EGGHEAD CHOICE – Crack open for a hard boiled think

Crack open for a hard boiled think

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think, PHILOSOPHY - The love of wisdom

Life is more unpredictable than we are prepared to accept. In this brilliant book Nassim Nicholas Taleb (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_taleb and http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/) distils his idiosyncratic wisdom to demolish our illusions, contrasting the classical values of courage, elegance and erudition against modern philistinism and phoniness. Only by accepting what we don’t know, he shows, can we really see the world as […]

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The Nature and Destiny of Man by Reinhold Niebuhr

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think, SPIRIT MATTERS - Reaching for the Divine

The Nature and Destiny of Man (1943) issues a vigorous challenge to Western civilization to understand its roots in the faith of the Bible, particularly the Hebraic tradition. The growth, corruption, and purification of the important Western emphases on individuality are insightfully chronicled here. This book is arguably Reinhold Niebuhr’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhold_Niebuhr and http://niebuhrsociety.typepad.com/) most important work.

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The Romantic Generation by Charles Rosen

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think, REASONABLE TASTE - Aesthetics & Literary Criticism

What Charles Rosen’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Rosen) celebrated book The Classical Style (1971) did for music of the Classical period, this volume of 1995 brilliantly does for the Romantic era. An exhilarating exploration of the musical language, forms, and styles of the Romantic period, it captures the spirit that enlivened a generation of composers and musicians, and in doing so

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Syntactic Structures Noam Chomsky

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think

Noam Chomsky’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky) book Syntactic Structures (1957) was one of the first serious attempts on the part of a linguist to construct a comprehensive theory of language which may be understood in the same sense that a chemical or biological theory is understood by experts in those fields. It proved to be a seminal work in linguistics. It is

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The Proper Study of Mankind by Isaiah Berlin

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think, LIVING TOGETHER - Thoughts on Politics & Society

‘The Proper Study of Mankind is Man’ appears as a line in the poem ‘An Essay on Man‘ by Alexander Pope in 1734. Isaiah Berlin chooses this as a title for a collection of his essentially humanistic writings. Berlin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaiah_Berlin) was one of the leading thinkers of the last century and one of its finest writers.

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The Story of English by Robert McCrum

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think, REASONABLE TASTE - Aesthetics & Literary Criticism

Now revised, The Story of English (1986) by Robert McCrum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_McCrum) was the first book to tell the whole story of the English language for a popular audience. It presents a stimulating and comprehensive record of spoken and written English, from its Anglo-Saxon origins some two thousand years ago to the present day, when English is

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On Human Nature by Edward O. Wilson

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think, EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE - Science & Technology, PHILOSOPHY - The love of wisdom

Is there such a thing as human nature? Sartre denied it with his epithet that ‘existence precedes essence’. We are free to choose what we become, he argued. Indeed, in a memorable phrase ‘we are condemned to be free’. Of the opposite opinion are thinkers like Steven Pinker (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker) (Cf. The Blank Slate: The Modern

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