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Author: Christopher Anvil
Publisher: Baen Publishing Enterprises
ISBN: 1618247832
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 615
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Book Description
A new collection of stories by the master of humorous science fiction adventure, including: The full-length novel, The Day the Machines Stopped¾and what happens, not just to civilization, but to humanity and its chances of survival when all the machines stop working at once? A man is captured by aliens who are investigating the Earth as a possible target for colonization. The aliens have science and technology far in advance of humans¾but, unfortunately for them, they have never developed the human art of bluffing. For the first time in book form, Anvil's stories of Richard Verner, who is called in to solve apparently insoluble problems, such as explaining why experimental missiles keep failing for no apparent reason, or locating a kidnapped judge, or even solving an inexplicable murder that's interrupting his vacation. And much more, in a generous volume of sardonically humorous science fiction. At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).
Author: Christopher Anvil
Publisher: Baen Publishing Enterprises
ISBN: 1618247832
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 615
Get Book Here
Book Description
A new collection of stories by the master of humorous science fiction adventure, including: The full-length novel, The Day the Machines Stopped¾and what happens, not just to civilization, but to humanity and its chances of survival when all the machines stop working at once? A man is captured by aliens who are investigating the Earth as a possible target for colonization. The aliens have science and technology far in advance of humans¾but, unfortunately for them, they have never developed the human art of bluffing. For the first time in book form, Anvil's stories of Richard Verner, who is called in to solve apparently insoluble problems, such as explaining why experimental missiles keep failing for no apparent reason, or locating a kidnapped judge, or even solving an inexplicable murder that's interrupting his vacation. And much more, in a generous volume of sardonically humorous science fiction. At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).
Author: Astrid Franke
Publisher: Universitatsverlag Winter
ISBN: 9783825357511
Category : American poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Based on the assumption that the concept of the 'public' as understood in American Pragmatism is better suited to literary and historical studies than is Habermas's "public sphere", this study investigates how public poetry pursues a public role not as a given but as a challenge and often an illusion. It traces a tradition of public poetry in the U.S. arising from the (neo-)classical tradition at the time of the American Revolution and its idea of poetry's public function in a republic to poetry as non-individualistic expression in the 19th century, to political poetry in the 1930s and '60s all the way to contemporary poets responding to September 11 and the war in Iraq. Offering nuanced readings of poems that reveal their public commitment and its problems at specific historical moments, the study bridges the gap between literary analysis and cultural studies and establishes a place for poetry in American Studies.
Author: Alan Watts
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 72
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Book Description
Author: Chris Hedges
Publisher: Knopf Canada
ISBN: 0307398587
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Book Description
Pulitzer prize–winner Chris Hedges charts the dramatic and disturbing rise of a post-literate society that craves fantasy, ecstasy and illusion. Chris Hedges argues that we now live in two societies: One, the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world, that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other, a growing majority, is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. In this “other society,” serious film and theatre, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins. In the tradition of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Hedges navigates this culture — attending WWF contests as well as Ivy League graduation ceremonies — exposing an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion.
Author: Jim Thompson
Publisher: Hachette+ORM
ISBN: 031619588X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 160
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Book Description
Dr. Peter S. Murphy needs fifteen thousand dollars by the end of the day, or the city of Los Angeles can say goodbye to the El Healtho clinic. A recovery center for the most severe cases of alcoholism in the state -- even if no one ever does quite seem to get dry there -- El Healtho has been the bane of Dr. Murphy's existence ever since he started running it. But now that its doors are about to close forever, Dr. Murphy finds he'll do anything to keep it open. Up to and including admitting Humphrey Van Twyne III, a patient with an extremely violent past whose wealthy family has the means to keep El Healtho open for business. Sure, the man isn't exactly an alcoholic. And yes, what he really needs is to be under the care of the surgeons who performed the lobotomy that's rendered Van Twyne all but a vegetable. But the money's good -- until the rag-tag group of ne'er-do-wells at El Healtho begin to wreak havoc with Dr. Murphy's plans, and suddenly no one day has ever seemed so long. A literary precursor to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Alcoholics is Thompson like you've never read him before, a pitch-black, mad-cap portrait of deviant behavior that is at once darkly comic, humane and harrowing.
Author: Linda Bierds
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101624035
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 112
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Book Description
“Her poems, with their constantly surprising delicacy and their language rich with insight and a sensuous music, radiate real power and authority and animal presence.” —W. S. Merwin (U.S. Poet Laureate, 2010–2011) He is best known for his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, but among filmmakers Roget is better known for his explanation of the optical illusion that still bedevils them: Why does a wheel moving forward always seem on film to be running backward? For Linda Bierds, the illusion also refers to our relationship to language, to our belief that words hold something more than their definitions. Why do we strive to articulate the world even as we know this is a shifting and illusory pursuit? Why do we continue to seek perfection, pursue beauty, yearn for immortality? Roget’s Illusion offers no answer. It simply shows the striving.
Author: Karen Fiss
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226252019
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
Franco-German cultural exchange reached its height at the 1937 Paris World’s Fair, where the Third Reich worked to promote an illusion of friendship between the two countries. Through the prism of this decisive event, Grand Illusion examines the overlooked relationships among Nazi elites and French intellectuals. Their interaction, Karen Fiss argues, profoundly influenced cultural production and normalized aspects of fascist ideology in 1930s France, laying the groundwork for the country’s eventual collaboration with its German occupiers. Tracing related developments across fine arts, film, architecture, and mass pageantry, Fiss illuminates the role of National Socialist propaganda in the French decision to ignore Hitler’s war preparations and pursue an untenable policy of appeasement. France’s receptiveness toward Nazi culture, Fiss contends, was rooted in its troubled identity and deep-seated insecurities. With their government in crisis, French intellectuals from both the left and the right demanded a new national culture that could rival those of the totalitarian states. By examining how this cultural exchange shifted toward political collaboration, Grand Illusion casts new light on the power of art to influence history.
Author: Steven Sloman
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0399184341
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
“The Knowledge Illusion is filled with insights on how we should deal with our individual ignorance and collective wisdom.” —Steven Pinker We all think we know more than we actually do. Humans have built hugely complex societies and technologies, but most of us don’t even know how a pen or a toilet works. How have we achieved so much despite understanding so little? Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue that we survive and thrive despite our mental shortcomings because we live in a rich community of knowledge. The key to our intelligence lies in the people and things around us. We’re constantly drawing on information and expertise stored outside our heads: in our bodies, our environment, our possessions, and the community with which we interact—and usually we don’t even realize we’re doing it. The human mind is both brilliant and pathetic. We have mastered fire, created democratic institutions, stood on the moon, and sequenced our genome. And yet each of us is error prone, sometimes irrational, and often ignorant. The fundamentally communal nature of intelligence and knowledge explains why we often assume we know more than we really do, why political opinions and false beliefs are so hard to change, and why individual-oriented approaches to education and management frequently fail. But our collaborative minds also enable us to do amazing things. The Knowledge Illusion contends that true genius can be found in the ways we create intelligence using the community around us.
Author: Rudiger Dornbusch
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226158489
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 416
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Book Description
Again and again, Latin America has seen the populist scenario played to an unfortunate end. Upon gaining power, populist governments attempt to revive the economy through massive spending. After an initial recovery, inflation reemerges and the government responds with wage an price controls. Shortages, overvaluation, burgeoning deficits, and capital flight soon precipitate economic crisis, with a subsequent collapse of the populist regime. The lessons of this experience are especially valuable for countries in Eastern Europe, as they face major political and economic decisions. Economists and political scientists from the United States and Latin America detail in this volume how and why such programs go wrong and what leads policymakers to repeatedly adopt these policies despite a history of failure. Authors examine this pattern in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Peru—and show how Colombia managed to avoid it. Despite differences in how each country implemented its policies, the macroeconomic consequences were remarkably similar. Scholars of Latin America will find this work a valuable resource, offering a distinctive macroeconomic perspective on the continuing controversy over the dynamics of populism.
Author: William Fish
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199888736
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
The idea of a disjunctive theory of visual experiences first found expression in J.M. Hinton's pioneering 1973 book Experiences. In the first monograph in this exciting area since then, William Fish develops a comprehensive disjunctive theory, incorporating detailed accounts of the three core kinds of visual experience--perception, hallucination, and illusion--and an explanation of how perception and hallucination could be indiscriminable from one another without having anything in common. In the veridical case, Fish contends that the perception of a particular state of affairs involves the subject's being acquainted with that state of affairs, and that it is the subject's standing in this acquaintance relation that makes the experience possess a phenomenal character. Fish argues that when we hallucinate, we are having an experience that, while lacking phenomenal character, is mistakenly supposed by the subject to possess it. Fish then shows how this approach to visual experience is compatible with empirical research into the workings of the brain and concludes by extending this treatment to cover the many different types of illusion that we can be subject to.
