For more than thirty years, Jonathan Raban has written with infectious fascination about people and places in transition or on the margins, about journeys undertaken and destinations never quite reached, and, as an Englishman transplanted in Seattle, about what it means to feel rooted in America. Spanning two decades, "Driving Home" charts a course through the Pacific Northwest, American history, and current events as witnessed by "a super-sensitive, all-seeing eye. Raban spots things we might otherwise miss; he calls up the apt metaphors that transform things into phenomena. He is one of our most gifted observers" ("Newsday").
Stops en route include a Missoula bar, a Tea Party convention in Nashville hosted by Sarah Palin, the Mississippi in full flood, a trip to Hawaii with his daughter, a steelhead river in the Cascades, and the hidden corners of his adopted hometown, Seattle. He deftly explores public and personal spaces, poetry and politics, geography and catastrophe, art and economy, and the shifts in various arenas that define our society. Whether the topic is Robert Lowell or Barack Obama, or how various painters, explorers, and homesteaders have engaged with our mythical and actual landscape, he has an outsider's eye for the absurd, and his tone is intimate, never nostalgic, and always fresh.
Frank, witty, and provocative, "Driving Home" is part essay collection, part diary--and irresistibly insightful about America's character, contradictions, and idiosyncrasies.
This selection of Oscar Wilde's writings provides a fresh perspective on his character and thinking. Compiled from his lecture tours, newspaper articles, essays and epigrams, these pieces show that beneath the trademark wit, Wilde was a deeply humane and visionary writer, as challenging today as he was in the late 1800s. This edition includes essays on interior design, prison reform, Shakespeare, the dramatic dialogue Decay of Lying and the seminal Soul of Man.
Michael Sells brand new Imagine That series--short, popular histories of how the past didn't quite happen--launches with four titles this year.
Each book is a flight of imagination that explores how the smallest changes to history could have spiraled out of control.
Would a happy ending to Casablanca have led to a more prejudiced world? Would the death of a cat have been the most costly road accident in the history of technology?
Imagine That . . .
Michael Sells brand new Imagine That series--short, popular histories of how the past didn't quite happen--launches with four titles this year.
Each book is a flight of imagination that explores how the smallest changes to history could have spiraled out of control.
Would a happy ending to Casablanca have led to a more prejudiced world? Would the death of a cat have been the most costly road accident in the history of technology?
Imagine That . . .
"The New York Times" bestselling author of "The Psychopath Test," Jon Ronson writes about the dark, uncanny sides of humanity with clarity and humor. "Lost at Sea "reveals how deep our collective craziness lies, even in the most mundane circumstances.
Ronson investigates the strange things we re willing to believe in, from lifelike robots programmed with our loved ones personalities to indigo children to hypersuccessful spiritual healers to the Insane Clown Posse s juggalo fans. He looks at ordinary lives that take on extraordinary perspectives, for instance a pop singer whose life s greatest passion is the coming alien invasion, and the scientist designated to greet those aliens when they arrive. Ronson throws himself into the stories in a tour de force piece, he splits himself into multiple Ronsons (Happy, Paul, and Titch, among others) to get to the bottom of credit card companies predatory tactics and the murky, fabulously wealthy companies behind those tactics. Amateur nuclear physicists, assisted-suicide practitioners, the town of North Pole, Alaska s Christmas-induced high school mass-murder plot: Ronson explores all these tales with a sense of higher purpose and universality, and suddenly, mid-read, they are stories not about the fringe of society or about people far removed from our own experience, but about all of us.
Incisive and hilarious, poignant and maddening, revealing and disturbing Ronson writes about our modern world, the foibles of contemporary culture, and the chaos that lies at the edge of our daily lives."
When you hear that now ubiquitous phrase "I find that offensive," you know you're being told to shut up. Social discourse is now dominated by competitive offence-claiming. But how did we become so thin-skinned? This book blames three culprits: official multiculturalism's relativistic conflation of tolerance with positive "recognition," narcissistic identity politics, and finally therapeutic educational interventions such as anti-bullying campaigns.
Claire Fox is a British libertarian writer. She is the founder of the Institute of Ideas think tank and a broadcaster and social commentator, appearing regularly on BBC television and radio.
