The Oxford Book of Death

Author: D. J. Enright
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199556520
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 351

Book Description
The inescapable reality of death has given rise to much of literature's most profound and moving work. D. J. Enright's wonderfully eclectic selection presents the words of poet and novelist, scientist and philosopher, mystic and sceptic. And alongside these 'professional' writers, he allows the voices of ordinary people to be heard; for this is a subject on which there are no real experts and wisdom lies in many unexpected places.

The Oxford Book of Death

Author: Dennis Joseph Enright
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Book Description
A book of death might seem a strange and dubious venture. A book for no one? Or, since the subject, the editor suggests, is 'of exceptionally common concern' - a book for everyone?

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death

Author: Ben Bradley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190271450
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 517

Book Description
This Handbook consists of 21 new essays on the nature and value of death, the relevance of the metaphysics of time and personal identity for questions about death, the desirability of immortality, and the wrongness of killing.

The Oxford Book of American Short Stories

Author: Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195092622
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 788

Book Description
This volume offers a survey of American short fiction in 59 tales that combine classic works with 'different, unexpected gems', which invite readers to explore a wealth of important pieces by women and minority writers. Authors include: Amy Tan, Alice Adams, David Leavitt and Tim O'Brien.

The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes

Author: John Gross
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199543410
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Book Description
In The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, master anthologist John Gross brings together a delectable smorgasbord of literary tales, offering striking new insight into some of the most important writers in history. Many of the anecdotes here are funny, others are touching, outrageous, sinister, inspiring, or downright weird. They show writers from Chaucer to Bob Dylan acting both unpredictably and deeply in character. The range is wide--this is a book which finds room for Milton and Shakespeare, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, Kurt Vonnegut and P. G. Wodehouse, Chinua Achebe and Salman Rushdie, James Baldwin and Tom Wolfe. It is also a book in which you can find out which great historian's face was once mistaken for a baby's bottom, which film star experienced a haunting encounter with Virginia Woolf not long before her death, and what Agatha Christie really thought of her popular character Hercule Poirot. It is in short an unrivalled collection of literary gossip offering intimate glimpses into the lives of authors ranging from Shakespeare to Philip Roth--a book not just for lovers of literature, but for anyone with a taste for the curiosities of human nature.

The Oxford Book of Exploration

Author: Robin Hanbury-Tenison
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0192805568
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 595

Book Description
Selected by Robin Hanbury-Tenison, whom the Sunday Times called the 'greatest explorer of the last twenty years', this is a comprehensive anthology of the writings of explorers through the ages, now fully revised and updated. The ultimate in travel writing, these are the words of those who changed the world through their pioneering search for new lands, new peoples, and new experiences. Divided into geographical sections, the book takes us to Asia with Vasco da Gama, Francis Younghusband, and Wilfred Thesiger, to the Americas with John Cabot, Sir Francis Drake, and Alexander Von Humboldt, to Africa with Dr David Livingstone and Mary Kingsley, to the Pacific with Ferdinand Magellan and James Cook, and to the Poles with Robert Peary and Wally Herbert. Driven by a desire to discover that transcends all other considerations, the vivid writings of these extraordinary people reveal what makes them go beyond the possible and earn the right to be known as explorers.

The Oxford Book of Villains

Author: John Mortimer
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780192141958
Category : Villains in literature.
Languages : en
Pages : 431

Book Description
Gathers selections from literature and history depicting both real and fictitious criminals, murderers, confidence men, hypocrites, traitors, spies, and tyrants

The Book of the Dead

Author: Muriel Rukeyser
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781946684219
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Written in response to the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster of 1931 in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, The Book of the Dead is an important part of West Virginia's cultural heritage and a powerful account of one of the worst industrial catastrophes in American history. The poems collected here investigate the roots of a tragedy that killed hundreds of workers, most of them African American. They are a rare engagement with the overlap between race and environment in Appalachia. Published for the first time alongside photographs by Nancy Naumburg, who accompanied Rukeyser to Gauley Bridge in 1936, this edition of The Book of the Dead includes an introduction by Catherine Venable Moore, whose writing on the topic has been anthologized in Best American Essays.

The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories

Author: Patricia Craig
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780192829689
Category : Detective and mystery stories, English
Languages : en
Pages : 554

Book Description
Essential reading for all armchair detectives, this collection of 33 classic whodunits is the cream of crime writing.

The Death of Expertise

Author: Tom Nichols
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190469439
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
Technology and increasing levels of education have exposed people to more information than ever before. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows everything: with only a quick trip through WebMD or Wikipedia, average citizens believe themselves to be on an equal intellectual footing with doctors and diplomats. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism. Tom Nichols' The Death of Expertise shows how this rejection of experts has occurred: the openness of the internet, the emergence of a customer satisfaction model in higher education, and the transformation of the news industry into a 24-hour entertainment machine, among other reasons. Paradoxically, the increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated public, has instead created an army of ill-informed and angry citizens who denounce intellectual achievement. When ordinary citizens believe that no one knows more than anyone else, democratic institutions themselves are in danger of falling either to populism or to technocracy or, in the worst case, a combination of both. An update to the 2017breakout hit, the paperback edition of The Death of Expertise provides a new foreword to cover the alarming exacerbation of these trends in the aftermath of Donald Trump's election. Judging from events on the ground since it first published, The Death of Expertise issues a warning about the stability and survival of modern democracy in the Information Age that is even more important today.