Meaning of Life: Perspectives from the World’s Great Intellectual Traditions
What is the meaning of life? It's a question every thoughtful person has pondered at one time or another. Indeed, it may be the biggest question of all. Most of us have asked ourselves this question at some time, or posed it to somebody we respect. It is at once a profound and abstract question, and a deeply personal one. We want to understand the world in which we live, but we also want to understand how to make our own lives as meaningful as possible; to know not only why we're living, but that we're doing it with intention, purpose, and ethical commitment.
Post-Pop Cinema - The Search for Meaning in New American Film
Starting in the early 1990s, artists such as Quentin Tarantino, David Foster Wallace, and Kurt Cobain contributed to a swelling cultural tide of pop postmodernism that swept through music, film, literature, and fashion. In cinema in particular, some of the art's most fundamental aspects--stories, characters, and genres, for instance--assumed such a trite and trivialized appearance that only rarely could they take their places on the screen without provoking an inward smirk or a wink from the audience.
Wonders of Numbers: Adventures in Mathematics, Mind, and Meaning
Wonders of Numbers will enchant even the most left-brained of readers. Hosted by the quirky Dr. Googol--who resides on a remote island and occasionally collaborates with Clifford Pickover--Wonders of Numbers focuses on creativity and the delight of discovery. Here is a potpourri of common and unusual number theory problems of varying difficulty--each presented in brief chapters that convey to readers the essence of the problem rather than its extraneous history. Peppered throughout with illustrations that clarify the problems, Wonders of Numbers also includes fascinating "math gossip." How would we use numbers to communicate with aliens? Check out Chapter 30.
Jean Baudrillard - The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures
Jean Baudrillard's classic text was one of the first to focus on the process and meaning of consumption in contemporary culture. The book includes Baudrillard's most organized discussion of mass media culture, the meaning of leisure and anomie in affluent society.
Originally published in 1970, the book still makes a vital contribution to current debates on consumption.
In two magnificent and authoritative volumes, Harold C. Goddard takes readers on a tour through the works of William Shakespeare, celebrating his incomparable plays and unsurpassed literary genius. Goddard writes of Shakespeare with an unabashed love bordering on adoration. He was a Quaker who taught at Bryn Mawr, and his tone is that of a wise and affectionate teacher who would rather impart his enthusiasm than impose his ideas; he is fond of quoting William Blake’s saying that “enthusiastic admiration is the first principle of knowledge, and the last.” He never sounds academic.
