What is the key to happiness in later life? Since the time of the ancient philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, the human race has questioned and written about what makes us happy. But with the rise of life expectancy and rapidly ageing populations, happiness in later life has become a major topic of debate. Drawing on three sources, the lessons of history, a survey of 150 people aged over 65 and the findings of the present-day positive psychologists, this book analyses and considers what it means to be in happy in later life and how it can be achieved. Bowden reflects on our many and differing views of life after retirement and finds lessons that can also contribute to our happiness in earlier years. Importantly, this book also asks, and answers, what role governments and our social institutions play in bringing about happiness. This valuable and well-informed insight into happiness in later life leaves the reader with little doubt that the post-65 years can indeed be your best.
This analysis of primary documents allows readers to understand Shakespeare's tragedies within the context of historical issues of Renaissance England. Comprising dozens of primary source documents, this book explores Early Modern historical issues reflected in four of Shakespeare's tragedies most commonly taught in secondary schools and universities around the world: Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Macbeth. Primary source documents relating to Romeo and Juliet deal with subjects such as dueling, breast-feeding, and the Black Plague. Background discussion of Julius Caesar addresses the influence of Roman culture on Renaissance England; the nature of monarchy; and warfare in Renaissance England, including the defeat of the Spanish Armada. The backdrop for Hamlet includes the nature of spirits; heaven, hell, and purgatory; the history of revenge tragedy beginning with ancient Greece; and debates over the theater in Shakespeare's time. Macbeth brings the reader into the reign of King James and examines ongoing debates over the dangers of witchcraft; the crime of the century, the Gunpowder Plot of 1605; and the "Macbeth curse" that has plagued productions of the Scottish Play since its premiere.
An adventurous ride through the most blisteringly hot regions of science, history, and culture. Melting glaciers, warming oceans, droughts-it's clear that today's world is getting hotter. But while we know the agony of a sunburn or the comfort of our winter heaters, do we really understand heat? A bestselling scientist and nature writer who goes to any extreme to uncover the answers, Bill Streever sets off to find out what heat really means. Let him be your guide and you'll firewalk across hot coals and sweat it out in Death Valley, experience intense fever and fire, learn about the invention of matches and the chemistry of cooking, drink crude oil, and explore thermonuclear weapons and the hottest moment of all time-the big bang. Written in Streever's signature spare and refreshing prose, Heat is an adventurous personal narrative that leaves readers with a new vision of an everyday experience-how heat works, its history, and its relationship to daily life.
Medical Humanities may be broadly conceptualized as a discipline wherein medicine and its specialties intersect with those of the humanities and social sciences. As such it is a hybrid area of study where the impact of disease and healing science on culture is assessed and expressed in the particular language of the disciplines concerned with the human experience. However, as much as at first sight this definition appears to be clear, it does not reflect how the interaction of medicine with the humanities has evolved to become a separate field of study. In this publication we have explored, through the analysis of a group of selected multidisciplinary essays, the dynamics of this process. The essays predominantly address the interaction of literature, philosophy, art, art history, ethics, and education with medicine and its specialties from the classical period to the present. Particular attention has been given to the Medieval, Early Modern, and Enlightenment periods. To avoid a rigid compartmentalization of the book based on individual fields of study we opted for a fluid division into multidisciplinary sections, reflective of the complex interactions of the included works with medicine.
Find creative inspiration in this fascinating rummage through the wastebaskets, secret diaries, and abandoned files of 20 literary superstars. If you like to write—whether it’s a pastime, a passion, or a profession—you’ve probably found yourself reading something brilliant and thinking, “I could never do this! I might as well give up.” But if there’s one thing every great author has in common, it’s this: they’ve all written some hot garbage. In Revisionaries, a writing expert takes you on an engrossing tour through the discarded drafts, false starts, and abandoned projects of influential writers. In the process, he dismantles some of our most deeply held—and most suffocating—ideas about what it takes to produce great creative work. You’ll learn that: Franz Kafka lacked confidence Octavia Butler had writer's block F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote bad drafts Ralph Ellison got overwhelmed Louisa May Alcott got off to a bad start And more deep, dark secrets about the authors you most admire Written by an award-winning novelist and creative-writing professor, Revisionaries is a compelling peek behind the scenes of genius for writers and readers alike.
From the artistic genius to the tarot reader, a sense of communication with another order of reality is commonly affirmed; this ‘other’ may be termed god, angel, spirit, muse, daimon or alien, or it may be seen as an aspect of the human imagination or the ‘unconscious’ in a psychological sense. This volume of essays celebrates the daimonic presence in a diversity of manifestations, presenting new insights into inspired creativity and human beings’ relationship with mysterious and numinous dimensions of reality. In art and literature, many visual and poetic forms have been given to the daimonic intelligence, and in the realm of new age practices, encounters with spirit beings are facilitated through an increasing variety of methods including shamanism, hypnotherapy, mediumship and psychedelics. The contributors to this book are not concerned with ‘proving’ or ‘disproving’ the existence of such beings. Rather, they paint a broad canvas with many colours, evoking the daimon through the perspectives of history, literature, encounter and performance, and showing how it informs, and has always informed, human experience.
California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion’s Novels: Exiled from Eden focuses on the concept of Californian identity in the fiction of Joan Didion. This identity is understood as melancholic, in the sense that the critics following the tradition of both Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin use the word. The book traces the progress of the way Californian identity is portrayed in Joan Didion’s novels, starting with the first two in which California plays the central role, Run River and Play It As It Lays, through A Book of Common Prayer to Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted, where California functions only as a distant point of reference, receding to the background of Didion’s interests. Curiously enough, Didion presents Californian history as a history of white settlement, disregarding whole chapters of the history of the region in which the Californios and Native Americans, among other groups, played a crucial role: it is this reticence that the monograph sees as the main problem of Didion’s fiction and presents it as the silent center of gravity in Didion’s oeuvre. The monograph proposes to see the melancholy expressed by Didion’s fiction organized into four losses: of Nature, History, Ethics, and Language; around which the main analytical chapters are constructed. What remains unrepresented and silenced comes back to haunt Didion’s fiction, and it results in a melancholic portrayal of California and its identity – which is the central theme this monograph addresses.
The Glass Castle meets An Unquiet Mind in a mesmerizing, loving memoir about growing up in a family plagued by bipolar disorder. Scattershot is David Lovelace's poignant, humorous, and vivid account of bipolar disorder's effects on his family, and his gripping exploits as he spent his life running from—and finally learning to embrace—the madness imprinted on his genes. Four out of five people in David Lovelace's immediate family have experienced bipolar disorder, including David himself. In 1986, his father, his brother, and David himself were all committed in quick succession. Only his sister has escaped the disease. A coming-of-age story punctuated by truly harrowing experiences, this devastating and empathetic portrait of the Lovelace family strips away the shame associated with bipolar disorder—a disease that affects approximately 5.7 million adult Americans—and celebrates the profound creative gifts that come with it.