Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony

Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony PDF Author: Lewis Thomas
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0140243283
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
This magnificent collection of essays by scientist and National Book Award-winning writer Lewis Thomas remains startlingly relevant for today’s world. Luminous, witty, and provocative, the essays address such topics as “The Attic of the Brain,” “Falsity and Failure,” “Altruism,” and the effects the federal government’s virtual abandonment of support for basic scientific research will have on medicine and science. Profoundly and powerfully, Thomas questions the folly of nuclear weaponry, showing that the brainpower and money spent on this endeavor are needed much more urgently for the basic science we have abandoned—and that even medicine’s most advanced procedures would be useless or insufficient in the face of the smallest nuclear detonation. And in the title essay, he addresses himself with terrifying poignancy to the question of what it is like to be young in the nuclear age. “If Wordsworth had gone to medical school, he might have produced something very like the essays of Lewis Thomas.”—TIME “No one better exemplifies what modern medicine can be than Lewis Thomas.”—The New York Times Book Review

Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony

Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony PDF Author: Lewis Thomas
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0140243283
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 178

Get Book

Book Description
This magnificent collection of essays by scientist and National Book Award-winning writer Lewis Thomas remains startlingly relevant for today’s world. Luminous, witty, and provocative, the essays address such topics as “The Attic of the Brain,” “Falsity and Failure,” “Altruism,” and the effects the federal government’s virtual abandonment of support for basic scientific research will have on medicine and science. Profoundly and powerfully, Thomas questions the folly of nuclear weaponry, showing that the brainpower and money spent on this endeavor are needed much more urgently for the basic science we have abandoned—and that even medicine’s most advanced procedures would be useless or insufficient in the face of the smallest nuclear detonation. And in the title essay, he addresses himself with terrifying poignancy to the question of what it is like to be young in the nuclear age. “If Wordsworth had gone to medical school, he might have produced something very like the essays of Lewis Thomas.”—TIME “No one better exemplifies what modern medicine can be than Lewis Thomas.”—The New York Times Book Review

The Lives of a Cell

The Lives of a Cell PDF Author: Lewis Thomas
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101667052
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Elegant, suggestive, and clarifying, Lewis Thomas's profoundly humane vision explores the world around us and examines the complex interdependence of all things. Extending beyond the usual limitations of biological science and into a vast and wondrous world of hidden relationships, this provocative book explores in personal, poetic essays to topics such as computers, germs, language, music, death, insects, and medicine. Lewis Thomas writes, "Once you have become permanently startled, as I am, by the realization that we are a social species, you tend to keep an eye out for the pieces of evidence that this is, by and large, good for us."

The Youngest Science

The Youngest Science PDF Author: Lewis Thomas
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101667079
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
From the 1920s when he watched his father, a general practitioner who made housecalls and wrote his prescriptions in Latin, to his days in medical school and beyond, Lewis Thomas saw medicine evolve from an art into a sophisticated science. The Youngest Science is Dr. Thomas's account of his life in the medical profession and an inquiry into what medicine is all about--the youngest science, but one rich in possibility and promise. He chronicles his training in Boston and New York, his war career in the South Pacific, his most impassioned research projects, his work as an administrator in hospitals and medical schools, and even his experiences as a patient. Along the way, Thomas explores the complex relationships between research and practice, between words and meanings, between human error and human accomplishment, More than a magnificent autobiography, The Youngest Science is also a celebration and a warning--about the nature of medicine and about the future life of our planet.

Twenty After Midnight

Twenty After Midnight PDF Author: Daniel Galera
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735224781
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
A dark and masterful portrait of a generation in crisis, from one of the most exciting young voices in international literature The world had been theirs in the late 90s: they were the young provocateurs behind a countercultural scene, digital bohemians creating a new future. But fifteen years later, Duke, the leader and undisputed genius of their group, has been murdered, and the three remaining members of their circle reunite to piece together what became of their lives and how they fell so short of their expectations. Now in their thirties, Aurora, Antero, and Emiliano have succumbed to the pressures of adulthood, the exigencies of carving out a life in a country that is fraying at the seams. Reunited after years of long-held grudges and painful crushes, the three try to resurrect the spirit of the all-night parties and early morning trysts, the protests and pornography of their youths. Lurking over them, as they puzzle out their fates, is the question of whether or not there is a future for them to believe in, or if the end has already arrived. Twenty After Midnight is a portrait of the first generation of the digital age, a group that was promised everything but handed a fractured world. Daniel Galera has written a pre-apocalyptic tale of millennial longings.

Scales to Scalpels

Scales to Scalpels PDF Author: Lisa Wong
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1639360727
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
A Simon & Schuster eBook. Simon & Schuster has a great book for every reader.

The Medusa and the Snail

The Medusa and the Snail PDF Author: Lewis Thomas
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101667060
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
The medusa is a tiny jellyfish that lives on the ventral surface of a sea slug found in the Bay of Naples. Readers will find themselves caught up in the fate of the medusa and the snail as a metaphor for eternal issues of life and death as Lewis Thomas further extends the exploration of man and his world begun in The Lives of a Cell. Among the treasures in this magnificent book are essays on the human genius for making mistakes, on disease and natural death, on cloning, on warts, and on Montaigne, as well as an assessment of medical science and health care. In these essays and others, Thomas once again conveys his observations of the scientific world in prose marked by wonder and wit.

Et Cetera, Et Cetera

Et Cetera, Et Cetera PDF Author: Lewis Thomas
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781566491662
Category : English language
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
One of the best writiers of short essays in English.--Newsweek

Gustav Mahler's Symphonic Landscapes

Gustav Mahler's Symphonic Landscapes PDF Author: Thomas Peattie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316298442
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
In this study Thomas Peattie offers a new account of Mahler's symphonies by considering the composer's reinvention of the genre in light of his career as a conductor and more broadly in terms of his sustained engagement with the musical, theatrical, and aesthetic traditions of the Austrian fin de siècle. Drawing on the ideas of landscape, mobility, and theatricality, Peattie creates a richly interdisciplinary framework that reveals the uniqueness of Mahler's symphonic idiom and its radical attitude toward the presentation and ordering of musical events. The book goes on to identify a fundamental tension between the music's episodic nature and its often-noted narrative impulse and suggests that Mahler's symphonic dramaturgy can be understood as a form of abstract theatre.

Mahler in Context

Mahler in Context PDF Author: Charles Youmans
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108540147
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 561

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Book Description
Mahler in Context explores the institutions, artists, thinkers, cultural movements, socio-political conditions, and personal relationships that shaped Mahler's creative output. Focusing on the contexts surrounding the artist, the collection provides a sense of the complex crosscurrents against which Mahler was reacting as conductor, composer, and human being. Topics explored include his youth and training, performing career, creative activity, spiritual and philosophical influences, and his reception after his death. Together, this collection of specially commissioned essays offers a wide-ranging investigation of the ecology surrounding Mahler as a composer and a fuller appreciation of the topics that occupied his mind as he conceived his works. Readers will benefit from engagement with lesser known dimensions of Mahler's life. Through this broader contextual approach, this book will serve as a valuable and unique resource for students, scholars, and a general readership.

After Mahler

After Mahler PDF Author: Stephen Downes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107469937
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
The music of Gustav Mahler repeatedly engages with Romantic notions of redemption. This is expressed in a range of gestures and procedures, shifting between affirmative fulfilment and pessimistic negation. In this groundbreaking study, Stephen Downes explores the relationship of this aspect of Mahler's music to the output of Benjamin Britten, Kurt Weill and Hans Werner Henze. Their initial admiration was notably dissonant with the prevailing Zeitgeist – Britten in 1930s England, Weill in 1920s Germany and Henze in 1950s Germany and Italy. Downes argues that Mahler's music struck a profound chord with them because of the powerful manner in which it raises and intensifies dystopian and utopian complexes and probes the question of fulfilment or redemption, an ambition manifest in ambiguous tonal, temporal and formal processes. Comparisons of the ways in which this topic is evoked facilitate new interpretative insights into the music of these four major composers.