Steven Ray started reading The Book by Alan Watts
The Book by Alan Watts
At the root of human conflict is our fundamental misunderstanding of who we are. The illusion that we are isolated …
I’m interested in a multitude of things, including social justice, socialism, history, poetry, magical realism (fiction), capitalism, race, class struggle, wine, baseball, music…
So mostly non-fiction, though I read maybe two novels per year.
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93% complete! Steven Ray has read 14 of 15 books.
At the root of human conflict is our fundamental misunderstanding of who we are. The illusion that we are isolated …
In this age when so much is wrong with the world, Frédéric Gros seeks to convince us that by obeying others we disobey ourselves. Also, that our highest calling is to defend the community that we are a part of, our human community. By undertaking a habit of civil disobedience, we resist injustice. When we speak up for ourselves, we speak up for the whole of humanity.
He references people as diverse as Thoreau and Eichmann, Antigone and Kant, Foucault and la Boétie, finishing with Socrates and Plato. Describing the various ways we justify to ourselves the continuation of our docility, this obeisance to authority which we’ve practiced since childhood, he seeks avenues through which we can finally be true to ourselves.
I’d say he succeeds, if only we’ll take his lesson to heart.
The Motorcycle Diaries (Spanish: Diarios de motocicleta) is a posthumously published memoir of the Marxist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara. It …
The world is out of joint, so much so that disobeying should be an urgent act for everyone. In this …
A very entertaining read. I expected more talk of revolution, but instead got vivid descriptions of the scenes and people Ernesto and his friend Alberto, as they made their way from Buenos Aires to Chile and up the west coast of South America and on to Caracas, encountered on their trek. Still, there were seeds planted on that trip and comments of the injustices he saw.
I don't know if the tenor of the text was due to the translation or from his original writing, but it was a great story told in a casual, almost modern day tone. Very contemporary. Highly recommended.
The Motorcycle Diaries (Spanish: Diarios de motocicleta) is a posthumously published memoir of the Marxist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara. It …
The Outsider is the seminal work on alienation, creativity and the modern mind-set. First published over forty years ago, it …
Quite the study of the psyche of the Outsider in our society. The author delves into some of the major characters of modern literature, as well as the temperaments of various artists. I confess that I didn't always grasp what he was trying to communicate (and I hadn't read all of the works he referenced), but I learned a lot nonetheless.
Yeats once wrote of a poem, saying he had made it out of a mouthful of air. Burgess advances this …
The Motorcycle Diaries (Spanish: Diarios de motocicleta) is a posthumously published memoir of the Marxist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara. It …
"Acclaimed fantasy author China Mieville plunges us into the year the world was turned upside down The renowned fantasy and …