Stuart's bookshelf: all en-US Thu, 19 Jun 2025 02:45:05 -0700 60 Stuart's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Faust, Part One 14705 nearest "equivalent" rendering of the German ever achieved.]]> 240 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 0192835955 Stuart 4 4.00 1808 Faust, Part One
author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1808
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/06/19
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]]> <![CDATA[Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment]]> 55339408 From the bestselling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow and the co-author of Nudge, a groundbreaking exploration of why most people make bad judgments, and how to control for that noise.�

Imagine that two doctors in the same city give different diagnoses to identical patients � or that two judges in the same courthouse give different sentences to people who have committed the same crime. Suppose that different food inspectors give different ratings to indistinguishable restaurants � or that when a company is handling customer complaints, the resolution depends on who happens to be handling the particular complaint. Now imagine that the same doctor, the same judge, the same inspector, or the same company official makes different decisions, depending on whether it is morning or afternoon, or Monday rather than Wednesday. These are examples of noise: variability in judgments that should be identical.
Ìę
In Noise, Daniel Kahneman, Cass R. Sunstein, and Olivier Sibony show how noise contributes significantly to errors in all fields, including medicine, law, economic forecasting, police behavior, food safety, bail, security checks at airports, strategy, and personnel selection. And although noise can be found wherever people make judgments and decisions, individuals and organizations alike are commonly oblivious to the role of chance in their judgments and in their actions.
Ìę
Drawing on the latest findings in psychology and behavioral economics, and the same kind of diligent, insightful research that made Thinking, Fast and Slow and Nudge groundbreaking New York Times bestsellers, Noise explains how and why humans are so susceptible to noise in judgment � and what we can do about it.
Ìę]]> 454 Daniel Kahneman 0316451401 Stuart 3 3.64 2021 Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment
author: Daniel Kahneman
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2025/05/11
date added: 2025/05/11
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]]> <![CDATA[Death in Venice and Other Tales]]> 53064 384 Thomas Mann 0141181737 Stuart 3 3.92 1998 Death in Venice and Other Tales
author: Thomas Mann
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1998
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/05/05
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]]> <![CDATA[Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction (Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Environmental Humanities)]]> 11392601 184 Deborah Bird Rose 081393091X Stuart 0 to-read 4.07 2011 Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction (Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Environmental Humanities)
author: Deborah Bird Rose
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> Naval Warfare, 1919-1945 6703211 656 Malcolm H. Murfett 0415458048 Stuart 5 Really humane and engaging account of the naval war of ww2]]> 5.00 2008 Naval Warfare, 1919-1945
author: Malcolm H. Murfett
name: Stuart
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2008
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/03/23
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review:
Great book on naval history by NUS professor and UWCSEA parent of 4 alumni.
Really humane and engaging account of the naval war of ww2
]]> <![CDATA[No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies: A Lyric Essay]]> 59875242 A collection of essays on resistance, resilience, and collective power in the age of climate disaster from Chamorro human rights lawyer and organizer Julian Aguon.

Part memoir, part manifesto, Chamorro climate activist Julian Aguon's No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies is a coming-of-age story and a call for justice—for everyone, but in particular, for Indigenous peoples.

In bracing poetry and compelling prose, Aguon weaves together stories from his childhood in the villages of Guam with searing political commentary about matters ranging from nuclear weapons to global warming. Undertaking the work of bearing witness, wrestling with the most pressing questions of the modern day, and reckoning with the challenge of truth-telling in an era of rampant obfuscation, he culls from his own life experiences—from losing his father to pancreatic cancer to working for Mother Teresa to an edifying chance encounter with Sherman Alexie—to illuminate a collective path out of the darkness.

A powerful, bold, new voice writing at the intersection of Indigenous rights and environmental justice, Julian Aguon is entrenched in the struggles of the people of the Pacific to liberate themselves from colonial rule, defend their sacred sites, and obtain justice for generations of harm. In No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies, Aguon shares his wisdom and reflections on love, grief, joy, and triumph and extends an offer to join him in a hard-earned hope for a better world.]]> 128 Julian Aguon 1662601638 Stuart 0 to-read 4.24 2022 No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies: A Lyric Essay
author: Julian Aguon
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/11
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]]> <![CDATA[Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature]]> 239293 312 Donna J. Haraway 0415903874 Stuart 0 currently-reading 4.15 1990 Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
author: Donna J. Haraway
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1990
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/04
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> <![CDATA[Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (Sexual Cultures, 53)]]> 48815954 Argues that blackness disrupts our essential ideas of race, gender, and, ultimately, the human

Rewriting the pernicious, enduring relationship between blackness and animality in the history of Western science and philosophy, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World breaks open the rancorous debate between black critical theory and posthumanism.

Through the cultural terrain of literature by Toni Morrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler, the art of Wangechi Mutu and Ezrom Legae, and the oratory of Frederick Douglass, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson both critiques and displaces the racial logic that has dominated scientific thought since the Enlightenment. In so doing, Becoming Human demonstrates that the history of racialized gender and maternity, specifically antiblackness, is indispensable to future thought on matter, materiality, animality, and posthumanism.

Jackson argues that African diasporic cultural production alters the meaning of being human and engages in imaginative practices of world-building against a history of the bestialization and thingification of blackness—the process of imagining the black person as an empty vessel, a non-being, an ontological zero—and the violent imposition of colonial myths of racial hierarchy. She creatively responds to the animalization of blackness by generating alternative frameworks of thought and relationality that not only disrupt the racialization of the human/animal distinction found in Western science and philosophy but also challenge the epistemic and material terms under which the specter of animal life acquires its authority.

What emerges is a radically unruly sense of a being, knowing, feeling existence: one that necessarily ruptures the foundations of "the human."]]> 320 Zakiyyah Iman Jackson 1479830372 Stuart 0 currently-reading 4.44 2020 Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (Sexual Cultures, 53)
author: Zakiyyah Iman Jackson
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/04
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> <![CDATA[Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning]]> 738083 524 Karen Barad 082233917X Stuart 5 4.34 2006 Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning
author: Karen Barad
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/04
date added: 2025/03/04
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Just a tremendously important book on the indeterminate nature of the universe and the way our preconceptions ‘determineâ€� it temporarily - and the implications of that for our understanding of meaning and the world .
]]> <![CDATA[The Black Gull of Corrie Lochan]]> 134896184 128 Margaret MacAlpine Stuart 5 5.00 1964 The Black Gull of Corrie Lochan
author: Margaret MacAlpine
name: Stuart
average rating: 5.00
book published: 1964
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/12
date added: 2025/01/12
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]]> Life of St. Columba 1237012 406 AdomnĂĄn of Iona 0140444629 Stuart 5 3.93 713 Life of St. Columba
author: AdomnĂĄn of Iona
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.93
book published: 713
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/11
date added: 2025/01/11
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An incredible historical treasure if you are interested in Scottish and Pictish history
]]> <![CDATA[Life of Saint Columba, Founder of Hy. Written by Adamnan. Edited by William Reeves]]> 62517494 188 William Reeves 1371299439 Stuart 0 to-read 0.0 Life of Saint Columba, Founder of Hy. Written by Adamnan. Edited by William Reeves
author: William Reeves
name: Stuart
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The King in the North: The Pictish Realms of Fortriu and Ce]]> 44163596
This is the first account of this northern heartland of Pictavia for a more general audience to take in the full implications of this and of the substantial recent archaeological work that has been undertaken in recent years. Part of the The Northern Picts project at Aberdeen University, this book represents an exciting cross disciplinary approach to the study of this still too little understood yet formative period in Scotland's history.]]> 208 Gordon Noble 178027551X Stuart 4 4.24 2019 The King in the North: The Pictish Realms of Fortriu and Ce
author: Gordon Noble
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/03
date added: 2025/01/03
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A wonderful exploration of Pictish archeology in particularly north east Scotland - fascinating to understand what is nearby to Aberdeen and the hidden history of a lost people.
]]> <![CDATA[Ingrained: An uplifting and passionate memoir about woodworking and craftsmanship]]> 202567831
In beautifully wrought prose, Callum tells the story of returning to the workshop and to the wood, to handcrafting furniture for people who will love it and then pass it on to the next generation—an antidote to a culture where everything seems so easily disposable. As he does so, he brings us closer to nature and the physical act of creation—and we begin to understand how he has been shaped, as both a craftsman and a son.

Blending memoir and nature writing at its finest, Ingrained is an uplifting meditation on the challenges of working with your hands in our modern age, on community, consumerism, and the beauty of the natural world—one that asks us to see our local trees, and our own wooden objects, in a new and revelatory light.]]> 303 Callum Robinson 1529913713 Stuart 4 4.53 2024 Ingrained: An uplifting and passionate memoir about woodworking and craftsmanship
author: Callum Robinson
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.53
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/26
date added: 2024/12/26
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]]> <![CDATA[Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (Pelican Books)]]> 34640994 336 Graham Harman 0241269156 Stuart 4 core-doctoral-research-texts 3.68 2018 Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (Pelican Books)
author: Graham Harman
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/17
date added: 2024/12/17
shelves: core-doctoral-research-texts
review:
Interesting - and the concept of flat ontology is useful - reads as a mish mash of others� ideas but nonetheless some really interesting arguments that relate to conceptualisation and metaphors
]]> <![CDATA[Navigating the Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Terrain Across Disciplines: An Introductory Guide (Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Research)]]> 56472296
Supported by its own website, this first book in a larger series is an essential companion to the primary texts and original sources of the theorists discussed in this and other books in the series. Disrupting the theory/practice divide, the book offers a postqualitative reimagining of traditional research processes. In doing so, it guides readers through the contestation of binaries, innovative concepts, and the practical provocations that make up the postqualitative terrain. It orients the researcher in the ontological re-turn also by considering Indigenous knowledges, African, Eastern and young children’s philosophies. The style itself is postqualitative through diffractive engagements by the authors and the website includes some examples of the practical provocations described in the book that give an imaginary of how postqualitative research can be taught and enacted.

This book is an essential resource for novice as well as experienced researchers working both within and across disciplines in higher education.

More information and pocasts for this book can be found at

]]> 209 Karin Murris 1000334317 Stuart 5 5.00 Navigating the Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Terrain Across Disciplines: An Introductory Guide (Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Research)
author: Karin Murris
name: Stuart
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 5
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]]> The Story of Scottish Design 36349754
This inspiring and hugely varied volume explores, chronologically, over 60 themes, from early manuscripts and vernacular furniture to urban planning, textile design, the emergence of videogame development in Dundee, and Scotland’s role as a world leader in renewable technology development. Figures such as architect Robert Adam, engineer Thomas Telford, artist Eduardo Paolozzi, fashion designer Holly Fulton, designer Christopher Dresser, and designer and architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh are testament to Scotland’s role as a major player in design.

Scottish designers continue to have a profound and creative influence on design history. Throughout the modern age, their highly original and pioneering designs have showcased Scotland’s significance on the international stage.]]> 208 Philip Long 0500480338 Stuart 5 3.87 2018 The Story of Scottish Design
author: Philip Long
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2018
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/12/17
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A great account of Scottish design over the centuries. Inspiring source book .
]]> <![CDATA[Memoirs of a Highland Lady (Albemarle Library)]]> 21067755 296 Elizabeth Grant 071950550X Stuart 4 4.00 1899 Memoirs of a Highland Lady (Albemarle Library)
author: Elizabeth Grant
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1899
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/17
date added: 2024/12/17
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The setting is the estate next to the land I called home growing up - and the memories of those places and revisiting them now - are still vivid. Now that estates are ‘rewildingâ€� some of the descriptions of logging and total deforestation mentioned as asides are sobering. But in general a genial and warming read.
]]> <![CDATA[Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future from the Stanford d.school]]> 197516631 A powerful guide to why even the most well-intentioned innovations go haywire, and the surprising ways we can change course to create a more positive future, by two celebrated experts working at the intersection of design, technology, and learning at Stanford University’s acclaimed d.school.

In Assembling Tomorrow, authors Scott Doorley and Carissa Carter explore the intangible forces that prevent us from anticipating just how fantastically technology can get out of control, and what might be in store for us if we don’t start using new tools and tactics. Despite our best intentions, our most transformative innovations tend to have consequences we can’t always predict. From the effects of social media to the uncertainty of AI and the consequences of climate change, the outcomes of our creations ripple across our lives. Time and again, our seemingly ceaseless capacity to create rubs up against our limited capacity to understand our impact.

Assembling Tomorrow explores how to use readily accessible tools to both mend the mistakes of our past and shape our future for the better. We live in an era of “runaway design,â€� where innovations tangle with our lives in unpredictable ways. This book explores the off-­­kilter feelings of today and follows up with actionables to alter your perspective and help you find opportunities in these turbulent times.

Mixed throughout are histories of the future, short pieces of speculative fiction that imagine the future as if it has already happened and consider the past with a critical yet hopeful eye so that all of us—as designers of our own futures—can create a better world for generations to come.]]> 320 Scott Doorley 1984858181 Stuart 5 3.76 Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future from the Stanford d.school
author: Scott Doorley
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.76
book published:
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life)]]> 39644200 How inclusive methods can build elegant design solutions that work for all. Sometimes designed objects reject their users: a computer mouse that doesn't work for left-handed people, for example, or a touchscreen payment system that only works for people who read English phrases, have 20/20 vision, and use a credit card. Something as simple as color choices can render a product unusable for millions. These mismatches are the building blocks of exclusion. In Mismatch, Kat Holmes describes how design can lead to exclusion, and how design can also remedy exclusion. Inclusive design methods--designing objects with rather than for excluded users--can create elegant solutions that work well and benefit all.

Holmes tells stories of pioneers of inclusive design, many of whom were drawn to work on inclusion because of their own experiences of exclusion. A gamer and designer who depends on voice recognition shows Holmes his "Wall of Exclusion," which displays dozens of game controllers that require two hands to operate; an architect shares her firsthand knowledge of how design can fail communities, gleaned from growing up in Detroit's housing projects; an astronomer who began to lose her eyesight adapts a technique called "sonification" so she can "listen" to the stars.

Designing for inclusion is not a feel-good sideline. Holmes shows how inclusion can be a source of innovation and growth, especially for digital technologies. It can be a catalyst for creativity and a boost for the bottom line as a customer base expands. And each time we remedy a mismatched interaction, we create an opportunity for more people to contribute to society in meaningful ways.]]> 176 Kat Holmes 0262038889 Stuart 0 to-read 4.08 2018 Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life)
author: Kat Holmes
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> Mansfield Park 45032 488 Jane Austen Stuart 0 3.86 1814 Mansfield Park
author: Jane Austen
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1814
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/27
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]]> <![CDATA[Ericksonian Hypnosis: Strategies for Effective Communications]]> 30251654

Robert Dilts, author and founder of NLP
“Rich in inspirational quotes, solid principles and practical examples, Stephen Paul Adler's book Ericksonian Strategies for Effective Communication captures both the genius and humanity of Milton Erickson in a unique and engaging style.
“Stephen has clearly personally mastered the methods and techniques he presents in the book. As a practitioner and teacher of Erickson's work, I highly recommend this book to anyone who wishes to capture both the genius and humanity of Milton Erickson.
“I would have loved to have a resource like this when I was first learning hypnosis and therapy.â€�


Diane Poole Heller, Ph.D., trauma recovery
“With integrity, grace, wit, and true inspiration, Stephen Paul Adler eloquently describes and competently embodies Milton Erickson's compassion and empowerment based approach to healing and transformation.
“This is a must read for anyone, client or therapist, who is seriously engaged in understanding the depths of the human journey and who wants to learn more about this collection of time-honored wisdom.
“Full of fine-tuned, clear practical guidelines and applications of Ericksonian hypnotherapy, communications skills, and the fine art of change, this book provides concise ‘how to do itâ€� instructions embellished with relevant clinical applications to streamline the learning curve and improve results.
“I love the book, I love the inspirational quotes, I love the transformational empowering process, I love the applications and suggestions! Read it!â€�


Betty Alice Erickson MS,
“Stephen, I am very impressed by your students. Be proud of how you have communicated my father’s work to them! I've had a lot of students and I know well-trained students—these are equal to the best I've had.â€�


These quotes best represent the results I’ve hoped to achieve with this book.]]> 215 Stephen Paul Adler 1942899971 Stuart 3 4.33 2010 Ericksonian Hypnosis: Strategies for Effective Communications
author: Stephen Paul Adler
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2019/07/04
date added: 2024/09/28
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Quite a lot of good Ericksonian strategies and scripts to illustrate them. Still a bit opaque and the final 'story' is unnecessarily disturbing... but the early parts of the book have a good selection of Erickson's verbal patterns.
]]> Tao Te Ching 8192772 193 Lao Tzu Stuart 5 3.90 -350 Tao Te Ching
author: Lao Tzu
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.90
book published: -350
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/25
date added: 2024/09/25
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Perhaps a book I was not really ready for until now - makes perfect sense when read against Spinoza and Posthumanism - a very different way of thinking than the post-Socratic and humanist tradition
]]> Lettera sulla felicitĂ  3414307 Lettera a Meneceo, qui proposta in una traduzione che punta a restituirci l'affabilitĂ  della voce di un uomo che pose l'amicizia al di sopra di tutto, Ăš uno dei pochissimi scritti di Epicuro che non siano stati distrutti nel corso della storia dall'odio ideologico.]]> 30 Epicurus 8872260604 Stuart 0 3.95 -300 Lettera sulla felicitĂ 
author: Epicurus
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.95
book published: -300
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Orkneyinga Saga: The History of the Earls of Orkney]]> 43530753
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700Ìętitles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust theÌęseries to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-dateÌętranslations by award-winning translators.]]> 256 Joseph Anderson Stuart 5 3.84 1978 Orkneyinga Saga: The History of the Earls of Orkney
author: Joseph Anderson
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1978
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/17
date added: 2024/09/17
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Just mind blowing to read detailed accounts of the goings on between Orkney, Shetland, Norway and Scotland - even Aberdeen gets a mention - between 900 and 1200 AD. An utterly wonderful text
]]> Scandinavian Design 283915 352 Charlotte Fiell 3822841188 Stuart 5 4.00 2002 Scandinavian Design
author: Charlotte Fiell
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2002
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/14
date added: 2024/09/14
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]]> <![CDATA[The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins]]> 25510906 What a rare mushroom can teach us about sustaining life on a fragile planetMatsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the world—and a weed that grows in human-disturbed forests across the northern hemisphere. Through its ability to nurture trees, matsutake helps forests to grow in daunting places. It is also an edible delicacy in Japan, where it sometimes commands astronomical prices. In all its contradictions, matsutake offers insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial what manages to live in the ruins we have made? A tale of diversity within our damaged landscapes, The Mushroom at the End of the World follows one of the strangest commodity chains of our times to explore the unexpected corners of capitalism. Here, we witness the varied and peculiar worlds of matsutake the worlds of Japanese gourmets, capitalist traders, Hmong jungle fighters, industrial forests, Yi Chinese goat herders, Finnish nature guides, and more. These companions also lead us into fungal ecologies and forest histories to better understand the promise of cohabitation in a time of massive human destruction. By investigating one of the world's most sought-after fungi, The Mushroom at the End of the World presents an original examination into the relation between capitalist destruction and collaborative survival within multispecies landscapes, the prerequisite for continuing life on earth.]]> 331 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing 0691162751 Stuart 0 to-read, must-read-soon 3.98 2015 The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
author: Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/22
shelves: to-read, must-read-soon
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]]> <![CDATA[A Wizard of Earthsea (Earthsea Cycle, #1)]]> 13642
Hungry for power and knowledge, Sparrowhawk tampered with long-held secrets and loosed a terrible shadow upon the world. This is the tale of his testing, how he mastered the mighty words of power, tamed an ancient dragon, and crossed death's threshold to restore the balance.]]> 183 Ursula K. Le Guin Stuart 4 4.02 1968 A Wizard of Earthsea (Earthsea Cycle, #1)
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1968
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/18
date added: 2024/08/18
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]]> The Left Hand of Darkness 33830160 304 Ursula K. Le Guin 1473221625 Stuart 4 4.00 1969 The Left Hand of Darkness
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1969
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/18
date added: 2024/08/18
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]]> Selected Essays 1855126 351 D.H. Lawrence 0140007539 Stuart 4 3.80 Selected Essays
author: D.H. Lawrence
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.80
book published:
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/08/07
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]]> <![CDATA[The Prussian Officer and Other Stories]]> 459090 304 D.H. Lawrence 0140187804 Stuart 0 3.56 The Prussian Officer and Other Stories
author: D.H. Lawrence
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.56
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/07
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]]> <![CDATA[The Queen of Spades and Other Stories]]> 97381 The Queen of Spades has long been acknowledged as one of the world's greatest short stories, in which Pushkin explores the nature of obsession. The Tales of Belkin are witty parodies of sentimentalism, while Peter the Great's Blackamoor is an early experiment with recreating the past. The Captain's Daughter is a novel-length masterpiece which combines historical fiction in the manner of Sir Walter Scott with the devices of the Russian fairy-tale. The Introduction provides close readings of the stories and places them in their European literary context.]]> 336 Alexander Pushkin 0192839543 Stuart 5 4.15 1841 The Queen of Spades and Other Stories
author: Alexander Pushkin
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1841
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/08/07
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]]> The Limits to Growth 647942 207 Donella H. Meadows 0451057678 Stuart 4 concept-based-curriculum 4.19 The Limits to Growth
author: Donella H. Meadows
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.19
book published:
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: concept-based-curriculum
review:
A pretty amazing book recommended by Kath Lane, in which Donella Meadows system maps Earth's environmental and human systems, warning of the dangers of CO2 emissions... in the 1970s! Unbelievably ahead of its time, and somewhat unsurprisingly written in collaboration with MIT. The system maps still look the same 50 years later only now we think of them as 'new tools'.
]]> <![CDATA[The Ramayana: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)]]> 19676070 192 R.K. Narayan 0140187006 Stuart 0 3.90 1957 The Ramayana: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
author: R.K. Narayan
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1957
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/07
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]]> <![CDATA[Games people play: The psychology of human relationships]]> 13245420 Do you realise you, and all the people you know, play games? All the time? Sexual games, marital games, complex games that you're not even aware of as you go about your usual life? You might play games like 'Alcoholic'; or 'The Frigid Woman' at weekends, or perhaps 'Ain't it awful' or 'Kick me' while you're at work.

First published in the 1960s and recognized as a classic work of its kind by professionals, the bestselling 'Games People Play' is also an accessible and fascinating read. It is a wise, original, witty and very sensible analysis of the games we play in order to live with one another and with ourselves.

]]> 176 Eric Berne 0141938366 Stuart 4 3.55 1964 Games people play: The psychology of human relationships
author: Eric Berne
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.55
book published: 1964
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/04
date added: 2024/08/04
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review:

]]> Modern Scandinavian Design 34220907
Bestselling design authors Charlotte and Peter Fiell have extensively researched all aspects of the aesthetic, along with contributions from Magnus Englund of Skandium. With sections onïżœarchitecture, furniture, lighting, glass, ceramics, metalwork, woodenware, plastics, textiles, jewelry, and graphic design, this will be an indispensable resource for any design enthusiast, collector, or casual reader seeking inspiration for their home.ïżœ]]> 592 Charlotte Fiell 1786270528 Stuart 0 to-read 4.33 Modern Scandinavian Design
author: Charlotte Fiell
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition]]> 765418
A Penguin Classic
Ìę
When Walt Whitman self-published his Leaves of Grass in July 1855, he altered the course of literary history. One of the greatest masterpieces of American literature, it redefined the rules of poetry while describing the soul of the American character.ÌęThroughout his great career, Whitman continuously revised, expanded, and republished Leaves of Grass , but many critics believe that the book that matters most is the 1855 original. Penguin Classics proudly presents that text in its original and complete form, with an introductory essay by the writer and poet Malcolm Cowley.

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.�

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700Ìętitles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust theÌęseries to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-dateÌętranslations by award-winning translators.]]> 145 Walt Whitman 0140421998 Stuart 0 4.08 1855 Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition
author: Walt Whitman
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1855
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/01
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Wild Mind, Wild Earth: Our Place in the Sixth Extinction]]> 61946966
Earth is embroiled in its sixth major extinction event—this time caused not by asteroids or volcanos, but by us. At bottom, preventing this sixth extinction is a spiritual/philosophical problem, for it is the assumptions defining us and our relation to earth that are driving the devastation. Those assumptions insist on a fundamental separation of human and earth that devalues earth and enables our exploitative relation to it.

In Wild Mind, Wild Earth , David Hinton explores modes of seeing and being that could save the planet by reestablishing a deep kinship between human and the insights of primal cultures and the Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism of ancient China. He also shows how these insights have become well-established in the West over the last two hundred years, through the work of poets and philosophers and scientists. This offers marvelous hope and beauty—but like so many of us, Hinton recognizes the sixth extinction is now an inexorable and perhaps unstoppable tragedy. And he reveals how those primal/Zen insights enable us to inhabit even the unfurling catastrophe as a profound kind of liberation. Wild Mind, Wild Earth is a remarkable and revitalizing journey.]]> 144 David Hinton 1645471470 Stuart 0 to-read 4.02 Wild Mind, Wild Earth: Our Place in the Sixth Extinction
author: David Hinton
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.02
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Experimental Futures)]]> 28369185 Staying with the Trouble further cements Haraway's reputation as one of the most daring and original thinkers of our time.]]> 312 Donna J. Haraway 0822362147 Stuart 5
]]> 4.04 2016 Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Experimental Futures)
author: Donna J. Haraway
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2023/03/11
date added: 2024/07/09
shelves:
review:
Reading Staying with the Trouble reminded me a great deal of Thus Spoke Zarathustra: it is mischievously metaphorical and mercurial, and delights it evading being too literal or straightforward as to do so would be to partake in an epistemology that it has decided to drop out from. The arguments through the metaphors seem extremely similar to Aldo Leopold's notion of kin in The Land Ethic, that prescient birth of ecological thinking. It brings that thinking into a space beyond dominant enlightenment narratives, into a kinder and more equal democratic space.


]]> Thus Spoke Zarathustra 51893 Thus Spoke Zarathustra is translated from the German by R.J. Hollingdale in Penguin Classics.

Nietzsche was one of the most revolutionary and subversive thinkers in Western philosophy, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra remains his most famous and influential work. It describes how the ancient Persian prophet Zarathustra descends from his solitude in the mountains to tell the world that God is dead and that the Superman, the human embodiment of divinity, is his successor. Nietzsche's utterance 'God is dead', his insistence that the meaning of life is to be found in purely human terms, and his doctrine of the Superman and the will to power were all later seized upon and unrecognisably twisted by, among others, Nazi intellectuals. With blazing intensity and poetic brilliance, Nietzsche argues that the meaning of existence is not to be found in religious pieties or meek submission to authority, but in an all-powerful life passionate, chaotic and free.]]> 327 Friedrich Nietzsche Stuart 5 4.10 1883 Thus Spoke Zarathustra
author: Friedrich Nietzsche
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1883
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/16
date added: 2024/06/16
shelves:
review:
Still one of the most important books ever written - great to re-read and revisit as part of going back to explore influences on Posthumanism - the snake is the perfect symbol of this.
]]> <![CDATA[One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization]]> 594968 336 Dee Hock 1576753328 Stuart 0 to-read 4.11 2000 One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
author: Dee Hock
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Three Impostors and Other Stories (The Best Weird Tales of Arthur Machen #1)]]> 59396 240 Arthur Machen 1568821328 Stuart 0 to-read 4.07 2001 The Three Impostors and Other Stories (The Best Weird Tales of Arthur Machen #1)
author: Arthur Machen
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> On the Genealogy of Morals 19948086 The companion book to Beyond Good and Evil, the three essays included here offer vital insights into Nietzsche's theories of morality and human psychology.



Nietzsche claimed that the purpose of The Genealogy of Morals was to call attention to his previous writings. But in fact the book does much more than that, elucidating and expanding on the cryptic aphorisms of Beyond Good and Evil and signalling a return to the essay form. In these three essays, Nietzsche considers the development of ideas of 'good' and 'evil'; explores notions of guilt and bad consience; and discusses ascetic ideals and the purpose of the philosopher. Together, they form a coherent and complex discussion of morality in a work that is more accessible than some of Nietzsche's previous writings.



Friedrich Nietzsche was born near Leipzig in 1844. When he was only twenty-four he was appointed to the chair of classical philology at Basel University. From 1880, however, he divorced himself from everyday life and lived mainly abroad. Works published in the 1880s include The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist. In January 1889, Nietzsche collapsed on a street in Turin and was subsequently institutionalized, spending the rest of his life in a condition of mental and physical paralysis. Works published after his death in 1900 include Will to Power, based on his notebooks, and Ecce Homo, his autobiography.



Michael A. Scarpitti is an independent scholar of philosophy whose principal interests include English and German thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as exegesis and translation theory.



Robert C. Holub is currently Ohio Eminent Scholar and Professor of German at the Ohio State University. Among his published works are monographs on Heinrich Heine, German realism, Friedrich Nietzsche, literary and aesthetic theory, and Jïżœrgen Habermas.

]]> 195 Friedrich Nietzsche Stuart 5 4.15 1887 On the Genealogy of Morals
author: Friedrich Nietzsche
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1887
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/05
date added: 2024/06/05
shelves:
review:
A few passages which date badly - but the ideas are as fresh, powerful and compelling as the day they were written - if western philosophy is ‘footnotes to Platoâ€� then both much of post-modernism and almost all of posthumanism could be considered ‘footnotes to Nietzscheâ€� and this text in particular exemplifies that - the idea of genealogy and value rather than transcendent truth echoes through Deleuze, Haraway, Foucault and Braidotti. It is both an eternal text and you also get the feeling Nietzsche is sometimes thinking through very small, immediate concerns he has. That reflects the very Spinozan sense of meaning immanent in things.
]]> <![CDATA[The Astonishing Power of Storytelling: Leading, Teaching, and Transforming in a New Way]]> 39971877
Everyone loves a good story. More than entertainment, stories told well captivate listeners and motivate action. This guidebook shows how to leverage the power of storytelling to engage and persuade any audience.ÌęÌę

Featuring current cognitive neuroscience research and updated references, the book ]]> 240 Robert J. Garmston 1506386393 Stuart 5 4.14 The Astonishing Power of Storytelling: Leading, Teaching, and Transforming in a New Way
author: Robert J. Garmston
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.14
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2019/03/05
date added: 2024/05/25
shelves:
review:
If I could give 6 stars I would - it helps if you have worked with Garmston’s work before - but it has already changed how I think about interactions ... in classroom and working with adults - superb ! It is really a workbook disguised as a monograph ... so takes a lot of unpicking as the surface seems quite bland and unobjectionable - but there is profundity below
]]> Madness as Methodology 38241709 208 Ken Gale 1138066028 Stuart 0 to-read 2.50 Madness as Methodology
author: Ken Gale
name: Stuart
average rating: 2.50
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers]]> 7487043 224 Johnny Saldaña 1847875491 Stuart 0 to-read 4.18 2009 The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers
author: Johnny Saldaña
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Companion Species Manifesto **ISBN: 9780971757585**]]> 139695051 0 Donna J. Haraway Stuart 5 4.00 2003 The Companion Species Manifesto **ISBN: 9780971757585**
author: Donna J. Haraway
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2003
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/15
date added: 2024/05/15
shelves:
review:
Brilliant, imaginative, bold and idiosyncratic- a really innovative thinkers book.
]]> <![CDATA[Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals]]> 230733 Straw Dogs is a work of philosophy, which sets out to challenge our most cherished assumptions about what it means to be human. From Plato to Christianity, from the Enlightenment to Nietzsche, the Western tradition has been based on arrogant and erroneous beliefs about human beings and their place in the world. Philosophies such as liberalism and Marxism think of humankind as a species whose destiny is to transcend natural limits and conquer the Earth. Even in the present day, despite Darwin's discoveries, nearly all schools of thought take as their starting point the belief that humans are radically different from other animals. John Gray argues that this humanist belief is an illusion. The aim of Straw Dogs is to explore how the world and human life look once humanism has been finally abandoned.
Straw Dogs explores philosophical issues such as the nature of the self, free will, morality, progress and the value of truth. Drawing his inspiration from art, poetry, and the frontiers of science as well as philosophy itself, John Gray presents a post-humanist view of the world and of human life. Straw Dogs is an exhilarating, sometimes disturbing book that leads the reader to question their deepest beliefs.]]> 246 John Gray 1862075964 Stuart 4 3.94 2002 Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
author: John Gray
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2002
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/13
date added: 2024/04/13
shelves:
review:
A really interesting and popular take on many arguments that would be familiar to post humanism, but within an additional modern scepticism and wry take. Provocative and a little overstated and political in feel - but very interesting and helpful
]]> <![CDATA[I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche]]> 37707826 A groundbreaking new biography of philosophy's greatest iconoclast

Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most enigmatic figures in philosophy, and his concepts—the ÜČú±đ°ùłŸ±đČÔČőłŠłó, the will to power, slave morality—have fundamentally reshaped our understanding of the human condition. But what do most people really know of Nietzsche—beyond the mustache, the scowl, and the lingering association with nihilism and fascism? Where do we place a thinker who was equally beloved by Albert Camus, Ayn Rand, Martin Buber, and Adolf Hitler?

Nietzsche wrote that all philosophy is autobiographical, and in this vividly compelling, myth-shattering biography, Sue Prideaux brings readers into the world of this brilliant, eccentric, and deeply troubled man, illuminating the events and people that shaped his life and work. From his placid, devoutly Christian upbringing—overshadowed by the mysterious death of his father—through his teaching career, lonely philosophizing on high mountains, and heart-breaking descent into madness, Prideaux documents Nietzsche's intellectual and emotional life with a novelist's insight and sensitivity.

She also produces unforgettable portraits of the people who were most important to him, including Richard and Cosima Wagner, Lou Salomé, the femme fatale who broke his heart; and his sister Elizabeth, a rabid German nationalist and anti-Semite who manipulated his texts and turned the Nietzsche archive into a destination for Nazi ideologues.

I Am Dynamite! is the essential biography for anyone seeking to understand history's most misunderstood philosopher.]]> 464 Sue Prideaux 152476082X Stuart 5 4.30 2018 I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche
author: Sue Prideaux
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/29
date added: 2024/03/29
shelves: posthumanism, phd-ontology-and-methods, doctorate-related
review:
A brilliantly readable biography that considerably helps to get a overview of Nietzsches evolving preoccupations through his life, and the challenges of the appropriation of his work after his death.
]]> <![CDATA[Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream]]> 496975 The Scream, hardly anyone knows much about the man. What kind of person could have created this universal image, one that so vividly expressed all the uncertainties of the twentieth century? What kind of experiences did he have? In this book, the first comprehensive biography of Edvard Munch in English, Sue Prideaux brings the artist fully to life. Combining a scholar’s precision with a novelist’s insight, she explores the events of his turbulent life and unerringly places his experiences in their intellectual, emotional, and spiritual contexts.
With unlimited access to tens of thousands of Munch’s papers, including his letters and diaries, Prideaux offers a portrait of the artist that is both intimate and moving. Munch sought to paint what he experienced rather than what he saw, and as his life often veered out of control, his experiences were painful. Yet he painted throughout his long life, creating strange and dramatic works in which hysteria and violence lie barely concealed beneath the surface. An extraordinary genius, Munch connects with an audience that reaches around the world and across more than a century.]]> 391 Sue Prideaux 0300110243 Stuart 0 to-read 4.21 2005 Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream
author: Sue Prideaux
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Spinoza: Practical Philosophy 154329 130 Gilles Deleuze 0872862186 Stuart 4
The project of posthumanism is to decenter humans as the measure of all things, and as a meaningful interpretive unit for understnading the rest of the world. The emblems of the position they reject are firstly Descartes, as he separates thought from the body (and even gives rise to the thought that the material world and body may well not even exist), and the image of the Vitruvian man which quite literally suggests that 'Man' could be the measure and perfect proportions for understanding the world around us.

In the story of humanism, these moments of the 'rediscovery' of man, are moments of transcendence - where truth, beauty and goodness assert themselves over the base inconstancy of the sublunary world. There is a re-writing of the history before as the 'dark ages' and a diminishment of their cultural value or meaning. Then there is the explosion of knowledge of the Enlightenment.

To the post-structuralists, they noticed that in order to create meaning from the complex, interconnected entanglement of reality, the transcendent approach has a common technique. A verbal definition of identity is formed, then examples and non examples are used to 'split' that in fact was a genealogically diverse whole, in to distinct species. This could be everything from 'civilized and uncivilized' to 'male and female' to 'inside and outside' These binary oppositions form the basis of structuralism that tried to understand them, and post structuralism that tried to point of how contradictory and power laden these dichotomies were. Critical post structuralisms abounded for specific groups who worked on a particular set of oppositions - critical feminism, critical post colonialism, queer theory.

Meanwhile in the history of philosophy, a small number of philosophers had been doing something quite different, perhaps deliberately oppositionally, to this way of creating meaning by lifting an element of reality out of the complex whole, splitting it and then using that opposition to create meaning.

Spinoza is perhaps the first in this tradition. Spinoza argues the there is no real value in transcendent meaning. It misses the point that all meaning and 'identity' is in fact immanent within the complex whole of all material. Even God, is not transcendent, but just the fully realised nature of all the material world. Even thoughts are useful only in so far as they full comprehend and match the actual nature of the world around us, and if they do not they are not 'evil' or 'wrong' (which is one half of a binary he wants to avoid making) they are just missing the fullness of reality.

This insistance of positive affirmation, rather than definition by negation in a binary opposition, then resurfaces heavily in Nietzsche's mature works. Deleuze argues Nietzsche is straining for this in his early works, but still relies on binary oppositions like the desire for integration in a whole and the dissolution of self (Dionysus) and transcendent order (Apollo) in the Birth of Tragedy. But in his mature works he rejects the idea of the 'master slave' relationship where identity is formed in a complex entanglement between two people, and instead proposes the superman whose identity is entirely based on positive affirmation and joy. This identity is a complex coming together of elements of the whole, so a particular arrangement of parts, but it seeks nothing but to express itself - just as a particular genetic expression of life is not in 'opposition' to some other imaginary species, but is just an expression of itself.

Deleuze takes these two forbears to help construct posthumanism. He reworks the idea of the 'root' or 'tree' as a model of transcendent thoughts, and replaces it with the idea of a complex whole with mulitple positive ways of geneaology asserting itself in new complex combinations. Importantly, like Spinoza, the complex forms are no longer limited to thought, or humans; the complex whole is literally everything in the universe - and hence 'vital materialism' is born.

There is meanwhile a parallel evolution happening in Ecohumanism. In Aldo Leopold's The Land Ethic, before even poststructuralism had begun to question the man-nature split, Aldo Leopold suggested that we could extend out notion of 'Kin' not just beyond our family, and not just beyond our immediate allies and friends, but to firstly humanity in general, from there to animals, and from there to the land itself - which we would begin to see have the same rights and status as humans, we we see if examples from New Zealand where rivers and mountains have been given 'human' rights in some contexts. Althought this 'spreading' of rights from the human, is still very much ecohumanism, it's end point is the same - and I am curious of the extent to which the use of the word 'kinship' and 'making kin' in Donna Haraway comes from Leopold, who predates her so significantly.

Where does this take us? In one case this takes us to a place where some mud, has the same value as Michelangelo's David - and biologists might argue, rightly so given the enormous complexity of microbiological life in a small bit of mud. But when we start to suggest that human suffering is entirely indifferent - and just another example of physical matter - we baulk.

Nietzsche and Spinoza already encountered this however - and whilst both deny evil exists, they have a range of arguments about the importance of joy - which resolutely resist a pessimistic reading. It reminds me very strongly indeed of Walt Whitmans Song of Myself, where 'every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you' and he accepts the entire world around him, in it's joys and sorrows, with death 'luckier than you thought' - but at the same time, there is no sense of indifference.

Posthumanism takes us to the edge of just such a place Whitman describes and invites us to go inside. So far, it does not describe what you might find there.


]]> 4.26 1970 Spinoza: Practical Philosophy
author: Gilles Deleuze
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1970
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/24
date added: 2024/03/24
shelves: doctorate-related, posthumanism
review:
This review takes a wider look at Delueze's role in posthumanism in my current understanding.

The project of posthumanism is to decenter humans as the measure of all things, and as a meaningful interpretive unit for understnading the rest of the world. The emblems of the position they reject are firstly Descartes, as he separates thought from the body (and even gives rise to the thought that the material world and body may well not even exist), and the image of the Vitruvian man which quite literally suggests that 'Man' could be the measure and perfect proportions for understanding the world around us.

In the story of humanism, these moments of the 'rediscovery' of man, are moments of transcendence - where truth, beauty and goodness assert themselves over the base inconstancy of the sublunary world. There is a re-writing of the history before as the 'dark ages' and a diminishment of their cultural value or meaning. Then there is the explosion of knowledge of the Enlightenment.

To the post-structuralists, they noticed that in order to create meaning from the complex, interconnected entanglement of reality, the transcendent approach has a common technique. A verbal definition of identity is formed, then examples and non examples are used to 'split' that in fact was a genealogically diverse whole, in to distinct species. This could be everything from 'civilized and uncivilized' to 'male and female' to 'inside and outside' These binary oppositions form the basis of structuralism that tried to understand them, and post structuralism that tried to point of how contradictory and power laden these dichotomies were. Critical post structuralisms abounded for specific groups who worked on a particular set of oppositions - critical feminism, critical post colonialism, queer theory.

Meanwhile in the history of philosophy, a small number of philosophers had been doing something quite different, perhaps deliberately oppositionally, to this way of creating meaning by lifting an element of reality out of the complex whole, splitting it and then using that opposition to create meaning.

Spinoza is perhaps the first in this tradition. Spinoza argues the there is no real value in transcendent meaning. It misses the point that all meaning and 'identity' is in fact immanent within the complex whole of all material. Even God, is not transcendent, but just the fully realised nature of all the material world. Even thoughts are useful only in so far as they full comprehend and match the actual nature of the world around us, and if they do not they are not 'evil' or 'wrong' (which is one half of a binary he wants to avoid making) they are just missing the fullness of reality.

This insistance of positive affirmation, rather than definition by negation in a binary opposition, then resurfaces heavily in Nietzsche's mature works. Deleuze argues Nietzsche is straining for this in his early works, but still relies on binary oppositions like the desire for integration in a whole and the dissolution of self (Dionysus) and transcendent order (Apollo) in the Birth of Tragedy. But in his mature works he rejects the idea of the 'master slave' relationship where identity is formed in a complex entanglement between two people, and instead proposes the superman whose identity is entirely based on positive affirmation and joy. This identity is a complex coming together of elements of the whole, so a particular arrangement of parts, but it seeks nothing but to express itself - just as a particular genetic expression of life is not in 'opposition' to some other imaginary species, but is just an expression of itself.

Deleuze takes these two forbears to help construct posthumanism. He reworks the idea of the 'root' or 'tree' as a model of transcendent thoughts, and replaces it with the idea of a complex whole with mulitple positive ways of geneaology asserting itself in new complex combinations. Importantly, like Spinoza, the complex forms are no longer limited to thought, or humans; the complex whole is literally everything in the universe - and hence 'vital materialism' is born.

There is meanwhile a parallel evolution happening in Ecohumanism. In Aldo Leopold's The Land Ethic, before even poststructuralism had begun to question the man-nature split, Aldo Leopold suggested that we could extend out notion of 'Kin' not just beyond our family, and not just beyond our immediate allies and friends, but to firstly humanity in general, from there to animals, and from there to the land itself - which we would begin to see have the same rights and status as humans, we we see if examples from New Zealand where rivers and mountains have been given 'human' rights in some contexts. Althought this 'spreading' of rights from the human, is still very much ecohumanism, it's end point is the same - and I am curious of the extent to which the use of the word 'kinship' and 'making kin' in Donna Haraway comes from Leopold, who predates her so significantly.

Where does this take us? In one case this takes us to a place where some mud, has the same value as Michelangelo's David - and biologists might argue, rightly so given the enormous complexity of microbiological life in a small bit of mud. But when we start to suggest that human suffering is entirely indifferent - and just another example of physical matter - we baulk.

Nietzsche and Spinoza already encountered this however - and whilst both deny evil exists, they have a range of arguments about the importance of joy - which resolutely resist a pessimistic reading. It reminds me very strongly indeed of Walt Whitmans Song of Myself, where 'every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you' and he accepts the entire world around him, in it's joys and sorrows, with death 'luckier than you thought' - but at the same time, there is no sense of indifference.

Posthumanism takes us to the edge of just such a place Whitman describes and invites us to go inside. So far, it does not describe what you might find there.



]]> Ethics 205218 Ethics is undoubtedly Spinoza's greatest work—an elegant, fully cohesive cosmology derived from first principles, providing a coherent picture of reality, and a guide to the meaning of an ethical life. Following a logical step-by-step format, it defines in turn the nature of God, the mind, the emotions, human bondage to the emotions, and the power of understanding—moving from a consideration of the eternal, to speculate upon humanity's place in the natural order, the nature of freedom and the path to attainable happiness. A powerful work of elegant simplicity, the Ethics is a brilliantly insightful consideration of the possibility of redemption through intense thought and philosophical reflection. The Ethics is presented in the standard translation of the work by Edwin Curley. This edition also includes an introduction by Stuart Hampshire, outlining Spinoza's philosophy and placing it in context.]]> 186 Baruch Spinoza 0140435719 Stuart 4 4.10 1677 Ethics
author: Baruch Spinoza
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1677
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/24
date added: 2024/03/24
shelves: doctorate-related, posthumanism
review:
See review on Delueze, Spinoza Practical Philosophy
]]> <![CDATA[NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity]]> 22514020 Ìę
Along the way, he reveals the untold story of Hans Asperger, the father of Asperger’s syndrome, whose “little professorsâ€� were targeted by the darkest social-engineering experiment in human history; exposes the covert campaign by child psychiatrist Leo Kanner to suppress knowledge of the autism spectrum for fifty years; and casts light on the growing movement of "neurodiversity" activists seeking respect, support, technological innovation, accommodations in the workplace and in education, and the right to self-determination for those with cognitive differences.]]> 477 Steve Silberman 158333467X Stuart 0 to-read 4.27 2015 NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity
author: Steve Silberman
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Posthuman Knowledge 43730252
InÌę Posthuman Knowledge , Rosi Braidotti takes a closer look at the impact of these developments on three major the constitution of our subjectivity, the general production of knowledge and the practice of the academic humanities.Ìę Drawing on feminist, postcolonial and anti-racist theory, she argues that the human was never a neutral category but one always linked to power and privilege.Ìę Hence we must move beyond the old dualities in which Man defined himself, beyond the sexualized and racialized others that were excluded from humanity.Ìę Posthuman knowledge, as Braidotti understands it, is not so much an alternative form of knowledge as a critical a call to build a multi-layered and multi-directional project that displaces anthropocentrism while pursuing the analysis of the discriminatory and violent aspects of human activity and interaction wherever they occur.

Situated between the exhilaration of scientific and technological advances on the one hand and the threat of climate change devastation on the other, the posthuman convergence encourages us to think hard and creatively about what we are in the process of becoming.]]> 210 Rosi Braidotti 1509535268 Stuart 5 doctorate-related
I found it a wonderfully useful Rossetta stone of a text to begin to understand the preoccupations and language of posthumanism as Braidotti maps it.

The very biggest picture, places posthumanism in the same imminent world as Spinoza; the affirmation of joy harks back to Nietzsche and for me Whitman, and there is much of Aldo Leopold's The Land Ethic sitting near the surface, but stripped of its 'white male' origins.

At its heart the idea is simple. 'We' or life, is an emergent property of constellations of parts of a material world that is entirely intertwined. Ideas, which would include the idea of subjectivity, are just a mapping or cartography of that larger whole - and as a mapping, not a reality, these are just a provisional set of boundaries and connections established to artificially create a discreet entity - or territorialisation. The desire to split up this unity, and then oddly use the splits to create dialectics to re-create a new mappings - is the schizoid nature of much of western thinking. A bit like humans inventing imaginary boundaries for small kingdoms and then fighting to put them back together again - when they were always united in one world, before being artificially separated.

The opposite way of thinking would be to realise that these are just assemblages from a whole which we have learned not to see or consider. Nietzsche in 'beyond good and evil' would say because we want useful ideas to express our will to power; Heidegger might say, because we are too narrow to sit back and see the wider whole of 'Being', and Blake would say because our doors of perception are not opened properly. If we can remap our understanding of the world, we could do so in a way that decentered some of the things that have been centred - as there is no centre in reality - and we might embrace with more joy the whole that is there. We might begin to understand consciousness and subjectivity in a way much closer to Buddhism, than western humanism. This can certainly be political and liberatory - but really it goes beyond that.


]]> 3.70 2019 Posthuman Knowledge
author: Rosi Braidotti
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/06
date added: 2024/03/06
shelves: doctorate-related
review:
An incredibly rich and lucid account of Posthumanism - the text manages to balance the exuberance of neologisms Braidotti herself identifies as part of the 'transversal' nature of posthumanism, with actually a relatively heart felt and straightforward account of the relationships between humanism, post structuralism, the critical post-human studies and posthumanism itself.

I found it a wonderfully useful Rossetta stone of a text to begin to understand the preoccupations and language of posthumanism as Braidotti maps it.

The very biggest picture, places posthumanism in the same imminent world as Spinoza; the affirmation of joy harks back to Nietzsche and for me Whitman, and there is much of Aldo Leopold's The Land Ethic sitting near the surface, but stripped of its 'white male' origins.

At its heart the idea is simple. 'We' or life, is an emergent property of constellations of parts of a material world that is entirely intertwined. Ideas, which would include the idea of subjectivity, are just a mapping or cartography of that larger whole - and as a mapping, not a reality, these are just a provisional set of boundaries and connections established to artificially create a discreet entity - or territorialisation. The desire to split up this unity, and then oddly use the splits to create dialectics to re-create a new mappings - is the schizoid nature of much of western thinking. A bit like humans inventing imaginary boundaries for small kingdoms and then fighting to put them back together again - when they were always united in one world, before being artificially separated.

The opposite way of thinking would be to realise that these are just assemblages from a whole which we have learned not to see or consider. Nietzsche in 'beyond good and evil' would say because we want useful ideas to express our will to power; Heidegger might say, because we are too narrow to sit back and see the wider whole of 'Being', and Blake would say because our doors of perception are not opened properly. If we can remap our understanding of the world, we could do so in a way that decentered some of the things that have been centred - as there is no centre in reality - and we might embrace with more joy the whole that is there. We might begin to understand consciousness and subjectivity in a way much closer to Buddhism, than western humanism. This can certainly be political and liberatory - but really it goes beyond that.



]]> <![CDATA[Labours of Love: The Crisis of Care]]> 55288837
'[Labours of Love] should be compulsory reading for every MP, every manager in the NHS and the care "industry"... Informative, moving and essential' - Philippa Perry

We're facing a crisis in care likely to affect every one of us over the course of our lives. Care-work is underpaid; its values disregarded. Britain's society lauds economic growth, productivity and profit over compassion, kindness and empathy. For centuries the caring labours of women have been taken for granted, but with more women now in work, with increasing numbers of elderly and with austerity dismantling the welfare state, care is under pressure as never before.

Over five years, Madeleine Bunting travelled the country, speaking to charity workers, doctors, social workers, in-home carers, nurses, palliative care teams and parents, to explore the value of care, the hidden glue that binds us together. She finds remarkable stories, in GP surgeries, in work undertaken by parents for their disabled children and in end-of-life teams, that conjure a different way of imagining our society and the connections between us. Blending these revelatory testimonies with a history and language of care, and with Bunting's own experiences of caring for the young and old in her family, Labours of Love is a hugely important portrait of our nation today - and of how it might be - which raises a clarion call for change.]]> 320 Madeleine Bunting 1783783796 Stuart 0 to-read 4.05 Labours of Love: The Crisis of Care
author: Madeleine Bunting
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.05
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Posthuman 14803527
Braidotti then analyzes the escalating effects of post-anthropocentric thought, which encompass not only other species, but also the sustainability of our planet as a whole. Because contemporary market economies profit from the control and commodification of all that lives, they result in hybridization, erasing categorical distinctions between the human and other species, seeds, plants, animals and bacteria. These dislocations induced by globalized cultures and economies enable a critique of anthropocentrism, but how reliable are they as indicators of a sustainable future?

The Posthuman concludes by considering the implications of these shifts for the institutional practice of the humanities. Braidotti outlines new forms of cosmopolitan neo-humanism that emerge from the spectrum of post-colonial and race studies, as well as gender analysis and environmentalism. The challenge of the posthuman condition consists in seizing the opportunities for new social bonding and community building, while pursuing sustainability and empowerment.]]> 180 Rosi Braidotti 0745641571 Stuart 4 posthumanism
My framing of the Posthuman would run something like this: the Posthuman emerges as a resolution to the tensions that break post-structuralism. The humanist tradition has a long and complex genelogy with key points during the Renaissance and Romanticism, and through social constructivism. It essentially sees a split between nature and nurture, as opening up a space for human perfectibility - whether that is the neoplatonic chain of being, holistic education, the various bildung traditions of fiction or Kurt Hahn's educational innovations. I have always (perhaps until now) associated myself with this tradition, despite a keen awareness of its contractions.

The contradictions of this tradition come from the fact that the able bodied, neurotypical, intellectually, culturally and physically confident, white 'renaissance man' is taken as the cultural ideal - and try to hide it as you might - becomes the measure of all things. Hence Rosi Braidotti often cites the image of Vitruvian man as a central image of the renaissance.

Poststructuralism attempted to deconstruct the assertion of centrality and privilege that are implicit within humanism, and point out the way it empowered colonisation and violence, as well as enabled miraculous advances in technology. But even these are ambiguous, leading as they have to species extinction and climate change - still within the paradigm of 'nature and nurture'. So by problematising the idea of authority and 'presence' poststructuralists sought to create a space for other voices, and identities within the power of humanist structures of thought, language and behaviour.

The trouble with this though, is that nature and the material universe is still excluded, as if humans existed in their own special world the other side of a cordon sanitaire from 'nature' or the physical world. Posthumanism goes back to Spinoza, inspired by Deleuze, to suggest a new paradigm. This new paradigm would collapse the carefully constructed binary oppositions into richer wholes - these are sometimes described as 'rhizomes' (rather than roots, which constantly divide like a taxonomy) or cartographies which allow not only paths and territories to be mapped, but allow for 'deterritorialisation' and 'lines of flight' that ignore paths already worn into the earth. The most significant opposition they collapse is that between nature and nurture, or between human and nonhuman, or between life and matter.

This idea of radical embrace, reminds me in many ways of Whitman's song of myself - it has the same mixture of total acceptance of the physical world (of which humans are a part) and an acceptance of both optimism and terror at the same time. I find it liberating and it resolves some of the deadends which humanism and poststructuralism lead to.

The 'holistic education' which starts in earnest with Mathew Arnold finds its dissolution in this thinking. For too long schools (many of which I have loved, and worked for) have touted holistic education as the model. What starts with educators like Kurt Hahn as a model of Arnold's public school, empire building cultural conservatism, was always colonising. The original badge system for learning goals (like DoE or service awards) came from a model of military achievements, via the scouts and the Moray award, to dominate his thinking about 'character education'. One of Kurt Hahn's original quotes was 'what is the moral equivalent of war?' and his answer was service. The irony that the narrative of 'white saviourism' is then morally restored to the highest form of education, as uberprivileged students benevolently 'save' or more recently 'partner' with those less fortunately in order to 'transform the world' in a glowing aura of self congratulation, in an environment which is 'safe to fail' due to the cushion of privilege. Where this is benevolently shared with scholars or the emphasis is on the 'future impact' of these individuals for the common good - at heart the same saviourism beats at the heart and an individualist, humanist approach to learners becoming mobile agents of liberal thought in an all too human world.

The era of holistic education being a salve-all to education is over. The era of young 'change makers' learning to change the world in activities that could remind one of the way lions give their cubs injured animals to play with, to train them in earnest to take their place at the top of food chain is no longer valid.

I say this as a life long Kurt Hahn fan, who therefore has considerable qualms about any encroachment upon the godlike figure that has dominated 'progressive' approaches to education - indeed I say it as a child who grew up living in a progressive school my father led, and whose founder Badley as an archhumanist has always held a godlike status for me - with the motto of 'Hand, Heart, Head' resounding in our house, and service in 'Work of Each for the Weal of All'.

Nonetheless, posthumanism is a radical call for a rethink of our assumptions, and is a clarion that signals the downing of arms of the humanist approach - and a entry for something much more complex and less riven with contradictions of its own making. The tradition that got its full incarnation in "holistic education" in Mathew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy in 1869 is finally coming to the end of its intellectual legitimacy. The age of 'holistic education' is over. The age of Posthuman education starts here.]]> 3.82 2013 The Posthuman
author: Rosi Braidotti
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/25
date added: 2024/02/25
shelves: posthumanism
review:
I read this as an entry text into Posthumanism after reading Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble as a broader and more rhetorically imaginative text. This book does provide exactly that - a solid introduction to the Posthuman, well laid out in a historical context.

My framing of the Posthuman would run something like this: the Posthuman emerges as a resolution to the tensions that break post-structuralism. The humanist tradition has a long and complex genelogy with key points during the Renaissance and Romanticism, and through social constructivism. It essentially sees a split between nature and nurture, as opening up a space for human perfectibility - whether that is the neoplatonic chain of being, holistic education, the various bildung traditions of fiction or Kurt Hahn's educational innovations. I have always (perhaps until now) associated myself with this tradition, despite a keen awareness of its contractions.

The contradictions of this tradition come from the fact that the able bodied, neurotypical, intellectually, culturally and physically confident, white 'renaissance man' is taken as the cultural ideal - and try to hide it as you might - becomes the measure of all things. Hence Rosi Braidotti often cites the image of Vitruvian man as a central image of the renaissance.

Poststructuralism attempted to deconstruct the assertion of centrality and privilege that are implicit within humanism, and point out the way it empowered colonisation and violence, as well as enabled miraculous advances in technology. But even these are ambiguous, leading as they have to species extinction and climate change - still within the paradigm of 'nature and nurture'. So by problematising the idea of authority and 'presence' poststructuralists sought to create a space for other voices, and identities within the power of humanist structures of thought, language and behaviour.

The trouble with this though, is that nature and the material universe is still excluded, as if humans existed in their own special world the other side of a cordon sanitaire from 'nature' or the physical world. Posthumanism goes back to Spinoza, inspired by Deleuze, to suggest a new paradigm. This new paradigm would collapse the carefully constructed binary oppositions into richer wholes - these are sometimes described as 'rhizomes' (rather than roots, which constantly divide like a taxonomy) or cartographies which allow not only paths and territories to be mapped, but allow for 'deterritorialisation' and 'lines of flight' that ignore paths already worn into the earth. The most significant opposition they collapse is that between nature and nurture, or between human and nonhuman, or between life and matter.

This idea of radical embrace, reminds me in many ways of Whitman's song of myself - it has the same mixture of total acceptance of the physical world (of which humans are a part) and an acceptance of both optimism and terror at the same time. I find it liberating and it resolves some of the deadends which humanism and poststructuralism lead to.

The 'holistic education' which starts in earnest with Mathew Arnold finds its dissolution in this thinking. For too long schools (many of which I have loved, and worked for) have touted holistic education as the model. What starts with educators like Kurt Hahn as a model of Arnold's public school, empire building cultural conservatism, was always colonising. The original badge system for learning goals (like DoE or service awards) came from a model of military achievements, via the scouts and the Moray award, to dominate his thinking about 'character education'. One of Kurt Hahn's original quotes was 'what is the moral equivalent of war?' and his answer was service. The irony that the narrative of 'white saviourism' is then morally restored to the highest form of education, as uberprivileged students benevolently 'save' or more recently 'partner' with those less fortunately in order to 'transform the world' in a glowing aura of self congratulation, in an environment which is 'safe to fail' due to the cushion of privilege. Where this is benevolently shared with scholars or the emphasis is on the 'future impact' of these individuals for the common good - at heart the same saviourism beats at the heart and an individualist, humanist approach to learners becoming mobile agents of liberal thought in an all too human world.

The era of holistic education being a salve-all to education is over. The era of young 'change makers' learning to change the world in activities that could remind one of the way lions give their cubs injured animals to play with, to train them in earnest to take their place at the top of food chain is no longer valid.

I say this as a life long Kurt Hahn fan, who therefore has considerable qualms about any encroachment upon the godlike figure that has dominated 'progressive' approaches to education - indeed I say it as a child who grew up living in a progressive school my father led, and whose founder Badley as an archhumanist has always held a godlike status for me - with the motto of 'Hand, Heart, Head' resounding in our house, and service in 'Work of Each for the Weal of All'.

Nonetheless, posthumanism is a radical call for a rethink of our assumptions, and is a clarion that signals the downing of arms of the humanist approach - and a entry for something much more complex and less riven with contradictions of its own making. The tradition that got its full incarnation in "holistic education" in Mathew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy in 1869 is finally coming to the end of its intellectual legitimacy. The age of 'holistic education' is over. The age of Posthuman education starts here.
]]> A Shining 78311985 48 Jon Fosse 1804270636 Stuart 0 3.47 2023 A Shining
author: Jon Fosse
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/26
shelves:
review:

]]> The Bookseller of Inverness 63251888
'This slice of historical fiction takes you on a wild ride' THE TIMES

After Culloden, Iain MacGillivray was left for dead on Drummossie Moor. Wounded, his face brutally slashed, he survived only by pretending to be dead as the Redcoats patrolled the corpses of his Jacobite comrades.

Six years later, with the clan chiefs routed and the Highlands subsumed into the British state, Iain lives a quiet life, working as a bookseller in Inverness. One day, after helping several of his regular customers, he notices a stranger lurking in the upper gallery of his shop, poring over his collection. But the man refuses to say what he's searching for and only leaves when Iain closes for the night.

The next morning Iain opens up shop and finds the stranger dead, his throat cut, and the murder weapon laid out in front of him - a sword with a white cockade on its hilt, the emblem of the Jacobites. With no sign of the killer, Iain wonders whether the stranger discovered what he was looking for - and whether he paid for it with his life. He soon finds himself embroiled in a web of deceit and a series of old scores to be settled in the ashes of war.

***

PRAISE FOR THE BOOKSELLER OF INVERNESS

'Fresh and intriguing . . . Her best yet' ANDREW TAYLOR

'Everything you could ask for from a historical thriller' ANTONIA HODGSON

'An intricately wrought, compulsively page-turning tale' CRAIG RUSSELL

'A first rate historical thriller' 5* READER REVIEW

'From the moment I began reading I was hooked' 5* READER REVIEW

'Hugely entertaining . . . fast paced, twisting and turning' 5* READER REVIEW]]> 352 S.G. MacLean 1529414210 Stuart 4 3.94 2022 The Bookseller of Inverness
author: S.G. MacLean
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/10
date added: 2023/12/10
shelves:
review:
A really nice Scottish historical fiction piece set around d Inverness - and lovely to give a historical context to browsing books in Leaky’s bookshop in Inverness which was an inspiration for the story.
]]> <![CDATA[The Pattern Seekers: A New Theory of Human Invention]]> 60100242
'Sheds light on one of humanity's most distinctive traits, celebrates human cognitive diversity, and is rich with empathy and psychological insight.' - Steven Pinker

Why can humans alone invent? In this book, psychologist and world renowned autism expert Simon Baron-Cohen puts forward a bold new theory: because we can identify patterns, specifically if-and-then patterns. And he argues that the genes for this unique ability overlap with the genes for autism.

From the first musical instrument to the agricultural, industrial and digital revolutions, Baron-Cohen shows how this unique ability has driven human progress for 70,000 years. By linking one of our greatest human strengths with a condition that is so often misunderstood, The Pattern Seekers challenges us to think differently about those who think differently.]]> 0 Simon Baron-Cohen 0241242193 Stuart 4 4.00 2020 The Pattern Seekers: A New Theory of Human Invention
author: Simon Baron-Cohen
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/09
date added: 2023/12/09
shelves:
review:
An interesting essay on hyper-systemising and autism - an easy and entertaining read - and a nice contribution to the discussion about the importance and contribution of neurodiversity to human cultures.
]]> World as Lover, World as Self 536524 252 Joanna Macy 0938077279 Stuart 0 to-read, ecohumanism 4.28 1991 World as Lover, World as Self
author: Joanna Macy
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1991
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/21
shelves: to-read, ecohumanism
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're in without Going Crazy]]> 13235686 272 Joanna Macy 1577319729 Stuart 0 to-read, ecohumanism 4.11 2012 Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're in without Going Crazy
author: Joanna Macy
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/21
shelves: to-read, ecohumanism
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Great Work: Our Way into the Future]]> 143389 241 Thomas Berry 0609804995 Stuart 0 to-read, ecohumanism 4.03 1999 The Great Work: Our Way into the Future
author: Thomas Berry
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/21
shelves: to-read, ecohumanism
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Ecology, Community and Lifestyle]]> 1074849 223 Arne NĂŠss 0521348730 Stuart 0 to-read, ecohumanism 3.90 1981 Ecology, Community and Lifestyle
author: Arne NĂŠss
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1981
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/21
shelves: to-read, ecohumanism
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Ecology of Wisdom: Writings by Arne Naess]]> 2226656 320 Arne NĂŠss 1582434018 Stuart 0 to-read, ecohumanism 3.83 2008 The Ecology of Wisdom: Writings by Arne Naess
author: Arne NĂŠss
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/21
shelves: to-read, ecohumanism
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays]]> 146151 The Art of the Commonplace gathers twenty essays by Wendell Berry that offer an agrarian alternative to our dominant urban culture. Grouped around five themes―an agrarian critique of culture, agrarian fundamentals, agrarian economics, agrarian religion, and geobiography―these essays promote a clearly defined and compelling vision important to all people dissatisfied with the stress, anxiety, disease, and destructiveness of contemporary American culture. Why is agriculture becoming culturally irrelevant, and at what cost? What are the forces of social disintegration and how might they be reversed? How might men and women live together in ways that benefit both? And, how does the corporate takeover of social institutions and economic practices contribute to the destruction of human and natural environments? Through his staunch support of local economies, his defense of farming communities, and his call for family integrity, Berry emerges as the champion of responsibilities and priorities that serve the health, vitality and happiness of the whole community of creation.]]> 352 Wendell Berry 1593760078 Stuart 0 to-read 4.37 2002 The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
author: Wendell Berry
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> What Are People For? 146153

Damage --
Healing --
A remarkable man [Nate Shaw] --
Harry Caudill in the Cumberlands --
A few words in favor of Edward Abbey --
Wallace Stegner and the great community --
A poem of difficult hope --
Style and grace --
Writer and region --
The responsibility of the poet --
God and country --
A practical harmony --
An argument for diversity --
What are people for? --
Waste --
Economy and pleasure --
The pleasures of eating --
The work of local culture --
Why I am not going to buy a computer --
Feminism, the body, and the machine --
Word and flesh --
Nature as measure]]> 210 Wendell Berry 0865474370 Stuart 0 4.25 1990 What Are People For?
author: Wendell Berry
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1990
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/21
shelves: to-read, core-doctoral-research-texts
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture]]> 146191 The Unsettling of America has been recognized as a classic of American letters. In it, Wendell Berry argues that good farming is a cultural development and spiritual discipline. Today’s agribusiness, however, takes farming out of its cultural context and away from families. As a result, we as a nation are more estranged from the land—from the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it.
Sadly, as Berry notes in his Afterword to this third edition, his arguments and observations are more relevant than ever. We continue to suffer loss of community, the devaluation of human work, and the destruction of nature under an economic system dedicated to the mechanistic pursuit of products and profits. Although “this book has not had the happy fate of being proved wrong,â€� Berry writes, there are good people working “to make something comely and enduring of our life on this earth.â€� Wendell Berry is one of those people, writing and working, as ever, with passion, eloquence, and conviction.]]> 246 Wendell Berry 0871568772 Stuart 0 4.33 1977 The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
author: Wendell Berry
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1977
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/21
shelves: to-read, core-doctoral-research-texts
review:

]]> Lady Chatterley's Lover 49583709
With her soft brown hair, lithe figure and big, wondering eyes, Constance Chatterley is possessed of a certain vitality. Yet she is deeply unhappy; married to an invalid, she is almost as inwardly paralyzed as her husband Clifford is paralyzed below the waist. It is not until she finds refuge in the arms of Mellors the game-keeper, a solitary man of a class apart, that she feels regenerated. Together they move from an outer world of chaos towards an inner world of fulfillment.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700Ìętitles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust theÌęseries to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-dateÌętranslations by award-winning translators.]]> 400 D.H. Lawrence 014303961X Stuart 5 3.48 1928 Lady Chatterley's Lover
author: D.H. Lawrence
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.48
book published: 1928
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/10/18
shelves:
review:

]]> The Longest Journey 3101 The Longest Journey as the book "I am most glad to have written." An introspective novel of manners at once comic and tragic, it tells of a sensitive and intelligent young man with an intense imagination and a certain amount of literary talent. He sets out full of hope to become a writer, but gives up his aspirations for those of the conventional world, gradually sinking into a life of petty conformity and bitter disappointments.]]> 396 E.M. Forster 0141441488 Stuart 3 3.46 1907 The Longest Journey
author: E.M. Forster
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.46
book published: 1907
rating: 3
read at: 2023/10/18
date added: 2023/10/18
shelves:
review:

]]> Septology (Septologien, #1-7) 60246552
Jon Fosse’s ​S±đ±èłÙŽÇ±ôŽÇČ”Čâ is a transcendent exploration of the human condition, and a radically other reading experience â€� incantatory, hypnotic, and utterly unique.]]> 825 Jon Fosse 1804270067 Stuart 0 to-read 4.48 2022 Septology (Septologien, #1-7)
author: Jon Fosse
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World]]> 48582 Winner of the International Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction

Animal tracks, word magic, the speech of stones, the power of letters, and the taste of the wind all figure prominently in this intellectual tour de force that returns us to our senses and to the sensuous terrain that sustains us. This major work of ecological philosophy startles the senses out of habitual ways of perception.

For a thousand generations, human beings viewed themselves as part of the wider community of nature, and they carried on active relationships not only with other people with other animals, plants, and natural objects (including mountains, rivers, winds, and weather patters) that we have only lately come to think of as inanimate. How, then, did humans come to sever their ancient reciprocity with the natural world? What will it take for us to recover a sustaining relation with the breathing earth?

In The Spell of the Sensuous David Abram draws on sources as diverse as the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Balinese shamanism, Apache storytelling, and his own experience as an accomplished sleight-of-hand of magician to reveal the subtle dependence of human cognition on the natural environment. He explores the character of perception and excavates the sensual foundations of language, which--even at its most abstract--echoes the calls and cries of the earth. On every page of this lyrical work, Abram weaves his arguments with a passion, a precision, and an intellectual daring that recall such writers as Loren Eisleley, Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez.]]> 368 David Abram 0679776397 Stuart 0 to-read, doctorate-related 4.16 1996 The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World
author: David Abram
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1996
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/08
shelves: to-read, doctorate-related
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Transformative Doctoral Research Practices for Professionals (Critical Issues in the Future of Learning and Teaching, 12)]]> 30515776 180 Pamela Burnard 946300629X Stuart 0 0.0 Transformative Doctoral Research Practices for Professionals (Critical Issues in the Future of Learning and Teaching, 12)
author: Pamela Burnard
name: Stuart
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/07
shelves: to-read, core-doctoral-research-texts
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District]]> 22856150 320 James Rebanks 0385682840 Stuart 0 to-read 4.12 2015 The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District
author: James Rebanks
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Uncommon Therapy: The Psychiatric Techniques of Milton H. Erickson, M.D.]]> 668757 320 Jay Haley 0393310310 Stuart 3 4.21 1973 Uncommon Therapy: The Psychiatric Techniques of Milton H. Erickson, M.D.
author: Jay Haley
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1973
rating: 3
read at: 2023/09/24
date added: 2023/09/24
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Hypnotherapy Training: Methods, Techniques & Philosophies]]> 40195116 202 Freddy Jacquin Stuart 4 4.34 Hypnotherapy Training: Methods, Techniques & Philosophies
author: Freddy Jacquin
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.34
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/23
date added: 2023/09/23
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building]]> 63063173
“Whether you are a new manager or a CEO, there are going to be moments when you feel alone and need help. Odds are, the advice you need is in Scaling People . You are going to pull this book off your shelf over and over!"
Ìę —Kim Scott, New York Times bestselling author of Radical Candor and Just Work

A leader at both Google and Stripe from their early days, Claire Hughes Johnson has worked with founders and company builders to try to replicate their success. The most common questions she’s asked are not about business strategy—they’re about how to scale the operating structures and people systems of a rapidly growing startup.

Scaling People is a practical and empathetic guide to being an effective leader and manager in a high-growth environment. The tactical information it puts forward—including guidance on crafting foundational documents, strategic and financial planning, hiring and team development, and feedback and performance mechanisms—can be applied to companies of any size, in any industry. Scaling People includes dozens of pages of worksheets, templates, exercises, and example documents to help founders, leaders, and company builders create scalable operating systems and lightweight processes that really work.

Implementing effective leadership and management practices takes effort and discipline, but the reward is a sustainable, scalable company that’s set up for long-term success. Scaling People is a detailed roadmap for company builders to put the right operating systems and structures in place to scale the most important resource a company its people.]]> 480 Claire Hughes Johnson 1953953212 Stuart 0 to-read 4.23 Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building
author: Claire Hughes Johnson
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.23
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Death of the Moth and Other Essays]]> 785075 248 Virginia Woolf 0156252341 Stuart 2 4.13 1931 The Death of the Moth and Other Essays
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1931
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2023/08/01
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Voyage Out (The Virginia Woolf Library)]]> 148905 ]]> 375 Virginia Woolf 0156028050 Stuart 3 3.77 1915 The Voyage Out (The Virginia Woolf Library)
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1915
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2023/07/27
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Cave Birds: An Alchemical Cave Drama]]> 964614 Book by Ted Hughes 60 Ted Hughes 0670209279 Stuart 3 3.94 1975 Cave Birds: An Alchemical Cave Drama
author: Ted Hughes
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1975
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2023/07/26
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships]]> 56883977
Robin Dunbar is the world-renowned psychologist and author who famously discovered Dunbar's number: how our capacity for friendship is limited to around 150 people. In Friends, he looks at friendship in the round, at the way different types of friendship and family relationships intersect, or at the complex of psychological and behavioural mechanisms that underpin friendships and make them possible - and just how complicated the business of making and keeping friends actually is.

Mixing insights from scientific research with first person experiences and culture, Friends explores and integrates knowledge from disciplines ranging from psychology and anthropology to neuroscience and genetics in a single magical weave that allows us to peer into the incredible complexity of the social world in which we are all so deeply embedded.

Working at the coalface of the subject at both research and personal levels, Robin Dunbar has written the definitive book on how and why we are friends.v]]> 432 Robin I.M. Dunbar 1408711745 Stuart 3 3.55 Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships
author: Robin I.M. Dunbar
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.55
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2023/07/19
date added: 2023/07/19
shelves:
review:

]]> Truth and Method 213142 Truth and Method is Gadamer's magnum opus. An astonishing synthesis of literary criticism, philosophy, theology, the theory of law and classical scholarship, it is undoubtedly one of the most important texts in twentieth century philosophy. Looking behind the self-consciousness of science, he discusses the tense relationship between truth and methodology. In examining the different experiences of truth, he aims to "present the hermeneutic phenomenon in its fullest extent."]]> 640 Hans-Georg Gadamer 082647697X Stuart 0 4.15 1960 Truth and Method
author: Hans-Georg Gadamer
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1960
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/17
shelves: to-read, phd-ontology-and-methods
review:

]]> <![CDATA[English Bread and Yeast Cookery]]> 2367678 591 Elizabeth David 0713910267 Stuart 4
The book is wonderful. The only parts which date terribly, as those around food attitudes in England at the time of her writing. You wish they were not there, as the rest of the book has not dated. Her statement that Neapolitan pizza is just like what you can get in 1950s London, and her recipe for dough for her pizza's just are horrifying (cheddar on pizza anyone?). But the 'historical' and 'factual' parts of the book are great, and read perfectly well today.

A great book.]]> 4.33 1977 English Bread and Yeast Cookery
author: Elizabeth David
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1977
rating: 4
read at: 2023/06/15
date added: 2023/06/15
shelves:
review:
A wonderfully geeky 'everything you wanted to know about bread' book. I found it very enlightening, and especially the chapters on grains and the plants they come from. I have always struggled to understand what spelt is, and what is the relationship between flours and things like semolinas, and what Duram wheat should be used for, and why stone grinding is different to rolling etc. And now all is clear.

The book is wonderful. The only parts which date terribly, as those around food attitudes in England at the time of her writing. You wish they were not there, as the rest of the book has not dated. Her statement that Neapolitan pizza is just like what you can get in 1950s London, and her recipe for dough for her pizza's just are horrifying (cheddar on pizza anyone?). But the 'historical' and 'factual' parts of the book are great, and read perfectly well today.

A great book.
]]> Yellowface 59357120
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees.

But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.]]> 329 R.F. Kuang Stuart 4 3.84 2023 Yellowface
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/06/10
date added: 2023/06/10
shelves:
review:
Clever, fun and thought provoking.
]]> <![CDATA[Quality: Keywords in Teacher Education]]> 61796732 · the use of standards, accreditation and inspection frameworks;
· the range of input, process, output and perspectival indicators used to judge quality in ITE;
· the different discourses of teacher quality which influence the pedagogy and structure of teacher education programmes.
The author also gives particular attention to how to address different approaches to quality when they start to reach conundrum proportions, and how to redress teacher education towards what matters rather than what counts.]]> 128 Clare Brooks 1350285978 Stuart 0 to-read 4.00 Quality: Keywords in Teacher Education
author: Clare Brooks
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't]]> 13588394
Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data. Most predictions fail, often at great cost to society, because most of us have a poor understanding of probability and uncertainty. Both experts and laypeople mistake more confident predictions for more accurate ones. But overconfidence is often the reason for failure. If our appreciation of uncertainty improves, our predictions can get better too. This is the "prediction paradox": The more humility we have about our ability to make predictions, the more successful we can be in planning for the future.

In keeping with his own aim to seek truth from data, Silver visits the most successful forecasters in a range of areas, from hurricanes to baseball, from the poker table to the stock market, from Capitol Hill to the NBA. He explains and evaluates how these forecasters think and what bonds they share. What lies behind their success? Are they good-or just lucky? What patterns have they unraveled? And are their forecasts really right? He explores unanticipated commonalities and exposes unexpected juxtapositions. And sometimes, it is not so much how good a prediction is in an absolute sense that matters but how good it is relative to the competition. In other cases, prediction is still a very rudimentary-and dangerous-science.

Silver observes that the most accurate forecasters tend to have a superior command of probability, and they tend to be both humble and hardworking. They distinguish the predictable from the unpredictable, and they notice a thousand little details that lead them closer to the truth. Because of their appreciation of probability, they can distinguish the signal from the noise.]]> 544 Nate Silver 159420411X Stuart 3 to-read
It is amazing how quickly the book has dated - and it is a remarkable reflection on just how much the world has changed over the time, and particularly the emergence of AI recently - which means many of the example stories seem hopelessly dated.]]> 3.95 2012 The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't
author: Nate Silver
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2023/06/07
date added: 2023/06/07
shelves: to-read
review:
I had seen this on so many books shelves of people I like and respect, I think I was expecting a bit more than I got. Basically it is Bayesian probability and a few cognitive biases, interspersed between now rather dated examples of predictions. It felt like it would be easier and better to just learn about Bayes' Theorem on wikipedia, and save yourself some time.

It is amazing how quickly the book has dated - and it is a remarkable reflection on just how much the world has changed over the time, and particularly the emergence of AI recently - which means many of the example stories seem hopelessly dated.
]]> <![CDATA[Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students]]> 23468051 A bold, brain-based teaching approach to culturally responsive instruction

The achievement gap remains a stubborn problem for educators of culturally and linguistically diverse students. With the introduction of the rigorous Common Core State Standards, diverse classrooms need a proven framework for optimizing student engagement and facilitating deeper learning

Culturally responsive pedagogy has shown great promise in meeting this need, but many educators still struggle with its implementation. In this book, Zaretta Hammond draws on cutting-edge neuroscience research to offer an innovative approach for designing and implementing brain-compatible culturally responsive instruction.

The book includes:
*Information on how one’s culture programs the brain to process data and affects learning relationships
*Ten “key movesâ€� to build studentsâ€� learner operating systems and prepare them to become independent learners
*Prompts for action and valuable self-reflection

With a firm understanding of these techniques and principles, teachers and instructional leaders will confidently reap the benefits of culturally responsive instruction.]]> 192 Zaretta Lynn Hammond 1483308014 Stuart 0 to-read 4.35 2014 Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students
author: Zaretta Lynn Hammond
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Secret Commonwealth (The Book of Dust, #2)]]> 19034943 La Belle Sauvage: The Book of Dust Volume One unfolded and saw the baby Lyra Belacqua begin her life-changing journey.

It is seven years since readers left Lyra and the love of her young life, Will Parry, on a park bench in Oxford's Botanic Gardens at the end of the ground-breaking, bestselling His Dark Materials sequence.

Now, in The Secret Commonwealth, we meet Lyra Silvertongue. And she is no longer a child . . .

The second volume of Sir Philip Pullman's The Book of Dust sees Lyra, now twenty years old, and her daemon Pantalaimon, forced to navigate their relationship in a way they could never have imagined, and drawn into the complex and dangerous factions of a world that they had no idea existed.

Pulled along on his own journey too is Malcolm; once a boy with a boat and a mission to save a baby from the flood, now a man with a strong sense of duty and a desire to do what is right.

Theirs is a world at once familiar and extraordinary, and they must travel far beyond the edges of Oxford, across Europe and into Asia, in search for what is lost - a city haunted by daemons, a secret at the heart of a desert, and the mystery of the elusive Dust.]]> 784 Philip Pullman Stuart 1 3.99 2019 The Secret Commonwealth (The Book of Dust, #2)
author: Philip Pullman
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2019
rating: 1
read at: 2023/05/29
date added: 2023/05/29
shelves:
review:
There is something really off with the gender dynamics in this book. It is quite disturbing - not in a good provocative way, but in a way that makes you wonder about the author and it feels creepy. This is such a pity, as the other books I really liked.
]]> <![CDATA[The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves]]> 6321234
Brian Arthur is a pioneer of complexity theory and the discoverer of the highly influential "theory of increasing returns," which took Silicon Valley by storm, famously explaining why some high-tech companies achieve breakaway success. Now, in this long-awaited and ground-breaking book, he solves the great outstanding puzzle of technology—where do transformative new technologies come from?—putting forth the first full theory of how new technologies emerge and offering a definitive answer to the mystery of why some cultures—Silicon Valley, Cambridge, England in the 1920s—are so extraordinarily inventive. He has discovered that rather than springing from insight moments of individual genius, new technologies arise in a process akin to evolution. Technology evolves by creating itself out of itself, much as a coral reef builds itself from activities of small organisms.

Drawing on a wealth of examples, from the most ancient to cutting-edge inventions of today, Arthur takes readers on a delightful intellectual journey, bringing to life the wonders of this process of technological evolution. The Nature of Technology is the work of one of our greatest thinkers at the top of his game, composing a classic for our times that is sure to generate wide acclaim.]]> 256 W. Brian Arthur 1416544054 Stuart 5
His basic idea is that technology is as much a process or evolution, as it is a 'thing'. He clarifies three attributes of technology: it is recursive, and each bit of technology is a combination of prior technologies. If you look at a computer, everything from the screen, to the buttons, to the screws in the casing, heck, even to the forging of metals, is a prior technology. Technology captures natural phenomena. At first in human history physical properties (like fissile but hard flint), the physical processes to make tools and metal work, then chemical, electrical, nuclear, quantum and biological... in a huge sprawling mess. It is symbotic, but not the same as science, and often the tools of science (for example a mircoscope) are technologies themselves. Sometimes science leads, but often technology leads (e.g. flight engineering). Technology produces itself - the material culture develops in huge interrelated systems of technologies which build upon and out of each other. Thirdly, it is a designed material culture or processes with a designed intent to solve a problem or exploit an opportunity.

These three describe the 'evolution' and nature of technology. He describes technology, a bit like the sum of all human languages, as having domains and often problems are translated between domains and different 'grammars and vocabularies'. For example a computer that connects to another computer through a fibre optic cable, which has its own domain vocabulary and grammar.

Innovation by definition is using what already exists, but it happens in different ways. He identifies four: by the iterative problem solving of engineering, and he gives the example of the development of the 747. The second method is by a novel combination of existing technologies to solve a problem. Or the third by 're domaining' a problem or process, for example when Babbage decided to move calculations from the mental domain, and try to solve the same problem with an 'engine'. The final and perhaps most significant, is when a new physical phenomena is captured by technology. The first windmills, or nuclear power, or solar panels. They all involve bringing new physical phenomena into our use.

So is a symphony a technology then? It is made with a purpose, musical instruments capture physical properties, it is a novel combination of music, and it is certainly made of pre-existing parts of other pieces of music or music theory. Brian Arthur says, yes... but not completely. The innovation here is a social innovation, not one about material culture. Whilst the instruments are clearly a technology when invented to capture the way moving air vibrates over or with certain objects, the development of the symphony and coordination of all the instruments sits in a different domain - it is a behavioural, cultural and social innovation. It is not the development of our material culture by new technologies.

The book also explores our feelings about technology and relationship with it, ending on a note that technology must allow us to be more human, and not be limited by it or controlled by it.

I cannot over-state how good I think this book is - just an absolute stunning job, in an area where so many others fail to reach coherence or clarity. I found it profoundly insightful about innovation particularly and it will genuinely change the way I think about this in future. There are lots of other bonuses, such as an amazing description of how technologies' life spans work and how technologies get 'locked in' a bit like the idea of paradigms and Kuhn's work on this.

A brilliant book. If you are interested in tech and innovation, I strongly recommend it.]]> 3.98 2009 The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves
author: W. Brian Arthur
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2023/05/21
date added: 2023/05/21
shelves:
review:
Defining tech is notoriously difficult. I have watched in our recent initiative discussions many of the best brains on the planet try and fail to say what it is. I stumbled on this book, and discovered with joy that Brian Arthur had managed it. It is simply a brilliant book - stunning, clear and insightful. I was blown away reading it.

His basic idea is that technology is as much a process or evolution, as it is a 'thing'. He clarifies three attributes of technology: it is recursive, and each bit of technology is a combination of prior technologies. If you look at a computer, everything from the screen, to the buttons, to the screws in the casing, heck, even to the forging of metals, is a prior technology. Technology captures natural phenomena. At first in human history physical properties (like fissile but hard flint), the physical processes to make tools and metal work, then chemical, electrical, nuclear, quantum and biological... in a huge sprawling mess. It is symbotic, but not the same as science, and often the tools of science (for example a mircoscope) are technologies themselves. Sometimes science leads, but often technology leads (e.g. flight engineering). Technology produces itself - the material culture develops in huge interrelated systems of technologies which build upon and out of each other. Thirdly, it is a designed material culture or processes with a designed intent to solve a problem or exploit an opportunity.

These three describe the 'evolution' and nature of technology. He describes technology, a bit like the sum of all human languages, as having domains and often problems are translated between domains and different 'grammars and vocabularies'. For example a computer that connects to another computer through a fibre optic cable, which has its own domain vocabulary and grammar.

Innovation by definition is using what already exists, but it happens in different ways. He identifies four: by the iterative problem solving of engineering, and he gives the example of the development of the 747. The second method is by a novel combination of existing technologies to solve a problem. Or the third by 're domaining' a problem or process, for example when Babbage decided to move calculations from the mental domain, and try to solve the same problem with an 'engine'. The final and perhaps most significant, is when a new physical phenomena is captured by technology. The first windmills, or nuclear power, or solar panels. They all involve bringing new physical phenomena into our use.

So is a symphony a technology then? It is made with a purpose, musical instruments capture physical properties, it is a novel combination of music, and it is certainly made of pre-existing parts of other pieces of music or music theory. Brian Arthur says, yes... but not completely. The innovation here is a social innovation, not one about material culture. Whilst the instruments are clearly a technology when invented to capture the way moving air vibrates over or with certain objects, the development of the symphony and coordination of all the instruments sits in a different domain - it is a behavioural, cultural and social innovation. It is not the development of our material culture by new technologies.

The book also explores our feelings about technology and relationship with it, ending on a note that technology must allow us to be more human, and not be limited by it or controlled by it.

I cannot over-state how good I think this book is - just an absolute stunning job, in an area where so many others fail to reach coherence or clarity. I found it profoundly insightful about innovation particularly and it will genuinely change the way I think about this in future. There are lots of other bonuses, such as an amazing description of how technologies' life spans work and how technologies get 'locked in' a bit like the idea of paradigms and Kuhn's work on this.

A brilliant book. If you are interested in tech and innovation, I strongly recommend it.
]]> <![CDATA[Explanation in Causal Inference: Methods for Mediation and Interaction]]> 23215855
The book begins with a comprehensive introduction to mediation analysis, including chapters on concepts for mediation, regression-based methods, sensitivity analysis, time-to-event outcomes, methods for multiple mediators, methods for time-varying mediation and longitudinal data, and relations between mediation and other concepts involving intermediates such as surrogates, principal stratification, instrumental variables, and Mendelian randomization. The second part of the book concerns interaction or "moderation," including concepts for interaction, statistical interaction, confounding and interaction, mechanistic interaction, bias analysis for interaction, interaction in genetic studies, and power and sample-size calculation for interaction. The final part of the book provides comprehensive discussion about the relationships between mediation and interaction and unites these concepts within a single framework. This final part also provides an introduction to spillover effects or
social interaction, concluding with a discussion of social-network analyses.

The book is written to be accessible to anyone with a basic knowledge of statistics. Comprehensive appendices provide more technical details for the interested reader. Applied empirical examples from a variety of fields are given throughout. Software implementation in SAS, Stata, SPSS, and R is provided. The book should be accessible to students and researchers who have completed a first-year graduate sequence in quantitative methods in one of the social- or biomedical-sciences disciplines. The book will only presuppose familiarity with linear and logistic regression, and could potentially be used as an advanced undergraduate book as well.]]> 728 Tyler Vanderweele 0199325871 Stuart 0 to-read 4.44 2015 Explanation in Causal Inference: Methods for Mediation and Interaction
author: Tyler Vanderweele
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Penguin Classics Culture and Anarchy and Other Selected Prose]]> 24874287 480 Matthew Arnold 0141396245 Stuart 3 learning-theory
There are sections on 'culture' that feel quite oppressive, and the emphasis on 'the establishment' and shared culture really troubling to me - but I can see the diamonds inbetween the rough and rubble.

]]> 3.78 2015 Penguin Classics Culture and Anarchy and Other Selected Prose
author: Matthew Arnold
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2023/05/09
date added: 2023/05/09
shelves: learning-theory
review:
I had long wanted to read this book, as I really like his poem Dover Beach, and had always thought of him as sitting somewhere in the progressive tradition of education that I feel aligned to. The book is a bit bewildering in some places as it is so deeply submerged in the politics and petty concerns of its time... but it has moments where from the contemporary it starts naming ideas which resonate through time up to the present. You can see the early articulation of holistic and experiential learning here, and the Helenistic archetype of learning that is informed by the development of the whole character. There is a wonderful section on what we would call now the difference between technical and adaptive change, and there is a part which in spirit echos Dee Hock's famous quote about the importance of clear principles, rather than complex procedures. The most powerful thing about the book is that it helps make sense of a lot of the concerns of other Victorian and later literature - Oscar Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest, EM Forster's 'only connect' quote, and Howard's End, suddenly make more sense in this context... and holistic education is given another tap root which makes sense of its later flourishing in figures like Kurt Hahn.

There are sections on 'culture' that feel quite oppressive, and the emphasis on 'the establishment' and shared culture really troubling to me - but I can see the diamonds inbetween the rough and rubble.


]]> <![CDATA[Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies]]> 20527133 Superintelligence asks the questions: what happens when machines surpass humans in general intelligence? Will artificial agents save or destroy us? Nick Bostrom lays the foundation for understanding the future of humanity and intelligent life.

The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. If machine brains surpassed human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become extremely powerful—possibly beyond our control. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on humans than on the species itself, so would the fate of humankind depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence.

But we have one advantage: we get to make the first move. Will it be possible to construct a seed Artificial Intelligence, to engineer initial conditions so as to make an intelligence explosion survivable? How could one achieve a controlled detonation?]]> 352 Nick Bostrom 0199678111 Stuart 3 3.85 2014 Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
author: Nick Bostrom
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2023/05/03
date added: 2023/05/03
shelves:
review:
A very timely account of the dangers of superintelligence developing in AI
]]> <![CDATA[A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence]]> 54503521 288 Jeff Hawkins 1541675819 Stuart 4 4.01 2021 A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence
author: Jeff Hawkins
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2023/04/13
date added: 2023/04/13
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Contemporary Theories of Learning: Learning Theorists � In Their Own Words]]> 7238295
Professor Knud Illeris has collected chapters that explain both the complex frameworks in which learning takes place and the specific facets of learning, such as the acquisition of learning content, personal development, and the cultural and social nature of learning processes. Each international expert provides either a seminal text or an entirely new precis of the conceptual framework they have developed over a lifetime of study.

Elucidating the key concepts of learning, Contemporary Theories of Learning provides both the perfect desk reference and an ideal introduction for students. It will prove an authoritative guide for researchers and academics involved in the study of learning, and an invaluable resource for all those dealing with learning in daily life and work. It provides a detailed synthesis of current learning theories... all in the words of the theorists themselves.

The theories of

Knud Illeris

Peter Jarvis

Robert Kegan

Yrjo Engestrom

Bente Elkjaer

Jack Mezirow

Howard Gardner

Peter Alheit

John Heron

Mark Tennant

Jerome Bruner

Robin Usher

Thomas Ziehe

Jean Lave

Etienne Wenger

Danny Wildemeersch & Veerle Stroobants

In their own words]]> 256 Knud Illeris 0415473446 Stuart 4 3.86 2008 Contemporary Theories of Learning: Learning Theorists 
 In Their Own Words
author: Knud Illeris
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2023/04/09
date added: 2023/04/09
shelves:
review:
A very helpful collection to landscape some of the major approaches to learning theory. Some are brilliant - some are trivial and obscure - but overall very helpful if slightly dated now it is a decade on.
]]> <![CDATA[Fostering Critical Reflection in Adulthood: A Guide to Transformative and Emancipatory Learning]]> 268683 416 Jack Mezirow 1555422071 Stuart 0 to-read, learning-theory 3.66 1990 Fostering Critical Reflection in Adulthood: A Guide to Transformative and Emancipatory Learning
author: Jack Mezirow
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1990
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/04/08
shelves: to-read, learning-theory
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Book of Magic: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment]]> 30112185 '. . . as when iron is drawn to a magnet, camphor is sucked into hot air, crystal lights up in the Sun, sulfur and a volatile liquid are kindled by flame, an empty eggshell filled with dew is raised towards the Sun . . .'

This rich, fascinating anthology of the western magical tradition stretches from its roots in the wizardry of the Old Testament and the rituals of the ancient world, through writers such as Thomas Aquinas, John Milton, John Dee and Matthew Hopkins, and up to the tangled, arcane beginnings of the scientific revolution. Arranged historically, with commentary, this book includes incantations, charms, curses, Golems, demons and witches, as well as astrology, divination and alchemy, with some ancient and medieval works which were once viewed as too dangerous even to open.

Selected and translated with an introduction and notes by Brian Copenhaver]]> 704 Brian P. Copenhaver 0141393149 Stuart 0 to-read 3.67 2016 The Book of Magic: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment
author: Brian P. Copenhaver
name: Stuart
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/04/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology]]> 152435
"This collection amounts to a retrospective exhibition of a working life. . . . Bateson has come to this position during a career that carried him not only into anthropology, for which he was first trained, but into psychiatry, genetics, and communication theory. . . . He . . . examines the nature of the mind, seeing it not as a nebulous something, somehow lodged somewhere in the body of each man, but as a network of interactions relating the individual with his society and his species and with the universe at large."—D. W. Harding, New York Review of Books

"[Bateson's] view of the world, of science, of culture, and of man is vast and challenging. His efforts at synthesis are tantalizingly and cryptically suggestive. . . .This is a book we should all read and ponder."—Roger Keesing, American Anthropologist

Ìę]]> 533 Gregory Bateson 0226039056 Stuart 0 to-read, learning-theory 4.26 1972 Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology
author: Gregory Bateson
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1972
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/04/07
shelves: to-read, learning-theory
review:

]]> The Carl Rogers Reader 174875 544 Carl R. Rogers 0395483573 Stuart 0 to-read 4.21 1989 The Carl Rogers Reader
author: Carl R. Rogers
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1989
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]]> On Organizational Learning 1774897 480 Chris Argyris 0631213090 Stuart 0 to-read, learning-theory 4.40 1993 On Organizational Learning
author: Chris Argyris
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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shelves: to-read, learning-theory
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]]> <![CDATA[Organizational Learning II: Theory, Method, and Practice]]> 1123713 336 Chris Argyris 0201629836 Stuart 0 to-read, learning-theory 4.13 1995 Organizational Learning II: Theory, Method, and Practice
author: Chris Argyris
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1995
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[La Belle Sauvage (Book of Dust, #1)]]> 9307699
Malcolm Polstead's life in the pub beside the Thames is safe and happy enough, if uneventful. But during a winter of unceasing rain the forces of science, religion and politics begin to clash, and as the weather rises to a pitch of ferocity, all of Malcolm's certainties are torn asunder.

Finding himself linked to a baby by the name of Lyra, Malcolm is forced to undertake the challenge of his life and to make the dangerous journey that will change him and Lyra for ever
]]> 546 Philip Pullman 0385604416 Stuart 4 4.19 2017 La Belle Sauvage (Book of Dust, #1)
author: Philip Pullman
name: Stuart
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2023/04/02
date added: 2023/04/01
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