Loved itIn terms of an artistic gateway drug, the book is outstanding.
Winter Light: On Late Life's Radiance (2025)
Others: Positive - ISBN:
- 9781685712242
Genres: nonfiction
Lists: …
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Sexual Personae
Camille Paglia
1990 · 718 pages · 1 review
Others: PositiveDiscusses the works of Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare, Rousseau, de Sade, Goethe, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Balzac, Gautier, Baudelaire, Huysmans, Emily Bronte, Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Whitman, Henry James, and Emily Dickinson.
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Also nonfiction86%Better Than Food loved bothPersonalize your recommendations14%The accursed share
Georges Bataille
1988 · 200 pages · 1 review
Others: PositiveMost Anglo-American readers know Bataille as a novelist. The "Accursed Share "provides an excellent introduction to Bataille the philosopher. Here he uses his unique economic theory as the basis for an incisive inquiry into the very nature of civilization. Unlike conventional economic models based on notions of scarcity, Bataille's theory develops the concept of excess: a civilization, he argues, reveals its order most clearly in the treatment of its surplus energy. The result is a brilliant blend of ethics, aesthetics, and cultural anthropology that challenges both mainstream economics and ethnology. The three volumes of "The Accursed Share" address what Georges Bataille sees as the paradox of utility: namely, if being useful means serving a further end, then the ultimate end of utility can only be uselessness. The first volume, the only one published before Bataille's death, treated this paradox in economic terms, showing that "it is not necessity but its contrary, luxury, that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems." In the second and third volumes, "The History of Eroticism" and "Sovereignty", Bataille explores the same paradox of utility from an anthropological and an ethical perspective, respectively. "The History of Eroticism" analyzes the fears and fascination, the prohibitions and transgressions attached to the realm of eroticism as so many expressions of the "uselessness" of erotic life. In the third volume, Bataille raises the ethical problems of sovereignty, of "the independence of man relative to useful ends."
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Also nonfiction86%Better Than Food loved bothPersonalize your recommendations14%The origins and history of consciousness
Erich Neumann
1949 · 493 pages · 1 review
Others: PositiveThe Origins and History of Consciousness draws on a full range of world mythology to show how individual consciousness undergoes the same archetypal stages of development as human consciousness as a whole. Erich Neumann was one of C. G. Jung's most creative students and a renowned practitioner of analytical psychology in his own right. In this influential book, Neumann shows how the stages begin and end with the symbol of the Uroboros, the tail-eating serpent. The intermediate stages are projected in the universal myths of the World Creation, Great Mother, Separation of the World Parents, Birth of the Hero, Slaying of the Dragon, Rescue of the Captive, and Transformation and Deification of the Hero. Throughout the sequence, the Hero is the evolving ego consciousness. Featuring a foreword by Jung, this Princeton Classics edition introduces a new generation of readers to this eloquent and enduring work. Wikipedia discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origins_and_History_of_Consciousness Jordan B. Peterson: Erich Neumann is the most well-regarded student, analyst & distiller of Carl Jung's work.
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Also nonfiction86%Better Than Food loved bothPersonalize your recommendations14%21 Things You May Not Know about the Indian Act
Bob Joseph
2018 · 160 pages · 2 reviews
Others: PositiveA guide to understanding the Indian Act and its impact on generations of Indigenous Peoples, as well as an examination of how Indigenous Peoples can return to self-government, self-determination, and self-reliance.
21 Things You Need to Know about Indigenous Self-Government
Bob Joseph
2025 · 200 pages · 1 review
Others: PositiveBob Joseph's 21 Things® You May Not Know About the Indian Act captured the attention of hundreds of thousands of Canadians by shining a light on the Indian Act and the problems associated with it. In that book, readers learned that the Consolidated Indian Act of 1876 has controlled the lives of Indigenous Peoples in Canada for generations, and despite its objective to assimilate Indians into the economic and political mainstream, it has had the opposite effect: segregation. They live under different laws and on different lands. People came away from that book with questions such as "Can we get rid of the Indian Act?" and "What would that look like? Would self-government work?" These are timely questions, given that 2026 will mark 150 years since the Consolidated Indian Act of 1876. The short answer to these questions is, yes, we can dismantle the Act, and there are current examples of self-government arrangements that are working. With his trademark wisdom, humility, and deep understanding, Bob Joseph shows us the path forward, in which Indigenous self-governance is already happening and not to be feared--and negotiating more such arrangements, sooner rather than later, is an absolute necessity. Beginning with the relationship between Indigenous Peoples, the Crown, and settlers in at the early days of colonization, Joseph travels to the current landscape and the tremendous possibility for reconciliation--a future every Canadian can support. He illustrates the widespread negative consequences of the reserve system that can only be redressed by self-government. With insight and clarity, he busts myths about taxation, the so-called benefits of the Indian Act, and the trustee-wardship relationship. And he provides inspiring examples of how self-government agreements are working well, from the Nisga'a Final Agreement to the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, while showing how key the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is to defining what sovereignty really means. 21 Things You Need to Know About Indigenous Self-Government: A Conversation about Dismantling the Indian Act illuminates what Canadians need to know to stand in the work of reconciliation as individuals, as organizations, and as a country of many nations. Bob Joseph shows us a way forward with his trademark wisdom, humility, and deep understanding, Indigenous self-governance is not only a possibility, but an absolute necessity.
50 Ways to Protect Bookstores
Danny Caine
2023 · 48 pages · 1 review
Others: PositiveBookstores are important. So are booksellers. And they--and the ideas and communities they serve--need protection. Danny Caine, the best-selling author of How to Resist Amazon and Why and co-owner of the Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas, writes a stirring call to action. Bookstores are not charities, he writes, and they shouldn't get a pass on exploitative labor practices, but they play a vital role in our society that is worth upholding. Preparing the ground for a more expansive book on the topic, Caine offers 50 ideas for protecting this idiosyncratic business niche and, by extension, the neighborhoods that bookstores anchor. Some of the ideas are buy books at bookstores, talk them up on social media, and write glowing online reviews. Others ask you to think support your local bookstore's neighboring businesses, support your local library, and lobby your elected officials to pass legislation that ensures livable wages and makes it easier to run small businesses. Still others are just excellent go on dates at bookstores and buy and read weird books that you've never heard of before. Readers, publishers, politicians, workers, union organizers, and landlords can all find tailor-made calls to action in these pages. Especially now, with freedom of speech under attack from the right, it's time for us to protect books and those who sell them.
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