en-US Sat, 25 Jan 2025 15:55:59 -0800 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 287510 Lenz, Georg Büchner’s visionary exploration of an 18th century playwright’s descent into madness, grew in part out of Alsatian pastor Johann Oberlin’s journal, which is translated here in its entirety for the first time. Lenz is a dispassionate account on the nervous system of a schizophrenic, perhaps the first third-person text ever written from the “inside� of insanity. At his death at the age of 23 in 1837, Georg Büchner also left behind Leonce and Lena, Woyzeck, and Danton’s Death—psychologically and politically acute plays well ahead of their time.

Richard Sieburth’s translations include Hölderlin’s Hymns and Fragments, Walter Benjamin’s Moscow Diary, Gérard de Nerval’s Selected Writings and Henri Michaux’s Emergences/Resurgences. His English edition of the Nerval writings won the 2000 PEN Book-of-the-Month-Club Translation Prize.]]> 200 Georg Büchner 0974968021 jesse 4 3.66 1835
author: Georg BĂĽchner
name: jesse
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1835
rating: 4
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]]> 62069739
Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize and the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature

A fictional examination of the lives of real-life scientists and thinkers whose discoveries resulted in moral consequences beyond their imagining.

When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction.Ěý

Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger—these are some of luminaries into whose troubled lives Benjamín Labatut thrusts the reader, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, alienate friends and lovers, descend into isolation and insanity. Some of their discoveries reshape human life for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear.

At a breakneck pace and with a wealth of disturbing detail, Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to tell the stories of the scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.]]> 193 BenjamĂ­n Labatut jesse 4 4.10 2020
author: BenjamĂ­n Labatut
name: jesse
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/29
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]]> 901182 200 Jonathan Boyarin 0816635978 jesse 4 4.06 2002
author: Jonathan Boyarin
name: jesse
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2002
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/06
date added: 2024/10/06
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Perfect for a guy like me who doesn't have the time to finish Unheroic Conduct
]]> 546008 252 Dimitri Gutas 0415061334 jesse 4 4.08 1998
author: Dimitri Gutas
name: jesse
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1998
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/06
date added: 2024/10/06
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]]> 11087233 256 Joshua Schreier 0813547946 jesse 4 4.40 2010
author: Joshua Schreier
name: jesse
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/14
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Good for what it is, which is a data-forward, quantitative treatment of a very social and complex history. Focuses on marriage and family law as the principal site of French civilizing efforts. Chapter on “synagogues and surveillance� was a hit.
]]> 7918722 176 Gillian Rose 1590173651 jesse 4 3.98 1995
author: Gillian Rose
name: jesse
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1995
rating: 4
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]]> 22941075 Minima Philologica brings together two essays by Werner Hamacher that are meant to revitalize philology as a practice beyond its restriction to the restoration of linguistic data and their meanings. In these two texts, "95 Theses on Philology" and "For--Philology," Hamacher propounds a notion of generalized philology that is equivalent to the real production of linguistic utterances, and indeed utterances not limited to predicative or even discursive statements. Philology, in speaking for language where no clear and distinct language is given, exhibits and exposes the structure of language in general. The first text, "95 Theses on Philology," challenges academic philology as well as other disciplines across the humanities and sciences that "use" language, assuming it to be a given entity and not an event. The theses develop what Hamacher calls the "idea of philology" by describing the constitution of its objects, its relation to knowledge, its suspension of consciousness, and its freedom for what remains always still to be said.

In "For--Philology," both speaking and writing, Hamacher argues, follow, discursively and non-discursively, the desire for language. Desire--phil�a--is the insatiable affect that drives the movement between utterances toward the next and the one after that. Desiring language--logos--means to respond to an alien utterance that precedes you, ignorant about where the path will lead, accepting loss and uncertainty, thinking in and through language and the lack of it, exceeding, returning, responding to others, cutting into and off what is to be said. In arguing this, Hamacher responds, directly or obliquely, to other philological thinkers such as Plato and Schlegel, Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Heidegger, as well as to poets such as Rene Char, Francis Ponge, Paul Celan, and Friedrich Holderlin. Taken together, the essays of Minima Philologica constitute a manifesto for a new understanding of linguistic existence that breaks new ways of attending to language and those who live by it.]]> 176 Werner Hamacher 0823265358 jesse 4 3.47 2015
author: Werner Hamacher
name: jesse
average rating: 3.47
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rating: 4
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]]> 60747366 Ěý
“A self-consciously radical statement that is both astute and joyous.”� Kirkus Reviews
Ěý
Today there are two seemingly mutually exclusive notions of what “the Jews� either a religion or a nation/ethnicity. The widespread conception is that the Jews were formerly either a religious community in exile or a nation based on Jewish ethnicity. The latter position is commonly known as Zionism, and all articulations of a political theory of Zionism are taken to be variations of that view.
Ěý
In this provocative book, based on his decades of study of the history of the Jews, Daniel Boyarin lays out the problematic aspects of this binary opposition and offers the outlines of a different—and very old—answer to the question of the identity of a diaspora nation. He aims to drive a wedge between the “nation� and the “state,� only very recently conjoined, and recover a robust sense of nationalism that does not involve sovereignty.]]> 200 Daniel Boyarin 0300251289 jesse 5 4.11
author: Daniel Boyarin
name: jesse
average rating: 4.11
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]]> 176028633 A timely, progressive collection of essays on the Jewish relationship to Zionism and exile.

What is exile? What is diaspora? What is Zionism? Jewish identity today has been shaped by prior generations� answers to these questions, and the future of Jewish life will depend on how we respond to them in our own time. In The Necessity of Essays from a Distance, celebrated rabbi and scholar Shaul Magid offers an essential contribution to this intergenerational process, inviting us to rethink our current moment through religious and political resources from the Jewish tradition.

On many levels, Zionism was conceived as an attempt to “end the exile� of the Jewish people, both politically and theologically. In a series of incisive essays, Magid challenges us to consider the price of diminishing or even erasing the exilic character of Jewish life. A thought-provoking work of political imagination, The Necessity of Exile reclaims exile as a positive stance for constructive Jewish engagement with Israel|Palestine, antisemitism, diaspora, and a broken world in need of repair.]]> 295 Shaul Magid jesse 4 4.18
author: Shaul Magid
name: jesse
average rating: 4.18
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]]> 385712 168 Jacques Derrida 0804725551 jesse 0 3.99 1995
author: Jacques Derrida
name: jesse
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1995
rating: 0
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]]> 24727558
For Boyarin, the Babylonian Talmud is a diasporist manifesto, a text that produces and defines the practices that constitute Jewish diasporic identity. Boyarin examines the ways the Babylonian Talmud imagines its own community and sense of homeland, and he shows how talmudic commentaries from the medieval and early modern periods also produce a doubled cultural identity. He links the ongoing productivity of this bifocal cultural vision to the nature of the book: as the physical text moved between different times and places, the methods of its study developed through contact with surrounding cultures. Ultimately, A Traveling Homeland envisions talmudic study as the center of a shared Jewish identity and a distinctive feature of the Jewish diaspora that defines it as a thing apart from other cultural migrations.]]> 192 Daniel Boyarin 0812247248 jesse 5 4.12 2015
author: Daniel Boyarin
name: jesse
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/09
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]]> 14847536 336 Christian K. Wedemeyer 0231530951 jesse 4 4.11 2012
author: Christian K. Wedemeyer
name: jesse
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2012
rating: 4
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]]> 477925 Ěý]]> 214 George Steiner 0300080956 jesse 4 4.12 1997
author: George Steiner
name: jesse
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1997
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/22
date added: 2023/11/22
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]]> 34551010 A scathing critique of the Left from an indigenous anti-colonial perspective.

Why am I writing this book? Because I share Gramsci's anxiety: “The old are dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.� The fascist monster, born in the entrails of Western modernity. Of course, the West is not what it used to be. Hence my question: what can we offer white people in exchange for their decline and for the wars that will ensue? There is only one answer: peace. There is only one way: revolutionary love.—from Whites, Jews, and Us

With Whites, Jews, and Us, Houria Bouteldja launches a scathing critique of the European Left from an indigenous anti-colonial perspective, reflecting on Frantz Fanon's political legacy, the republican pact, the Shoah, the creation of Israel, feminism, and the fate of postcolonial immigration in the West in the age of rising anti-immigrant populism. Drawing upon such prominent voices as James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and Jean Genet, she issues a polemical call for a militant anti-racism grounded in the concept of revolutionary love.

Such love will not come without significant discomfort for whites, and without necessary provocation. Bouteldja challenges widespread assumptions among the Left in the United States and Europe—that anti-Semitism plays any role in Arab–Israeli conflicts, for example, or that philo-Semitism doesn't in itself embody an oppressive position; that feminism or postcolonialist theory is free of colonialism; that integrationalism is a solution rather than a problem; that humanism can be against racism when its very function is to support the political-ideological apparatus that Bouteldja names the “white immune system.�

At this transitional moment in the history of the West—which is to say, at the moment of its decline—Bouteldja offers a call for political unity that demands the recognition that whiteness is not a genetic question: it is a matter of power, and it is high time to dismantle it.

This Semiotext(e)/Intervention series English-language edition includes a foreword by Cornel West.]]> 152 Houria Bouteldja 1635900034 jesse 5 3.96 2016
author: Houria Bouteldja
name: jesse
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2016
rating: 5
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]]> 4217857 204 Leonard Greenspoon PH D 1555401473 jesse 4 4.00 1987
author: Leonard Greenspoon PH D
name: jesse
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1987
rating: 4
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]]> 52129542 cuaderna v�a poetry from Christians to Jews. The research focuses on poems written by Jews in Castilian (Spanish) during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that illustrate a progressive mastery of cuaderna v�a poetry, which is the product of interaction in monastic schools between Jews and Christian clerics who created and cultivated this Castilian poetic form.]]> 104 Gregory B Kaplan 1641891475 jesse 0 5.00
author: Gregory B Kaplan
name: jesse
average rating: 5.00
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rating: 0
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]]> 9135913
In Sacred Trash, MacArthur-winning poet and translator Peter Cole and acclaimed essayist Adina Hoffman tell the story of the retrieval from an Egyptian geniza, or repository for worn-out texts, of the most vital cache of Jewish manuscripts ever discovered. This tale of buried scholarly treasure weaves together unforgettable portraits of Solomon Schechter and the other heroes of this drama with explorations of the medieval documents themselves—letters and poems, wills and marriage contracts, Bibles, money orders, fiery dissenting tracts, fashion-conscious trousseaux lists, prescriptions, petitions, and mysterious magical charms. Presenting a panoramic view of nine hundred years of vibrant Mediterranean Judaism, Hoffman and Cole bring modern readers into the heart of this little-known trove, whose contents have rightly been dubbed “the Living Sea Scrolls.� Part biography and part meditation on the supreme value the Jewish people has long placed on the written word, Sacred Trash is above all a gripping tale of adventure and redemption.]]> 286 Adina Hoffman 0805242589 jesse 0 4.04 2011
author: Adina Hoffman
name: jesse
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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]]> 822108 240 Louise GlĂĽck 0880014776 jesse 5 4.15 1990
author: Louise GlĂĽck
name: jesse
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1990
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/09/30
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]]> 730376 Vertigo, W. G. Sebald's first novel, never before translated into English, is perhaps his most amazing and certainly his most alarming. Sebald—the acknowledged master of memory's uncanniness—takes the painful pleasures of unknowability to new intensities in Vertigo.

Here in their first flowering are the signature elements of Sebald's hugely acclaimed novels The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn. An unnamed narrator, beset by nervous ailments, is again our guide on a hair-raising journey through the past and across Europe, amid restless literary ghosts—Kafka, Stendhal, Casanova. In four dizzying sections, the narrator plunges the reader into vertigo, into that "swimming of the head," as Webster's defines it: in other words, into that state so unsettling, so fascinating, and so "stunning and strange," as The New York Times Book Review declared about The Emigrants, that it is "like a dream you want to last forever."]]> 263 W.G. Sebald 0811214850 jesse 4 4.04 1990
author: W.G. Sebald
name: jesse
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1990
rating: 4
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date added: 2023/09/30
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]]> 36288026
"Biale . . .Ěýnot only captures Scholem’s scholarship, but also his personal involvement in the major issues, conflicts, tragedies, and triumphs of Jewish life during the last century. . . . [An] excellent new book."â€� Reform Judaism

Gershom Scholem (1897�1982) was perhaps the foremost Jewish intellectual of the twentieth century. Pioneering the study of Jewish mysticism as a legitimate academic discipline, he overturned the rationalist bias of his predecessors and revealed an extraordinary world of myth and messianism. In his youth, he rebelled against the assimilationist culture of his parents and embraced Zionism as the vehicle for the renewal of Judaism in a secular age. He moved to Palestine in 1923 and participated in the creation of the Hebrew University, where he was a towering figure for nearly seventy years.

David Biale traces Scholem’s tumultuous life of political activism and cultural criticism, including his falling-out with Hannah Arendt over the Eichmann trial. Mining a rich trove of diaries, letters, and other writings, Biale shows that his subject’s inner life illuminates his most important writings. Scholem emerges as a passionately engaged man of his times—a period that encompassed two world wars, the rise of Nazism, and the Holocaust.

About Jewish Lives:Ěý

Jewish Lives is a prizewinning series of interpretative biography designed to explore the many facets of Jewish identity. Individual volumes illuminate the imprint of Jewish figures upon literature, religion, philosophy, politics, cultural and economic life, and the arts and sciences. Subjects are paired with authors to elicit lively, deeply informed books that explore the range and depth of the Jewish experience from antiquity to the present.

In 2014, the Jewish Book Council named Jewish Lives the winner of its Jewish Book of the Year Award, the first series ever to receive this award.

More praise for Jewish Lives:

"Excellent"Ěý–New York Times

"Exemplary"Ěý–Wall Street Journal

"Distinguished"Ěý–New Yorker

"Superb"Ěý–The Guardian]]> 256 David Biale 0300215908 jesse 5 gershom-scholem 4.31
author: David Biale
name: jesse
average rating: 4.31
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]]> 343904 112 Gershom Scholem 0882145665 jesse 5 3.76 2006
author: Gershom Scholem
name: jesse
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2006
rating: 5
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]]> 324245
Deeply insightful and always moving, Saul Bellow's heartfelt novel is a journey through love and memory. It is brave, dark, and bleakly funny: an elegy to friendship and to lives well (or badly) lived.]]> 233 Saul Bellow 0141001763 jesse 4 3.63 2000
author: Saul Bellow
name: jesse
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2000
rating: 4
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]]> 57693639 Pure Colour is a galaxy of a novel: explosive, celestially bright, huge, and streaked with beauty. It is a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling, and an absurdly funny guide to the great (and terrible) things about being alive. Sheila Heti is a philosopher of modern experience, and she has reimagined what a book can hold.

Here we are, just living in the first draft of Creation, which was made by some great artist, who is now getting ready to tear it apart.

In this first draft of the world, a woman named Mira leaves home to study. There, she meets Annie, whose tremendous power opens Mira’s chest like a portal—to what, she doesn’t know. When Mira is older, her beloved father dies, and his spirit passes into her. Together, they become a leaf on a tree. But photosynthesis gets boring, and being alive is a problem that cannot be solved, even by a leaf. Eventually, Mira must remember the human world she’s left behind, including Annie, and choose whether or not to return.]]> 224 Sheila Heti 0374603944 jesse 3 3.46 2022
author: Sheila Heti
name: jesse
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/08/13
date added: 2023/08/13
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Gave this to a woman on the train when I was done and haven’t thought about it since
]]> 78150 157 Hildegard of Bingen 0824510275 jesse 4 3.96 1990
author: Hildegard of Bingen
name: jesse
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1990
rating: 4
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]]> 1858288
Grondin begins with brief overviews of the pre-nineteenth-century thinkers Philo, Origen, Augustine, Luther, Flacius, Dannhauer, Chladenius, Meier, Rambach, Ast, and Schlegel. Next he provides more extensive treatments of such major nineteenth-century figures as Schleiermacher, Böckh, Droysen, and Dilthey. There are full chapters devoted to Heidegger and Gadamer as well as shorter discussions of Betti, Habermas, and Derrida. Because he is the first to pay close attention to pre-Romantic figures, Grondin is able to show that the history of hermeneutics cannot be viewed as a gradual, steady progression in the direction of complete universalization. His book makes it clear that even in the early period, hermeneutic thinkers acknowledged a universal aspect in interpretation―that long before Schleiermacher, hermeneutics was philosophical and not merely practical. In revising and correcting the standard account, Grondin's book is not merely introductory but revisionary, suitable for beginners as well as advanced students in the field.]]> 252 Jean Grondin 0300070896 jesse 4 3.99 1991
author: Jean Grondin
name: jesse
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1991
rating: 4
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]]> 345768
Previous scholars have occasionally noted the various phenomena in isolation from each other and have sometimes applied modern medical or psychological theories to them. Using materials based on saints' lives and the religious and mystical writings of medieval women and men, Caroline Walker Bynum uncovers the pattern lying behind these aspects of women's religiosity and behind the fascination men and women felt for such miracles and devotional practices. She argues that food lies at the heart of much of women's piety. Women renounced ordinary food through fasting in order to prepare for receiving extraordinary food in the eucharist. They also offered themselves as food in miracles of feeding and bodily manipulation.

Providing both functionalist and phenomenological explanations, Bynum explores the ways in which food practices enabled women to exert control within the family and to define their religious vocations. She also describes what women meant by seeing their own bodies and God's body as food and what men meant when they too associated women with food and flesh. The author's interpretation of women's piety offers a new view of the nature of medieval asceticism and, drawing upon both anthropology and feminist theory, she illuminates the distinctive features of women's use of symbols. Rejecting presentist interpretations of women as exploited or masochistic, she shows the power and creativity of women's writing and women's lives.]]> 499 Caroline Walker Bynum 0520063295 jesse 5 4.20 1987
author: Caroline Walker Bynum
name: jesse
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1987
rating: 5
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]]> 1109536

In the visionary experience, as Wolfson describes it, imagination serves a primary function, transmuting sensory data and rational concepts into symbols of those things beyond sense and reason. In this view, the experience of a vision is inseparable from the process of interpretation. Fundamentally challenging the conventional distinction between experience and exegesis, revelation and interpretation, Wolfson argues that for the mystics themselves, the study of texts occasioned a visual experience of the divine located in the imagination of the mystical interpreter. Thus he shows how Jewish mystics preserved the invisible transcendence of God without doing away with the visual dimension of belief.]]> 464 Elliot R. Wolfson 0691017220 jesse 5 4.46 1994
author: Elliot R. Wolfson
name: jesse
average rating: 4.46
book published: 1994
rating: 5
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]]> 437563 200 Martin Heidegger 0060638591 jesse 5 4.09 1959
author: Martin Heidegger
name: jesse
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1959
rating: 5
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]]> 85828 A formidable and influential work, Language and Death sheds a highly original light on issues central to Continental philosophy, literary theory, deconstruction, hermeneutics, and speech-act theory. Focusing especially on the incompatible philosophical systems of Hegel and Heidegger within the space of negativity, Giorgio Agamben offers a rigorous reading of numerous philosophical and poetic works to examine how these issues have been traditionally explored. Agamben argues that the human being is not just “speaking� and “mortal� but irreducibly “social� and “ethical.�

Giorgio Agamben teaches philosophy at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris and at the University of Macerata in Italy. He is the author of Means without End (2000), Stanzas (1993), and The Coming Community (1993), all published by the University of Minnesota Press.

Karen E. Pinkus is professor of French and Italian at the University of Southern California.

Michael Hardt is professor of literature and romance studies at Duke University.]]> 136 Giorgio Agamben 0816649235 jesse 5 4.14 1982
author: Giorgio Agamben
name: jesse
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1982
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/06/21
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My favorite Agamben, next to End of the Poem
]]> 38749549 234 Daniel Boyarin 0813571626 jesse 5 4.07
author: Daniel Boyarin
name: jesse
average rating: 4.07
book published:
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/06/20
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]]> 571119 Ěý
In the whole of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, there is no single treatise more deeply revered or widely practiced thanĚý A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life . Composed in the eighth century by the Indian BodhisattvaĚýSantideva, it became an instant classic in the curricula of the Buddhist monastic universities of India, and its renown has grown ever since.ĚýSantidevaĚýpresents methods to harmonize one's life with the Bodhisattva ideal and inspires the reader to cultivate the perfections of the generosity, ethics, patience, zeal, meditative concentration, and wisdom.]]> 152 ĹšÄĺ˛ÔłŮľ±»ĺ±đ±ą˛ą 1559390611 jesse 5 4.31 700
author: ĹšÄĺ˛ÔłŮľ±»ĺ±đ±ą˛ą
name: jesse
average rating: 4.31
book published: 700
rating: 5
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]]> 31939475
Taste, Agamben argues, is a category that has much to reveal to the contemporary world. Taking a step into theĚýhistoryĚýof philosophy and reaching toĚýthe very origins of aesthetics, Agamben critically recovers the roots of one of Western culture’s cardinal concepts.ĚýAgambenĚýis the rare writer whose ideas and works have a broad appeal across many fields, and withĚý Taste Ěýhe turns his critical eye to the realm of Western art and aesthetic practice.ĚýThis volume will not only engage the author’s devoted fans in philosophy, sociology, and literary criticism, but also his growing audience among art theorists and historians.
Ěý]]> 96 Giorgio Agamben 085742436X jesse 5 3.88 1979
author: Giorgio Agamben
name: jesse
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1979
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/06/18
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]]> 867915 352 Gil Anidjar 0804741212 jesse 4 3.44 2002
author: Gil Anidjar
name: jesse
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2002
rating: 4
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date added: 2023/06/18
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]]> 62039276 An entertaining account of the philosophy and technology of hacking--and why we all need to understand it.

It's a signal paradox of our times that we live in an information society but do not know how it works. And without understanding how our information is stored, used, and protected, we are vulnerable to having it exploited. In Fancy Bear Goes Phishing, Scott J. Shapiro draws on his popular Yale University class about hacking to expose the secrets of the digital age. With lucidity and wit, he establishes that cybercrime has less to do with defective programming than with the faulty wiring of our psyches and society. And because hacking is a human-interest story, he tells the fascinating tales of perpetrators, including Robert Morris Jr., the graduate student who accidentally crashed the internet in the 1980s, and the Bulgarian "Dark Avenger," who invented the first mutating computer-virus engine. We also meet a sixteen-year-old from South Boston who took control of Paris Hilton's cell phone, the Russian intelligence officers who sought to take control of a US election, and others.

In telling their stories, Shapiro exposes the hackers' tool kits and gives fresh answers to vital questions: Why is the internet so vulnerable? What can we do in response? Combining the philosophical adventure of G�del, Escher, Bach with dramatic true-crime narrative, the result is a lively and original account of the future of hacking, espionage, and war, and of how to live in an era of cybercrime.

Includes black-and-white images]]> 420 Scott J. Shapiro 0374601178 jesse 5 3.92 2023
author: Scott J. Shapiro
name: jesse
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
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review:
If you read one book this year make it Professor Shapiro’s latest. Erudite, gripping, and thoroughly enjoyable � this is probably the best introduction to the critically important field of cybersecurity in print right now.
]]> 517943
There were no characteristics or features that could be described as uniquely Jewish or Christian in late antiquity, Boyarin argues. Rather, Jesus-following Jews and Jews who did not follow Jesus lived on a cultural map in which beliefs, such as that in a second divine being, and practices, such as keeping kosher or maintaining the Sabbath, were widely and variably distributed. The ultimate distinctions between Judaism and Christianity were imposed from above by "border-makers," heresiologists anxious to construct a discrete identity for Christianity. By defining some beliefs and practices as Christian and others as Jewish or heretical, they moved ideas, behaviors, and people to one side or another of an artificial border—and, Boyarin significantly contends, invented the very notion of religion.]]> 392 Daniel Boyarin 0812219864 jesse 0 4.16 2004
author: Daniel Boyarin
name: jesse
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/06/12
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]]> 3778173 336 Moshe Idel 0812241304 jesse 3 gershom-scholem 3.89 2008
author: Moshe Idel
name: jesse
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at: 2023/06/07
date added: 2023/06/07
shelves: gershom-scholem
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]]> 5622013 343 Gregory Vlastos 0268015287 jesse 3 4.00
author: Gregory Vlastos
name: jesse
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2023/06/03
date added: 2023/06/03
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]]> 6415189 256 Steven Runciman jesse 0 4.00 1933
author: Steven Runciman
name: jesse
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1933
rating: 0
read at: 2023/05/30
date added: 2023/05/30
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]]> 146738
The Autumn of the Middle Ages is Johan Huizinga's classic portrait of life, thought, and art in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century France and the Netherlands. Few who have read this book in English realize that The Waning of the Middle Ages, the only previous translation, is vastly different from the original Dutch, and incompatible will all other European-language translations.

For Huizinga, the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century marked not the birth of a dramatically new era in history—the Renaissance—but the fullest, ripest phase of medieval life and thought. However, his work was criticized both at home and in Europe for being "old-fashioned" and "too literary" when The Waning of the Middle Ages was first published in 1919. In the 1924 translation, Fritz Hopman adapted, reduced and altered the Dutch edition—softening Huizinga's passionate arguments, dulling his nuances, and eliminating theoretical passages. He dropped many passages Huizinga had quoted in their original old French. Additionally, chapters were rearranged, all references were dropped, and mistranslations were introduced.

This translation corrects such errors, recreating the second Dutch edition which represents Huizinga's thinking at its most important stage. Everything that was dropped or rearranged has been restored. Prose quotations appear in French, with translations preprinted at the bottom of the page, mistranslations have been corrected.

"The advantages of the new translation are so many. . . . It is one of the greatest, as well as one of the most enthralling, historical classics of the twentieth century, and everyone will surely want to read it in the form that was obviously intended by the author." —Francis Haskell, New York Review of Books

"A once pathbreaking piece of historical interpretation. . . . This new translation will no doubt bring Huizinga and his pioneering work back into the discussion of historical interpretation." —Rosamond McKitterick, New York Times Book Review]]> 467 Johan Huizinga 0226359921 jesse 5 4.03 1919
author: Johan Huizinga
name: jesse
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1919
rating: 5
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]]> 12916 Aeneid to honour the emperor Augustus by praising Aeneas - Augustus' legendary ancestor. As a patriotic epic imitating Homer, the Aeneid also set out to provide Rome with a literature equal to that of Greece. It tells of Aeneas, survivor of the sack of Troy, and of his seven-year journey: to Cartage, where he fell tragically in love with Queen Dido; then to the underworld, in the company of the Sibyl of Cumae; and finally to Italy, where he founded Rome. It is a story of defeat and exile, of love and war, hailed by Tennyson as 'the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man'.

David West's acclaimed prose translation is accompanied by an updated introduction, including a new discussion of each of the twelve books of the Aeneid.]]> 297 Virgil 0140449329 jesse 5 3.79 -19
author: Virgil
name: jesse
average rating: 3.79
book published: -19
rating: 5
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]]> 1382866 559 Jane Ellen Harrison 0850362296 jesse 4 4.36 1963
author: Jane Ellen Harrison
name: jesse
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1963
rating: 4
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]]> 97743 178 Sigmund Freud 0394700147 jesse 2 3.70 1939
author: Sigmund Freud
name: jesse
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1939
rating: 2
read at: 2023/05/13
date added: 2023/05/13
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Added an extra star bc there are some parts that hit
]]> 706554 The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud under the general editorship of James Strachey.


Freud approved the overall editorial plan, specific renderings of key words and phrases, and the addition of valuable notes, from bibliographical and explanatory. Many of the translations were done by Strachey himself; the rest were prepared under his supervision. The result was to place the Standard Edition in a position of unquestioned supremacy over all other existing versions.Newly designed in a uniform format, each new paperback in the Standard Edition opens with a biographical essay on Freud's life and work —along with a note on the individual volume—by Peter Gay, Sterling Professor of History at Yale.]]> 92 Sigmund Freud 0393007693 jesse 5 3.78 1920
author: Sigmund Freud
name: jesse
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1920
rating: 5
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]]> 10519409 176 H. Outram Evennett 0521072875 jesse 0 4.25 1968
author: H. Outram Evennett
name: jesse
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1968
rating: 0
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]]> 4161267 The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche expounds on the origins of Greek tragedy and its relevance to the German culture of its time. He declares it to be the expression of a culture which has achieved a delicate but powerful balance between Dionysian insight into the chaos and suffering which underlies all existence and the discipline and clarity of rational Apollonian form. In order to promote a return to these values, Nietzsche critiques complacent rationalism of late nineteenth-century German culture and makes an impassioned plea for the regenerative potential of the music of Wagner. A wide ranging discussion of the nature of art, science, and religion, The Birth of Tragedy's argument raises important questions about the problematic nature of cultural origins which are still valid today.
About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.]]> 118 Friedrich Nietzsche 0199540144 jesse 3 ugh 3.91 1871
author: Friedrich Nietzsche
name: jesse
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1871
rating: 3
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ugh
]]> 168214 Satyricon is the most celebrated prose work to have survived from the ancient world. It can be described as the first realistic novel, the father of the picaresque genre. It recounts the sleazy progress of a pair of literate scholars as they wander through the cities of the southern Mediterranean in the age of Nero, encountering en route type-figures whom the author wishes to satirize. P.G. Walsh captures the spirit of the original in this new and lively translation. His introduction and detailed notes provide the reader with a comprehensive guide to the meanings and intentions of the story and the later history of its literary influence.]]> 272 Petronius 0192839527 jesse 0 3.83 60
author: Petronius
name: jesse
average rating: 3.83
book published: 60
rating: 0
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]]> 271114 290 Richard William Southern 0300002300 jesse 5 4.02 1953
author: Richard William Southern
name: jesse
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1953
rating: 5
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]]> 138380
Exploring the question of what exactly makes good people good, Protagoras and Meno are two of the most enjoyable and accessible of all of Plato's dialogues. Widely regarded as his finest dramatic work, the Protagoras, set during the golden age of Pericles, pits a youthful Socrates against the revered sophist Protagoras, whose brilliance and humanity make him one the most interesting and likeable of Socrates' philosophical opponents, and turns their encounter into a genuine and lively battle of minds. The Meno sees an older but ever ironic Socrates humbling a proud young aristocrat as they search for a clear understanding of what it is to be a good man, and setting out the startling idea that all human learning may be the recovery of knowledge already possessed by our immortal souls.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700Ěýtitles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust theĚýseries to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-dateĚýtranslations by award-winning translators.]]> 166 Plato 0140449035 jesse 0 4.06 -390
author: Plato
name: jesse
average rating: 4.06
book published: -390
rating: 0
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]]> 73708614 216 Julian Baldick 0857725807 jesse 5 5.00 1989
author: Julian Baldick
name: jesse
average rating: 5.00
book published: 1989
rating: 5
read at: 2023/04/29
date added: 2023/04/29
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]]> 822730 The Wretched of the Earth is considered by many to be one of the canonical books on the worldwide black liberation struggles of the 1960s. Within a Marxist framework, using a cutting and nonsentimental writing style, Fanon draws upon his horrific experiences working in Algeria during its war of independence against France. He addresses the role of violence in decolonization and the challenges of political organization and the class collisions and questions of cultural hegemony in the creation and maintenance of a new country's national consciousness. As Fanon eloquently writes, "[T]he unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps."
Although socialism has seemingly collapsed in the years since Fanon's work was first published, there is much in his look into the political, racial, and social psyche of the ever-emerging Third World that still rings true at the cusp of a new century.--Eugene Holley, Jr.]]> 256 Frantz Fanon 0141186542 jesse 5 4.28 1961
author: Frantz Fanon
name: jesse
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1961
rating: 5
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]]> 13270 'What is poetry, how many kinds of it are there, and what are their specific effects?'

Aristotle's Poetics is the most influential book on poetry ever written. A founding text of European aesthetics and literary criticism, from it stems much of our modern understanding of the creation and impact of imaginative writing, including poetry, drama, and fiction. For Aristotle, the art of representation conveys universal truths which we can appreciate more easily than the lessons of history or philosophy. In his short treatise Aristotle discusses the origins of poetry and its early development, the nature of tragedy and plot, and offers practical advice to playwrights.]]> 144 Aristotle 0140446362 jesse 0 3.84 -335
author: Aristotle
name: jesse
average rating: 3.84
book published: -335
rating: 0
read at: 2023/04/19
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]]> 10137362 Bruno Bettelheim jesse 2 fraternal-cults 3.50 1954
author: Bruno Bettelheim
name: jesse
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1954
rating: 2
read at: 2023/04/09
date added: 2023/04/16
shelves: fraternal-cults
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]]> 277635 160 Georges Duby 039475154X jesse 4 3.82 1976
author: Georges Duby
name: jesse
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1976
rating: 4
read at: 2023/04/15
date added: 2023/04/15
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]]> 357636 127 Sigmund Freud 0393301583 jesse 0 3.79 1930
author: Sigmund Freud
name: jesse
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1930
rating: 0
read at: 2023/04/15
date added: 2023/04/15
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]]> 531581 452 Edmond Jabès 0819562483 jesse 5 4.65 1963
author: Edmond Jabès
name: jesse
average rating: 4.65
book published: 1963
rating: 5
read at: 2023/04/15
date added: 2023/04/15
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]]> 360882 144 Plato 0872202208 jesse 0 3.98 -370
author: Plato
name: jesse
average rating: 3.98
book published: -370
rating: 0
read at: 2023/04/12
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]]> 1717 After Ovid (also Faber) was published in 1995, Hughes's three contributions to the collective effort were nominated by most critics as outstanding. He had shown that rare translator's gift for providing not just an accurate account of the original, but one so thoroughly imbued with his own qualities that it was as if Latin and English poet were somehow the same person. Tales from Ovid, which went on to win the Whitbread Prize for Poetry, continued the project of recreation with 24 passages, including the stories of Phaeton, Actaeon, Echo and Narcissus, Procne, Midas and Pyramus and Thisbe. In them, Hughes's supreme narrative and poetic skills combine to produce a book that stands, alongside his Crow and Gaudete, as an inspired addition to the myth-making of our time.]]> 264 Ovid 0571191037 jesse 5 true love 4.40 1997
author: Ovid
name: jesse
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1997
rating: 5
read at: 2023/04/08
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true love
]]> 18136439 Jarava Lal Mehta jesse 5 4.17 1971
author: Jarava Lal Mehta
name: jesse
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1971
rating: 5
read at: 2023/04/08
date added: 2023/04/08
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]]> 3509525 ÁŞPsychoanalysis is dead!â€� Again and again this obituary is pronounced, with ever-increasing conviction in newspapers and scholarly journals alike. But the ghost of Freud and his thought continues to haunt those who would seal the grave. The Legend of Freud shows why psychoanalysis has remained uncanny, not just for its enemies but for its advocates and practitioners as well—and why it continues to fascinate us. For psychoanalysis is not just a theory of psychic conflict: it is a thought in conflict with itself. Often violent, the conflicts of psychoanalysis are most productive where they remain unresolved, thus producing a text that must be read: deciphered, interpreted, rewritten. Psychoanalysis: legenda est.

Review

ÁŞThe Legend of Freud is a fine example of what can be done with Freud's texts when philosophical and literary approaches converge, and you leave the couch in the other room. . . . Like Lacan and Derrida, Weber doesn’t so much explain or interpret Freud as engage him, performing what Freud would have called an Auseinandersetzung, a discussion or argument that’s also a taking apart, a deconstruction. . . . Deconstruction has picked up a bad name, especially in the minds of those who don’t understand it; but this wouldn’t be the case if there were more books like Weber’s. The Legend of Freud is the best deconstructive work I’ve seen lately, and the best response to Freud; it merits close attention from anyone who wants a challenge, not merely a guide to what’s right and wrong. . . . Weber is brilliantly imaginative, respectful of his subject and his readers, and productive of new ideas.â€�

—Village Voice Literary Supplement

]]> 280 Samuel Weber 0804731209 jesse 3 3.40 1982
author: Samuel Weber
name: jesse
average rating: 3.40
book published: 1982
rating: 3
read at: 2023/04/04
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]]> 789853
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700Ěýtitles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust theĚýseries to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-dateĚýtranslations by award-winning translators.]]> 144 Virgil 014044419X jesse 5 3.90 -39
author: Virgil
name: jesse
average rating: 3.90
book published: -39
rating: 5
read at: 2023/04/02
date added: 2023/04/02
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]]> 6235075
A detailed and challenging reading of work by Lacan and his associates on femininity reveals its reliance upon a virulently sexist discourse and upon an iconography derived from surrealism. The view that Lacanian psychoanalysis has a positive contribution to make to feminism and to theories of gender and sexual difference is contested. As well as providing a new and provocative reading of Lacan’s work, Lacan in Contexts Ěýis an important contribution to psychoanalytic history and to the history of French intellectual life.]]> 336 David Macey 0860919420 jesse 5 4.20 1988
author: David Macey
name: jesse
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1988
rating: 5
read at: 2023/04/01
date added: 2023/04/01
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Of course the most lucid English biography of Lacan would be written by an anti-Lacanian. Macey's very curmudgeonly dry anglo sensibilities provide a lot of stability and comfort. Chapters on surrealism and feminism were excellent.
]]> 118288 On Beauty and Being Just Elaine Scarry not only defends beauty from the political arguments against it but also argues that beauty does indeed press us toward a greater concern for justice. Taking inspiration from writers and thinkers as diverse as Homer, Plato, Marcel Proust, Simone Weil, and Iris Murdoch as well as her own experiences, Scarry offers up an elegant, passionate manifesto for the revival of beauty in our intellectual work as well as our homes, museums, and classrooms.

Scarry argues that our responses to beauty are perceptual events of profound significance for the individual and for society. Presenting us with a rare and exceptional opportunity to witness fairness, beauty assists us in our attention to justice. The beautiful object renders fairness, an abstract concept, concrete by making it directly available to our sensory perceptions. With its direct appeal to the senses, beauty stops us, transfixes us, fills us with a surfeit of aliveness. In so doing, it takes the individual away from the center of his or her self-preoccupation and thus prompts a distribution of attention outward toward others and, ultimately, she contends, toward ethical fairness.

Scarry, author of the landmark The Body in Pain and one of our bravest and most creative thinkers, offers us here philosophical critique written with clarity and conviction as well as a passionate plea that we change the way we think about beauty.]]> 144 Elaine Scarry 0691089590 jesse 5 3.65 1999
author: Elaine Scarry
name: jesse
average rating: 3.65
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at: 2023/03/28
date added: 2023/03/28
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Finally something on the beauty-morality equation that doesn't get weirdly right-wing about it
]]> 329760 192 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi 0300057563 jesse 5 4.07 1991
author: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi
name: jesse
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1991
rating: 5
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]]> 153356 108 Hélène Cixous 0804737959 jesse 5 4.20 1998
author: Hélène Cixous
name: jesse
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1998
rating: 5
read at: 2023/03/24
date added: 2023/03/24
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]]> 179617 296 Jean Leclercq 0823204073 jesse 5 4.31 1960
author: Jean Leclercq
name: jesse
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1960
rating: 5
read at: 2023/03/23
date added: 2023/03/23
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]]> 53244193
Dream and reality overlap in Divorcing, a book in which divorcing is not just a matter of marital collapse but names a rift that runs right through the inner and outer worlds of Sophie Blind, its brilliant but desperate protagonist. Can the rift be mended? Perhaps in the form of a novel, one that goes back from present-day New York to Sophie's childhood in pre-World War II Budapest, that revisits the divorce between her Freudian father and her fickle mother, and finds a place for a host of further tensions and contradictions of her life now. The question that haunts Divorcing, however, is whether any novel can be fleet and bitter and true and light enough to gather up all the darkness of a given life.

Susan Taubes's startlingly original novel was published in 1969 but largely ignored; after the author's tragic early death, it was forgotten. Its republication presents a chance to rediscover a dazzlingly intense and inventive writer whose work in many ways anticipates the fragmentary, glancing, lyrical novels that Renata Adler and Elizabeth Hardwick would write in the 1970s.]]> 288 Susan Taubes jesse 4 3.70 1969
author: Susan Taubes
name: jesse
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1969
rating: 4
read at: 2023/03/23
date added: 2023/03/23
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come because she was married to Jacob Taubes, stay for the depiction of ancien regime Jewish intellectual life
]]> 139248
"Judaic mythos, Freudian psychoanalysis, and e-mail all get fused into another staggeringly dense, brilliant slab of scholarship and suggestion."� The Guardian

"[Derrida] convincingly argues that, although the archive is a public entity, it nevertheless is the repository of the private and personal, including even intimate details."� Choice

"Beautifully written and clear."—Jeremy Barris, Philosophy in Review

"Translator Prenowitz has managed valiantly to bring into English a difficult but inspiring text that relies on Greek, German, and their translations into French."� Library Journal]]> 128 Jacques Derrida 0226143678 jesse 4 3.80 1995
author: Jacques Derrida
name: jesse
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1995
rating: 4
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]]> 1355242 Charles Homer Haskins 0801490154 jesse 4 3.70 1923
author: Charles Homer Haskins
name: jesse
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1923
rating: 4
read at: 2023/03/05
date added: 2023/03/05
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]]> 2080337 192 Christina Howells 0745611680 jesse 3 3.67 1991
author: Christina Howells
name: jesse
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1991
rating: 3
read at: 2023/03/04
date added: 2023/03/04
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]]> 564166 266 Daniel Boyarin 0804737045 jesse 4 3.58 1999
author: Daniel Boyarin
name: jesse
average rating: 3.58
book published: 1999
rating: 4
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]]> 29777192 Paris Review has called 'a literary institution', explores the ancient texts known as the Vedas. Little is known about the Vedic people who lived more than three thousand years ago in northern India: they left behind almost no objects, images, ruins. Only a 'Parthenon of words' remains: verses and formulations suggesting a daring understanding of life.

'If the Vedic people had been asked why they did not build cities,' writes Calasso, 'they could have replied: we did not seek power, but rapture.' This is the ardor of the Vedic world, a burning intensity that is always present, both in the mind and in the cosmos. With his signature erudition and profound sense of the past, Calasso explores the enigmatic web of ritual and myth that define the Vedas. Often at odds with modern thought, he shows how these texts illuminate the nature of consciousness more than neuroscientists have been able to offer us up to now.]]> 432 Roberto Calasso 1846145074 jesse 5 4.60 2010
author: Roberto Calasso
name: jesse
average rating: 4.60
book published: 2010
rating: 5
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]]> 36722683 192 Rebecca Comay 0262535351 jesse 4 4.31
author: Rebecca Comay
name: jesse
average rating: 4.31
book published:
rating: 4
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]]> 4670919 Mystical Bodies, Mystical Meals is the first book-length study of mystical eating practices and experiences in the kabbalah. Focusing on the Jewish mystical literature of late-thirteenth-century Spain, author Joel Hecker analyzes the ways in which the Zohar and other contemporaneous literature represent mystical attainment in their homilies about eating. What emerges is not only consideration of eating practices but, more broadly, the effects such practices and experiences have on the bodies of its practitioners.

Using anthropology, sociology, ritual studies, and gender theory, Hecker accounts for the internal topography of the body as imaginatively conceived by kabbalists. For these mystics, the physical body interacts with the material world to effect transformations within themselves and within the Divinity. The kabbalists experience the ideal body as one of fullness, one whose boundaries allow for the intake of divine light and power, and for the outward overflow of fruitfulness and generosity; at the same time, the body retains sufficient integrity to confer a sense of completeness, as the perfect symbol for the Divinity itself.

Nourishment imagery is used throughout the kabbalah as a metaphor signifying the flow of divine blessing from the upper worlds to the lower, from masculine to feminine, and from Israel to the Godhead. The body's spiritual continuity allows for unions between the kabbalistic devotee and his food, table, chair, and wine and is exemplified in the practices and experiences surrounding the consumption of food; this continuity is also applicable to other aspects of embodiment, such as the kabbalist's union with his fellow man. Mystical Bodies, Mystical Meals underscores the homosocial quality of the kabbalistic fraternity, in which gendered hierarchies of master and disciple are linked to the imagery and dynamics of nourishment and sexuality. Bringing this entire spectrum into focus, Hecker ultimately considers how the oral cavity and stomach, even the emotions associated with festive meals, are mobilized to produce the soul of the mystical saint in medieval kabbalah.]]> 296 Joel Hecker 0814331815 jesse 4 3.71 2005
author: Joel Hecker
name: jesse
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at: 2023/02/21
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best sections were the ones on "the set table" and wine. it all resonates so much
]]> 243991
Blurring the lines of fiction, essay and memoir, Chris Kraus's novel was a literary sensation when it was first published in 1997. Widely considered to be the most important feminist novel of the past two decades, I Love Dick is still essential reading; as relevant, fierce and funny as ever.]]> 280 Chris Kraus 1584350342 jesse 0 3.53 1997
author: Chris Kraus
name: jesse
average rating: 3.53
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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]]> 13696266
Butler considers the rights of the dispossessed, the necessity of plural cohabitation, and the dangers of arbitrary state violence, showing how they can be extended to a critique of Zionism, even when that is not their explicit aim. She revisits and affirms Edward Said’s late proposals for a one-state solution within the ethos of binationalism. Butler’s startling suggestion: Jewish ethics not only demand a critique of Zionism, but must transcend its exclusive Jewishness in order to realize the ethical and political ideals of living together in radical democracy.]]> 256 Judith Butler 0231146108 jesse 3 4.08 2012
author: Judith Butler
name: jesse
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2012
rating: 3
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]]> 40265212
This book does not seek to draw a parallel or comparison between the Holocaust and Nakba or to merely inaugurate a “dialogue� between them. Instead, it searches for a new historical and political grammar for relating and narrating their complicated intersections. The book features prominent international contributors, including a foreword by Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury on the centrality of the Holocaust and Nakba in the essential struggle of humanity against racism, and an afterword by literary scholar Jacqueline Rose on the challenges and contributions of the linkage between the Holocaust and Nakba for power to shift and a world of justice and equality to be created between the two peoples. The Holocaust and the Nakba is the first extended and collective scholarly treatment in English of these two constitutive traumas together.]]> 424 Bashir Bashir 023118297X jesse 4 4.24
author: Bashir Bashir
name: jesse
average rating: 4.24
book published:
rating: 4
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]]> 77810 The Days of Abandonment shocked and captivated its Italian public when first published. It is the gripping story of a woman's descent into devastating emptiness after being abandoned by her husband with two young children to care for. When she finds herself literally trapped within the four walls of their high-rise apartment, she is forced to confront her ghosts, the potential loss of her own identity, and the possibility that life may never return to normal.]]> 188 Elena Ferrante 1933372001 jesse 4 3.92 2002
author: Elena Ferrante
name: jesse
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2002
rating: 4
read at: 2023/02/04
date added: 2023/02/04
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review:
Imagine the mood in the closing scene of Haneke’s “The Piano Teacher� (Isabelle Huppert stabs herself in the heart with a kitchen knife and then calmly leaves the theater) stretched out over 200 pages
]]> 30340 The Pound EraĚýcould as well be known as the Kenner era, for there is no critic who has more firmly established his claim to valuable literary property than has Kenner to the first three decades of the 20th century in England. Author of pervious studies of Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and Pound (to name a few), Kenner bestrides modern literature if not like a colossus then at least a presence of formidable proportions. A new book by him is certainly an event....A demanding, enticing book that glitters at the same time it antagonizes...."The Pound EraĚýpresents us with an idiosyncratic but sharply etched skeletal view of our immediate literary heritage."â€�The New York Times]]> 624 Hugh Kenner 0520024273 jesse 5 4.38 1971
author: Hugh Kenner
name: jesse
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1971
rating: 5
read at: 2023/01/23
date added: 2023/01/23
shelves:
review:
better than actually reading Ezra Pound, no offense
]]> 1880446 160 Gil Anidjar 0804756953 jesse 4 4.14 2007
author: Gil Anidjar
name: jesse
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/21
date added: 2023/01/21
shelves:
review:

]]> 57371655 80 Annie Ernaux 1913097552 jesse 4 4.06 1991
author: Annie Ernaux
name: jesse
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1991
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/19
date added: 2023/01/19
shelves:
review:
Song of Songs if it was written by a french woman. More concise than Getting Lost, and more perfect. It’s an incredible thing, the absent beloved, and evidently worth writing many books about.
]]> 14494246 219 John Collins 1849041814 jesse 4 4.38 2011
author: John Collins
name: jesse
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/19
date added: 2023/01/19
shelves:
review:

]]> 43726578
In this richly illustrated and unusual history, Jack Hartnell uncovers the fascinating ways in which people thought about, explored, and experienced their physical selves in the Middle Ages, from Constantinople to Cairo and Canterbury. Unfolding like a medieval pageant, and filled with saints, soldiers, caliphs, queens, monks and monstrous beasts, this book throws light on the medieval body from head to toe―revealing the surprisingly sophisticated medical knowledge of the time.

Bringing together medicine, art, music, politics, philosophy, religion, and social history, Hartnell's work is an excellent guide to what life was really like for the men and women who lived and died in the Middle Ages. Perfumed and decorated with gold, fetishized or tortured, powerful even beyond death, these medieval bodies are not passive and buried away; they can still teach us what it means to be human.]]> 352 Jack Hartnell 1324002166 jesse 3 3.96 2018
author: Jack Hartnell
name: jesse
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2023/01/15
date added: 2023/01/15
shelves:
review:

]]> 55817233 240 Joshua Cohen 1913097609 jesse 5 3.81 2021
author: Joshua Cohen
name: jesse
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2023/01/14
date added: 2023/01/14
shelves:
review:
How do you recommend a book that feels like it was written for you. At once very funny and very poignant, and then devastating. Must read for all Jewish-American men and those who love them
]]> 817197 255 Mircea Eliade 0061319430 jesse 4 4.17 1957
author: Mircea Eliade
name: jesse
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1957
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/08
date added: 2023/01/08
shelves:
review:
Standard fare from Eliade. Covers themes and case studies in return to origin mythology ("nostalgia for paradise"), shamanism, and initiation. Really good, uncommon section in the last chapter on the initiation of girls and women's mystery cults.
]]> 6816744 276 Marshall McLuhan 1584232358 jesse 4 4.65 2006
author: Marshall McLuhan
name: jesse
average rating: 4.65
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/08
date added: 2023/01/08
shelves:
review:
McLuhan's dissertation as a young man at Cambridge, written simultaneously with his very private conversion to Catholicism. Surprisingly lucid history of the trivium's development from antiquity, lingering (of course) over Augustine and the scholastics.
]]> 64713 320 Ivan Illich 0714529931 jesse 3 4.10 1974
author: Ivan Illich
name: jesse
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1974
rating: 3
read at: 2023/01/03
date added: 2023/01/03
shelves:
review:

]]> 6407380 384 Elliot K. Ginsburg 0887067794 jesse 4 4.50 1989
author: Elliot K. Ginsburg
name: jesse
average rating: 4.50
book published: 1989
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/03
date added: 2023/01/03
shelves:
review:
The rare excellent secondary source on Kabbalah—by an Oberlin professor, no less. Entry level(ish) without being condescending.
]]> 253080
Examining the Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor, Illich celebrates the culture of the book from the twelfth century to the present. Hugh's work, at once an encyclopedia and guide to the art of reading, reveals a twelfth-century revolution as sweeping as that brought about by the invention of the printing press and equal in magnitude only to the changes of the computer age—the transition from reading as a vocal activity done in the monastery to reading as a predominantly silent activity performed by and for individuals.]]> 162 Ivan Illich 0226372367 jesse 5 4.34 1991
author: Ivan Illich
name: jesse
average rating: 4.34
book published: 1991
rating: 5
read at: 2023/01/01
date added: 2023/01/01
shelves:
review:
Brilliant, dense but enjoyable, absurdly well-cited history of monastic reading in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Illich, with Agamben, represents my kind of take on medieval studies: pure pleasure.
]]> 2517 My Name Is Red is a transporting tale set amid the splendor and religious intrigue of sixteenth-century Istanbul, from one of the most prominent contemporary Turkish writers.

The Sultan has commissioned a cadre of the most acclaimed artists in the land to create a great book celebrating the glories of his realm. Their task: to illuminate the work in the European style. But because figurative art can be deemed an affront to Islam, this commission is a dangerous proposition indeed. The ruling elite therefore mustn’t know the full scope or nature of the project, and panic erupts when one of the chosen miniaturists disappears. The only clue to the mystery–or crime? –lies in the half-finished illuminations themselves. Part fantasy and part philosophical puzzle, My Name is Red is a kaleidoscopic journey to the intersection of art, religion, love, sex and power.]]> 417 Orhan Pamuk jesse 5 3.87 1998
author: Orhan Pamuk
name: jesse
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1998
rating: 5
read at: 2022/12/29
date added: 2022/12/29
shelves:
review:
When my mom recommended this she described it as being “about art and God, and about how art is about God and God is about art.� She’s right, as always � really, really excellent, and demonstrates how someone can do interesting / experimental things with form without sacrificing beauty. Some diffuse ottoman homoeroticism also never hurt anybody.
]]> 6991105 472 Elliot R. Wolfson 0231146302 jesse 5 4.03 2009
author: Elliot R. Wolfson
name: jesse
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2022/12/25
date added: 2022/12/25
shelves:
review:

]]> 60246617 Getting Lost is the diary kept by Annie Ernaux during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, an attaché to the Soviet embassy in Paris. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate and unfiltered. In these diaries it is 1989 and Annie is divorced with two grown sons, living in the suburbs of Paris and nearing fifty. Her lover escapes the city to see her there and Ernaux seems to survive only in expectation of these encounters. She cannot write, she trudges distractedly through her various other commitments in the world, she awaits his next call; she lives merely to feel desire and for the next rendezvous. When he is gone and the moment of desire has faded, she feels that she is a step closer to death.




Lauded for her spare prose, Ernaux here removes all artifice, her writing pared down to its most naked and vulnerable. Translated brilliantly for the first time by Alison L. Strayer, Getting Lost is a haunting record of a woman in the grips of love, desire and despair.]]> 240 Annie Ernaux 1913097005 jesse 4 3.43 2001
author: Annie Ernaux
name: jesse
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2001
rating: 4
read at: 2022/12/19
date added: 2022/12/19
shelves:
review:
A case study in desire, often impossible to read. The lovesick piety I could tolerate, and the shallow Lacanian allusions, but I draw a line at the Mishima reference
]]> 288107
Ibn 'Arabi (1165-1240) was one of the great mystics of all time. Through the richness of his personal experience and the constructive power of his intellect, he made a unique contribution to Shi'ite Sufism. In this book, which features a powerful new preface by Harold Bloom, Henry Corbin brings us to the very core of this movement with a penetrating analysis of Ibn 'Arabi's life and doctrines.

Corbin begins with a kind of spiritual topography of the twelfth century, emphasizing the differences between exoteric and esoteric forms of Islam. He also relates Islamic mysticism to mystical thought in the West.

The remainder of the book is devoted to two complementary essays: on "Sympathy and Theosophy" and "Creative Imagination and Creative Prayer." A section of notes and appendices includes original translations of numerous Sufi treatises.

Harold Bloom's preface links Suufi mysticism with Shakespeare's visionary dramas and high tragedies, such as The Tempest and Hamlet. These works, he writes, intermix the empirical world with a transcendent element. Bloom shows us that this Shakespearean cosmos is analogous to Corbin's "Imaginal Realm" of the Sufis, the place of soul or souls.]]> 440 Henry Corbin 0691058342 jesse 5 4.41 1958
author: Henry Corbin
name: jesse
average rating: 4.41
book published: 1958
rating: 5
read at: 2022/12/10
date added: 2022/12/10
shelves:
review:
"...to recognize God in each form revealing Him, to invest each being, each faith, with a theophanic function—that is an essentially personal experience, which cannot be regulated by the norms common to collectivity." Good stuff
]]> 650277
Please note that Two Powers in Heaven was previously published by Brill in hardback, ISBN 90 04 05453 7 (no longer available).]]> 314 Alan F. Segal 039104172X jesse 4 4.03 2012
author: Alan F. Segal
name: jesse
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2022/11/11
date added: 2022/11/11
shelves:
review:
ancient jewish heterodoxy never felt so good
]]> 610889
This definitive treatment of Mithrais religion by the recognized authority on classical religions pieces together information from the fragments of texts, bas-reliefs, statuary, etc., remaining from the almost total destruction of the religion centuries ago. In a work of masterful scholarship, Dr. Cumont reconstructs the charateristics of the principle divinities, the rituals, the mystery teachings, the liturgy and clergy, the attitude towards Mithra of the typical Roman soldier, the rapid dissemination of the religion in the early years of the Christian era. 70 illustrations—photographs and drawings of Mithraic art—are included.

Preface to the French Edition
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
The Origins of Mithraism
The Dissemination of Mithraism in the Roman Empire
Mithra & the Imperial Power of Rome
The Doctrine of the Mithraic Mysteries
The Mithraic Liturgy, Clergy & Devotees
Mithraism & the Religions of the Empire
Mithraic Art
Index]]> 278 Franz Cumont 0486203239 jesse 4 3.76 1900
author: Franz Cumont
name: jesse
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1900
rating: 4
read at: 2022/11/08
date added: 2022/11/08
shelves:
review:
"I have trodden the threshold of Persephone, and having traversed all the elements I am returned to the earth. In the middle of the night I have seen the Sun scintillating with a pure light; I have approached the gods below and the gods above, and have worshipped them face to face."
]]> 41879543 468 Elliot R. Wolfson 0253042577 jesse 5 4.33
author: Elliot R. Wolfson
name: jesse
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2022/11/07
date added: 2022/11/07
shelves:
review:
I generally would never admit this but I understood maybe a twenty percent of this. Difficult even for wolfson. Second to last chapter was excellent though
]]> 22259836 289 Shaul Magid 0804791309 jesse 3 4.55 2014
author: Shaul Magid
name: jesse
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2022/11/02
date added: 2022/11/02
shelves:
review:
Skip to the fourth and fifth chapters (on kenosis and Jesus) and then it's worthwhile.
]]> 424316 151 Ibn ĘżArabi 9659012519 jesse 4 4.28 2000
author: Ibn ĘżArabi
name: jesse
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at: 2022/10/18
date added: 2022/10/18
shelves:
review:
Unfortunately just because I trust Sells as a translator of Arabic that doesn't mean I want to read his original poetry. Apparently he has another translation of this collection called "Translator of Desires" that I'll look into.
]]> 2671197
Pinchas Giller examines the characteristic mystical practices of the Beit El School. The dominant practice is that of ritual prayer with mystical "intentions," or kavvanot . The kavvanot themselves are the product of thousands of years of development and incorporate many traditions and bodies of lore. Giller examines the archaeology of the kavvanot literature, the principle aspect of which is the meditation on God's sacred names while reciting prayers, the development of particular rituals, and the innovative mystical and devotional practices of the Beit El kabbalists.]]> 216 Pinchas Giller 0195328809 jesse 3 3.60 2008
author: Pinchas Giller
name: jesse
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at: 2022/09/19
date added: 2022/09/19
shelves:
review:

]]> 3256952 270 Yehuda Liebes 0791411907 jesse 4 4.33 1993
author: Yehuda Liebes
name: jesse
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1993
rating: 4
read at: 2022/09/18
date added: 2022/09/18
shelves:
review:
Worth reading for the outrageous final section (on Christian influence in the Zohar). Really radical stuff. The first section, on messianism, is brilliant. Second section is pure philology � skippable, unless you're into that sort of thing. Has a nice appendix detailing the evidence for T. Abulafia as Rashbi.
]]> 60784625
The Dönme sect―a group of Jewish-Islamic adherents with ancient roots―lives in an isolated community on rural land outside of smalltown Mt. Izmir, Ohio. Self-sustaining, deeply-religious, and heavily-armed, they have followed their self-proclaimed prophet, Natan of Flatbush, from Brooklyn to this new land.

But the brutal murder of Natan’s teenage son throws their tight community into turmoil.

When Zeke Leger, a thirty-year-old writer at a national magazine, arrives from New York for the funeral of a friend, he becomes intrigued by the case, and begins to report on the murder. His college girlfriend Johanna Franklin prosecuted the case, and believes it is closed. Before he knows it, Zeke becomes entangled in the conflict between the Dönme, suspicious local citizens, Johanna, and the law―with dangerous implications for his body and his soul.]]> 304 Daniel Torday 1250191815 jesse 0 3.44 2023
author: Daniel Torday
name: jesse
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2022/09/11
date added: 2022/09/11
shelves:
review:

]]>