The Night Is Large: Collected Essays, 1938-1995
10 best books like The Night Is Large: Collected Essays, 1938-1995 (Martin Gardner): Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere, The Second Common Reader, The Thomas Paine Reader, Flesh in the Age of Reason: The Modern Foundations of Body and Soul, What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier, Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought, What are the Seven Wonders of the World?: And 100 Other Great Cultural Lists—Fully Explicated, Games People Play: Game Theory in Life, Business, and Beyond, Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, Reality Check: How Science Deniers Threaten Our Future
| Author | Christopher Hitchens |
| ISBN | 1859843832 |
A celebration of Percy Shelley’s assertion that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’, these thirty-plus essays on writers from Oscar Wilde to Salman Rushdie dispel the myth of politics as a stone tied to the neck of literature; Norman Podhoretz’s ‘bloody crossroads’....
| Author | Virginia Woolf |
| ISBN | 0156028166 |
3.5 stars
Last year I came across The Common Reader Vol. I at a Kinokuniya Bookstore in Bangkok and ordered Vol. II immediately. In fact, these famed two volumes have been published in various editions since 1932 and I've tried to buy them for a long time. Enticed by the simple title, I've since...
| Author | Thomas Paine |
| ISBN | 0140444963 |
This major collection demonstrates the extent to which Thomas Paine (1737—1809) was an inspiration to the Americans in their struggle for independence, a passionate supporter of the French Revolution and perhaps the outstanding English radical writer of his age. It contains all of Paine's key...
| Author | Roy Porter |
| ISBN | 0393326969 |
In this "readable and humane book" (Los Angeles Times Book Review), the late historian Roy Porter traces the course of man's philosophical journey from the superstitious, spiritually obsessed Dark Ages to our modern perspective, based on reason and grounded in the body. He demonstrates how the explosion...
| Author | James Gleick |
| ISBN | 0375421777 |
Here's some of what just happened: Millions of ordinary, sensible people came into possession of computers. These machines had wondrous powers, yet made unexpected demands on their owners. Telephones broke free of the chains that had shackled them to bedside tables and office desks. No one was out...
Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought
| Author | Louis A. Sass |
| ISBN | 0674541375 |
The similarities between madness and modernism are striking: defiance of authority, nihilism, extreme relativism, distortions of time, strange transformations of self, and much more. In this book, Louis Sass, a clinical psychologist, offers a new vision of schizophrenia, comparing it with the...
| Author | Peter D'Epiro |
| ISBN | 0385490623 |
Can you name... Newton's 3 laws of motion? The 4 horsemen of the Apocalypse? The 5 pillars of Islam? The 6 wives of Henry VIII? The 7 kinds of plane triangles? The 8 Beatitudes? If you're not sure about the answers to the above, this is the book for you. A compendium of 101 culturally significant particulars...
Games People Play: Game Theory in Life, Business, and Beyond
| Author | Scott P. Stevens |
| ISBN | 1629970107 |
Ever since modern game theory—the scientific study of interactive, rational decision making—achieved prominence in the mid-20th century, it has proven instrumental in helping us understand how and why we make decisions. Game theory plays a crucial role in our lives and provides startling...
| Author | Don Ross |
| ISBN | 0199276196 |
Every Thing Must Go argues that the only kind of metaphysics that can contribute to objective knowledge is one based specifically on contemporary science as it really is, and not on philosophers' a priori intuitions, common sense, or simplifications of science. In addition to showing how recent metaphysics...
| Author | Donald R. Prothero |
| ISBN | 0253010292 |
The battles over evolution, climate change, childhood vaccinations, and the causes of AIDS, alternative medicine, oil shortages, population growth, and the place of science in our country--all are reaching a fevered pitch. Many people and institutions have exerted enormous efforts to misrepresent...
| Author | Freeman Dyson |
| ISBN | 0060728892 |
Infinite in All Directions is a popularized science at its best. In Dyson's view, science and religion are two windows through which we can look out at the world around us.
The book is a revised version of a series of the Gifford Lectures under the title "In Praise of Diversity" given at Aberdeen,...
| Author | Rudy Rucker |
| ISBN | 1560258985 |
A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, goes the ancient saying. This concept is at the root of the computational worldview, which basically says that very complex systems — the world we live in — have their beginnings in simple mathematical equations. We've lately come to understand...
The Wizards of Armageddon
| Author | Fred Kaplan |
| ISBN | 0804718849 |
“An all-out nuclear war between Russia and the United States would be the worst catastrophe in history, a tragedy so huge it is difficult to comprehend. Even so, it would be far from the end of human life on earth. The dangers from nuclear weapons have been distorted and exaggerated, for varied reasons....
| Author | Chris McManus |
| ISBN | 0674009533 |
A labor of love and enthusiasm as well as deep scientific knowledge, Right Hand, Left Hand takes the reader on a trip through history, around the world, and into the cosmos, to explore the place of handedness in nature and culture. Chris McManus considers evidence from anthropology, particle physics,...
The Philosophy of Space and Time
| Author | Hans Reichenbach |
| ISBN | 0486604438 |
Hans Reichenbach, one of the twentieth century philosophers affiliated with the European movement of logical positivism, has an amazing gift to explain difficult physical and mathematical concepts in a language that the average reader understands. (Not to mention the highly informative and accessible...
| Author | Paul R. Gross |
| ISBN | 0801857074 |
With the emergence of "cultural studies" and the blurring of once-clear academic boundaries, scholars are turning to subjects far outside their traditional disciplines and areas of expertise. In Higher Superstition scientists Paul Gross and Norman Levitt raise serious questions about the growing...
Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy
| Author | Nick Bostrom |
| ISBN | 0415938589 |
Anthropic Bias explores how to reason when you suspect that your evidence is biased by "observation selection effects"--that is, evidence that has been filtered by the precondition that there be some suitably positioned observer to "have" the evidence. This conundrum--sometimes alluded to as...
| Author | Stephen Jay Gould |
| ISBN | 0609605410 |
In this new edition of Questioning the Millennium, best-selling author Stephen Jay Gould applies his wit and erudition to one of today's most pressing subjects: the significance of the millennium.
In 1950 at age eight, prompted by an issue of Life magazine marking the century's midpoint,...
| Author | Evan Thompson |
| ISBN | 0674025113 |
How is life related to the mind? The question has long confounded philosophers and scientists, and it is this so-called explanatory gap between biological life and consciousness that Evan Thompson explores in Mind in Life. Thompson draws upon sources as diverse as molecular biology, evolutionary...
| Author | Roberto Calasso |
| ISBN | 0375725431 |
Brilliant, inspired, and gloriously erudite, Literature and the Gods is the culmination of Roberto Calasso’s lifelong study of the gods in the human imagination. By uncovering the divine whisper that lies behind the best poetry and prose from across the centuries, Calasso gives us a renewed sense...
Perhaps more than any other scientist of our century, Edward O. Wilson has scrutinized animals in their natural settings, tweezing out the dynamics of their social organization, their relationship with their environments, and their behavior, not only for what it tells us about the animals themselves,...
| Author | Denis Diderot |
| ISBN | 1903083028 |
Истински ценна според мен е втората, полемичната част на книгата, в която барон Холбах с охладено от опита и разсъждението въображение пространно разсъждава...
| Author | Michael E. Wysession |
| ISBN | 1629972584 |
This is an important set of lectures. Professor Wysession is very enthusiastic and knowledgeable, but the lectures still felt to be a bit of a slog. The information is dense, the particulars of energy complicated, and the breadth of energy sources covered is extensive. From physics and geology, to...
Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy
| Author | Gwyneth Cravens |
| ISBN | 0307266567 |
I wholeheartedly agree with the statements made in this book. There are so many arguments for nuclear power and so few against that for an intelligent person, reading this book is almost an academic confirmation exercise. The fact that the author repeatedly invokes the theory of man-made global warming...
"Michael Shermer has given a lot of things a lot of thought. If your perceptions have ever rubbed you the wrong way, you'll find Science Friction fascinating." —Bill Nye, The Science Guy
A scientist pretends to be a psychic for a day—and fools everyone. An athlete discovers that good-luck...
