Added by: Cheramie | Karma: 275.78 | Fiction literature | 22 December 2009
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On Second Thoughts by Simon Brett
Fiction and humour writer Brett invents what might have been found in the imaginary wastepaper baskets of the famous and great from history. Things could have been very different if King Arthur had figured out the seating plan for a square table, if Picasso hadn't received the wrong prescription for his spectacles or if Ronald Reagan hadn't misspelled 'unclear' as 'nuclear' in his lost letter to Gorbachev
This book is an unrivalled indictment of the banality of mass culture - Adorno's finest essays are collected here, offering the reader unparalleled insights into Adorno's thoughts on culture.
From antiquity, the phenomenon of speech has been an object of both general curiosity and scientific inquiry. Over the centuries, much effort has been devoted to the study of this remarkable process whereby our eating and breathing apparatus is used to transform thoughts in the mind of a speaker into vibrations in the air and back into congruent thoughts in the mind of a listener. Although we still do not have satisfactory answers to many of the questions about speech and language that the ancients pondered, we do have substantial scientific knowledge of the subject and an evolving technology based on it.
