The Trouble with Being Born

The Trouble with Being Born PDF Author: E. M. Cioran
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 162872496X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
In this volume, which reaffirms the uncompromising brilliance of his mind, Cioran strips the human condition down to its most basic components, birth and death, suggesting that disaster lies not in the prospect of death but in the fact of birth, "that laughable accident." In the lucid, aphoristic style that characterizes his work, Cioran writes of time and death, God and religion, suicide and suffering, and the temptation to silence. Through sharp observation and patient contemplation, Cioran cuts to the heart of the human experience. “A love of Cioran creates an urge to press his writing into someone’s hand, and is followed by an equal urge to pull it away as poison.”—The New Yorker “In the company of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard."—Publishers Weekly "No modern writer twists the knife with Cioran's dexterity. . . . His writing . . . is informed with the bitterness of genuine compassion."—Boston Phoenix

The Trouble with Being Born

The Trouble with Being Born PDF Author: E. M. Cioran
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 162872496X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 188

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this volume, which reaffirms the uncompromising brilliance of his mind, Cioran strips the human condition down to its most basic components, birth and death, suggesting that disaster lies not in the prospect of death but in the fact of birth, "that laughable accident." In the lucid, aphoristic style that characterizes his work, Cioran writes of time and death, God and religion, suicide and suffering, and the temptation to silence. Through sharp observation and patient contemplation, Cioran cuts to the heart of the human experience. “A love of Cioran creates an urge to press his writing into someone’s hand, and is followed by an equal urge to pull it away as poison.”—The New Yorker “In the company of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard."—Publishers Weekly "No modern writer twists the knife with Cioran's dexterity. . . . His writing . . . is informed with the bitterness of genuine compassion."—Boston Phoenix

A Guide to Being Born

A Guide to Being Born PDF Author: Ramona Ausubel
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1594632685
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Reminiscent of Aimee Bender and Karen Russell, from the author of the new collection, Awayland—an enthralling book of stories that uses the world of the imagination to explore the heart of the human condition. Major literary talent Ramona Ausubel, author of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, combines the otherworldly wisdom of her much-loved debut novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us, with the precision of the short-story form. A Guide to Being Born is organized around the stages of life—love, conception, gestation, birth—and the transformations that happen as people experience deeply altering life events, falling in love, becoming parents, looking toward the end of life. In each of these eleven stories Ausubel’s stunning imagination and humor are moving, entertaining, and provocative, leading readers to see the familiar world in a new way. In “Atria” a pregnant teenager believes she will give birth to any number of strange animals rather than a human baby; in “Catch and Release” a girl discovers the ghost of a Civil War hero living in the woods behind her house; and in “Tributaries” people grow a new arm each time they fall in love. Funny, surprising, and delightfully strange—all the stories have a strong emotional core; Ausubel’s primary concern is always love, in all its manifestations.

Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life PDF Author: Dacher Keltner
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393073351
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
“A landmark book in the science of emotions and its implications for ethics and human universals.”—Library Journal, starred review In this startling study of human emotion, Dacher Keltner investigates an unanswered question of human evolution: If humans are hardwired to lead lives that are “nasty, brutish, and short,” why have we evolved with positive emotions like gratitude, amusement, awe, and compassion that promote ethical action and cooperative societies? Illustrated with more than fifty photographs of human emotions, Born to Be Good takes us on a journey through scientific discovery, personal narrative, and Eastern philosophy. Positive emotions, Keltner finds, lie at the core of human nature and shape our everyday behavior—and they just may be the key to understanding how we can live our lives better. Some images in this ebook are not displayed owing to permissions issues.

Being Born

Being Born PDF Author: Alison Stone
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192584634
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
All human beings are born and all human beings die. In these two ways we are finite: our lives begin and our lives come to an end. Historically philosophers have concentrated attention on our mortality—and comparatively little has been said about being born and how it shapes our existence. Alison Stone sets out to overcome this oversight by providing a systematic philosophical account of how being born shapes our condition as human beings. Drawing on both feminist philosophy and existentialist concerns about the structure of meaningful human existence, Stone offers an original perspective on human existence. She explores how human existence is shaped by the way that we are born. Taking natality into account transforms our view of human existence and illuminates how many of its aspects are connected with our birth. These aspects include dependency, the relationality of the self, vulnerability, reception and inheritance of culture and history, embeddedness in social power, situatedness, and radical contingency. Considering natality also sheds new light on anxiety, mortality, and the temporality of human life. This book therefore bears on death and the meaning of life, as well as many debates in feminist and continental philosophy.

The Inconvenience of Being Born

The Inconvenience of Being Born PDF Author: Amy Arbus
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781881270355
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 72

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Book Description
Fotografisk billedværk.

The Best Medicine: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future

The Best Medicine: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future PDF Author: Perri Klass
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393610004
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description
The fight against child mortality that transformed parenting, doctoring, and the way we live. Only one hundred years ago, in even the world’s wealthiest nations, children died in great numbers—of diarrhea, diphtheria, and measles, of scarlet fever and tuberculosis. Throughout history, culture has been shaped by these deaths; diaries and letters recorded them, and writers such as Louisa May Alcott, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Eugene O’Neill wrote about and mourned them. Not even the powerful and the wealthy could escape: of Abraham and Mary Lincoln’s four children, only one survived to adulthood, and the first billionaire in history, John D. Rockefeller, lost his beloved grandson to scarlet fever. For children of the poor, immigrants, enslaved people and their descendants, the chances of dying were far worse. The steady beating back of infant and child mortality is one of our greatest human achievements. Interweaving her own experiences as a medical student and doctor, Perri Klass pays tribute to groundbreaking women doctors like Rebecca Lee Crumpler, Mary Putnam Jacobi, and Josephine Baker, and to the nurses, public health advocates, and scientists who brought new approaches and scientific ideas about sanitation and vaccination to families. These scientists, healers, reformers, and parents rewrote the human experience so that—for the first time in human memory—early death is now the exception rather than the rule, bringing about a fundamental transformation in society, culture, and family life. Previously published in hardcover as A Good Time to Be Born.

When a Monster Is Born

When a Monster Is Born PDF Author: Sean Taylor
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9781596432543
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 44

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Book Description
Explores the options available to a monster from the time it is born, such as becoming the scary monster under someone's bed or playing on the school basketball team.

Being Born

Being Born PDF Author: Sheila Kitzinger
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780863184215
Category : Childbirth
Languages : en
Pages : 64

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Book Description
Photographs and text describe the baby's nine-month journey from conception to birth. Suggested level: intermediate, secondary.

Born with Teeth

Born with Teeth PDF Author: Kate Mulgrew
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316334308
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Raised by unconventional Irish Catholics who knew "how to drink, how to dance, how to talk, and how to stir up the devil," Kate Mulgrew grew up with poetry and drama in her bones. But in her mother, a would-be artist burdened by the endless arrival of new babies, young Kate saw the consequences of a dream deferred. Determined to pursue her own no matter the cost, at 18 she left her small Midwestern town for New York, where, studying with the legendary Stella Adler, she learned the lesson that would define her as an actress: "Use it," Adler told her. Whatever disappointment, pain, or anger life throws in your path, channel it into the work. It was a lesson she would need. At twenty-two, just as her career was taking off, she became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter. Having already signed the adoption papers, she was allowed only a fleeting glimpse of her child. As her star continued to rise, her life became increasingly demanding and fulfilling, a whirlwind of passionate love affairs, life-saving friendships, and bone-crunching work. Through it all, Mulgrew remained haunted by the loss of her daughter, until, two decades later, she found the courage to face the past and step into the most challenging role of her life, both on and off screen. We know Kate Mulgrew for the strong women she's played -- Captain Janeway on Star Trek ; the tough-as-nails "Red" on Orange is the New Black. Now, we meet the most inspiring and memorable character of all: herself. By turns irreverent and soulful, laugh-out-loud funny and heart-piercingly sad, Born with Teeth is the breathtaking memoir of a woman who dares to live life to the fullest, on her own terms.

Better Never to Have Been

Better Never to Have Been PDF Author: David Benatar
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191516317
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Most people believe that they were either benefited or at least not harmed by being brought into existence. Thus, if they ever do reflect on whether they should bring others into existence—-rather than having children without even thinking about whether they should—-they presume that they do them no harm. Better Never to Have Been challenges these assumptions. David Benatar argues that coming into existence is always a serious harm. Although the good things in one's life make one's life go better than it otherwise would have gone, one could not have been deprived by their absence if one had not existed. Those who never exist cannot be deprived. However, by coming into existence one does suffer quite serious harms that could not have befallen one had one not come into existence. Drawing on the relevant psychological literature, the author shows that there are a number of well-documented features of human psychology that explain why people systematically overestimate the quality of their lives and why they are thus resistant to the suggestion that they were seriously harmed by being brought into existence. The author then argues for the 'anti-natal' view—-that it is always wrong to have children—-and he shows that combining the anti-natal view with common pro-choice views about foetal moral status yield a 'pro-death' view about abortion (at the earlier stages of gestation). Anti-natalism also implies that it would be better if humanity became extinct. Although counter-intuitive for many, that implication is defended, not least by showing that it solves many conundrums of moral theory about population.