The Well-Educated Mind offers brief, entertaining histories of five literary genres--fiction, autobiography, history, drama, and poetry--accompanied by detailed instructions on how to read each type. The annotated lists at the end of each chapter--ranging from Cervantes to A. S. Byatt, Herodotus to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich--preview recommended reading and encourage readers to make vital connections between ancient traditions and contemporary writing.
The Well-Educated Mind reassures those readers who worry that they read too slowly or with below-average comprehension. If you can understand a daily newspaper, there's no reason you can't read and enjoy Shakespeare's Sonnets or Jane Eyre. But no one should attempt to read the "Great Books" without a guide and a plan. Susan Wise Bauer will show you how to allocate time to your reading on a regular basis; how to master a difficult argument; how to make personal and literary judgments about what you read; how to appreciate the resonant links among texts within a genre--what does Anna Karenina owe to Madame Bovary?--and also between genres. Followed carefully, the advice in The Well-Educated Mind will restore and expand the pleasure of the written word.
Is the deejay a wannabe?
Or does the D.J. just want to be?
When is heaven capitalized?
Do you stand in line or on line?
For anyone who writes short stories or business plans, book reports or news articles knotty choices of spelling, grammar, punctuation, and meaning lurk in every line: Lay or lie? Who or whom? None is or none are? Is Touch-Tone a trademark? How about Day-Glo? It s enough to send you in search of a Martini. (Or is that a martini?) Now everyone can find answers to these and thousands of other questions in the handy alphabetical guide used by the writers and editors of the world s most authoritative newspaper.
The guidelines to hyphenation, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling are crisp and compact, created for instant reference in the rush of daily deadlines. This revised and expanded edition is updated with solutions to the tantalizing problems that plague writers in the new century:
* How to express the equality of the sexes without using self-conscious devices like he or she.
* How to choose thoughtfully between African-American and black; Hispanic and Latino; American Indian and Native American.
* How to translate the vocabulary of e-mail and cyberspace and cope with the eccentricities of Internet company names and website addresses.
With wry wit, the authors, who have more than seventy-five years of combined newsroom experience at the "New York Times," have created an essential and entertaining reference tool."
"Like that of] his literary ancestor Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut's] crankiness is good-humored and sharp-witted. . . . Reading A Man Without a Country is] like sitting down on the couch for a long chat with an old friend."-The New York Times Book Review
"Filled with Vonnegut's] usual contradictory mix of joy and sorrow, hope and despair, humor and gravity."-Chicago Tribune "Fans will linger on every word . . . as once again Vonnegut] captures the complexity of the human condition with stunning calligraphic simplicity."-The Australian "Thank God, Kurt Vonnegut has broken his promise that he will never write another book. In this wondrous assemblage of mini-memoirs, we discover his family's legacy and his obstinate, unfashionable humanism."-Studs Terkel
Did you ever have the uneasy feeling the experts
are not . . . well, expert?
--Irving Fisher, professor of economics at Yale University, October 17, 1929 "Forget it, Louis, no Civil War picture ever made a nickel."
--Irving Thalberg's warning to Louis B. Mayer regarding Gone With the Wind "We don't like their sound. Groups of guitars are on the way out."
--Decca Recording Company executive, turning down the Beatles, 1962 "With over fifty foreign cars already on sale here the Japanese auto industry isn't likely to carve out a big share of the market for itself."--Business Week, 1968 "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home."
--President of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977 "Bill Clinton will lose to any Republican who doesn't drool on stage."
--The Wall Street Journal, in a 1995 editorial The Experts Speak systematically catalogues, footnotes, and sets straight these and a couple of thousand other examples of expert misunderstanding, miscalculation, egregious prognostication, boo-boos, and just plain lies. The experts have been wrong about everything under, including, and beyond the sun: time, space, the sexes, the races, the environment, economics, politics, crime, education, the media, history, and science. In this expanded and updated edition (now more error-filled than ever), we see just how much the experts don't know. But the book also goes deeper, presenting a through-the-looking-glass chronicle of human knowledge: the story of what was and is so, as seen through the story of what we wanted to and did believe.
THE THINKERS, THE THOUGHTS, AND THE THEORIES YOU NEED TO KNOW TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD WE LIVE IN.
With A World of Ideas, you can get to the bottom of the big bang theory; find out where Freud's ideas were coming from, and where Einstein's might take us; demystify surrealism and structuralism, communism and capitalism. Prepared with the assistance of an academic board of leading scholars, this invaluable reference includes - Hundreds of entries, alphabetically arranged, with key words and concepts highlighted and cross-referenced--more than two thousand in all- A special emphasis on multicultural influences and contemporary thought
- A comprehensive index giving easy access to all essential terms and names A World of Ideas is an indispensable resource for the curious reader.
First published in 1988. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Wilson is one of a handful of book designers who brought the West Coast to the admiring notice of the world of typography. In 1983 he received a MacArthur Prize. This nice, practical, inexpensive reprint, with a new foreword by Sumner Stone, brings back into print a classic on layout, type, paper, printing, binding. Essential to any collection on the book. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.
