Poetry in Person, edited by Alexander Neubauer, is a rich book of conversations between Pearl London, the legendary New School teacher, and the many important American poets she brought into her classroom to share their poems in progress. Lucille Clifton, who passed away in February of this year, visited London’s classroom on May 3, 1983.
More >In the 1970s, psychologists began the formal study of wisdom as a subject worthy of research. These social scientists identified a number of common psychological and behavioral characteristics associated with wisdom, including compassion, emotion regulation, a sense of social justice, moral reasoning, patience, and an ability to deal with uncertainty and change.
In Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience, Stephen S. Hall examines the way recent brain science is shedding light on these timeless human virtues. He refers to them as eight “neural pillars of wisdom.” Click through to find out more about the findings in each area.
More >Ishawooa, Wyoming, is far from bucolic nowadays. The sheriff, Crane Carlson, needs no reminder of this but gets one anyway when he finds a kid not yet twenty murdered in a meth lab. His other troubles include a wife who’s going off the rails with bourbon and pot, and his own symptoms of the disease that killed his grandfather.
More >A compelling investigation into one of our most coveted and cherished ideals, and the efforts of modern science to penetrate the mysterious nature of this timeless virtue.
More >In 1977, Laura Bell, at loose ends after graduating from college, leaves her family home in Kentucky for a wild and unexpected adventure: herding sheep in Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin. Inexorably drawn to this life of solitude and physical toil, a young woman in a man’s world, she is perhaps the strangest member of this beguiling community of drunks and eccentrics. So begins her unabating search for a place to belong and for the raw materials with which to create a home and family of her own. Yet only through time and distance does she acquire the wisdom that allows her to see the love she lived through and sometimes left behind.
More >On the night of January 31, 1953, a mountain of water, literally piled up out of the sea by a freak winter hurricane, swept down onto the Netherlands, demolishing the dikes protecting the country and wiping a quarter of its landmass from the map. It was the worst natural disaster to strike the Netherlands in three hundred years.
More >A rich and significant collection of more than one hundred poems, drawn from a lifetime of “wild gratitude” in poetry.
More >In a White House ceremony on Thursday, February 25, President Obama honored leaders in the humanities with the National Humanities Medal, one of the nation’s highest awards. The honorees included prize-winning author Robert A. Caro and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel.
More >The memoirs of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair will be published in September, it was announced today by Gail Rebuck, Chairman and Chief Executive of the Random House Group. Tony Blair: The Journey will be published in the UK by Hutchinson and simultaneously in the United States by Knopf and in Canada by Knopf Canada.
More >Reviewers all over the world are falling in love with John Banville’s storytelling in his new novel, The Infinities, a contemporary comedy in the classical mode, complete with a pantheon of Greek gods meddling in the human lives below.
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Knopf
Doubleday
Pantheon
Vintage/Anchor