As an academic, I am always looking for books that chronicle the currents that underlie the surface waves of contemporary events. Mark Polizzotti's Why Surrealism Matters does a nice and well-written job of reviewing the intellectual origin of much of today's art and pop-culture fads. Surrealism arose primarily in poetry and painting, more so than in other art forms at any rate. I particularly like how Polizzotti organizes the material by theme to shows the present-day presence and relevance of surrealism. Hint: it involves much more than scratching one's head at Salvador Dali's fantastic canvasses.
An elegant consideration of the Surrealist movement as a global phenomenon and why it continues to resonate
"Mr. Polizzotti carefully balances the movement's aspirations and attainments against its flaws and contradictions, hoping to recuperate Surrealism's 'critical and imaginative essence' for the present. . . . The best concise account of the movement available."-Michael Saler, Wall Street Journal
Selected by Art in America as an "Essential Book About Surrealism"
Why does Surrealism continue to fascinate us a century after Andre Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism? How do we encounter Surrealism today? Mark Polizzotti vibrantly reframes the Surrealist movement in contemporary terms and…
Ibn Khaldun's book is a classic work of world history, written in the mid-1300s CE. It is part of a seven-volume work and the first volume (The Introduction, or Muqaddimah) is the best known and most read. Readers who wish to read an Islamic polymath may be pleasantly surprised by Ibn Khaldun's erudite mind and by how "modern" many of his discussions about politics, economy, and culture are. Several versions are available in translation. I read the Princeton University Press abridged version, 2015.
The Muqaddimah, often translated as "Introduction" or "Prolegomenon," is the most important Islamic history of the premodern world. Written by the great fourteenth-century Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), this monumental work established the foundations of several fields of knowledge, including the philosophy of history, sociology, ethnography, and economics. The first complete English translation, by the eminent Islamicist and interpreter of Arabic literature Franz Rosenthal, was published in three volumes in 1958 as part of the Bollingen Series and received immediate acclaim in the United States and abroad. A one-volume abridged version of Rosenthal's masterful translation first appeared in 1969.…
First published in 2014, Malik's book is an intellectual history of moral philosophy (ethics). It claims to be a global history but given the relative dearth of non-Western written material on which to draw, the "global" part inevitably is given short shrift and limited to a few chapters on Indian and Chinese thought. African and Latin American ethics are missing as well, as are the ethics of virtually all other "native" peoples. But this is a shortcoming less of Malik's book than that of the field of the history of ethics as a whole. That said, Malik provides a fairly lively and thoughtful romp through the history of thought in ethics. I particularly like his relatively frequent compare-and-contrast stops along the way so that readers are reminded from time to time of the way they already traveled as they progress through the book. Ample references provide opportunities to take this book as one's springboard and explore further on one's own. Why study the history of ethics at all? In part because all of us cling to one or the other version of ethics, even if we are not wholly aware of the intellectual origin of our cherished beliefs and practices. Here is an opportunity to (re)examine them.
Accessible, fascinating, and thought-provoking, this is the groundbreaking story of the global search for moral truths
In this remarkable book, Kenan Malik explores the history of moral thought as it has developed over three millennia, from Homer’s Greece to Mao’s China, from ancient India to modern America. It tells the stories of the great philosophers, and breathes life into their ideas, while also challenging many of our most cherished moral beliefs.
Engaging and provocative, The Quest for a Moral Compass confronts some of humanity’s deepest questions. Where do values come from? Is God necessary for moral guidance? Are there absolute…
Timeless economics explained in down-to-earth fashion. Between 1991 and 2004, the author, an acclaimed and now-retired business school economics professor in Augusta, Georgia, USA, wrote dozens of newspapers columns mostly for local and at times for national and international papers. Here is an edited collection of one hundred columns, each about 800 words in length, hence the book's title. Neither "liberal" nor "conservative," Brauer lays out economic reasoning in plain, simple prose, often in strikingly funny and memorable ways for Main Street, USA readers. The columns are an extension of the classroom to the local community and beyond, with examples covering an astonishing diversity of topics, from ecology to organ transplantation, from peace to war, from law to medicine, from playgrounds to philosophy, from interest rates to national debt, from crime to international trade, from currency speculation to biotech and automotive manufacturing, from Labor Day to highway road thicknesses, and from hurricanes to truth-telling in church. Economics leaves no topic unexamined. Each column packed in just 800 words of thought. How could you not want to read this work?
