The Avid Reader Show

An engaging look at the founder of one of the most important philosophical schools of ancient Greece.

The ancient philosopher Diogenes--nicknamed "The Dog" and decried by Plato as a "Socrates gone mad"--was widely praised and idealized as much as he was mocked and vilified. A favorite subject of sculptors and painters since the Renaissance, his notoriety is equally due to his infamously eccentric behavior, scorn of conventions, and biting aphorisms, and to the role he played in the creation of the Cynic school, which flourished from the 4th century B.C. to the Christian era. In this book, Jean-Manuel Roubineau paints a new portrait of an atypical philosopher whose life left an indelible mark on the Western collective imagination and whose philosophy courses through various schools of thought well beyond antiquity.

Roubineau sifts through the many legends and apocryphal stories that surround the life of Diogenes. Was he, the son of a banker, a counterfeiter in his hometown of Sinope? Did he really meet Alexander the Great? Was he truly an apologist for incest, patricide, and anthropophagy? And how did he actually die? To answer these questions, Roubineau retraces the known facts of Diogenes' existence.

Beyond the rehashed clich's, this book inspires us to rediscover Diogenes' philosophical legacy--whether it be the challenge to the established order, the detachment from materialism, the choice of a return to nature, or the formulation of a cosmopolitan ideal strongly rooted in the belief that virtue is better revealed in action than in theory.

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For much of recorded history, people considered the heart to be the most important organ in the body. In cultures around the world, the heart-not the brain-was believed to be the location of intelligence, memory, emotion, and the soul. Over time, views on the purpose of the heart have transformed as people sought to understand the life forces it contains. Modern medicine and science dismissed what was once the king of the organs as a mere blood pump subservient to the brain, yet the heart remains a potent symbol of love and health and an important part of our cultural iconography.

This book traces the evolution of our understanding of the heart from the dawn of civilization to the present. Vincent M. Figueredo-an accomplished cardiologist and expert on the history of the human heart-explores the role and significance of the heart in art, culture, religion, philosophy, and science across time and place. He examines how the heart really works, its many meanings in our emotional and daily lives, and what cutting-edge science is teaching us about this remarkable organ. Figueredo considers the science of heart disease, recent advancements in heart therapies, and what the future may hold. He highlights the emerging field of neurocardiology, which has found evidence of a "heart-brain connection" in mental and physical health, suggesting that ancient views hold more truth than moderns suspect.

Ranging widely and deeply throughout human history, this book sheds new light on why the heart remains so central to our sense of self.

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Whenever a person engages with music―when a piano student practices a scale, a jazz saxophonist riffs on a melody, a teenager sobs to a sad song, or a wedding guest gets down on the dance floor―countless neurons are firing. Playing an instrument requires all of the resources of the nervous system, including cognitive, sensory, and motor functions. Composition and improvisation are remarkable demonstrations of the brain’s capacity for creativity. Something as seemingly simple as listening to a tune involves mental faculties most of us don’t even realize we have.

Larry S. Sherman, a neuroscientist and lifelong musician, and Dennis Plies, a professional musician and teacher, collaborate to show how our brains and music work in harmony. They consider music in all the ways we encounter it―teaching, learning, practicing, listening, composing, improvising, and performing―in terms of neuroscience as well as music pedagogy, showing how the brain functions and even changes in the process. Every Brain Needs Music draws on leading behavioral, cellular, and molecular neuroscience research as well as surveys of more than a hundred musical people. It provides new perspectives on learning to play, teaching, how to practice and perform, the ways we react to music, and why the brain benefits from musical experiences.

Written for both musical and nonmusical people, including newcomers to brain science, this book is a lively and easy-to-read exploration of the neuroscience of music and its significance in our lives.

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Warren Buffett is perhaps the most accomplished investor of all time. The CEO and chair of Berkshire Hathaway has earned admiration for not only his financial feats but also the philosophy behind them. Todd A. Finkle provides striking new insights into Buffett's career through the lens of entrepreneurship. This book demonstrates that although Buffett is thought of primarily as an investor, one of the secrets to his success has been running Berkshire as an entrepreneur.

Finkle-a Buffett family friend-shares his perspective on Buffett's early life and business ventures. The book traces the entrepreneurial paths that shaped Buffett's career, from selling gum door-to-door during childhood to forming Berkshire Hathaway and developing it into a global conglomerate through the imaginative deployment of financial instruments and creative deal making. Finkle considers Buffett's investment methodology, management strategy, and personal philosophy on building a rewarding life in terms of entrepreneurship. He also zeros in on Buffett's longtime business partner, Charlie Munger, and his contributions to Berkshire's success. Finkle draws key lessons from Buffett's mistakes as well as his successes, using these failures to explore the ways behavioral biases can affect investors and how to overcome them.

By viewing Buffett as an entrepreneur, this book offers readers a fresh take on one of the world's best-known financial titans.

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For as long as we’ve studied human cognition, we’ve believed that our senses give us direct access to the world. What we see is what’s really there—or so the thinking goes. But new discoveries in neuroscience and psychology have turned this assumption on its head. What if rather than perceiving reality passively, your mind actively predicts it?

Widely acclaimed philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark unpacks this provocative new theory that the brain is a powerful, dynamic prediction engine, mediating our experience of both body and world. From the most mundane experiences to the most sublime, reality as we know it is the complex synthesis of sensory information and expectation. Exploring its fascinating mechanics and remarkable implications for our lives, mental health, and society, Clark nimbly illustrates how the predictive brain sculpts all human experience. Chronic pain and mental illness are shown to involve subtle malfunctions of our unconscious predictions, pointing the way towards more effective, targeted treatments. Under renewed scrutiny, the very boundary between ourselves and the outside world dissolves, showing that we are as entangled with our environments as we are with our onboard memories, thoughts, and feelings. And perception itself is revealed to be something of a controlled hallucination.

Unveiling the extraordinary explanatory power of the predictive brain, The Experience Machine is a mesmerizing window onto one of the most significant developments in our understanding of the mind.

ANDY CLARK is a Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the University of Sussex. He is the author of six books including Supersizing the Mind, Natural-Born Cyborgs, and Mindware.

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For readers of Peggy Orenstein and Rebecca Traister, an authoritative, big think look at pornography in all its facets - historical, religious, and cultural.

In the 1960s, sex researchers Masters and Johnson declared the end of the fake orgasm. Nearly two decades later, in 1982, evangelical activist Tim LaHaye foretold that the entire pornography industry would soon be driven out of business. Neither prediction proved true. Instead, with the rise of the internet, pornography saturates the American conscience more than ever and has reshaped our understanding of sexuality, relationships, media, and even the nature of addiction.

Dr. Kelsy Burke has spent the last five years researching and interviewing internet pornography's opponents and its sympathizers. In The Pornography Wars, Burke does a deep dive into the long history of pornography in America and then turns her gaze on our present society to examine the ways this industry touches on the most intimate parts of American lives. She offers a complete understanding of the major players in the debates around porn's place in society: everyone from sex workers, activists, therapists, religious leaders, and consumers. In doing so, she addresses and debunks the myths that surround porn and porn usage while showing how everything from the way we teach children about sex to the legal protections for what can be published is tied up in the deeply complicated battles over pornography.

Sweeping, savvy, and deeply researched, The Pornography Wars is a necessary and comprehensive new look at pornography and American life.

Kelsy Burke is an award-winning sociologist and author of Christians under Covers. She has spent the last decade studying how people talk about sex in America and is currently an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her work has been supported by multiple grants and fellowships, including an award from the National Science Foundation, and her writing has appeared in The Washington Post The Huffington Post, Newsweek, Salon, and Slate.

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Everyone has heard of the term "pseudoscience," typically used to describe something that looks like science, but is somehow false, misleading, or unproven. Many would be able to agree on a list of things that fall under its umbrella - astrology, phrenology, UFOlogy, creationism, and eugenics might come to mind. But defining what makes these fields "pseudo" is a far more complex issue. It has proved impossible to come up with a simple criterion that enables us to differentiate pseudoscience from genuine science. Given the virulence of contemporary disputes over the denial of climate change and anti-vaccination movements - both of which display allegations of "pseudoscience" on all sides - there is a clear need to better understand issues of scientific demarcation.

Pseudoscience: A Very Short Introduction explores the philosophical and historical attempts to address this problem of demarcation. This book argues that by understanding doctrines that are often seen as antithetical to science, we can learn a great deal about how science operated in the past and does today. This exploration raises several questions: How does a doctrine become demonized as pseudoscientific? Who has the authority to make these pronouncements? How is the status of science shaped by political or cultural contexts? How does pseudoscience differ from scientific fraud?

Michael D. Gordin both answers these questions and guides readers along a bewildering array of marginalized doctrines, looking at parapsychology (ESP), Lysenkoism, scientific racism, and alchemy, among others, to better understand the struggle to define what science is and is not, and how the controversies have shifted over the centuries. Pseudoscience: A Very Short Introduction provides a historical tour through many of these fringe fields in order to provide tools to think deeply about scientific controversies both in the past and in our present.

Michael D. Gordin is Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History and the director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University. He specializes in the history of modern science in Russia, Europe, and North America, in particular on issues related to the history of fringe science, the early years of the nuclear arms race, Russian and Soviet science, language and science, and Albert Einstein. He is the author of The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe, Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English, and Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly.

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A stellar novel rendered into a darkly comic, unforgettable narrative by Booker International Prize winning translator Jessica Cohen. An Israeli professor travels to a fictitious West African nation to trace a slave-trading ancestor, only to be imprisoned under a new law barring successive generations from profiting off the proceeds of slavery. But before departing from Tel Aviv, the protagonist falls in love with Lucile, a mysterious African migrant worker who cleans his house. Entertaining and thought-provoking, this satire of contemporary attitudes toward racism and the legacy of colonialism examines economic inequality and the global refugee crisis, as well as the memory of transatlantic chattel slavery and the Holocaust. Is the professor's passion for Africa merely a fashionable pose and the book he's secretly writing about his experience there nothing but a modern version of the slave trade?

Agur Schiff, born in 1955 in Tel Aviv, is a graduate of Saint Martin's School of Art in London and the Rijks Art Academy in Amsterdam. He has worked as a filmmaker, started writing fiction in the early 1990s, and has published two short story collections and six novels. Schiff, professor emeritus at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, has been awarded the Israeli Prime Minister's Prize.Jessica Cohen shared the 2017 Man Booker International Prize with author David Grossman for her translation of A Horse Walks into a Bar. She has translated works by Amos Oz, Etgar Keret, Dorit Rabinyan, Ronit Matalon, Nir Baram, and others.

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Where does one go, you might ask, when the world falls apart? When the immutable facts of your life—the mundane, the trivial, the take-for-granted minutiae that once filled every second of every day—suddenly disappear? Where does one go in such dire and unexpected circumstances?

I went home, of course.

 MURBRIDGE COMMUNITY MESSAGE BOARD

FREE: 500 cans of corn. Accidentally ordered them online. I really hate corn. Happy to help load.

REMINDER: use your own goddamn garbage can for your own goddamn pet waste. I’m looking at you Peter Luflin.

REMINDER: monthly Select Board meeting this Friday. Agenda items: 1) sludge removal; 2) upkeep of chime tower; 3) ice rink monitor thank you gift. Questions? Contact Hildegard Hyman, [email protected]

Darcy Clipper, prodigal daughter, nearly thirty, has returned home to Murbridge, Massachusetts, after her life takes an unwelcome left turn. Murbridge, Darcy is convinced, will welcome her home and provide a safe space in which she can nurse her wounds and harbor grudges, both real and imagined.

But Murbridge, like so much else Darcy thought to be fixed and immutable, has changed. And while Darcy’s first instinct might be to hole herself up in her childhood bedroom, subsisting on Chef Boy-R-Dee and canned chickpeas, it is human nature to do two things: seek out meaningful human connection and respond to anonymous internet postings. As Murbridge begins to take shape around Darcy, both online and in person, Darcy will consider the most fundamental of American questions: What can she ask of her community? And what does she owe it in return?

Tara Conklin was born on St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands and raised in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. She is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Last Romantics and The House Girl.  

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Music composed for television had, until recently, never been taken seriously by scholars or critics. Catchy TV themes, often for popular weekly series, were fondly remembered but not considered much more culturally significant than commercial jingles. Yet noted composers like John Williams, Henry Mancini, Jerry Goldsmith and Lalo Schifrin learned and/or honed their craft in television before going on to major success in feature films.

Oscar-winning film composers like Bernard Herrmann, Franz Waxman and Maurice Jarre wrote hours of music for television projects, and such high-profile jazz figures as Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck and Quincy Jones also contributed music to TV series. Concert-hall luminaries from Aaron Copland to Leonard Bernstein, and theater writers from Jerome Moross to Richard Rodgers, penned memorable scores for TV.

Music for Prime Time is the first serious, journalistic history of music for American television. It is the product of 35 years of research and more than 450 interviews with composers, orchestrators, producers, editors and musicians active in the field. Based on, but vastly expanded and revised from, an earlier book by the same author, this wide-ranging narrative not only tells the backstory of every great TV theme but also examines the many neglected and frequently underrated orchestral and jazz compositions for television dating back to the late 1940s.

Covering every series genre (crime, comedy, drama, westerns, action-adventure, fantasy and sci-fi), it also looks at music for animated series, news and documentary programming, TV-movies and miniseries, and how music for television has evolved in the era of cable and streaming options. It is the most comprehensive history of television scoring ever published.

Jon Burlingame is one of the nation's leading writers on the subject of music for films and television. He writes regularly for Variety and has also written for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, The Hollywood Reporter and Premiere magazine. He teaches film-music history at the University of Southern California, hosts the "For Scores" podcast, and is the author of five books including the best-selling and Deems Taylor Award-winning The Music of James Bond.

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