Facing Up

Author: Steven Weinberg
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674066405
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Book Description
The New York Times’s James Glanz has called Steven Weinberg “perhaps the world’s most authoritative proponent of the idea that physics is hurtling toward a ‘final theory,’ a complete explanation of nature’s particles and forces that will endure as the bedrock of all science forevermore. He is also a powerful writer of prose that can illuminate—and sting... He recently received the Lewis Thomas Prize, awarded to the researcher who best embodies ‘the scientist as poet.’” Both the brilliant scientist and the provocative writer are fully present in this book as Weinberg pursues his principal passions, theoretical physics and a deeper understanding of the culture, philosophy, history, and politics of science.Each of these essays, which span fifteen years, struggles in one way or another with the necessity of facing up to the discovery that the laws of nature are impersonal, with no hint of a special status for human beings. Defending the spirit of science against its cultural adversaries, these essays express a viewpoint that is reductionist, realist, and devoutly secular. Each is preceded by a new introduction that explains its provenance and, if necessary, brings it up to date. Together, they afford the general reader the unique pleasure of experiencing the superb sense, understanding, and knowledge of one of the most interesting and forceful scientific minds of our era.

Facing Up to Low Productivity Growth

Author: Adam S. Posen
Publisher: Peterson Institute for International Economics
ISBN: 0881327328
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 499

Book Description
Labor productivity growth in the United States and other advanced countries has slowed dramatically since the mid-2000s, a major factor in their economic stagnation and political turmoil. Economists have been debating the causes of the slowdown and possible remedies for some years. Unaddressed in this discussion is what happens if the slowdown is not reversed. In this volume, a dozen renowned scholars analyze the impact of sustained lower productivity growth on public finances, social protection, trade, capital flows, wages, inequality, and, ultimately, politics in the advanced industrial world. They conclude that slow productivity growth could lead to unpredictable and possibly dangerous new problems, aggravating inequality and increasing concentration of market power. Facing Up to Low Productivity Growth also proposes ways that countries can cope with these consequences.

The American Dream and the Public Schools

Author: Jennifer L. Hochschild
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199839689
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Book Description
The American Dream and the Public Schools examines issues that have excited and divided Americans for years, including desegregation, school funding, testing, vouchers, bilingual education, and ability grouping. While these are all separate problems, much of the contention over them comes down to the same thing--an apparent conflict between policies designed to promote each student's ability to succeed and those designed to insure the good of all students or the nation as a whole. The authors show how policies to promote individual success too often benefit only those already privileged by race or class, and often conflict with policies that are intended to benefit everyone. They propose a framework that builds on our nation's rapidly changing population in order to help Americans get past acrimonious debates about schooling. Their goal is to make public education work better so that all children can succeed.

Facing Up to Scarcity

Author: Barbara H. Fried
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192587099
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Book Description
Facing Up to Scarcity offers a powerful critique of the nonconsequentialist approaches that have been dominant in Anglophone moral and political thought over the last fifty years. In these essays Barbara H. Fried examines the leading schools of contemporary nonconsequentialist thought, including Rawlsianism, Kantianism, libertarianism, and social contractarianism. In the realm of moral philosophy, she argues that nonconsequentialist theories grounded in the sanctity of "individual reasons" cannot solve the most important problems taken to be within their domain. Those problems, which arise from irreducible conflicts among legitimate (and often identical) individual interests, can be resolved only through large-scale interpersonal trade-offs of the sort that nonconsequentialism foundationally rejects. In addition to scrutinizing the internal logic of nonconsequentialist thought, Fried considers the disastrous social consequences when nonconsequentialist intuitions are allowed to drive public policy. In the realm of political philosophy, she looks at the treatment of distributive justice in leading nonconsequentialist theories. Here one can design distributive schemes roughly along the lines of the outcomes favoured—but those outcomes are not logically entailed by the normative premises from which they are ostensibly derived, and some are extraordinarily strained interpretations of those premises. Fried concludes, as a result, that contemporary nonconsequentialist political philosophy has to date relied on weak justifications for some very strong conclusions.

Facing Up

Author: Bear Grylls
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 033051539X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Book Description
No one could fail to be gripped by his heartfelt excitement and emotion over what was the adventure of a lifetime' – Independent At the age of 23, a young challenger named Bear Grylls set out to defy nature's mightiest peak, Mount Everest. With the relentless drive to conquer and a heart weighed down by a past marred by a life-threatening accident, Grylls overcame the obstacles to become one of the youngest Britons to claim Everest's summit. The expedition, chronicled in Facing Up, was marked by uncompromising weather, debilitating fatigue, severe dehydration, and sudden illnesses. Yet, Grylls' determination never wavered, his spirit and humour pushing him through every obstacle in his path. Facing Up isn't just a narrative of a dangerous mountaineering adventure, but a testament to enduring friendships, unyielding faith, and resilience against impossible odds. Join Grylls in his Himalayan adventure, an all-consuming ride, from base camp to summit, that will leave you breathless and dare you to chase your own Everest.

Facing Up To Modernity

Author: Peter L. Berger
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Book Description
Concerns the growing problems the modernity brings including marriage, psychoanalysis, the secularization of religion, corruption of pornography, and more.

Facing Up to Change

Author: Georgia Brock
Publisher: FriesenPress
ISBN: 1460238311
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
An intricate novel about how changes in family dynamic can ignite the flame of personal reawakening. Gloria Beaton is a self-made woman of substance. Defined by her trailblazing spirit, she is shunned by the new influences who have overtaken her Ontario establishment family and tainted it with dysfunctionality. Having recently ended a loveless marriage, at forty-nine, she finds herself cultivating a dual career and developing a relationship with a mesmerizing man twelve years her junior, Canadian-born Raj Mukherjee. As her family's once burgeoning business flounders, Gloria is torn by having to make a painful decision: Should she once and for all embrace her own happiness, widening the divide between her and her kin? Or should she continue to protect her family's values and traditions, sacrificing her need to be true to herself? Loyalties are tested, roles shift, and the tables inevitably turn. Facing Up to Change shines a light on how inextricably and, sometimes, painfully family, money, and love are linked.

The Age of Apology

Author: Mark Gibney
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812240337
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Book Description
In The Age of Apology twenty-two law, politics, and human rights scholars explore the legal, political, social, historical, moral, religious, and anthropological aspects of Western apologies.

Whose Blues?

Author: Adam Gussow
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469660377
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 333

Book Description
Mamie Smith's pathbreaking 1920 recording of "Crazy Blues" set the pop music world on fire, inaugurating a new African American market for "race records." Not long after, such records also brought black blues performance to an expanding international audience. A century later, the mainstream blues world has transformed into a multicultural and transnational melting pot, taking the music far beyond the black southern world of its origins. But not everybody is happy about that. If there's "No black. No white. Just the blues," as one familiar meme suggests, why do some blues people hear such pronouncements as an aggressive attempt at cultural appropriation and an erasure of traumatic histories that lie deep in the heart of the music? Then again, if "blues is black music," as some performers and critics insist, what should we make of the vibrant global blues scene, with its all-comers mix of nationalities and ethnicities? In Whose Blues?, award-winning blues scholar and performer Adam Gussow confronts these challenging questions head-on. Using blues literature and history as a cultural anchor, Gussow defines, interprets, and makes sense of the blues for the new millennium. Drawing on the blues tradition's major writers including W. C. Handy, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Amiri Baraka, and grounded in his first-person knowledge of the blues performance scene, Gussow's thought-provoking book kickstarts a long overdue conversation.

Facing Up to Fatherhood

Author: Miranda Lee
Publisher: Harlequin
ISBN: 1459210948
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 185

Book Description
"I'm not the baby's father!" When a beautiful brunette wheeled a baby carriage into Dominic Hunter's office, he knew he could not have forgotten making love to her! But Tina was convinced that Dominic was Bonnie's father—even if he did insist on denying paternity—and she was determined to make this heartless seducer face up to fatherhood. Heartless? Even Dominic couldn't resist baby Bonnie, whether she was his or not. Seducer? Suddenly Dominic couldn't resist being that, either; never before had he wanted a woman—Tina—so much....