Fragments of wisdom from the ancient worldIn the sixth century b.c.-twenty-five hundred years before Einstein--Heraclitus of Ephesus declared that energy is the essence of matter, that everything becomes energy in flux, in relativity. His great book, On Nature, the world's first coherent philosophical treatise and touchstone for Plato, Aristotle, and Marcus Aurelius, has long been lost to history--but its surviving fragments have for thousands of years tan...

In these marvelous pages, the award-winning poet turns a searching gaze toward the shared habitat and intertwined fates of man and animal. He looks back and forward in time, down at the soil, up at the stars, and deeply into his personal relationships.Brooks Haxton has been writing for years about the connections between human beings and the creatures we find fascinating. Mister Toebones, his new collection, draws its title from a nickname Haxton gives to ...

A selection of poems from one of the nineteenth century's greatest French writersFor most of his life, Victor Hugo (1802-1885) was the most famous writer in the world. His legacy includes celebrated works of drama, fiction, memoir, and criticism. But in his day Hugo was known foremost as a poet—indeed the greatest French poet of the age. He wrote with passion about history, sensual experience, familial love, philosophy, nature, social justice, art, and mysticism.

Centered around multi–million dollar stakes and a series of nationally televised poker tournaments, Fading Hearts on the River offers a story of odds—the odds of a newborn surviving severe jaundice, the odds of Congress passing a law that renders one's online gambling income inaccessible, the odds of drawing the right card on the turn or the river. In this tale of fatherhood and worldy success, Haxton follows his son Isaac's unlikely career as a poker player, the nervous father of...

The critically acclaimed poet and translator Brooks Haxton embraces life, from our naked beginnings to the first signs of middle age and beyond, in this inviting collection of poems. The book opens with the dramatic birth of twins, and speaks in the intimate voice of a husband, father, and poet. Diverse products of the imagination pass through Haxton’s generous mind—the mysterious number zero, Milton’s “Lycidas,” nuclear technology—even as he captures the humor and pathos of the everyday. ...

Brooks Haxton’s poetry has celebrated for thirty years our troubled pleasures in the daily world. This new collection, titled after a meditation on the cry of the snowy tree cricket, gives us his most moving response to the ferocious beauty of nature and to the folly and magnificence of human undertakings.In the opening poem, the poet comes home drunk without his key, collapses in the yard, and looks up to where, he says:Whorls of a magnetic fieldexfoliated under the ...

In this book of homemade psalms, Brooks Haxton brings the poetry of the original psalmists, their awe and their music, into our world of jet planes and space travel, automatic rifles and suburban pleasures. As he writes in his preface, “I take psalms less as doctrine than as outcries, and I cry back in these poems from whatever vantage I can find.” The result is lucid, touching verse that connects the exalted language of scripture with everyday experience. In a poem called “Dark,” for exam...

In these marvelous pages, the award-winning poet turns a searching gaze toward the shared habitat and intertwined fates of man and animal. He looks back and forward in time, down at the soil, up at the stars, and deeply into his personal relationships.Brooks Haxton has been writing for years about the connections between human beings and the creatures we find fascinating. Mister Toebones, his new collection, draws its title from a nickname Haxton gives to ...

Heraclitus of Ephesus was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who lived a lonely life earning him the moniker of the "Weeping Philosopher." His principal philosophy is embodied in the following statement "No man ever steps in the same river twice," in other words man faces an ever-present change in the universe. He believed in the unity of opposites, stating that "the path up and down are one and the same." According to Diogenes, Heraclitus worked on "a continuous treatise On Nature," which "...

The definitive sequel to New York Times bestseller How the Scots Invented the Modern World is a magisterial account of how the two greatest thinkers of the ancient world, Plato and Aristotle, laid the foundations of Western culture—and how their rivalry shaped the essential features of our culture down to the present day.Plato came from a wealthy, connected Athenian family and lived a comfortable upper-class lifestyle until he met an odd little ma...

The atmosphere of silence all around provided a faithful setting for Heidegger’s philosophy. I could not help comparing it with the atmosphere I had encountered in the house of Professor Berdyaev near Paris and that of Professor Jaspers in Heidelberg. In every case, the external world faithfully reflected the world of the mind. In Berdyaev’s case it was the spirit of communion; in Jaspers’s that of spiritual engagement. But in Heidegger’s case it was the spirit of overwhelming solitude. Wi...

This book is no less than a guide to the whole of Western philosophy -- the ideas that have undergirded our civilization for two-and-a-half thousand years. Anthony Kenny tells the story of philosophy from ancient Greece through the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment into the modern world. He introduces us to the great thinkers and their ideas, starting with Plato, Aristotle, and the other founders of Western thought. In the second part of the book he takes us through a thousand years of med...