Author: Carol J. Swiedler
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780963898609
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 208
Book Description
Letters from the Cosmos
Author: Carol J. Swiedler
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780963898609
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 208
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780963898609
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 208
Book Description
The Letter and the Cosmos
Author: Laurence de Looze
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442624124
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285
Book Description
From our first ABCs to the Book of Revelation’s statement that Jesus is “the Alpha and Omega,” we see the world through our letters. More than just a way of writing, the alphabet is a powerful concept that has shaped Western civilization and our daily lives. In The Letter and the Cosmos, Laurence de Looze probes that influence, showing how the alphabet has served as a lens through which we conceptualize the world and how the world, and sometimes the whole cosmos, has been perceived as a kind of alphabet itself. Beginning with the ancient Greeks, he traces the use of alphabetic letters and their significance from Plato to postmodernism, offering a fascinating tour through Western history. A sharp and entertaining examination of how languages, letterforms, orthography, and writing tools have reflected our hidden obsession with the alphabet, The Letter and the Cosmos is illustrated with copious examples of the visual and linguistic phenomena which de Looze describes. Read it, and you’ll never look at the alphabet the same way again.
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442624124
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285
Book Description
From our first ABCs to the Book of Revelation’s statement that Jesus is “the Alpha and Omega,” we see the world through our letters. More than just a way of writing, the alphabet is a powerful concept that has shaped Western civilization and our daily lives. In The Letter and the Cosmos, Laurence de Looze probes that influence, showing how the alphabet has served as a lens through which we conceptualize the world and how the world, and sometimes the whole cosmos, has been perceived as a kind of alphabet itself. Beginning with the ancient Greeks, he traces the use of alphabetic letters and their significance from Plato to postmodernism, offering a fascinating tour through Western history. A sharp and entertaining examination of how languages, letterforms, orthography, and writing tools have reflected our hidden obsession with the alphabet, The Letter and the Cosmos is illustrated with copious examples of the visual and linguistic phenomena which de Looze describes. Read it, and you’ll never look at the alphabet the same way again.
The Human Cosmos
Author: Jo Marchant
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593183045
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 401
Book Description
A Best Book of 2020 (NPR) A Best Book of 2020 (The Economist) A Top Ten Best Science Book of 2020 (Smithsonian) A Best Science and Technology Book of 2020 (Library Journal) A Must-Read Book to Escape the Chaos of 2020 (Newsweek) Starred review (Booklist) Starred review (Publishers Weekly) A historically unprecedented disconnect between humanity and the heavens has opened. Jo Marchant's book can begin to heal it. For at least 20,000 years, we have led not just an earthly existence but a cosmic one. Celestial cycles drove every aspect of our daily lives. Our innate relationship with the stars shaped who we are—our art, religious beliefs, social status, scientific advances, and even our biology. But over the last few centuries we have separated ourselves from the universe that surrounds us. It's a disconnect with a dire cost. Our relationship to the stars and planets has moved from one of awe, wonder and superstition to one where technology is king—the cosmos is now explored through data on our screens, not by the naked eye observing the natural world. Indeed, in most countries, modern light pollution obscures much of the night sky from view. Jo Marchant's spellbinding parade of the ways different cultures celebrated the majesty and mysteries of the night sky is a journey to the most awe-inspiring view you can ever see: looking up on a clear dark night. That experience and the thoughts it has engendered have radically shaped human civilization across millennia. The cosmos is the source of our greatest creativity in art, in science, in life. To show us how, Jo Marchant takes us to the Hall of the Bulls in the caves at Lascaux in France, and to the summer solstice at a 5,000-year-old tomb at Newgrange, Ireland. We discover Chumash cosmology and visit medieval monks grappling with the nature of time and Tahitian sailors navigating by the stars. We discover how light reveals the chemical composition of the sun, and we are with Einstein as he works out that space and time are one and the same. A four-billion-year-old meteor inspires a search for extraterrestrial life. The cosmically liberating, summary revelation is that star-gazing made us human.
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593183045
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 401
Book Description
A Best Book of 2020 (NPR) A Best Book of 2020 (The Economist) A Top Ten Best Science Book of 2020 (Smithsonian) A Best Science and Technology Book of 2020 (Library Journal) A Must-Read Book to Escape the Chaos of 2020 (Newsweek) Starred review (Booklist) Starred review (Publishers Weekly) A historically unprecedented disconnect between humanity and the heavens has opened. Jo Marchant's book can begin to heal it. For at least 20,000 years, we have led not just an earthly existence but a cosmic one. Celestial cycles drove every aspect of our daily lives. Our innate relationship with the stars shaped who we are—our art, religious beliefs, social status, scientific advances, and even our biology. But over the last few centuries we have separated ourselves from the universe that surrounds us. It's a disconnect with a dire cost. Our relationship to the stars and planets has moved from one of awe, wonder and superstition to one where technology is king—the cosmos is now explored through data on our screens, not by the naked eye observing the natural world. Indeed, in most countries, modern light pollution obscures much of the night sky from view. Jo Marchant's spellbinding parade of the ways different cultures celebrated the majesty and mysteries of the night sky is a journey to the most awe-inspiring view you can ever see: looking up on a clear dark night. That experience and the thoughts it has engendered have radically shaped human civilization across millennia. The cosmos is the source of our greatest creativity in art, in science, in life. To show us how, Jo Marchant takes us to the Hall of the Bulls in the caves at Lascaux in France, and to the summer solstice at a 5,000-year-old tomb at Newgrange, Ireland. We discover Chumash cosmology and visit medieval monks grappling with the nature of time and Tahitian sailors navigating by the stars. We discover how light reveals the chemical composition of the sun, and we are with Einstein as he works out that space and time are one and the same. A four-billion-year-old meteor inspires a search for extraterrestrial life. The cosmically liberating, summary revelation is that star-gazing made us human.
Lost in the Cosmos
Author: Walker Percy
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1453216340
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 201
Book Description
“A mock self-help book designed not to help but to provoke . . . to inveigle us into thinking about who we are and how we got into this mess.” (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Filled with quizzes, essays, short stories, and diagrams, Lost in the Cosmos is National Book Award–winning author Walker Percy’s humorous take on a familiar genre—as well as an invitation to serious contemplation of life’s biggest questions. One part parody and two parts philosophy, Lost in the Cosmos is an enlightening guide to the dilemmas of human existence, and an unrivaled spin on self-help manuals by one of modern America’s greatest literary masters.
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1453216340
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 201
Book Description
“A mock self-help book designed not to help but to provoke . . . to inveigle us into thinking about who we are and how we got into this mess.” (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Filled with quizzes, essays, short stories, and diagrams, Lost in the Cosmos is National Book Award–winning author Walker Percy’s humorous take on a familiar genre—as well as an invitation to serious contemplation of life’s biggest questions. One part parody and two parts philosophy, Lost in the Cosmos is an enlightening guide to the dilemmas of human existence, and an unrivaled spin on self-help manuals by one of modern America’s greatest literary masters.
Letters in a Bruised Cosmos
Author: Liz Howard
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0771037570
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
The latest from the author of the Griffin Poetry Prize Award-winning collection Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent. GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE, FINALIST TRILLIUM BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY, FINALIST I have to believe my account will outpace its ending. The danger and necessity of living with each other is at the core of Liz Howard’s daring and intimate second collection. Letters in a Bruised Cosmos asks who do we become after the worst has happened? Invoking the knowledge histories of Western and Indigenous astrophysical science, Howard takes us on a breakneck river course of radiant and perilous survival in which we are invited to “reforge [ourselves] inside tomorrow’s humidex”. Everyday observation, family history, and personal tragedy are sublimated here in a propulsive verse that is relentlessly its own. Part autobiography, part philosophical puzzlement, part love song, Letters in a Bruised Cosmos is a book that once read will not soon be forgotten.
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0771037570
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
The latest from the author of the Griffin Poetry Prize Award-winning collection Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent. GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE, FINALIST TRILLIUM BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY, FINALIST I have to believe my account will outpace its ending. The danger and necessity of living with each other is at the core of Liz Howard’s daring and intimate second collection. Letters in a Bruised Cosmos asks who do we become after the worst has happened? Invoking the knowledge histories of Western and Indigenous astrophysical science, Howard takes us on a breakneck river course of radiant and perilous survival in which we are invited to “reforge [ourselves] inside tomorrow’s humidex”. Everyday observation, family history, and personal tragedy are sublimated here in a propulsive verse that is relentlessly its own. Part autobiography, part philosophical puzzlement, part love song, Letters in a Bruised Cosmos is a book that once read will not soon be forgotten.
The Household and the War for the Cosmos
Author: C.R. Wiley
Publisher: Canon Press & Book Service
ISBN: 1947644912
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 144
Book Description
Your household is not just a shelter from a war zone; it is the command center from where you launch your attacks. It's this vision of the world, with the Christian family at the heart, that modern parents desperately need to recover.
Publisher: Canon Press & Book Service
ISBN: 1947644912
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 144
Book Description
Your household is not just a shelter from a war zone; it is the command center from where you launch your attacks. It's this vision of the world, with the Christian family at the heart, that modern parents desperately need to recover.
Cosmos
Author: Witold Gombrowicz
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802195261
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 144
Book Description
A “creatively captivating and intellectually challenging” existential mystery from the great Polish author—“sly, funny, and . . . lovingly translated” (The New York Times). Winner of the 1967 International Prize for Literature Milan Kundera called Witold Gombrowicz “one of the great novelists of our century.” Now his most famous novel, Cosmos, is available in a critically acclaimed translation by the award-winning translator Danuta Borchardt. Cosmos is a metaphysical noir thriller narrated by Witold, a seedy, pathetic, and witty student, who is charming and appalling by turns. In need of a quiet place to study, Witold and his melancholy friend Fuks head to a boarding house in the mountains. Along the way, they discover a dead bird hanging from a string. Is this a strange but meaningless occurrence or is it the first clue to a sinister mystery? As the young men become embroiled in the Chekhovian travails of the family that runs the boarding house, Grombrowicz creates a gripping narrative where the reader questions who is sane and who is safe. “Probably the most important 20th-century novelist most Western readers have never heard of.” —Benjamin Paloff, Words Without Borders
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802195261
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 144
Book Description
A “creatively captivating and intellectually challenging” existential mystery from the great Polish author—“sly, funny, and . . . lovingly translated” (The New York Times). Winner of the 1967 International Prize for Literature Milan Kundera called Witold Gombrowicz “one of the great novelists of our century.” Now his most famous novel, Cosmos, is available in a critically acclaimed translation by the award-winning translator Danuta Borchardt. Cosmos is a metaphysical noir thriller narrated by Witold, a seedy, pathetic, and witty student, who is charming and appalling by turns. In need of a quiet place to study, Witold and his melancholy friend Fuks head to a boarding house in the mountains. Along the way, they discover a dead bird hanging from a string. Is this a strange but meaningless occurrence or is it the first clue to a sinister mystery? As the young men become embroiled in the Chekhovian travails of the family that runs the boarding house, Grombrowicz creates a gripping narrative where the reader questions who is sane and who is safe. “Probably the most important 20th-century novelist most Western readers have never heard of.” —Benjamin Paloff, Words Without Borders
Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come
Author: Norman Cohn
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300090888
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298
Book Description
All over the world people look forward to a perfect future, when the forces of good will be finally victorious over the forces of evil. Once this was a radically new way of imagining the destiny of the world and of mankind. How did it originate, and what kind of world-view preceded it? In this engrossing book, the author of the classic work The Pursuit of the Millennium takes us on a journey of exploration, through the world-views of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India, through the innovations of Iranian and Jewish prophets and sages, to the earliest Christian imaginings of heaven on earth. Until around 1500 B.C., it was generally believed that once the world had been set in order by the gods, it was in essence immutable. However, it was always a troubled world. By means of flood and drought, famine and plague, defeat in war, and death itself, demonic forces threatened and impaired it. Various combat myths told how a divine warrior kept the forces of chaos at bay and enabled the world to survive. Sometime between 1500 and 1200 B.C., the Iranian prophet Zoroaster broke from that static yet anxious world-view, reinterpreting the Iranian version of the combat myth. For Zoroaster, the world was moving, through incessant conflict, toward a conflictless state--"cosmos without chaos." The time would come when, in a prodigious battle, the supreme god would utterly defeat the forces of chaos and their human allies and eliminate them forever, and so bring an absolutely good world into being. Cohn reveals how this vision of the future was taken over by certain Jewish groups, notably the Jesus sect, with incalculable consequences. Deeply informed yet highly readable, this magisterial book illumines a major turning-point in the history of human consciousness. It will be mandatory reading for all who appreciated The Pursuit of the Millennium.
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300090888
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298
Book Description
All over the world people look forward to a perfect future, when the forces of good will be finally victorious over the forces of evil. Once this was a radically new way of imagining the destiny of the world and of mankind. How did it originate, and what kind of world-view preceded it? In this engrossing book, the author of the classic work The Pursuit of the Millennium takes us on a journey of exploration, through the world-views of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India, through the innovations of Iranian and Jewish prophets and sages, to the earliest Christian imaginings of heaven on earth. Until around 1500 B.C., it was generally believed that once the world had been set in order by the gods, it was in essence immutable. However, it was always a troubled world. By means of flood and drought, famine and plague, defeat in war, and death itself, demonic forces threatened and impaired it. Various combat myths told how a divine warrior kept the forces of chaos at bay and enabled the world to survive. Sometime between 1500 and 1200 B.C., the Iranian prophet Zoroaster broke from that static yet anxious world-view, reinterpreting the Iranian version of the combat myth. For Zoroaster, the world was moving, through incessant conflict, toward a conflictless state--"cosmos without chaos." The time would come when, in a prodigious battle, the supreme god would utterly defeat the forces of chaos and their human allies and eliminate them forever, and so bring an absolutely good world into being. Cohn reveals how this vision of the future was taken over by certain Jewish groups, notably the Jesus sect, with incalculable consequences. Deeply informed yet highly readable, this magisterial book illumines a major turning-point in the history of human consciousness. It will be mandatory reading for all who appreciated The Pursuit of the Millennium.
Letters from an Astrophysicist
Author: Neil deGrasse Tyson
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324003324
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 207
Book Description
New York Times Bestseller A luminous companion to the phenomenal bestseller Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has attracted one of the world’s largest online followings with his fascinating, widely accessible insights into science and our universe. Now, Tyson invites us to go behind the scenes of his public fame by revealing his correspondence with people across the globe who have sought him out in search of answers. In this hand-picked collection of 101 letters, Tyson draws upon cosmic perspectives to address a vast array of questions about science, faith, philosophy, life, and of course, Pluto. His succinct, opinionated, passionate, and often funny responses reflect his popularity and standing as a leading educator. Tyson’s 2017 bestseller Astrophysics for People in a Hurry offered more than one million readers an insightful and accessible understanding of the universe. Tyson’s most candid and heartfelt writing yet, Letters from an Astrophysicist introduces us to a newly personal dimension of Tyson’s quest to explore our place in the cosmos.
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324003324
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 207
Book Description
New York Times Bestseller A luminous companion to the phenomenal bestseller Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has attracted one of the world’s largest online followings with his fascinating, widely accessible insights into science and our universe. Now, Tyson invites us to go behind the scenes of his public fame by revealing his correspondence with people across the globe who have sought him out in search of answers. In this hand-picked collection of 101 letters, Tyson draws upon cosmic perspectives to address a vast array of questions about science, faith, philosophy, life, and of course, Pluto. His succinct, opinionated, passionate, and often funny responses reflect his popularity and standing as a leading educator. Tyson’s 2017 bestseller Astrophysics for People in a Hurry offered more than one million readers an insightful and accessible understanding of the universe. Tyson’s most candid and heartfelt writing yet, Letters from an Astrophysicist introduces us to a newly personal dimension of Tyson’s quest to explore our place in the cosmos.
The Elements of the Cosmos
Author: Scenza
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 142
Book Description
Our spiritual ancestors encoded their understanding of the cosmos into the very numbers and letters we use to describe the world. Fields as diverse as architecture, fine art, mathematics, and music are all underpinned by a common numeric symbolism. The Elements of the Cosmos: Numbers & Letters as Archetypes pierces the veil to shed a modern light on these ancient mysteries.The text is divided into two main sections. Section I introduces the principles of Sacred Geometry through an exploration of the arithmetic, geometric, and symbolic properties of the first ten digits. Section II investigates the esoteric structure of the Ancient Hebrew Alphabet, linking the letters to the symbolism of the numbers. In addition to the traditional analytic avenues of Idea, Number, and Form, the author reveals a new mode of interpretation: that of sound symbolism.Numbers and letters are at the heart of every student's education. In The Elements of the Cosmos: Numbers & Letters as Archetypes, those numbers and letters assume the ponderous, profoundly spiritual values they were originally designed to possess.
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 142
Book Description
Our spiritual ancestors encoded their understanding of the cosmos into the very numbers and letters we use to describe the world. Fields as diverse as architecture, fine art, mathematics, and music are all underpinned by a common numeric symbolism. The Elements of the Cosmos: Numbers & Letters as Archetypes pierces the veil to shed a modern light on these ancient mysteries.The text is divided into two main sections. Section I introduces the principles of Sacred Geometry through an exploration of the arithmetic, geometric, and symbolic properties of the first ten digits. Section II investigates the esoteric structure of the Ancient Hebrew Alphabet, linking the letters to the symbolism of the numbers. In addition to the traditional analytic avenues of Idea, Number, and Form, the author reveals a new mode of interpretation: that of sound symbolism.Numbers and letters are at the heart of every student's education. In The Elements of the Cosmos: Numbers & Letters as Archetypes, those numbers and letters assume the ponderous, profoundly spiritual values they were originally designed to possess.