Ryle is assertive, stubborn, maybe even a little arrogant. As questions about her new relationship overwhelm her, so do thoughts of Atlas Corrigan—her first love and a link to the past she left behind. He was her kindred spirit, her protector. When Atlas suddenly reappears, everything Lily has built with Ryle is threatened. Details the books that have forever changed civilization, from the Bible and the Koran to Darwin's Origin of the Species and Freidan's Feminine Mystique, and includes a historical overview and fascinating facts for each author and book, and much more.
This book is an attempt to coax Roman history closer to the bone, to the breath and matter of the living being. Drawing from a remarkable array of ancient and modern sources, Carlin Barton offers the most complex understanding to date of the emotional and spiritual life of the ancient Romans. Her provocative and original inquiry focuses on the sentiments of honor that shaped the Romans' sense of themselves and their society.
Speaking directly to the concerns and curiosities of the contemporary reader, Barton brings Roman society to life, elucidating the complex relation between the inner life of its citizens and its social fabric.
Though thoroughly grounded in the ancient writings--especially the work of Seneca, Cicero, and Livy--this book also draws from contemporary theories of the self and social theory to deepen our understanding of ancient Rome.
Barton explores the relation between inner desires and social behavior through an evocative analysis of the operation, in Roman society, of contests and ordeals, acts of supplication and confession, and the sense of shame.
As she fleshes out Roman physical and psychological life, she particularly sheds new light on the consequential transition from republic to empire as a watershed of Roman social relations. Spam This list contains spam. Self-Promotional This list is self-promotional. Welcome back. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen 4. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars. Want to Read saving… Error rating book.
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky 4. Hamlet by William Shakespeare 4. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy 4. The Stranger by Albert Camus really liked it 4.
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Want in? Then get your reviewer access right away. For those of us who are busy CEOs, Must Reads Book Summaries are the perfect solution for how to get all of the value of the top business books in a condensed version. Saves time. Makes me smarter. Thank you Frumi. Now I know exactly which books to buy — the latest and greatest as well as the tried and true! Her experience and background give her unique perspective on the key issues around managing a successful business.
Also, the convenience of being able to print out the few pages of the book notes and take them with you when you are on the go. As a busy transactional attorney, I am reading all of the time, but not necessarily those books which can help me improve on the business management and marketing skills I need to run my own firm effectively.
Thank you Frumi for your intelligent yet down-to-earth approach which helps me greatly with time management and efficiency in my quest for professional growth. Since meeting Frumi, she has given me priceless nuggets of wisdom which has allowed me to grow both personally and professionally. Thank you, you are a gem, and for many, many reasons. She is known for two massive and very different sequences of novels. However, the novel by Doris Lessing which has probably meant most to most readers over the years is The Golden Notebook, the story of writer Anna Wulf.
Anna writes about the different elements of her life in different coloured notebooks. The black notebook records the memories of her past, the red one expresses her political ideas and her interaction with the British Communist Party, the yellow one is for detailing the painful aftermath of an affair, and the blue one for writing down her dreams. It is only in the golden notebook of the title that she can integrate all her different selves into a whole.
As a novelist, Lessing has never contented herself with the second-best and The Golden Notebook is her most challenging, provoking and inspiring book. Born in Turin, the city he was to call home for most of his life, Levi studied chemistry at the university there and graduated in Anti-semitic legislation made it difficult for him to find work but much worse persecution was to follow as the war continued, Mussolini was deposed and Italy became a battleground between Fascist and anti-Fascist forces.
Levi joined the Partisans in the hills of northern Italy but was captured by Fascist militia and, as a Jew, was sent to Auschwitz in February He spent eleven months in the camp, surviving through luck and the small advantages his scientific knowledge conferred on him, before it was liberated by the Red Army. In If This is a Man he describes, in clear and careful prose, the terrible events to which he was witness.
At times Levi, unsurprisingly, reached the darkest depths of despair and was prepared to give up any hope of survival. The message that another inmate, with his stoic determination to maintain self-respect, gave him was central to his willingness to keep going.
The book was eventually published in English in As a humane testimony to monstrous inhumanity, it has its place among the most important and challenging books of the twentieth century.
His volumes on Christianity include such titles as Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain and The Screwtape Letters, a clever and mischievous satire in the form of a series of letters of advice supposedly sent by a demon named Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood who is embarking on the tempt- ation of an ordinary man. A Grief Observed, originally published under a pseudonym, is a series of moving reflections on grief occasioned by the death of his wife.
He does not des- cribe embracing his faith with the fervour usually expected of new devotees. In the book to which he gave that title, he provides one of the most revealing and readable accounts in the twentieth century of a spiritual quest. His invention of the electron capture detector in the s has proved of lasting benefit in detecting the persistence of certain man-made chemicals in the atmosphere. Others of his inventions have been used in NASA planetary exploration programmes.
Naming the hypothesis after the Greek goddess of the earth was the suggestion of the novelist William Golding who lived at the time in the same village in Wiltshire as Lovelock. He began to speculate on the fundamental differences between lifeless Mars and abundant Earth. Many scientists have criticised them but many have come to accept their validity. His daring new model of the world on which we live has only gained greater relevance in the thirty years since it was first published.
When he was only six, his father was found dead, almost certainly the victim of white vigilantes angered by his support of black politicians and, some years later, his mother, who had never recovered from her loss, was detained in a mental hospital where she was to spend the rest of her life. Malcolm drifted into crime and addiction and was imprisoned for ten years in In prison, he became a Black Muslim and, once released, he reinvented himself as a powerful advocate of black power and black separatism.
In , after a pilgrimage to Mecca, he announced his rejection of his separatist beliefs and his new found conviction that good men of all races could join together to combat discrimination and injustice. On 21 February , Malcolm X was speaking at the Audubon Ballroom in New York when he was shot several times by men who rose from their seats in the audience and rushed the podium. He was pronounced dead on arrival at a nearby hospital. Although three men were eventually convicted of his assassination, controversy about who really shot Malcolm X continues to this day.
Whoever was guilty had killed one of the most remarkable Americans of his generation as his auto- biography demonstrates. It is one of the most powerful and revelatory documents to emerge from s and s America and from the movement to fight racism and oppression.
He campaigned against the racial segregation of apartheid from its introduction into South Africa in and endured several periods of imprisonment before he was given a life sentence in He remained in jail for 26 years, an increasingly potent symbol of resistance to apartheid.
Released in , he became the first black president of South Africa four years later, guiding the country in its transition from minority rule to true democracy. His enduring faith, through years of hardship and imprisonment, that truth and justice could eventually triumph over oppression is humbling. So, too, is his conviction that love is ultimately a more powerful force in the world than hate.
There is an untranslatable pun embedded in the title of the memoir and its successor, Hope Abandoned. Osip Mandelstam was already a renowned poet in revolutionary Russia when he married a young Jewish woman named Nadezhda Hazin in Throughout the s and early s, his literary fame continued to grow but Mandelstam was constitution- ally incapable of the kind of conformism required of writers in the Soviet era.
Mandelstam was not immediately arrested but, within a year, he had been despatched into exile and the last years of his life were made wretched by harrassment and persecution. His first stories, published in Spanish the mids, introduced the imaginary town of Macondo which has been the setting for much of his fiction, including his most famous novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
In its opening chapter, as Colonel Aureliano Buendia faces a firing squad, the extraordinary history of generations of his family unfolds in his mind. They begin as poor peasants in a one- roomed hut on the edge of a swamp. They proliferate wildly until the existence of the family and the existence of Macondo seem indissolubly linked.
Then, led by the Colonel, they defend the old values of the town against invasion by a government which wants to impose the same laws on Macondo as everywhere else. Macondo is a town unlike any other and its people, both the Buendias and others, live in the mind like few other fictional characters. When the technological wonders of the modern age reach Macondo, the townsfolk are unsure what to make of them. Possible and impossible events intertwine, time dissolves and imagination takes precedence in a narrative that renews the potential of fiction to re- invent the world.
He has continued to travel widely as an adult. He studied philosophy at university in Canada and became a full- time writer in his late twenties. His first book, a collection of short stories entitled The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, was pub- lished in and was followed three years later by Self, an ambitious novel about shifting sexual identities. Both books won some praise from critics but this was as nothing compared to the acclaim that met his second novel, Life of Pi which went on to win the Booker Prize.
The award of the Booker was certainly justified. The book is one of the more extraordinary and inventive works of fiction to appear so far in the twenty-first century. Martel clearly has confidence in the straightforward power of story-telling but he also demonstrates belief in the ability of the novel to bear the weight of philosophical speculation and digression as well.
Even the briefest precis of the plot gives some indication of how unusual the book is. Sharing a lifeboat with an assortment of animal survivors of the shipwreck, including a zebra, a hyena, an orang-utan and a pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker, he has time to ponder his fate and his future as the makeshift ark drifts across the ocean towards a landfall.
At its heart is the story of Jakob Beer. Covered in mud and filth, he is discovered by Athos Roussos, a Greek scholar excavating the ancient Polish city of Biskupin. Athos takes responsibility for the boy and smuggles him out of Poland and back to his home on the Greek island of Zakynthos. As Jakob grows up, Athos becomes his beloved mentor, who introduces him to the pleasures of knowledge and language and intellectual curiosity but the young man remains haunted by his loss and, especially, by fleeting memories of a sister whose final fate he has never learned.
The narrative continues to follow Jakob as he moves from Europe to Canada and back again, charting the failure of his marriage, his attempts to come to terms with his extraordinary past and his short-lived happiness with a much younger woman. She studied at the University of Basel, gaining a PhD in , and then worked as a psychoanalyst for more than twenty years.
The trauma of any kind of abuse in childhood — physical, sexual or emotional — is longlasting. If parents, for whatever reasons, refuse to acknowledge children as individuals, then the consequences are terrible.
And how could a person do that if, from the very beginning, he has had no chance to experience his true feelings and to learn to know himself?
The old gas attendant has no easy answers. The world is a difficult place. Free of pain, free of the obligations of life and death. Through its intriguing blend of fact and fiction, and through the character of Socrates, it leads readers on a memorable journey.
However, her finest work is usually acknowledged to be Beloved. Loosely based on the real-life story of Margaret Garner, an escaped slave who killed her own daughter rather than see her returned to slavery, this is the tale of Sethe who, when the novel opens in the year , is living in a house near Cincinatti with her daughter Denver. Sethe harbours terrible memories of events years earlier when she escaped from her brutal life as slave to a sadist. Her freedom was short-lived and, when she was tracked down and recaptured, she tried to kill all four of her children.
Moving back and forth in time, and flitting between the viewpoints of several different characters, Beloved is a complicated but compelling narrative that brings the dehumanising consequences of slavery vividly to life. All the characters are haunted by the ghosts of history and Morrison provides no easy healing for the damage they have all suffered.
Her novel looks at African-American history with unblinkered eyes and presents it to the reader with a complete lack of sentimentality. He was a brilliant classical scholar and was offered a professorship at a Swiss university when still only in his twenties. His university career lasted for a decade until it was brought to an end by his ill health. He then began a nomadic life, moving from city to city across Europe and surviving as an independent scholar and writer.
In , while in Turin, he suffered what was to be a permanent breakdown of his mental health which left him an invalid in the care of his sister for the rest of his life. Nietzsche was not, in any sense, a systematic philosopher, rigorously pursuing an argument. His ideas emerge in a sequence of devastatingly precise and resonant aphorisms and insights which move swiftly from subject to subject, from art and music to science and morality.
He challenged most of the ruling assumptions and ideas of his time. He rejected Christianity, with its emphasis on humility and submission to an objectively existing God, as the morality of the slave. Instead he believed in an extreme form of subjective idealism: that we live in a self-created world which is the projection of our own minds.
Probably no great philosopher has been so misunderstood as Nietzsche. His ideas have been seized upon and twisted out of recognition by later generations, most damagingly for his reputation by the Nazis. Read a book like Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the world will never seem quite the same again. After studying in Toronto and Kingston, Ontario, he became a university lecturer in English literature and a poet. When he started to write fiction, it was in a prose that was as rich, dense and allusive as his verse.
Early, experimental novels like Coming Through Slaughter and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid won him admirers but it was only with the publication of The English Patient, which won the Booker Prize and was later transformed by Anthony Minghella into a successful film, that Ondaatje gained a much wider audience.
As the Second World War drags to its con- clusion, a nurse and her patient, an Englishman burnt beyond recognition and swathed in bandages, are holed up in a villa near Florence after the retreat of the Germans. As the nurse and her two companions enter into complex relationships of their own and speculate about the enigma of the English patient, he returns in his own mind to North Africa before the war and to memories of an intense but doomed love affair.
In The English Patient, narrative provides the bare bones on which Ondaatje hangs his often haunting and beautiful language and imagery. The novel stays in the memory long after it has been read, a reminder of just how poignant and enigmatic fiction can be. Zhivago which provoked a savage response from the Soviet authorities of the time.
In the story of these two people caught up in world-changing historical events, human emotions of love and generosity are championed in a time when hatred, division and violence have taken hold. After enduring much in his service as a medical officer in Tsarist and revolutionary armies, he dies of a heart attack in Moscow. She disappears from the novel and from history, probably a victim although it is never explicitly stated of State terrorism. Yet their love, enjoyed in the few snatched moments that history allows them, somehow transcends their deaths.
After a further ten years in private practice, he was in a position to redirect his energies towards working as an inspirational speaker. The means for doing this were provided by The Road Less Travelled, first published in but a bestseller throughout the s and beyond. Many self-help gurus gain their successes by offering apparently pain-free ways to achieve all that potential disciples have dreamed of achieving.
Scott Peck is not that kind of guru. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult — once we truly understand and accept it — then life is no longer difficult.
Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters. Honesty and the admission that there is no easy path to happiness and enlightenment have their own attractions. Peck believes that people are only too likely to turn their backs on responsibility and opportunities to embrace real freedom. Many will refuse to change and the road to a richer life is, indeed, the road less travelled.
However, for those prepared to take it, the rewards are substantial. There can be few more intriguing questions we can ask ourselves and, over the last fifteen years, the Canadian academic Steven Pinker has done more than almost anybody to provide general readers with answers to it.
Before the publication of The Language Instinct in , Pinker was already well-known in his field as an innovative thinker on the development of language in children. His much-praised first book for a general readership brought his ideas to a wider public.
In it he argues that the capacity for language is imprinted in the biological structure of our brains and develops spontaneously in the growing child. Language is an instinct. People know how to talk in the same way that spiders know how to spin webs or eagles know how to fly.
His second book was more ambitious as its title suggests. In How the Mind Works he extends his approach to language to cover all the functions of the mind from vision to memory, consciousness to the emotions. The subjects that Pinker tackles are weighty ones but he writes about them with a lightness and a clarity that make even the most difficult of concepts comprehensible to non-specialists.
How the Mind Works and his later volumes like The Blank Slate allow us all to enter cutting-edge scientific debates about human nature and the human mind.
As an adult he struggled at first to find his way in life. He served with the US military in Korea where he developed an interest in Buddhism and, on his return to the US, he became a teacher and lecturer.
PIRSIG suffered a breakdown which resulted in his spending time in a mental hospital where he underwent electric shock therapy. When Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was first published, it was immediately recognised as utterly original and memorable, a book that attempts to blend Eastern and Western thought into a unique and uncategorisable whole.
At its heart, however, is his vision of a world where the rationality of the West and the non-intellectual insights of the East can be reconciled. To Pirsig, the two are not necessarily in conflict. Robert Pirsig turns the trip he and his son make into a personal odyssey in search of what is true, real and valuable in life. Striving to heal the age-old division between science and mysticism, he creates a philosophical masterpiece.
The Bell Jar tells the story of Esther Greenwood, a brilliant young college student who is given the chance to work in the exhilarating world of New York journalism. The year is and ideas of femininity and the correct social roles for women are in flux. Esther is torn between rebellion and conformity, between her ambitions to excel as a writer and a nagging wish simply to succumb to convention and marry her boyfriend Buddy.
She realises that she has been handed a golden opportunity but she seems unable to take full advantage of it. She feels alienated from the excitements of city life and this feeling only increases when she fails to win acceptance on a prestigious writing course and is obliged to return to suburban life for the summer.
Her sense of misery and separation from the world makes Esther feel like she is trapped under a laboratory bell jar, deprived of all air. She struggles to make any connection with reality. However, before the Hollywood movie version made that novella famous, she gained attention and the Pulitzer Prize with her full- length novel, The Shipping News.
At the beginning of the book, the central character Quoyle is an unsuccessful newspaperman in New York, still brooding on the humiliations of his marriage to a woman who first betrayed him and then was killed in an accident, leaving him with two small children. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery. The Celestine Prophecy is presented as a novel.
In the rain forests of Peru an ancient manuscript has been discovered. In its pages are nine insights into the nature and meaning of life. The narrator of the story decides to head for South America to learn more of the manuscript and its spiritual truths but he discovers that the powers that be, in both state and Church, are disturbed by the idea that the insights will be further disseminated and are prepared to go to great lengths to stop this.
As the narrator learns each insight, one by one, and sees each one begin to operate in his life, he is also obliged to escape the dangerous attentions of those who wish to keep the insights to themselves. The story of The Celestine Prophecy is not always a particularly compelling one nor its characters particularly convincing.
Redfield is no great novelist and his novel is intended primarily as a vehicle for the nine insights. These begin with the aware- ness that a new spiritual awakening is underway and that individuals can only achieve their full potential if they align themselves with it. From this basis, they move towards the revelation of how humans can evolve into a new dimension of existence.
Sophisticated sceptics may mock The Celestine Prophecy but, as its startling word-of-mouth success indicates, it speaks very directly to millions of people.
He decides that, in future, he will make no conscious decisions about his life. Instead, he will allow the fall of the dice to determine his actions. He will merely put forward options and then let the dice choose between them. By this simple means he will shake himself out of the inertia and the tedium which have come to dominate his life. By creating problems for myself I created thought. Appropriately for a novel so enthralled by the mysteries of chance and randomness, its author remains an enigma.
Is he really a psychiatrist named Luke Rhinehart? Could he even be H. Saint, author of a book called Memoirs of an Invisible Man? No one seems sure. What is certain is that The Dice Man is a novel like few others — a subversive, scary and liberating exploration of what life might be like if it was guided by the throw of a dice.
For the last thirty years he has been one of the most prominent interpreters of Buddhism to Western audiences, both through his writings and through the international organisation he founded and called Rigpa. To Western minds, the experience of dying is often seen as one that is too anxiety-provoking to contemplate.
To Rinpoche and other Buddhists, it is only through contemplation of death that the joys of life can be revealed. In his book, Rinpoche explains ideas of karma and rebirth which are central to a specifically Buddhist tradition but much of what he writes about the value of the impermanent world in which we presently find ourselves, about the nature of spirituality and the best means to nurture it, is applicable to the lives of us all.
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying can help people of many faiths and none to understand the meaning of life and the place of death within it. Nuland, How We Die J. So enormous has been the success of J.
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