 Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and
Vietnam veteran Philip Caputo takes you on a voyeuristic, cerebral, and virtual tour of this unpopular war.
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Marshall McLuhan's theories from the mid-sixties on "electronic" media and the many different ways human communicate, continue to resonate in this Internet age. Websites: Cybermedia: McLuhan, also McLuhan HotLinks
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 Ernest Becker won the Pulitzer Prize for this
work dealing with our psychological struggle and the many neuroses associated with our attempt to deny our mortality. Website: The Ernest Becker Foundation
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Allan Bloom traces 20th-century American social, political, and intellectual history and how it has negatively affected the university, and contributed to the present crisis of Western Civilization.
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 If you want some insights, and
"conservative" commentary about the political and social events that made the 20th century what it was, this book covers it all.
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 Henry Louis Mencken, the sage of Baltimore,
the most prominent essayist, critic, newspaper man, book reviewer, and political commentator of his day. Website: Mencken Home Page
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 Taking place in 1905, this is an imaginary
re-creation of Einstein's discovery of the nature of time, 30 little fables about places where time behaves differently. Websites: Einstien's Web
(explores themes in the novel) and
Albert Einstein on Line
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The author of one Modern Library's top 100 novels, the Moviegoer
, and the bestseller The Thanatos Syndrome
, Walker Percy explores the subjects of symbolic reasoning, the origins of mankind, the nature of tourism, the Delta Factor, semioticism and more. Website: The Walker Percy Project
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 James Gleick explains the theories and
people behind the birth of the science called chaos. It's a way of seeing order and pattern where formerly only the random, the erratic, and the unpredictable have been observed.
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A compelling classic, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions are full of insight, intrique, and humor that captures the period and intellectual climate, even if Rousseau made
up many of these stories, as some suggest. Website: Rousseau Association
. Also a text-only version of Confessions
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This is not a linear autobiography. Like Charles Mingus' music, this prose swings between extemes, leading the reader straight into the psyche of a great jazz musician. Amazon.com Glance at Mingus
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 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is
actually the autobiography of Gertrude Stein. Gertrude creates a delightful ode to herself and her literary/artistic circle in Paris. See the Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Website
: Gertrude Stein On-Line
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 Annie Dillard, Author of the Pulitzer
Prize-winning
Pilgram at Tinker Creek, Living by Fiction deals with writers such as
Nabokov, Barth, Pynchon, Borges, García Márquez, Beckett, and Calvino, and shows why fiction matters.
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 Author of Lolita and Pale Fire, both of which
made Modern Library's Top 100 Novels of the Century, Nabokov's impressionistic perspectives of his life and times is less an autobiography than a series of carefully chosen vignettes to let his memory simply
speak with lyrical beauty and touching nostalgia. Website: International Valdimir Nabokov Society
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The Ghost in the Machine:
The Urge to Self-Destruction:
A Psychological and Evolutionary Study of
Modern Man's Predicament
by Arthur Koestler |
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Arthur Koestler, author of Darkness at Noon
, examines how the parts of the human brain-structure that account for reason and emotion are not fully coordinated which may partially explain humankind's paranoia, violence, and insanity. Website:
Calendar of Authors |
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The Waning of the Middle Ages:
The Study of the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France, and the
Netherlands in the XIVth and XVth Centuries
by J. Huizinga |
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If you want to experience what it was really like over 500 years ago, this tour de force
exploration will drop you right into the middle of it. |
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Grammatical Man:
Information, Entropy, Language and Life
by Jeremy
Campbell
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This tells the story of information theory, exploring the relationship between communication theory, entropy,
probability theory, psychology, computers, DNA coding, cell development, linguistics, and the evolution of intelligence. |
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A parody and introduction to literary criticism using a series of reviews of Winnie the Pooh from a different critical
perspective--Marxist, feminist, post-structuralist, etc. It cuts down the pretentious critiques of literary criticism. |
