Showing results for "The Essays" in Biological Sciences

What is nature? What is humanity's place in nature? And what is the relationship of society to the natural world? In an era of ecological breakdown, answering these questions has become of momentous importance for our everyday lives and for the future that we and other life-forms face. In the essays of The Philosophy of Social Ecology, Murray Bookchin confronts these questions head on, invoking the ideas of mutualism, self-organization, and unity in diversity, in the service of ever-expanding freedom.

Brought to you by Penguin. A poetic and intimate essay collection on the lives of plants and their entanglement with our human worlds A seed slips beyond a garden wall. A seaweed drifts through an ocean. A tree is planted on a shifting border. A shrub is uprooted from its culture and its land...

Part of John Muir's appeal to modern audiences is that he not only explored the American West and wrote about its beauties but also fought for their preservation. His successes dot the landscape and are evident in all the natural features that bear his name: forests, lakes, trails, and glaciers. Here collected are some of Muir's finest wilderness essays, ranging in subject matter from Alaska to Yellowstone, from Oregon to the High Sierra.

The complete collection of works using this title. Other versions, including the Project Gutenberg version, have been radically shortened. Mark Twain published several collections of his short stories and essays. This collection, like the others, dramatically demonstrates the eclectic nature of his work and the depth of his humanistic thinking. Each essay stands alone. Listeners will find many instances where modern times come to mind. (John Greenman)

Here are 20 essays by various authors, covering all kinds of subjects. Some are famous, others are gems ferreted out from chapters or passages in books where they have lain hidden for decades. Britannica defines an essay as "an analytic, interpretive, or critical literary composition usually much shorter and less systematic and formal than a dissertation or thesis and usually dealing with its subjects from a limited and often personal point of view." In short, an essay is neither fiction nor a short story, but a composition designed to educate/persuade more than entertain or inform, though ...

A collection of wry looks at literature, education, and other social phenomena by Canadian humourist and economics professor, Stephen Leacock. (Summary by TriciaG)

From the award-winning author of The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary comes an immersive and thought-provoking exploration of the modern zoo that confronts our fraught relationship with the animal world in the age of extinction. Most thinking on the modern zoo falls neatly into two camps: zoos are...

Powys presents a set of literary devotions of great figures in Literature who have obsessed him. He attempts not so much a reasoned critique or any attempt to categorise these figures but rather, as he describes in the Preface: "to give [himself] up, absolutely and completely, to the various visions and temperaments of these great dead artists." Powys delivered popular lectures throughout the United States and was able to hold audiences in rapt attention for hours while speaking about great literature and writers, this book from the earlier part of his writing career gives us a little glimpse ...

"Believing as I do that James Thomson is, since Shelley, the most brilliant genius who has wielded a pen in the service of Freethought, I take a natural pride and pleasure in rescuing the following articles from burial in the great mausoleum of the periodical press. There will doubtless be a diversity of opinion as to their value. One critic, for instance, has called “The Story of a Famous Old Jewish Firm” a witless squib; but, on the other hand, the late Professor Clifford considered it a piece of exquisite mordant satire worthy of Swift. Such differences are inevitable from the very ...

This pamphlet by LGBT pioneer and philosopher Edward Carpenter was originally intended to form part of his work "Love's Coming of Age", but was removed following public discourse on the Oscar Wilde trials of 1895. It was subsequently published privately and circulated among his inner circle. This is Carpenter's first publication on the subject of homosexuality, and displays his typical forward-thinking and utopian sentiments. It seeks to make clear that homosexuality is innate, is more widespread than generally accepted, and even implies that degress of bisexuality may be universal. - Summary ...

In different ways the four essays set forth one theme—the moral use to which intelligence might be put, in rendering our admirations and our loyalties at once more sensible and more noble. - Summary by John Erskine

The title, An Essay on Criticism hardly indicates all that is included in the poem. It would have been impossible to give a full and exact idea of the art of poetical criticism without entering into the consideration of the art of poetry. Accordingly Pope has interwoven the precepts of both throughout the poem which might more properly have been styled an essay on the Art of Criticism and of Poetry. - Summary from the Gutenberg text

Here are 20 essays by various authors, covering all kinds of subjects. Some are famous, others are gems ferreted out from chapters or passages in books where they have lain hidden for decades. Britannica defines an essay as "an analytic, interpretive, or critical literary composition usually much shorter and less systematic and formal than a dissertation or thesis and usually dealing with its subjects from a limited and often personal point of view." In short, an essay is neither fiction nor a short story, but a composition designed to educate/persuade more than entertain or inform, though ...

Purported to be written by noted British Parliamentarian Charles James Fox as a result of a wager, this important and engaging essay is a meditation on the classifications of farts, the properties of them, the ingredients to consume in which to reproduce them as well as fascinating anecdotes of the various applications of wind-breaking in modern society. Join me in experiencing this fierce polemic...this call to action! - Summary by Ben Tucker

From the award-winning, New York Times best-selling author of Cod and Salt, To Catch a Fish is an entertaining and beautifully written illustrated collection of essays that explore a lifetime fascination with fishing. For as long as there have been humans, there have been humans trying to catch...

"We would no more choose to feed the minds of our countrymen and women with the despairing utterances of the pessimist poet, than we would their bodies with hasheesh. Such melancholy as his clothed in such eloquent words may be the luxury of the idle; it is poison to those who have work to do in the world. It shuts out hope, the very spring of energy; it makes the cheerful steady pursuit of duty a thing utterly beyond human powers. For we can none of us stand alone. Either in human or divine love we must find the mainspring of all life worth living. There must be something outside of ourselves...

On 15th June 1215 the Magna Carta was sealed under oath by King John at Runnymede, on the bank of the River Thames near Windsor, England. 2015 is the 800th anniversary of this charter, which led eventually to the rule of constitutional law in England and beyond. This book of essays on various aspects of the Charter was written by distinguished academics for the Royal Historical Society to commemorate the 700th anniversary of Magna Carta. N. B. The readers in this project are not scholars of mediaeval Latin or French. Where there are passages or phrases of Latin and Old French, we have ...

The Fabian Society is a British institution, which, though radical, advocated social reform through legislative rather than revolutionary means. It pre-dates the British Labour Party, which it influences to this day. The Fabian Society founded the London School of Economics in 1895. Here we have a collection of essays by great thinkers of the early 20th century and edited by George Bernard Shaw. - Summary by LynneT

This 1920 collection of essays gathers together 25 years of papers, articles, and presentations given by Arthur E. Bostwick. The ideas in many of the essays still hold true today: he advocates for such things as an expanded mission of the public library, professionalism in librarianship, and the keeping of statistics. The essays cover such topics as “The Library as the Educational Center of the Town,” “The Future of Library Work,” and “Three Kinds of Librarians.” Spoiler alert, Bostwick believes that the third kind of librarian, the “librarian of to-day,” should be proactive in...

This first collection of the correspondence of Oscar Wilde begins with the Irish playwright's earliest extant letter, thanking his mother for the hamper she had sent to him at school. It includes letters about his travels in Italy, his American lecture tour, the staging of his first play (Vera, or the Nihilists), arrangements for the publication of a friend's poetry collection, and exchanges in the press with artist James McNeill Whistler. The letters, some of which have been excerpted or redacted, are sourced from auction catalogues, newspapers, biographies, and other texts in the public ...