brand farrar straus and giroux (38 results)

Hardcover. Condition: Good. In the wake of the colossal acts of terrorism of the last decade, the legal historian and human rights lawyer Sadakat Kadri realized that many people in the West had ideas about the origins and implications of the sharia, or Islamic law, that were hazy, contradictory, or simply wrong. Even as sharia became a loaded word and an all-encompassing explanation, most of us remained ignorant of its true meaning. And we were doing this at our peril. In Heaven on Earth, Kadri brings lucid wit and analytical skill to the thrilling and turbulent story of Islams foundation and expansion. He shows how legal ideas gradually evolved out of thousands of reports about the Prophet Mohammad, most of which were not even written down until two centuries after his death. And he explains how, just in the last forty years, the sharia has been appropriated and transformed by hardliners desperate to impose their oppressive vision. In the second half of.

Hardcover. Condition: Good. "Wendy Lesser's extraordinary alertness, intelligence, and curiosity have made her one of America's most significant cultural critics," writes Stephen Greenblatt. In Why I Read, Lesser draws on a lifetime of pleasure reading and decades of editing one of the most distinguished literary magazines in the country, The Threepenny Review, to describe her love of literature. As Lesser writes in her prologue, "Reading can result in boredom or transcendence, rage or enthusiasm, depression or hilarity, empathy or contempt, depending on who you are and what the book is and how your life is shaping up at the moment you encounter it."Here the reader will discover a definition of literature that is as broad as it is broad-minded. In addition to novels and stories, Lesser explores plays, poems, and essays along with mysteries, science fiction, and memoirs. As she examines these works from such perspectives as "Character and Plot," "Novelty," "Grandeur and Intimacy," and "Authority," Why I Read sparks an overwhelming desire to put aside quotidian tasks in favor of reading. Lesser's passion for this pursuit resonates on every page, whether she is discussing the book as a physical object or a particular work's influence. "Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different," she writes. "It can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as well as the present, and it can help you realize that your present will someday be someone else's past. This may be disheartening, but it can also be strangely consoling at times."A book in the spirit of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Elizabeth Hardwick's A View of My Own, Why I Read is iconoclastic, conversational, and full of insight. It will delight those who are already avid readers as well as neophytes in search of sheer literary fun.

Hardcover. Condition: Good. Book by Trevor Bryce.

Softcover. Condition: Good. Thirteen essays by food producers and consumers address such topics as holistic resource management, environmentally sustainable systems, and the shortsightedness of modern agribusiness.

Hardcover. Condition: Good. Some time ago Rafi Zabor sat down to write a brief narrative of the year 1986. That was the year he set out across two continents in a used Mercedes--"Wabenzi" is the Swahili word for a member of the Mercedes-owning class--to buy a grave stone for his friend Mahmoud Rauf and to outrun the shadow of his own parents' recent death.But like a boat against the current, the writer was drawn back into the past: his father's escape from the Nazis, Rafi's own Brooklyn boyhood surrounded by the fractious, Zabors and Zaborovskys, and the anguished--sometimes farcical--spiritual journey that led Zabor from Brooklyn to Turkey by way of Coltrane, the thirteenth-century mystic Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi, the McGovern campaign, Gurdjieff, a shoe salesman named Gogol, and the cataclysmic months Zabor spent studying (and whirling) amid a band of Sufis in rural England. The result--the first of a projected four volumes--is one of the most original, capacious, and vivid narratives of the last few decades, a real-life Bildungsroman dealing with an expanded range of human experience, from matters of life and death to a piece of what lies beyond them.Straight from the unchartered territory between Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Tristram Shandy, I, Wabenzi lifts a corner of the known world as if it were the edge of a curtain, and begins to show a reality new to our literature gleaming on the other side.

Hardcover. Condition: Good. Traces the life of the great Spanish writer from his difficult childhood during the Spanish Civil War, through his adolescence to his exile in the international literary circles of Paris.

Hardcover. Condition: Good. Mac Griswold's The Manor is the biography of a uniquely American place that has endured through wars great and small, through fortunes won and lost, through histories bright and sinister-and of the family that has lived there since its founding as a Colonial New England slave plantation three and a half centuries ago.In 1984, the landscape historian Mac Griswold was rowing along a Long Island creek when she came upon a stately yellow house and a garden guarded by looming boxwoods. She instantly knew that boxwoods that large-twelve feet tall, fifteen feet wide-had to be hundreds of years old. So, as it happened, was the house: Sylvester Manor had been held in the same family for eleven generations.Formerly encompassing all of Shelter Island, New York, a pearl of 8,000 acres caught between the North and South Forks of Long Island, the manor had dwindled to 243 acres. Still, its hidden vault proved to be full of revelations and treasures, including the 1666 charter for the land, and correspondence from Thomas Jefferson. Most notable was the short and steep flight of steps the family had called the "slave staircase," which would provide clues to the extensive but little-known story of Northern slavery. Alongside a team of archaeologists, Griswold began a dig that would uncover a landscape bursting with stories.Based on years of archival and field research, as well as voyages to Africa, the West Indies, and Europe, The Manor is at once an investigation into forgotten lives and a sweeping drama that captures our history in all its richness and suffering. It is a monumental achievement.

Softcover. Condition: Good. In this engrossing journey into the lives of psychopaths and their infamously crafty behaviors, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton reveals that there is a scale of "madness" along which we all sit. Incorporating the latest advances in brain scanning and neuroscience, Dutton demonstrates that the brilliant neurosurgeon who lacks empathy has more in common with a Ted Bundy who kills for pleasure than we may wish to admit, and that a mugger in a dimly lit parking lot may well, in fact, have the same nerveless poise as a titan of industry.Dutton argues that there are indeed "functional psychopaths" among us-different from their murderous counterparts-who use their detached, unflinching, and charismatic personalities to succeed in mainstream society, and that shockingly, in some fields, the more "psychopathic" people are, the more likely they are to succeed. Dutton deconstructs this often misunderstood diagnosis through bold on-the-ground reporting and original scientific research as he mingles with the criminally insane in a high-security ward, shares a drink with one of the world's most successful con artists, and undergoes transcranial magnetic stimulation to discover firsthand exactly how it feels to see through the eyes of a psychopath.As Dutton develops his theory that we all possess psychopathic tendencies, he puts forward the argument that society as a whole is more psychopathic than ever: after all, psychopaths tend to be fearless, confident, charming, ruthless, and focused-qualities that are tailor-made for success in the twenty-first century. Provocative at every turn, The Wisdom of Psychopaths is a riveting adventure that reveals that it's our much-maligned dark side that often conceals the trump cards of success.

Softcover. Condition: Good. English (translation)Original German.

Softcover. Condition: Good. Depicts the stories of Vivian's intense relationship with her son and Naomi's struggle to come to an understanding of her brother's suicide.

Softcover. Condition: Good. Book by Naoya, Shiga.

Hardcover. Condition: Good. A searching, captivating look at the persistence of myth in our modern world"By nature volatile and discordant, the human animal looks to silence for relief from being itself while other creatures enjoy silence as their birthright."In a book by turns chilling and beautiful, John Gray continues the thinking that made his Straw Dogs such a cult classic.Gray draws on an extraordinary array of memoirs, poems, fiction, and philosophy to re-imagine our place in the world. Writers as varied as Ballard, Borges, Conrad, and Freud have been mesmerized by forms of human extremity-experiences that are on the outer edge of the possible or that tip into fantasy and myth. What happens to us when we starve, when we fight, when we are imprisoned? And how do our imaginations leap into worlds way beyond our real experiences?The Silence of Animals is consistently fascinating, filled with unforgettable images and a delight in the conundrum of human existence-an existence that we decorate with countless myths and ideas, where we twist and turn to avoid acknowledging that we too are animals, separated from the others perhaps only by our self-conceit. In the Babel we have created for ourselves, it is the silence of animals that both reproaches and bewitches us.

Softcover. Condition: Good. Poems from five decades deal with nature, aging, birth, magic, history, myth, travel, the atom bomb, love, marriage, and politics.

Hardcover. Condition: Good. Bringing together twenty of the author's prefaces to books by other writers and fifteen to her own, this volume collects a variety of observations on life, art, travel, food, and drink.

Softcover. Condition: Good. Delineates basic methodology and suggests variations in the craft of handbuilding with clay, with a study of and illustrations of the work of ten professional ceramicists.

Softcover. Condition: Good. English, German (translation).

Hardcover. Condition: Good. New York:: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, (1969). Near fine in black cloth in a very good minus dust jacket (price-clipped, some wear to the ends of the spine and the corners, creasing to front flap). First printing. The sequel to "The Manor," portraying the period between the Polish insurrection of 1863 and the end of the 19th century, a period during which the Jews began to play an important part in Polish industry, commerce, arts and science. INSCRIBED on the half title page and SIGNED I. B. Singer. Translated from the Yiddish by his nephew Joseph Singer, Elaine Gottlieb and Elizabeth Shub. 374 pp.

Hardcover. Condition: Good. Olof Landström (illustrator). Things are just not the same in Olsson's fabulous meat pie factory when a temporary lack of funds forces him to make substitutions for his usual quality ingredients.

Softcover. Condition: Good. Book by Goodwin, Jason.

Hardcover. Condition: Good. Book by Sunstein, Cass R.

Softcover. Condition: Good. Book by Collins, Emily.

Hardcover. Condition: Good. Translated from the French by Gerard Hopkins.

Hardcover. Condition: Good. It is the astonishment of Louise Glck's poetry that it resists collection. With each successive book her drive to leave behind what came before has grown more fierce, the force of her gaze fixed on what has yet to be imagined. She invented a form to accommodate this need, the book-length sequence of poems, like a landscape seen from above, a novel with lacunae opening onto the unspeakable. The reiterated yet endlessly transfigured elements in this landscape-Persephone, a copper beech, a mother and father and sister, a garden, a husband and son, a horse, a dog, a field on fire, a mountain-persistently emerge and reappear with the dark energy of the inevitable, shot through with the bright aspect of things new-made.From the outset ("Come here / Come here, little one"), Gluck's voice has addressed us with deceptive simplicity, the poems in lines so clear we "do not see the intervening fathoms."From within the earth'sbitter disgrace, coldness and barrennessmy friend the moon rises:she is beautiful tonight, but when is she not beautiful?To read these books together is to understand the governing paradox of a life lived in the body and of the work wrested from it, the one fated to die and the other to endure.

Hardcover. Condition: Good. Clement Hurd (illustrator). The story of young Rose's search for identity--a quest that leads her to friendships with dogs, rabbits, lions, and other children and finally on a trek to the top of a mountain.

Hardcover. Condition: Good. Vintage hardcover.

Hardcover. Condition: Good. Frank Alpine, an Italian -American drifter on the run from his past, stumbles into the orbit of struggling Brooklyn grocer Morris Bober. Seeing a chance to atone for his sins, Frank becomes Bober's stock boy and runs the store when the owner takes ill. But it is Bober's daughter , Helen , who gives Frank a real reason to turn his life around. Considered one of the greastest Jewish novels ever written. The Assistant is a classic look at social and racial divides of America in the early twentieth century. Filled with riveting scenes of life on the edge, this is an enduring story of how love and the human spirit can triumph over any adversity.

Hardcover. Condition: Good. A globe-trotting, eye-opening exploration of how cities can-and do-make us happier peopleCharles Montgomery's Happy City will revolutionize the way we think about urban life.After decades of unchecked sprawl, more people than ever are moving back to the city. Dense urban living has been prescribed as a panacea for the environmental and resource crises of our time. But is it better or worse for our happiness? Are subways, sidewalks, and tower dwelling an improvement on the car-dependence of sprawl?The award-winning journalist Charles Montgomery finds answers to such questions at the intersection between urban design and the emerging science of happiness, and during an exhilarating journey through some of the world's most dynamiccities. He meets the visionary mayor who introduced a "sexy" lipstick-red bus to ease status anxiety in Bogotá; the architect who brought the lessons of medieval Tuscan hill towns to modern-day New York City; the activist who turned Paris's urban freeways into beaches; and an army of American suburbanites who have transformed their lives by hacking the design of their streets and neighborhoods.Full of rich historical detail and new insights from psychologists and Montgomery's own urban experiments, Happy City is an essential tool for understanding and improving our own communities. The message is as surprising as it is hopeful: by retrofitting our cities for happiness, we can tackle the urgent challenges of our age. The happy city, the green city, and the low-carbon city are the same place, and we can all help build it.

Softcover. Condition: Good. Book by Flannery O'Connor.

Softcover. Condition: New. Shulevitz, Uri (illustrator). When the Czar proclaims that he will marry his daughter to the man who brings him a flying ship, the Fool of the World sets out to try his luck and meets some unusual companions on the way.

Softcover. Condition: Good. A classic American novel from the author of Borrowed Finery -- 'Chekhovian.Every line of Fox's story, every gesture of her characters, is alive and surprising.' New York Times On the eve of their trip to Africa, Laura Maldonada Clapper and her husband, Desmond, sit in a New York City hotel room, drinking scotch-and-sodas and awaiting the arrival of three Clara, Laura's timid daughter from a previous marriage; Carlos, Laura's flamboyant brother; and Peter, a melancholy editor whom Laura hasn't seen for over a year. But what begins as a bon voyage party soon becomes a bitter, claustrophobic clash of family resentment. From the hotel room to the tiny restaurant to which the five embark, Laura presides over the escalating innuendo and hostility with imperial cruelty, for she is hiding the knowledge that her mother, the family matriarch, has died of a heart attack that morning. Intense and unerringly observed, The Widow's Children is a tour de force from the incomparable Paula Fox.