Tragic Failures

Tragic Failures PDF Author: Carl F. Cranor
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190635754
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

Book Description
A world awash in little understood chemicals tragically harms adults and children alike. Laws keep health agencies in the dark about toxicants, slow, well motivated research hampers protections, and strenuous vested opposition exacerbates the harm. How science is used in the tort law can facilitate or frustrate redress of harm. This book recommends better approaches.

Tragic Failures

Tragic Failures PDF Author: Carl F. Cranor
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190635754
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

Book Description
A world awash in little understood chemicals tragically harms adults and children alike. Laws keep health agencies in the dark about toxicants, slow, well motivated research hampers protections, and strenuous vested opposition exacerbates the harm. How science is used in the tort law can facilitate or frustrate redress of harm. This book recommends better approaches.

Bold Ventures

Bold Ventures PDF Author: Charlotte Van den Broeck
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
ISBN: 1635423171
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Get Book Here

Book Description
A prize-winning Belgian poet explores the nature of creative endeavor—the godlike ambition, the crushing defeat of failure—through the stories of thirteen tragic architects. In thirteen fascinating chapters, Charlotte Van den Broeck goes in search of buildings that were fatal to their architects—architects who either killed themselves or are rumored to have done so. They range across time and space from a church with a twisted spire in seventeenth-century France to a theater that collapsed mid-performance in 1920s Washington, DC, and an eerily sinking swimming pool in the author’s hometown. Drawing on a vast range of material, from Hegel and Darwin to art history, stories from her own life, and popular culture, Van den Broeck brings patterns into focus as she asks, What is that strange, life-or-death connection between a creation and its creator? Threaded through each story is the author’s meditation on the question of suicide—what Albert Camus called the “one truly serious philosophical problem”—in relation to creativity and public disgrace. The result is a profoundly idiosyncratic book, breaking ground in literary nonfiction, as well as providing solace and consolation to anyone who has ever attempted a creative act.

Tragic Failure

Tragic Failure PDF Author: Tom Wicker
Publisher: Harper Perennial
ISBN: 9780688155605
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book Here

Book Description
For twenty-five years Tom Wicker wrote for The New York Times with passion and intelligence, educating a generation of readers on important social and political issues of the day. In Tragic Failure, this keen observer assesses the failure of racial integration in America. Thirty years after the landmark achievements of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, racial equality has made little progress and has, in fact, suffered setbacks as issues such as affirmative action, welfare reform, crime, and unemployment have made race the subtext for bitter political debate. Here, Mr. Wicker examines the current state of race relations and proposes some bold solutions-including major political realignment-to the disturbing and complex problems of race in America.

Forces of Fortune

Forces of Fortune PDF Author: Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416589686
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Get Book Here

Book Description
Leading authority on the Islamic world and influential advisor to the Obama administration Vali Nasr shows that the West's best hope of winning the battle against Islamic extremists is to foster the growth of a vibrant new Muslim middle class. This flourishing of Muslim bourgeoisie is reshaping the mind-set, politics, and even the religious values of Muslims in much the same way the Western bourgeoisie lead the capitalist and democratic revolution in Europe. Whereas extremism has grown out of the dismal economic failures of the authoritarian Islamic regimes, Nasr explains, the wealth and aspirations of this Islamic "critical middle" put them squarely at odds with extremism. They have ushered in remarkable transformations already in Dubai, Turkey, and Indonesia, and they are the key to tipping the balance in both Iran and Pakistan. As he writes "the great battle for the soul of the Muslim world will be fought not over religion but over market capitalism."

Failure

Failure PDF Author: Colin Feltham
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317547446
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Get Book Here

Book Description
Failure, success's ugly sister, is inevitable - cognitively, biologically and morally. We all make mistakes, we all die, and we all get it wrong. A chain of flaws can be traced through all phenomena, natural and human. We see impending and actual failures in individual lives, in marriages, careers, in religion, education, psychotherapy, business, nations, and in entire civilizations. And there are chronic and imperceptible failures in everyday domains that most of the time we barely notice, often until it is too late. Colin Feltham expores what constitutes failure across a number of domains. He takes guidance from the work of such diverse philosophers and thinkers as Diogenes, Epictetus, Augustine, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, Cioran and Ricoeur, while also drawing on the insights of artists and writers such as van Gogh, Arthur Miller, Philip Larkin, Samuel Beckett, Charles Bukowski and Philip Roth. Precursors and partial synonyms for failure can be seen in the concepts of hamartia, sin, fallenness, non-being, false consciousness and anthropathology. Philosophy can help us but is itself, in its reliance on language and logic, subject to inherent flaws and failures. It is the very pervasiveness yet common denial of failure which makes it a compelling topic that cries out for honest analysis. We live in a time when the cliche of failed Marxism may be segueing frighteningly (for some) into the failure of 'selfish capitalism', in a time of geopolitical uncertainty and failure to address the dire need for agreement and action on climate change. But many of us are also painfully aware of our own shortcomings, our own weakness of will and lack of authenticity. Trying to identify where the lines may be drawn between individual responsibility, social policy, and historical and biological dark forces is a key challenge in this fascinating book.

The Nobility of Failure

The Nobility of Failure PDF Author: Ivan Morris
Publisher:
ISBN: 9784902075502
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392

Get Book Here

Book Description
Long recognized as a core book in any study of Japanese culture and literature, The Nobility of Failure examines the lives and deaths of nine historical individuals who faced overwhelming odds, and, realizing they were doomed, accepted their fate--to be killed in battle or by execution, to wither in exile, or to escape through ritual suicide. Morris then turns his attention to the kamikaze pilots of World War II, who gave their lives in defense of their nation in the full realization that their deaths would have little effect on the course of the war. Through detail, crystal-clear prose and unmatched narrative sweep and brilliance, Professor Morris takes you into the innermost hearts of the Japanese people.

Moral Failure

Moral Failure PDF Author: Lisa Tessman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199396159
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Get Book Here

Book Description
Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality asks what happens when the sense that "I must" collides with the realization that "I can't." Bringing together philosophical and empirical work in moral psychology, Lisa Tessman here examines moral requirements that are non-negotiable and that contravene the principle that "ought implies can." In some cases, it is because two non-negotiable requirements conflict that one of them becomes impossible to satisfy, and yet remains binding. In other cases, performing a particular action may be non-negotiably required -- even if it is impossible -- because not performing the action is unthinkable. After offering both conceptual and empirical explanations of the experience of impossible moral requirements and the ensuing failures to fulfill them, Tessman considers what to make of such experience, and in particular, what role such experience has in the construction of value and of moral authority. According to the constructivist account that the book proposes, some moral requirements can be authoritative even when they are impossible to fulfill. Tessman points out a tendency to not acknowledge the difficulties that impossible moral requirements and unavoidable moral failures create in moral life, and traces this tendency through several different literatures, from scholarship on Holocaust testimony to discussions of ideal and nonideal theory, from theories of supererogation to debates about moral demandingness and to feminist care ethics.

The Aesthetics of Failure

The Aesthetics of Failure PDF Author: Zander Brietzke
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786483113
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
Critic Clive Barnes once called Eugene O’Neill the “world’s worst great playwright” and Brooks Atkinson called him “a tragic dramatist with a great knack for old-fashioned melodrama.” These descriptions of the man can also be used to describe his work. Despite the fact that O’Neill is the only American playwright to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and his last works are some of America’s finest, most of his published works are not good. This work closely examines how O’Neill’s failures as a playwright are inspiring and how his disappointments are reflections of his own theory that tragedy requires failure, a theory that is evident in his work. Conflicts in O’Neill’s plays are studied at the structural level, with attention paid to genre, language or dialogue, characters, space and time elements, and action. Included is information about O’Neill’s life and a chronological listing of all of his 50 plays with basic details such as production history, principal characters, dramatic action, and a brief commentary.

Success through Failure

Success through Failure PDF Author: Henry Petroski
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400889685
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the acclaimed author and engineer, an engaging and lively account of the surprising secret of great design Design pervades our lives. Everything from drafting a PowerPoint presentation to planning a state-of-the-art bridge embodies this universal human activity. But what makes a great design? In this compelling and wide-ranging look at the essence of invention, distinguished engineer and author Henry Petroski argues that, time and again, we have built success on the back of failure—not through easy imitation of success. Success through Failure shows us that making something better—by carefully anticipating and thus averting failure—is what invention and design are all about. Petroski explores the nature of invention and the character of the inventor through an unprecedented range of both everyday and extraordinary examples—illustrated lectures, child-resistant packaging for drugs, national constitutions, medical devices, the world's tallest skyscrapers, long-span bridges, and more. Stressing throughout that there is no surer road to eventual failure than modeling designs solely on past successes, he sheds new light on spectacular failures, from the destruction of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940 and the space shuttle disasters of recent decades, to the collapse of the World Trade Center in 2001. Petroski also looks at the prehistoric and ancient roots of many modern designs. The historical record, especially as embodied in failures, reveals patterns of human social behavior that have implications for large structures like bridges and vast organizations like NASA. Success through Failure—which will fascinate anyone intrigued by design, including engineers, architects, and designers themselves—concludes by speculating on when we can expect the next major bridge failure to occur, and the kind of bridge most likely to be involved.

Identity and the Failure of America

Identity and the Failure of America PDF Author: John Michael
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816651434
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Get Book Here

Book Description
From Thomas Jefferson to John Rawls, justice has been at the center of America’s self-image and national creed. At the same time, for many of its peoples-from African slaves and European immigrants to women and the poor-the American experience has been defined by injustice: oppression, disenfranchisement, violence, and prejudice. In Identity and the Failure of America, John Michael explores the contradictions between a mythic national identity promising justice to all and the realities of a divided, hierarchical, and frequently iniquitous history and social order. Through a series of insightful readings, Michael analyzes such cultural moments as the epic dramatization of the tension between individual ambition and communal complicity in Moby-Dick, attempts to effect social change through sympathy in the novels of Lydia Marie Child and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s antislavery activism and Frederick Douglass’s long fight for racial equity, and the divisive figures of John Brown and Nat Turner in American letters and memory. Focusing on exemplary instances when the nature of the United States as an essentially conflicted nation turned to force, Michael ultimately posits the development of a more cosmopolitan American identity, one that is more fully and justly imagined in response to the nation’s ethical failings at home and abroad. John Michael is professor of English and of visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester. He is the author of Anxious Intellects: Academic Professionals, Public Intellectuals, and Enlightenment Values and Emerson and Skepticism: The Cipher of the World.