Why Read
Selected Writings 2001-2021
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Why Read
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Narrado por:
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Will Self
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De:
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Will Self
Acerca de esta escucha
From one of the most unusual and distinctive writers working today, dubbed 'the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation' by the Guardian, Will Self's Why Read is a cornucopia of thoughtful and brilliantly witty essays on writing and literature.
Self takes us with him: from the foibles of his typewriter repairman to the irradiated exclusion zone of Chernobyl, to the Australian outback and to literary forms past and future. With his characteristic intellectual brio, Self aims his inimitable eye at titans of literature like Woolf, Kafka, Orwell and Conrad. He writes movingly on W.G. Sebald's childhood in Germany and provocatively describes the elevation of William S. Burroughs's Junky from shocking pulp novel to beloved cult classic. Self also expands on his regular column in Literary Hub to ask how, what and ultimately why we should read in an ever-changing world. Whether he is writing on the rise of the bookshelf as an item of furniture in the nineteenth century or on the impossibility of Googling his own name in a world lived online, Self's trademark intoxicating prose and mordant, energetic humour infuse every piece.
©2022 Will Self (P)2022 W. F. Howes LtdLos oyentes también disfrutaron...
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- Narrado por: Will Self
- Duración: 11 h y 31 m
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General4.5 out of 5 stars 8
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Will Self is one of Britain's best-known contemporary writers, a public intellectual whose novels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and translated into over 20 languages. In Will, his first-ever memoir, he turns his attention fully to his own self, and in particular his addictions as a young man. An addiction memoir like no other, Will echoes the best of Self's psychedelic fiction, and is one of the most eloquent depictions of the allure of hard drugs ever written.
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- Duración: 9 h y 11 m
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Henry Wotton, gay, drug addicted, and husband of Batface, the irrefutably aristocratic daughter of the Duke of This or That, is at the center of a clique dedicated to dissolution. His friend Baz Hallward, an artist, has discovered a young man who is the very epitome of male beauty - Dorian Gray. His installation Cathode Narcissus captures all of Dorian's allure, and, perhaps, something else.
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- De: Werner Herzog, Michael Hofmann - translator
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Werner Herzog was born in September 1942 in Munich, Germany, at a turning point in the Second World War. Soon Germany would be defeated and a new world would have to be made out the rubble and horrors of the war. Fleeing the Allied bombing raids, Herzog’s mother took him and his older brother to a remote, rustic part of Bavaria where he would spend much of his childhood hungry, without running water, in deep poverty. It was there, as the new postwar order was emerging, that one of the most visionary filmmakers of the next seven decades was formed.
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Freydis is the leader of a band of Viking warriors who get as far as Panama. Nobody knows what became of them. Five hundred years later, Christopher Columbus is sailing for the Americas, dreaming of gold and conquest. Even after he is captured by the Tainos, his faith in his superiority and his mission is unshaken. Thirty-nine years after that, Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor, arrives in Europe.
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The hero of John Kennedy Toole's incomparable, Pultizer Prize–winning comic classic is one Ignatius J. Reilly, an obese, self-absorbed, hapless Don Quixote of the French Quarter, whose half-hearted attempts at employment lead to a series of wacky adventures among the lower denizens of New Orleans.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Well Done
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Will
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- De: Will Self
- Narrado por: Will Self
- Duración: 11 h y 31 m
- Versión completa
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General4.5 out of 5 stars 8
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Narración:5 out of 5 stars 8
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Historia4.5 out of 5 stars 8
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De: Will Self
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Dorian
- De: Will Self
- Narrado por: John Lee
- Duración: 9 h y 11 m
- Versión completa
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General5 out of 5 stars 6
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Narración:5 out of 5 stars 5
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Historia4.5 out of 5 stars 5
Henry Wotton, gay, drug addicted, and husband of Batface, the irrefutably aristocratic daughter of the Duke of This or That, is at the center of a clique dedicated to dissolution. His friend Baz Hallward, an artist, has discovered a young man who is the very epitome of male beauty - Dorian Gray. His installation Cathode Narcissus captures all of Dorian's allure, and, perhaps, something else.
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- A Memoir
- De: Werner Herzog, Michael Hofmann - translator
- Narrado por: Werner Herzog
- Duración: 13 h y 42 m
- Versión completa
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Freydis is the leader of a band of Viking warriors who get as far as Panama. Nobody knows what became of them. Five hundred years later, Christopher Columbus is sailing for the Americas, dreaming of gold and conquest. Even after he is captured by the Tainos, his faith in his superiority and his mission is unshaken. Thirty-nine years after that, Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor, arrives in Europe.
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- Versión completa
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5 out of 5 stars
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Well Done
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The Visionaries
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The period from 1933 to 1943 was one of the darkest and most chaotic in human history, as the Second World War unfolded with unthinkable cruelty. It was also a crucial decade in the dramatic, intersecting lives of some of history’s greatest philosophers. There were four women, in particular, whose parallel ideas would come to dominate the twentieth century—at once in necessary dialogue and in striking contrast with one another.
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Satire and Beauvoir’s problematic behavior; Simone Weil’s problematic self-immolation
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The world’s leading economist of inequality presents a short but sweeping and surprisingly optimistic history of human progress toward equality despite crises, disasters, and backsliding, a perfect introduction to the ideas developed in his monumental earlier books.
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An unmatched guide to the religious dimensions of American politics, Jeff Sharlet journeys into corners of our national psyche where others fear to tread. The Undertow is both inquiry and meditation, an attempt to understand how, over the last decade, reaction has morphed into delusion, social division into distrust, distrust into paranoia, and hatred into fantasies—sometimes realities—of violence.
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3 out of 5 stars
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I'm just not feeling this one....
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A prophetic and experimental masterpiece by J. G. Ballard, the acclaimed author of ‘Crash’ and ‘Super-Cannes’. This edition features explanatory notes from the author. The irrational, all-pervading violence of the modern world is the subject of this extraordinary tour de force. The central character’s dreams are haunted by images of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, dead astronauts and car-crash victims as he traverses the screaming wastes of nervous breakdown.
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William Blake vs the World
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- Duración: 11 h y 12 m
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General5 out of 5 stars 101
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A wild and unexpected journey through culture, science, philosophy, and religion to better understand the mercurial genius of William Blake.
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5 out of 5 stars
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General5 out of 5 stars 280
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Faith, Hope and Carnage is a book about Nick Cave’s inner life. Created from more than forty hours of intimate conversations with Seán O’Hagan, it is a profoundly thoughtful exploration, in Cave’s own words, of what really drives his life and creativity. The book examines questions of faith, art, music, freedom, grief, and love. It draws candidly on Cave’s life, from his early childhood to the present day, his loves, his work ethic, and his dramatic transformation in recent years.
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4 out of 5 stars
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A collection of the author's articles and reviews, giving an insight into some of the most important literary, artistic, and scientific movements and events of the last 30 years.
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Arguably the most celebrated and revered writer of our time now gives us a new nonfiction collection - a rich gathering of her essays, speeches, and meditations on society, culture, and art, spanning four decades.
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A collection of 98 enthralling and pulse-quickening stories, spanning five decades, venerates the remarkable imagination of J. G. Ballard. With a body of work unparalleled in twentieth-century literature, J. G. Ballard is recognized as one of the greatest and most prophetic writers in the world. With the much-hailed release of The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard, readers now have a means to celebrate the unmatched range and mesmerizing cadences of a literary genius.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Reflections
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General4.5 out of 5 stars 11
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Narración:4 out of 5 stars 10
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Historia4.5 out of 5 stars 10
A companion volume to Illuminations, the first collection of Walter Benjamin’s writings, Reflections presents a further sampling of his wide-ranging work. Here Benjamin evolves a theory of language as the medium of all creation, discusses theater and surrealism, reminisces about Berlin in the 1920s, recalls conversations with Bertolt Brecht, and provides travelogues of various cities, including Moscow under Stalin.
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5 out of 5 stars
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W. B. Writes beautiful long sentences. yea!
- De Amazon Customer en 11-24-22
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Uncertain Places
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General5 out of 5 stars 34
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Historia5 out of 5 stars 27
Today’s leading voice of esotericism and the occult, Mitch Horowitz explores topics that evoke widespread misunderstanding, including the real history of secret societies, the wisdom of the Satanic, the relevance of Gnosticism, and connection between today’s spiritual culture and antiquity, including in areas of Hermeticism, deity worship, out-of-body experience, and magick. He demonstrates the occult roots of wide-ranging facets of modern culture, including politics, abstract art, mind-body healing, self-help, and scientific fields such as quantum physics and neuroplasticity.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Uncertain Places
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Under the Sign of Saturn
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Sontag's most important critical writings from 1972 to 1980 are collected in Under the Sign of Saturn. One of America's leading essayists, Sontag's writings are commentaries on the relation between moral and aesthetic ideas, discussing the works of Antonin Artaud, Leni Riefenstahl, Elias Canetti, Walter Benjamin, and others. The collection includes a variety of her well-known essays. Sontag's writings are famously full of intellectual range and depth, and are at turns exhilarating, ominous, disturbing, and beautiful.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great essays and a great reading performance
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- De: Benjamin Moser
- Narrado por: Tavia Gilbert
- Duración: 22 h y 4 m
- Versión completa
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General4 out of 5 stars 114
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Narración:4 out of 5 stars 92
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Historia4.5 out of 5 stars 91
No writer is as emblematic of the American 20th century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Cloying voice
- De Suzanne en 11-02-19
De: Benjamin Moser
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High Weirdness
- Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies
- De: Erik Davis
- Narrado por: Erik Davis
- Duración: 20 h y 57 m
- Versión completa
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General4.5 out of 5 stars 218
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Narración:4.5 out of 5 stars 177
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Historia4.5 out of 5 stars 174
A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s. These three authors changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experienced reality - but how did their writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America?
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5 out of 5 stars
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High Weirdness
- De Amazon Customer en 09-17-20
De: Erik Davis
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Time Travel
- A History
- De: James Gleick
- Narrado por: Rob Shapiro
- Duración: 10 h
- Versión completa
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General4 out of 5 stars 509
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Narración:4.5 out of 5 stars 449
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Historia4 out of 5 stars 442
James Gleick's story begins at the turn of the 20th century, with the young H. G. Wells writing and rewriting the fantastic tale that became his first book, an international sensation: The Time Machine. A host of forces were converging to transmute the human understanding of time, some philosophical and some technological - the electric telegraph, the steam railroad, the discovery of buried civilizations, and the perfection of clocks.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Fiction gives us Truth by connecting the dots
- De Gary en 04-21-17
De: James Gleick
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Origins of The Wheel of Time
- The Legends and Mythologies That Inspired Robert Jordan
- De: Michael Livingston, Harriet McDougal - contributor, Robert Jordan
- Narrado por: Harriet McDougal, Kate Reading, Michael Kramer, y otros
- Duración: 9 h y 35 m
- Versión completa
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General4.5 out of 5 stars 160
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Narración:4.5 out of 5 stars 139
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Historia4.5 out of 5 stars 139
Take a deep dive into the real-world history and mythology that inspired the world of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time®. This companion to the internationally bestselling series will delve into the creation of Jordan’s masterpiece, drawing from interviews and an unprecedented examination of his unpublished notes. Michael Livingston tells the behind-the-scenes story of who Jordan was, how he worked, and why he holds such an important place in modern literature. Origins of The Wheel of Time will provide exciting knowledge and insights to both new and longtime fans.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Agenda driven ideological bend.
- De Maxwell en 06-19-23
De: Michael Livingston, y otros
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On the Natural History of Destruction
- De: W. G. Sebald, Anthea Bell - Translator
- Narrado por: Simon Vance
- Duración: 4 h y 30 m
- Versión completa
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General4.5 out of 5 stars 30
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Narración:4.5 out of 5 stars 28
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Historia4.5 out of 5 stars 28
On the Natural History of Destruction is W.G. Sebald's harrowing and precise investigation of one of the least examined "silences" of our time. In it, the acclaimed novelist examines the devastation of German cities by Allied bombardment, and the reasons for the astonishing absence of this unprecedented trauma from German history and culture. This void in history is in part a repression of things - such as the death by fire of the city of Hamburg at the hands of the RAF - too terrible to bear.
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5 out of 5 stars
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After a few rereading and relistenings
- De whosis en 12-20-24
De: W. G. Sebald, y otros
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Gods of the Upper Air
- How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century
- De: Charles King
- Narrado por: January LaVoy
- Duración: 13 h y 32 m
- Versión completa
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General4.5 out of 5 stars 301
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Narración:4.5 out of 5 stars 259
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Historia4.5 out of 5 stars 257
A century ago, everyone knew that people were fated by their race, sex, and nationality to be more or less intelligent, nurturing, or warlike. But Columbia University professor Franz Boas looked at the data and decided everyone was wrong. Racial categories, he insisted, were biological fictions. Cultures did not come in neat packages labeled "primitive" or "advanced". What counted as a family, a good meal, or even common sense was a product of history and circumstance, not of nature.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great Book, Much Needed despite poor performance
- De J. Kahn en 08-21-19
De: Charles King
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At the Existentialist Café
- Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
- De: Sarah Bakewell
- Narrado por: Antonia Beamish
- Duración: 14 h y 39 m
- Versión completa
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General4.5 out of 5 stars 1,079
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Narración:4.5 out of 5 stars 951
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Historia4.5 out of 5 stars 945
Paris, 1933: Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!"
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4 out of 5 stars
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Consistent look at incoherent philosophy
- De Gary en 06-19-16
De: Sarah Bakewell
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How to Save the West
- Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises
- De: Spencer Klavan
- Narrado por: Spencer Klavan
- Duración: 6 h y 33 m
- Versión completa
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General5 out of 5 stars 198
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Narración:5 out of 5 stars 181
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Historia5 out of 5 stars 179
It has been proclaimed many times, but perhaps never more convincingly than now, when every news cycle seems to deliver further confirmation of a world gone mad. Is this the endgame? Author Spencer Klavan is a classicist, with a Ph.D. from Oxford, and a deep understanding of the West. His analysis: The situation is dire. But every crisis we face today, we have faced before. And we can surmount each one. Klavan brings to the West’s defense the insights of Plato, Aristotle, the Bible, and the Founding Fathers to show that in the wisdom of the past lies hope for the future.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Spectacular! A must read!
- De M.A. en 02-15-23
De: Spencer Klavan
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Parfit
- A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality
- De: David Edmonds
- Narrado por: Zeb Soanes
- Duración: 13 h y 14 m
- Versión completa
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General5 out of 5 stars 48
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Narración:5 out of 5 stars 45
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Historia5 out of 5 stars 45
Derek Parfit (1942–2017) is the most famous philosopher most people have never heard of. Widely regarded as one of the greatest moral thinkers of the past hundred years, Parfit was anything but a public intellectual. Yet his ideas have shaped the way philosophers think about things that affect us all: equality, altruism, what we owe to future generations, and even what it means to be a person. In Parfit, David Edmonds presents the first biography of an intriguing, obsessive, and eccentric genius.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Loved it
- De Anna Karenina en 07-05-23
De: David Edmonds
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Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies
- How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature
- De: Elizabeth Winkler
- Narrado por: Eunice Wong
- Duración: 14 h y 28 m
- Versión completa
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General4.5 out of 5 stars 67
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Narración:4.5 out of 5 stars 53
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Historia4.5 out of 5 stars 53
The theory that Shakespeare may not have written the works that bear his name is the most horrible, unspeakable subject in the history of English literature. Scholars admit that the Bard’s biography is a “black hole,” yet to publicly question the identity of the god of English literature is unacceptable, even (some say) “immoral.” In Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, journalist and literary critic Elizabeth Winkler sets out to probe the origins of this literary taboo.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent!
- De Virgil Tracy en 06-03-23
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Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely
- De: Andrew S. Curran
- Narrado por: Paul Boehmer
- Duración: 13 h y 18 m
- Versión completa
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General4.5 out of 5 stars 49
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Narración:4.5 out of 5 stars 40
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Historia4.5 out of 5 stars 40
Denis Diderot is often associated with the decades-long battle to bring the world's first comprehensive Encyclopedie into existence. But his most daring writing took place in the shadows. Thrown into prison for his atheism in 1749, Diderot decided to reserve his best books for posterity - for us, in fact. In the astonishing cache of unpublished writings left behind after his death, Diderot challenged virtually all of his century's accepted truths, from the sanctity of monarchy, to the racial justification of the slave trade, to the norms of human sexuality.
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5 out of 5 stars
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lifelong coverage of his life.
- De Michael Daly en 03-22-21
De: Andrew S. Curran
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Papyrus
- The Invention of Books in the Ancient World
- De: Irene Vallejo, Charlotte Whittle - translator
- Narrado por: Sophie Roberts
- Duración: 17 h y 30 m
- Versión completa
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General4.5 out of 5 stars 60
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Narración:4.5 out of 5 stars 48
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Historia4.5 out of 5 stars 48
Long before books were mass-produced, hand-copied scrolls made from Nile River reeds were the treasures of the ancient world. Emperors and pharaohs, determined to possess them, dispatched emissaries to the edges of the known world to bring them back. Exploring the deep and fascinating history of the written word, from the oral tradition to scrolls to codices, internationally bestselling author Irene Vallejo shows that books have always been a precious and precarious vehicle for civilization.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great read
- De Hunter Pechin en 12-15-22
De: Irene Vallejo, y otros
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Cultural Amnesia
- Notes in the Margin of My Time
- De: Clive James
- Narrado por: Clive James
- Duración: 6 h y 16 m
- Versión resumida
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General4 out of 5 stars 150
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Narración:4.5 out of 5 stars 105
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Historia4.5 out of 5 stars 104
From Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, via Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Thomas Mann and Charlie Chaplin, this varied and unfailingly absorbing book is both story and history, both public memoir and personal record - and provides an essential field-guide to the vast movements of taste, intellect, politics and delusion that helped to prepare the times we live in now.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Very enjoyable and well narrated
- De Larbi en 05-18-08
De: Clive James
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William Blake vs the World
- De: John Higgs
- Narrado por: John Higgs
- Duración: 11 h y 12 m
- Versión completa
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General5 out of 5 stars 101
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Narración:5 out of 5 stars 87
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Historia5 out of 5 stars 87
A wild and unexpected journey through culture, science, philosophy, and religion to better understand the mercurial genius of William Blake.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Best book ever
- De idamae en 11-04-22
De: John Higgs
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The Reason for the Darkness of the Night
- Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science
- De: John Tresch
- Narrado por: Paul Woodson
- Duración: 14 h y 12 m
- Versión completa
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General4.5 out of 5 stars 32
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Narración:4.5 out of 5 stars 24
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Historia4.5 out of 5 stars 24
John Tresch offers a bold new biography of a writer whose short, tortured life continues to fascinate. Shining a spotlight on an era when the lines separating entertainment, speculation, and scientific inquiry were blurred, Tresch reveals Poe's obsession with science and lifelong ambition to advance and question human knowledge. He remained an avid and often combative commentator on new discoveries, publishing and hustling in literary scenes that also hosted the era's most prominent scientists, semi-scientists, and pseudo-intellectual rogues.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Know the Real Poe
- De Elliott Wolfe, M.D. en 06-28-21
De: John Tresch
Lo que los oyentes dicen sobre Why Read
Calificaciones medias de los clientesReseñas - Selecciona las pestañas a continuación para cambiar el origen de las reseñas.
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Total5 out of 5 stars
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Ejecución5 out of 5 stars
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Historia5 out of 5 stars
- York Underwood
- 02-16-24
Instructive and Delightful
A collection of essays both instructive, delightful, and, occassionally, terrifying, spoken by the man himSelf.
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