain in the moment and do the seemingly impossible-to greet the fire not as an enemy to defeat, but as a friend to guide. Fire Monks pivots on the kind of moment some seek and some run from, when life and death hang in simultaneous view. Novices in fire but experts in readiness, the Tassajara monks summoned both intuition and wisdom to face crisis with startling clarity. The result is a profound lesson in the art of living.
Book Synopsis Promethean Fire by : Charles J. Lumsden
Download or read book Promethean Fire written by Charles J. Lumsden and published by . This book was released on 1984-09-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that a mutual change in genetics and culture brought about the development of human mental capacity
Book Synopsis Brain On Fire: My Month of Madness by : Susannah Cahalan
Download or read book Brain On Fire: My Month of Madness written by Susannah Cahalan and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2012-11-13 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'My first serious blackout marked the line between sanity and insanity. Though I would have moments of lucidity over the coming days and weeks, I would never again be the same person ...' Susannah Cahalan was a happy, clever, healthy twenty-four-year old. Then one day she woke up in hospital, with no memory of what had happened or how she had got there. Within weeks, she would be transformed into someone unrecognizable, descending into a state of acute psychosis, undergoing rages and convulsions, hallucinating that her father had murdered his wife; that she could control time with her mind. Everything she had taken for granted about her life, and who she was, was wiped out. Brain on Fire is Susannah's story of her terrifying descent into madness and the desperate hunt for a diagnosis, as, after dozens of tests and scans, baffled doctors concluded she should be confined in a psychiatric ward. It is also the story of how one brilliant man, Syria-born Dr Najar, finally proved - using a simple pen and paper - that Susannah's psychotic behaviour was caused by a rare autoimmune disease attacking her brain. His diagnosis of this little-known condition, thought to have been the real cause of devil-possessions through history, saved her life, and possibly the lives of many others. Cahalan takes readers inside this newly-discovered disease through the progress of her own harrowing journey, piecing it together using memories, journals, hospital videos and records. Written with passionate honesty and intelligence, Brain on Fire is a searingly personal yet universal book, which asks what happens when your identity is suddenly destroyed, and how you get it back. 'With eagle-eye precision and brutal honesty, Susannah Cahalan turns her journalistic gaze on herself as she bravely looks back on one of the most harrowing and unimaginable experiences one could ever face: the loss of mind, body and self. Brain on Fire is a mesmerizing story' -Mira Bartók, New York Times bestselling author of The Memory Palace Susannah Cahalan is a reporter on the New York Post, and the recipient of the 2010 Silurian Award of Excellence in Journalism for Feature Writing. Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times, and is frequently picked up by the Daily Mail, Gawker, Gothamist, AOL and Yahoo among other news aggregrator sites.
Book Synopsis A World Lit Only by Fire by : William Manchester
Download or read book A World Lit Only by Fire written by William Manchester and published by Back Bay Books. This book was released on 2009-09-26 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A "lively and engaging" history of the Middle Ages (Dallas Morning News) from the acclaimed historian William Manchester, author of The Last Lion. From tales of chivalrous knights to the barbarity of trial by ordeal, no era has been a greater source of awe, horror, and wonder than the Middle Ages. In handsomely crafted prose, and with the grace and authority of his extraordinary gift for narrative history, William Manchester leads us from a civilization tottering on the brink of collapse to the grandeur of its rebirth: the dense explosion of energy that spawned some of history's greatest poets, philosophers, painters, adventurers, and reformers, as well as some of its most spectacular villains. "Manchester provides easy access to a fascinating age when our modern mentality was just being born." --Chicago Tribune
Book Synopsis Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by : George Lakoff
Download or read book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things written by George Lakoff and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-08-08 with total page 633 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Its publication should be a major event for cognitive linguistics and should pose a major challenge for cognitive science. In addition, it should have repercussions in a variety of disciplines, ranging from anthropology and psychology to epistemology and the philosophy of science. . . . Lakoff asks: What do categories of language and thought reveal about the human mind? Offering both general theory and minute details, Lakoff shows that categories reveal a great deal."—David E. Leary, American Scientist
Book Synopsis Falling Into the Fire by : Christine Montross
Download or read book Falling Into the Fire written by Christine Montross and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-07-29 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Falling Into the Fire is psychiatrist Christine Montross’s thoughtful investigation of the gripping patient encounters that have challenged and deepened her practice. The majority of the patients Montross treats in Falling Into the Fire are seen in the locked inpatient wards of a psychiatric hospital; all are in moments of profound crisis. We meet a young woman who habitually commits self-injury, having ingested light bulbs, a box of nails, and a steak knife, among other objects. Her repeated visits to the hospital incite the frustration of the staff, leading Montross to examine how emotion can interfere with proper care. A recent college graduate, dressed in a tunic and declaring that love emanates from everything around him, is brought to the ER by his concerned girlfriend. Is it ecstasy or psychosis? What legal ability do doctors have to hospitalize—and sometimes medicate—a patient against his will? A new mother is admitted with incessant visions of harming her child. Is she psychotic and a danger or does she suffer from obsessive thoughts? Her course of treatment—and her child’s future—depends upon whether she receives the correct diagnosis. Each case study presents its own line of inquiry, leading Montross to seek relevant psychiatric knowledge from diverse sources. A doctor of uncommon curiosity and compassion, Montross discovers lessons in medieval dancing plagues, in leading forensic and neurological research, and in moments from her own life. Beautifully written, deeply felt, Falling Into the Fire brings us inside the doctor’s mind, illuminating the grave human costs of mental illness as well as the challenges of diagnosis and treatment. Throughout, Montross confronts the larger question of psychiatry: What is to be done when a patient’s experiences cannot be accounted for, or helped, by what contemporary medicine knows about the brain? When all else fails, Montross finds, what remains is the capacity to abide, to sit with the desperate in their darkest moments. At once rigorous and meditative, Falling Into the Fire is an intimate portrait of psychiatry, allowing the reader to witness the humanity of the practice and the enduring mysteries of the mind
Book Synopsis Mind on Fire by : Arnold Thomas Fanning
Download or read book Mind on Fire written by Arnold Thomas Fanning and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize 2019 '[A] painfully intense, courageous and gripping account of [Fanning's] journey to the underworld of madness and back. This is a brave and instructive book.' Irish Times 'Extraordinary. An account of mental illness, grief, delusions, homelessness, a fractured family relationship ... and all while trying to recover and create. Superb writing on a frequently difficult subject.' Sinéad Gleeson Arnold Thomas Fanning had his first experience of depression during adolescence, following the death of his mother. Some ten years later, an up-and-coming playwright, he was overcome by mania and delusions. Thus began a terrible period in which he was often suicidal, increasingly disconnected from family and friends, sometimes in trouble with the law, and homeless in London. Drawing on his own memories, the recollections of people who knew him when he was at his worst, and medical and police records, Arnold Thomas Fanning has produced a beautifully written, devastatingly intense account of madness - and recovery, to the point where he has not had any serious illness for over a decade and has become an acclaimed playwright. Fanning conveys the consciousness of a person living with mania, psychosis and severe depression with a startling precision and intimacy. Mind on Fire is the gripping, sometimes harrowing, and ultimately uplifting testament of a person who has visited hellish regions of the mind. 'Arnold Thomas Fanning offers the most vivid and unflinching window into the mind of someone who is in the throes of madness ... It was like nothing I'd read before' Rick Edwards 'Mind on Fire is a truly powerful, arresting, haunting account. Arnold Thomas Fanning has reckoned with the darkest matter of his heart and mind, and I challenge anyone not to be moved by that.' Sara Baume, author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither and A Line Made by Walking 'In this strange and singular book, Arnold Thomas Fanning mercilessly excavates the infernal underworld of his own years of madness. As reminiscent as it occasionally is of John Healy's The Grass Arena, and even of Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, the book is ultimately not quite like anything else I've read, and brought me as close to the lived reality of mental illness as I have ever been. It's a significant achievement: a painful, inexorable work of autobiography, whose existence is its own form of redemption.' Mark O'Connell, Baillie Gifford Prize-shortlisted author of To Be a Machine 'This is an extraordinary memoir about how it feels to be depressed, delusional, desperate' The Observer 'Incredibly important' Emilie Pine, author of Notes to Self 'A ratcheting pace, a tight first-person immediacy, and utterly staggering to be a passenger over its entire warped course ... An indelible, ground-shaking account' Hilary A White, Irish Independent, Memoir of the Year, Best Reads of 2018 'A spellbinding memoir that should prove both moving and hopefully cathartic for the reader.' RTE Culture 'Told in tight and immediate first-person, and imbued with a startling momentum that ratchets unnervingly, Fanning's publishing debut ... is a significant achievement and should be a talking point in publishing this year.' Irish Independent 'Fanning's debut book lays it on the line in a deeply personal and compelling chronicle of his descent into depression and his way back out.' RTE Guide 'Wonderful' Joseph O'Connor, Irish Times Books of the Year 'Unsparingly direct, searing and honest ... It is gripping to read and must have been exhausting to live' Medical Independent 'One of the most gripping and revealing memoirs I've read in a long time. A controlled and artful exploration of absolute loss of control, an unsettling and at times very moving reconstruction of a period of serious mental illness, Mind on Fire is a beautiful book about a terrifying thing.' Mark O'Connell, Irish Times Books of the Year 'Gripping' Sinéad Gleeson, Irish Times Books of the Year 'Shocking' Liz Nugent, Irish Times Books of the Year 'Poignant, beautifully detailed memoir' Sarah Gilmartin, Irish Times, Best debuts of 2018 'Brave and illuminating' Sunday Business Post 'This is the type of account that not only grips you wholesale as the pages flitter past, it also changes your very perception of psychology' Hilary A White, Sunday Independent Memoir of the Year
Download or read book The Arsonist written by Chloe Hooper and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story of one of the most devastating wildfires in Australian history and the search for the man who started it. On the scorching February day in 2009, a man lit two fires in the Australian state of Victoria, then sat on the roof of his house to watch the inferno. What came to be known as the Black Saturday bushfires killed 173 people and injured hundreds more, making them among the deadliest and most destructive wildfires in Australian history. As communities reeling from unspeakable loss demanded answers, detectives scrambled to piece together what really happened. They soon began to suspect the fires had been deliverately set by an arsonist. The Arsonist takes readers on the hunt for this man, and inside the puzzle of his mind. But this book is also the story of fire in the Anthropocene. The command of fire has defined and sustained us as a species, and now, as climate change normalizes devastating wildfires worldwide, we must contend with the forces of inequality, and desperate yearning for power, that can lead to such destruction. Written with Chloe Hooper’s trademark lyric detail and nuance, The Arsonist is a reminder that in the age of fire, all of us are gatekeepers.
Book Synopsis A Fire Upon The Deep by : Vernor Vinge
Download or read book A Fire Upon The Deep written by Vernor Vinge and published by Tor Science Fiction. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now with a new introduction for the Tor Essentials line, A Fire Upon the Deep is sure to bring a new generation of SF fans to Vinge's award-winning works. A Hugo Award-winning Novel! “Vinge is one of the best visionary writers of SF today.”-David Brin Thousands of years in the future, humanity is no longer alone in a universe where a mind's potential is determined by its location in space, from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures, and technology, can function. Nobody knows what strange force partitioned space into these "regions of thought," but when the warring Straumli realm use an ancient Transcendent artifact as a weapon, they unwittingly unleash an awesome power that destroys thousands of worlds and enslaves all natural and artificial intelligence. Fleeing this galactic threat, Ravna crash lands on a strange world with a ship-hold full of cryogenically frozen children, the only survivors from a destroyed space-lab. They are taken captive by the Tines, an alien race with a harsh medieval culture, and used as pawns in a ruthless power struggle. Tor books by Vernor Vinge Zones of Thought Series A Fire Upon The Deep A Deepness In The Sky The Children of The Sky Realtime/Bobble Series The Peace War Marooned in Realtime Other Novels The Witling Tatja Grimm's World Rainbows End Collections Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge True Names At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book The Mind on Fire written by Blaise Pascal and published by Victor. This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) earned recognition as a renowned mathematician, physicist--and a man after God's heart. As he came to the forefront of geometry and physics, he turned his considerable analytical abilities to study religion or, as he said, to "contemplate the greatness and the misery of man." Pascal's classic defense of Christianity--Pensées--persuaded many a skeptic in his time. Today, editor James Houston has organized Pascal's meditations into a logical progression of thought that contemporary readers can enjoy in Mind on Fire. Described as a "Masterpiece of theological scholarship," Mind on Fire also includes selections from Pascal's Letters to a Provincial, a description of his conversion in his own words.
Book Synopsis Unnecessarily Beautiful Spaces for Young Minds on Fire by : Kitania Folk
Download or read book Unnecessarily Beautiful Spaces for Young Minds on Fire written by Kitania Folk and published by . This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Every kid in the world needs a safe, welcoming, and even weird place to write. That's the theory behind 826 Valencia, a writing and tutoring center started in 2002. That center, with a pirate-themed storefront, inspired similar centers around the world, from New York to Melbourne. Across 280 pages and hundreds of beautiful full-color photos, this lavish, oversized book takes you behind the scenes of how these centers started, in the hopes of inspiring more communities, schools, and libraries around the world to build their own centers for young writers. Unnecessarily Beautiful Spaces for Young Minds on Fire is a joyous and wildly creative book, filled with stunning photos of the world's most welcoming and wild spaces for young minds."--Publisher's website.
Book Synopsis Bright Air, Brilliant Fire by : Gerald M. Edelman
Download or read book Bright Air, Brilliant Fire written by Gerald M. Edelman and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author takes the reader on a tour that covers such topics as computers, evolution, Descartes, Schrodinger, and the nature of perception, language, and invididuality. He argues that biology provides the key to understanding the brain. Underlying his argument is the evolutionary view that the mind arose at a definite time in history. This book ponders connections between psychology and physics, medicine, philosophy, and more. Frequently contentious, Edelman attacks cognitive and behavioral approaches, which leave biology out of the picture, as well as the currently fashionable view of the brain as a computer.
Download or read book Stealing Fire written by Steven Kotler and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-02-21 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Bestseller CNBC and Strategy + Business Best Business Book of the Year It’s the biggest revolution you’ve never heard of, and it’s hiding in plain sight. Over the past decade, Silicon Valley executives like Eric Schmidt and Elon Musk, Special Operators like the Navy SEALs and the Green Berets, and maverick scientists like Sasha Shulgin and Amy Cuddy have turned everything we thought we knew about high performance upside down. Instead of grit, better habits, or 10,000 hours, these trailblazers have found a surprising short cut. They're harnessing rare and controversial states of consciousness to solve critical challenges and outperform the competition. New York Times bestselling author Steven Kotler and high performance expert Jamie Wheal spent four years investigating the leading edges of this revolution—from the home of SEAL Team Six to the Googleplex, the Burning Man festival, Richard Branson’s Necker Island, Red Bull’s training center, Nike’s innovation team, and the United Nations’ Headquarters. And what they learned was stunning: In their own ways, with differing languages, techniques, and applications, every one of these groups has been quietly seeking the same thing: the boost in information and inspiration that altered states provide. Today, this revolution is spreading to the mainstream, fueling a trillion dollar underground economy and forcing us to rethink how we can all lead richer, more productive, more satisfying lives. Driven by four accelerating forces—psychology, neurobiology, technology and pharmacology—we are gaining access to and insights about some of the most contested and misunderstood terrain in history. Stealing Fire is a provocative examination of what’s actually possible; a guidebook for anyone who wants to radically upgrade their life.