A psychologist, a professor, a police officer, a nurse, a farmer, a midwife, a soldier, an engineer, a lawyer, an accountant, and a handful of public servants all walk into the public library. It sounds like the opening of a long-winded joke. It is, in fact, just a regular Thursday in Stittsville. The Stittsville Creative Writing Group has been meeting weekly for 13 years to share our creative fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Like villagers contributing the produce of their gardens to the ...

The Stittsville Creative Writing Group is a program of the Ottawa Public Library. The group meets every Thursday evening at the Stittsville branch to read pieces they have written.We are: poets, scholars, rogue scholars, authors, and audacious amateurs taking their first steps into group sharing and into the published world. There are those who mostly listen rather than write, those who write prolifically but only share with the group, and those who publish their work for a larger ...

Throughout history certain theories of childhood have influenced the way we have understood, cared for, and educated our young. These theories form the bases of our attitudes toward children, and underpin our popular childrearing pracitces. Yet they have passed through history fort eh most part unexamined. In Visions of Childhood, the authors unveil the central and often surprising notions that have shaped our conceptions of childhood in the Western world.Bringing the skill...

The definitive refutation to the argument of The Bell Curve.When published in 1981, The Mismeasure of Man was immediately hailed as a masterwork, the ringing answer to those who would classify people, rank them according to their supposed genetic gifts and limits.Yet the idea of biology as destiny dies hard, as witness the attention devoted to The Bell Curve, whose arguments are here so effectively anticipated and thoroughly undermined. In this ed...

“The landmark book that argued that psychiatry consistently expands its definition of mental illness to impose its authority over moral and cultural conflict.” — New York TimesThe 50th anniversary edition of the most influential critique of psychiatry every written, with a new preface on the age of Prozac and Ritalin and the rise of designer drugs, plus two bonus essays.Thomas Szasz's classic book revolutionized thinking about the ...

A study of aggression from the renowned social psychologist and New York Times –bestselling author of The Art of Loving and Escape from Freedom ."Rich and provocative . . . a major book from the pen of a major writer." — The Washington Post Book WorldThroughout history, humans have sh...

Identity: Youth and Crisis collects Erik H. Erikson's major essays on topics originating in the concept of the adolescent identity crisis.Identity, Erikson writes, is an unfathomable as it is all-pervasive. It deals with a process that is located both in the core of the individual and in the core of the communal culture. As the culture changes, new kinds of identity questions arise—Erikson comments, for example, on issues of social protest and changing gender roles that we...

A brief, radical defense of human uniqueness from acclaimed philosopher Roger ScrutonIn this short book, acclaimed writer and philosopher Roger Scruton presents an original and radical defense of human uniqueness. Confronting the views of evolutionary psychologists, utilitarian moralists, and philosophical materialists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, Scruton argues that human beings cannot be understood simply as biological objects. We are not only huma...

"Even more valuable than its widely praised predecessor, The Culture of Narcissism." —John W. AldridgeFaced with an escalating arms race, rising crime and terrorism, environmental deterioration, and long-term economic decline, people have retreated from commitments that presuppose a secure and orderly world. In his latest book, Christopher Lasch, the renowned historian and social critic, powerfully argues that self-concern, so characteristic of our time, h...

"A remarkable contribution to one of the most vexing problems in science: the 'demarcation' problem, or how to distinguish science from nonscience." —Francisco J. Ayala, author of Darwin's Gift to Science and ReligionWhat sets the practice of rigorously tested, sound science apart from pseudoscience? In this volume, the contributors seek to answer this question, known to philosophers of science as "the demarcation problem." This issue has a long history in ...

In Kierkegaard's Romantic Legacy, Anoop Gupta develops an original theory of the self based on Kierkegaard's writings. Gupta proceeds by historical exegesis and considers several important ways of thinking about self outside of the natural sciences. His study moves theories of the self from theology toward sociology, from a God-relationship to a social one, and illustrates how a loss in theological underpinnings partly contributes to the rise in the popularity of cultural relativi...