Adventures with Great Ideas: The Emotions

Recommended reading:

True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us, Robert C. Solomon.

"We live our lives through our emotions," writes Robert Solomon, "and it is our emotions that give our lives meaning. What interests or fascinates us, who we love, what angers us, what moves us, what bores us--all of this defines us, gives us character, constitutes who we are." In True to Our Feelings, Solomon illuminates the rich life of the emotions--why we don't really understand them, what they really are, and how they make us human and give meaning to life. Emotions have recently become a highly fashionable area of research in the sciences, with brain imaging uncovering valuable clues as to how we experience our feelings. But while Solomon provides a guide to this cutting-edge research, as well as to what others--philosophers and psychologists--have said on the subject, he also emphasizes the personal and ethical character of our emotions.

Utilizing sources from a variety of subject areas including philosophy, psychology, and biology, editor Robert Solomon provides an illuminating look at the "affective" side of psychology and philosophy from the perspective of the world's great thinkers.

Bridge: Intermediate Play

If you want to learn to play bridge the correct way, at your own pace, and have fun while doing it, then this is the book for you.

Deadly Detectives in Literary History

This is expensive new but can be easily be bought second hand through Amazon Marketplace. Beginning with the Conan Doyle era, this collection moves chronologically past Christie and Sayers to P. D. James and the present moment. Most of the 33 stories follow the Sherlock Holmes formula: a plethora of clues and a solution by ratiocination. No hard-boiled detectives or seedy characters can be found because, as Craig (The Lady Investigates) informs us in her introduction, such types never took root in the English detective story--British readers evidently prefer the urbanity of the drawing-room settings roamed by upper-class sleuths.

This volume includes Silver Blaze, The Speckled Band, The Sign of Four, A Scandal of Bohemia, The Naval Treaty, The Blue Carbuncle, The Greek Interpreter, The Red-Headed League, The Empty House, The Missing Three-Quarter, and His Last Bow.

One of Christie's most ingenious stories. A tour de force. (Newsweek) Outrageously satisfying...in this one [Christie] has brought off the bluff to end them all.

Foul and Fair Play is an examination of classic detective fiction as a genre - an attempt to read a wide variety of texts by different authors as variations on a common and relatively tight set of conventions. Mary Roth covers the period from the "prehistory" of detective fiction in Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Robert Louis Stevenson, and H. G. Wells up to the 1960s, which marked the end of the classic period.

How Presidents are Made: The Electoral College

"What emerges from the panorama of April 1865 is that the whole of our national history could have been altered but for a few decisions, a quirk of fate, a sudden shift in luck."

Human Behavior & Neurobiology: Are We Hardwired?

Wonderfully nourishing food for thought, tackling some of the toughest ethical issues of our time with vigor, intelligence and insight.

Behind the bad moral choices that sent Martha Stewart to prison, Tancredi discerns abnormal functioning of the brain. Indeed, much of what traditional morality has condemned as greed, lust, or sin looks like impaired neurobiology to this psychiatrist-lawyer, who locates the foundations of an ethical conscience in healthy genetic coding and properly balanced mental chemistry.

A three-year-old toddler is "a grammatical genius"--master of most constructions, obeying adult rules of language. To Pinker, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology psycholinguist, the explanation for this miracle is that language is an instinct, an evolutionary adaptation that is partly "hard-wired" into the brain and partly learned. In this exciting synthesis--an entertaining, totally accessible study that will regale language lovers and challenge professionals in many disciplines--Pinker builds a bridge between "innatists" like MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, who hold that infants are biologically programmed for language, and "social interactionists" who contend that they acquire it largely from the environment.

In the words of Jonathan Weiner, "Time, love, and memory are ... three cornerstones of the pyramid of behavior." While some find it difficult to view humans as mere machines, molecular biologists maintain that most behavior is genetically based. Even skeptics and opponents agree that molecular biology may well change the way we all live in the 21st century. Little-known outside this exploding field, Seymour Benzer, his mentors, and his generations of students have studied the common fruit fly, Drosophila, and discovered genes that seem to have some influence upon our internal clock, our sexuality, and our ability to learn from our experiences.

Islam from Mohammed to Osama

"The picture of Islam as a violent, backward, and insular tradition should be laid to rest," says Karen Armstrong, bestselling author of Muhammad and A History of God. Delving deep into Islamic history, Armstrong sketches the arc of a story that begins with the stirring of revelation in an Arab businessman named Muhammad. His concern with the poor who were being left behind in the blush of his society's new prosperity sets the tone for the tale of a culture that values community as a manifestation of God.

In a meticulous quest for the historical Muhammad, Armstrong first traces the West's long history of hostility toward Islam, which it has stigmatized as a "religion of the sword." This sympathetic, engrossing biography portrays Muhammad (ca. 570-632) as a passionate, complex, fallible human being--a charismatic leader possessed of political as well as spiritual gifts, and a prophet whose monotheistic vision intuitively answered the deepest longings of his people.

Georgetown professor Esposito has written an excellent primer on all aspects of Islam. The question-and-answer format allows readers to skip ahead to areas that interest them, including hot-button issues such as "Why are Muslims so violent?" or "Why do Muslim women wear veils and long garments?" In his answers, which are anywhere from a paragraph to several pages long, Esposito elegantly educates the reader through what the Qur'an says, how Muslims are influenced by their local cultures, and how the unique politics of Islamic countries affects Muslims' views.

Jane Eyre, Victorian Rebel

An orphan girl's progress from the custody of cruel relatives to an oppressive boarding school culminates in a troubled career as a governess. Jane's first assignment at Thornfield, where the proud and cynical master harbors a scandalous secret, draws readers ever deeper into a compelling exploration of the mysteries of the human heart.

These letters give an insight into the life of a writer whose novels continue to be bestsellers. They reveal much about Charlotte Bronte's personal life, her family relationships, and the society in which she lived. Many of her early letters are written with vigour, vivacity, and an engaging aptitude for self-mockery. In contrast, her letters to her 'master', the Belgian schoolteacher Constantin Heger, reveal her intense, obsessive longing for some response from him. Other letters are deeply moving, when Charlotte endures the agony of her brother's and sisters' untimely deaths.

'It is in every way worthy of what one great woman should have written of another.' Patrick Bronte Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857) is a pioneering biography of one great Victorian woman novelist by another. Gaskell was a friend of Charlotte Bronte, and, having been invited to write the offical life, determined both to tell the truth and to honour her friend.

In this eloquent revisionist biography of English novelist Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855), Gordon (Shared Lives) argues that she hid a passionate nature beneath the facade of a dutiful Victorian woman. She and her sisters Anne (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall) and Emily (Wuthering Heights) penned fiction and poetry during Yorkshire evenings at the Haworth Parsonage where they lived with their dictatorial father.

Lincoln's Melancholy: Pain, Pen & Power

Davidson delivers a fine performance in this exploration of Abraham Lincoln's depressive nature and its influence on his political life. From boyhood through assassination to legacy, Shenk probes all chambers of the 16th president's troubled heart. Davidson's voice is perfectly complementary for such historical and intimate matter, offering up an inviting rocking-chair-by-the-fire feel.

The period of the American Civil War was not one in which belles lettres flourished but it did produce a remarkable literature which mostly consists of speeches and pamphlets, private letters and diaries, personal memoirs and journalistic reports. Has there ever been another historical crisis of the magnitude of 1861-65 in which so many people were so articulate?

It is Lincoln's very deliberate, painstaking, multidraft process that Wilson seeks to document. Readers deeply immersed in Lincoln trivia will find Wilson's intricate forensics inviting. Others, nurturing a more casual interest, will fast find themselves drowned in details of subtle variations between drafts of Lincoln's various major addresses, all so carefully dissected in order to reveal the mechanical, trial-and-error process that lay behind Lincoln's soaring eloquence.

The life and times of Abraham Lincoln have been analyzed and dissected in countless books. Do we need another Lincoln biography? In Team of Rivals, esteemed historian Doris Kearns Goodwin proves that we do. Though she can't help but cover some familiar territory, her perspective is focused enough to offer fresh insights into Lincoln's leadership style and his deep understanding of human behavior and motivation.

In Lincoln's Quest for Union, Charles Strozier gives the most probing account available of Lincoln's inner life--from the time he was a young man in Illinois, just finding himself, through his ascent to the presidency when he guided the nation and articulated for the country the meaning of the Civil War.

Masterpieces of European Art

In 1865, no painter in France was more reviled than the 33-year-old Édouard Manet. The critics compared his brushwork to the action of a floor mop and judged his infamous "Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe," which features a naked woman picnicking with two clothed dandies, "a shameful open sore." The public laughed at anything he hung on the wall.

Van Gogh's reputation in the public imagination has been made as much by his descent into madness as by his art. Detailing the final year of his life and the "Studio of the South" in which Gauguin and Van Gogh painted side by side, Gayford brings the art back into focus. Explications of the works illuminate the collaboration—similar subjects find very different treatment by two entirely different temperaments. Yet their influence on each other is everywhere—a story that Van Gogh recommends to Gauguin finds its way into a painting; Van Gogh uses the jute canvas that is Gauguin's material of choice.

Revisiting Occupied France in Fact & Fiction

Celebrated in pre-WWII France for her bestselling fiction, the Jewish Russian-born Némirovsky was shipped to Auschwitz in the summer of 1942, months after this long-lost masterwork was composed. Némirovsky, a convert to Catholicism, began a planned five-novel cycle as Nazi forces overran northern France in 1940. This gripping "suite," collecting the first two unpolished but wondrously literary sections of a work cut short, have surfaced more than six decades after her death. The first, "Storm in June," chronicles the connecting lives of a disparate clutch of Parisians. The second, "Dolce," set in 1941 in a farming village under German occupation, tells how peasant farmers, their pretty daughters and petit bourgeois collaborationists coexisted with their Nazi rulers. In a workbook entry penned just weeks before her arrest, Némirovsky noted that her goal was to describe "daily life, the emotional life and especially the comedy it provides." This heroic work does just that, by focusing—with compassion and clarity—on individual human dramas.

Henry writes clearly and forcefully in this important new book. In just about every chapter, one can sense a strong personal commitment to recognize the courageous, altruistic activity of the rescuers and to inspire others to prevent recurrence of genocidal evil in the present and future.”

Science & Religion: Enemies, Strangers or Partners?

We're closing in on the 150th anniversary of Darwin's Origin of Species, but clearly not closing in on any resolution of the debates that the book stirred up between science and religion. In this slim volume, physicist and theologian Ian Barbour summarizes his own decades-long accumulation of knowledge in these two arenas. Writing with clarity and a scientist's eye for organization, Barbour takes on the scientific and theological significance of the big questions: the big bang, quantum physics, Darwin and Genesis, human nature (the question of determinism), and the relationship between a free God and a law-bound universe. In each chapter, Barbour recognizes four possible ways of responding to the dilemmas posed by these topics: conflict, represented by Biblical literalists and atheists, both of whom agree that a person cannot believe in both God and evolution; independence, which asserts that "science and religion are strangers who can coexist as long as they keep a safe distance from each other"; dialogue, which invites a conversation between the two fields; and integration, which moves beyond dialogue to explore ways in which the two fields can inform each other. Barbour notes that his own sympathies lie with dialogue and integration.

This ambitious, interdisciplinary book seeks to explain the origins of religion using our knowledge of the evolution of cognition. A cognitive anthropologist and psychologist, Scott Atran argues that religion is a by-product of human evolution just as the cognitive intervention, cultural selection, and historical survival of religion is an accommodation of certain existential and moral elements that have evolved in the human condition.

Miller, professor of biology at Brown University, believes firmly in evolution. He also believes in God-a belief not widely shared among scientists. Here he sets out to offer thoughts on how to reconcile the conflict many people see between the two positions. Evolution, he says, is a story of origins; so too is the Judeo-Christian creation story. "The conflict between these two versions of our history is real, and I do not doubt for a second that it needs to be addressed. What I do not believe is that the conflict is unresolvable."

Readers who recognize Newton and Bohr as pathbreaking scientists may be surprised to learn what they--and other laboratory mavens--have asserted about God. In a provocative and much-needed investigation, Campbell illuminates the ways in which science has recast the meaning of religious faith. Readers see how science first emerged in the seventeenth century as a new mediator between God and his people, so testing traditional religious authorities.

Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, tells of his exasperation with colleagues who try to play both sides of the street: looking to science for justification of their religious convictions while evading the most difficult implications—the existence of a prime mover sophisticated enough to create and run the universe, "to say nothing of mind reading millions of humans simultaneously." Such an entity, he argues, would have to be extremely complex, raising the question of how it came into existence, how it communicates —through spiritons!—and where it resides.

As progress in science continues to reveal unimagined complexities, three scientists revisit the difficult and compelling question of the origin of our universe. As mathematician, biochemist, and philosopher of science, they explore the possibility of developing a reliable method for detecting an intelligent cause and evidence for design at the origin of life. In the process, they present a strong case for opening and pursuing a fruitful exchange between science and theology.

Unraveling the Causes behind the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

"Wonderful...No book published in recent years has more lasting relevance to our understanding of the Middle East."

Wagner’s Ring Cycle & the Norse Myths

In a concise, beautifully shaped style, Lee summarizes the plot and analyzes each opera musically and psychologically while also examining the mythological roots and the meaning this work can hold for today's audience. The result is a readable critical essay that celebrates its subject and makes one eager to hear the operas. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries with strong music collections.

Reading the details of the often complex backgrounds of the operas, as well as what goes on in the opera itself, should immeasurably enrich the listener's opera-going experience, even in this age of the surtitle. And an appreciation of the range and cogency of Wagner's musical and dramatic genius, which this book offers, will serve to balance the unflattering portrait of Wagner the human being that dominates today's thinking about the Master.

Yes, You Can Draw!

Simple, methodical instructions in proportion, perspective, shading, and blending, along with detailed sequential illustrations, provide a thorough grounding in the basics. You’ll master the techniques—and render drawings like a virtuoso. “Emphasizes color and the digitally driven style of most modern texts: it is heavy on...illustration....A good volume.”