It's Christmas 2019 on Long Island, and something's gone very wrong: Christmas trees, the bright and merry creatures that everyone celebrates through song when the weather is frightful, are strangling people to death! It started with two ornery Brooklynites who were choked on the Long Island Expressway while driving their new tree home. Then it was an honor student at a prestigious school, then the heir to a famous culinary family...and that was just the start of their carnage. Join young ...

This book looks at both the past and the future of the debate over whether there are moral limits to scientific progress and what life will look like in the genetic age.

Democracy Reconsidered provides an enlightening study of democracy in America's post-modern context. Elizabeth Kaufer Busch and Peter Augustine Lawler explore some of the foundational principles of democracy as they have been borne out in American society. The essays included in this volume examine the lessons that novelists, philosophers, and political theorists have for democratic societies as they progress towards postmodern skepticism or even disbelief in the absolute principl...

Will Chambers, an easygoing Brooklyn librarian who loves cartoons and punk rock music, isn't so happy-go-lucky after eight months out of work. If he doesn't find another job soon, he's going to be living in a box somewhere in the New York City subway system! His back pressed firmly to the wall, Will applies for a job in trendy Williamsburg promising "lots of fresh air and unbeatable benefits." Will's unforeseen new career is an adventurous one, as he is quickly confronted with a neighborho...

Trevor Kaymardt, known to a generation of fans as the "Blue Light Express," has fallen on hard times. After losing the ability to pitch following the sudden death of his wife, life after retirement has turned the four-time National League All-Star into an anonymous corporate drone. But at a company retreat, Trevor meets Angelica, a free-spirited David Bowie fanatic with a checkered past of her own. Will the power of love and the Starman give Trevor his mojo--and his fastball--back?

Leon R. Kass has been helping Americans better understand the human condition for over four decades-as a teacher, writer, scholar, public champion of the humanities, and defender of human dignity. From bioethics to civic education, from interpreting the Bible to weighing the moral implications of modern science, Kass has offered wisdom, guidance, and instruction. In this volume, fifteen of Kass's admirers, including students, colleagues, and friends, honor his work by reflecting on the bro...

Drawing on startling new evidence from the mapping of the genome, an explosive new account of the genetic basis of race and its role in the human storyFewer ideas have been more toxic or harmful than the idea of the biological reality of race, and with it the idea that humans of different races are biologically different from one another. For this understandable reason, the idea has been banished from polite academic conversation. Arguing that race is more than jus...

A refreshing distillation of insights into the human condition, by one of the best-known and most popular philosophers in the UK.Thinking about life, what it means and what it holds in store does not have to be a despondent experience, but rather can be enlightening and uplifting. A life truly worth living is one that is informed and considered so a degree of philosophical insight into the inevitabilities of the human condition is inherently important and such an a...

For thirty years, Peter Singer's Practical Ethics has been the classic introduction to applied ethics. For this third edition, the author has revised and updated all the chapters and added a new chapter addressing climate change, one of the most important ethical challenges of our generation. Some of the questions discussed in this book concern our daily lives. Is it ethical to buy luxuries when others do not have enough to eat? Should we buy meat from intensively reared animals? Am I doin...

In this award-winning collection, the bestselling author of Gilead offers us other ways of thinking about history, religion, and society. Whether rescuing "Calvinism" and its creator Jean Cauvin from the repressive "puritan" stereotype, or considering how the McGuffey readers were inspired by Midwestern abolitionists, or the divide between the Bible and Darwinism, Marilynne Robinson repeatedly sends her reader back to the primary texts that are central to the development of Americ...

The promise of a regenerative medicine -- the regrowth of lost limbs and organs, new hope for patients with Alzheimer's or multiple sclerosis, the "cellular fountain of youth" -- sounds like science fiction, but it's real and on the cutting edge of medicine. Veteran medical journalist Karen van Kamped looks at this new technology through the stories of the scientists who are creating it and the ethical and legal questions with which they must deal. Many companies and universities in Canada...

The new bestseller from one of Britain's most pre-eminent philosophers and arguably the best known, A.C. GraylingEveryone wishes to live a life that is satisfying and fulfilling, in which there is achievement and pleasure, and which has the respect of people one, in turn, respects. And one of the fundamentals to living such a life is to reflect on the choices we make.In this new collection, A.C. Grayling invites the reader into a conversation with ideas. Fr...