Answering the question "What is death?" by focusing on the individual is blinkered. It restricts attention to a narrow zone around the individual body of a creature. Instead, how expansive is the answer we receive when we look at the context of death within the biosphere. Death now is tied to all of life, via the atmosphere and ocean. Death supports the biological enterprise of making abundant the green and squiggly life. Talk about death has headed us straight into a contemplation of life, not only individual life, but big life, life on a global scale. Death and life are neatly dovetailed by the supreme cabinetmaker of evolution.
Focusing on the needs of the first-time Web page creator, this plain-English guide shows how to build a basic personal site in no time * Updated to cover the latest trends and tools, including blogs, photo-hosting sites, and Google Page Creator * Covers super-easy Web creation options (such as MySpace, Flikr, and Blogger), simple Web building alternatives (such as Google Page Creator and Yahoo! SiteBuilder), and more advanced techniques for creating robust, feature-rich pages (such as Dreamweaver and HTML coding)
Teaching Thinking Skills with Fairy Tales and Fantasy This step-by-step introduction to teaching thinking skills will be useful to teachers, librarians, and staff development personnel. Each thinking skill is presented in a one-page reproducible (easily adapted to a transparency or PowerPoint slide), followed by several self-contained activities using fairy tales and fantasy books as the basis to teach the integrated skill. Skills taught range from deductive reasoning to inferential and perceptual thinking. There are over 30 skills in all. Gifted education teachers will love this book.
Literature elevates the mind...good literature, that is!
R.V. Young is a Professor and Director of Graduate Programs in the Department of English at North Carolina State University. He wrote this primer for college students as a part of the ISI Guides to the Major Disciplines series. Young believes, and encourages the reader to consider, that literature needs to be part of the diet of every student wanting to learn and explore the meaning of life. Young's premise is that literature, approached both with caution and abandon, literally elevates the mind, and thus, the person. He proceeds to give a brief summary of various authors and books that every student should consider for their own personal library beginning (of course) with Homer and ending with T.S. Eliot. Young ends with an incredible bibliographical appendix of various authors and titles that would be a great place to begin for readers wanting to expand their horizons and read a wide variety of books.
The book encourages the reader to read more, and I can see how a person could be discouraged and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the books listed - obviously the reader needs to be able to digest these suggestions and take small bites into the large apple of good literature.
Lukacs' fluid writing style is this book's greatest merit. He points out a great deal of classical and modern history of outstanding merit and durability. This booklet, however, is published by the ISI's publishing house. Reading it is like being flung back into the academic culture of East Coast Universities in the 1950s. The sensation is bizarre, and horribly exclusionary. Almost any other introduction to the discipline for undergraduates would be better by showing that non-European, non-Christian stories also have merit. History is not only the study of personal and national heritage, but the trials and value of all human cultures, even those not personally relevant. The book lacks such generosity, often termed imaginative sympathy. Too bad.
Answering the question "What is death?" by focusing on the individual is blinkered. It restricts attention to a narrow zone around the individual body of a creature. Instead, how expansive is the answer we receive when we look at the context of death within the biosphere. Death now is tied to all of life, via the atmosphere and ocean. Death supports the biological enterprise of making abundant the green and squiggly life. Talk about death has headed us straight into a contemplation of life, not only individual life, but big life, life on a global scale. Death and life are neatly dovetailed by the supreme cabinetmaker of evolution.
