What is the philosophy of sweat? Reality TV? Domestic warfare? Making up and having sex? Take a sparkling ride through an ordinary day with hilarious philosophical gadfly Robert Rowland Smith in Breakfast with Socrates.Ever want to have a bagel with Hegel? Eggs with Bacon? Or spend a day with Socrates, Mill, Herodotus, or Kant, able to pick their brains about the most mundane moments of your life? Former Oxford Philosophy Fellow Robert Rowland Smith though...

Learn to ride a bicycle with Einstein, have your first kiss with Kant, get your first job with Adam Smith, and weather midlife with Dante. Let history’s greatest minds illuminate life’s turning points.In Breakfast with Socrates, Robert Rowland Smith brought the power of philosophy down to earth by proving, in a very engaging and entertaining way, that human moments meet big ideas on a regular basis. Now Smith offers the natural offspring of that book, expa...

All too often, the history of poetry criticism in the 20th Century is told as a tale of two sides. While 'Lit crit' pored over the author's every line, 'Theory' stood on the shoulder of texts to gaze into the metaphysical mists.Drawing on the key insights of both Lit crit and Theory, On Modern Poetry tries to get beyond the opposition between them, proposing instead a 'total criticism' that draws on all resources available. It combines 'analytic irony' with 'imaginative em...

How is it that the most carefully-laid business strategies can go horribly wrong when put into practice? Robert Rowland Smith's answer, based on years of experience in high-level consultancy, is that 'reality eats strategy for breakfast': strategy, based on projections and assuming business is a rational pursuit, can't deal with the messy reality of life.More helpful are these practical questions that can help you plan what to do when your business comes into contact with reality. ...

Karen Armstrong explains how to practise the religion of compassion that her last books have preached.In November 2009 Armstrong and TED launched The Charter of Compassion, which states that "We call upon all men and women to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion...to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings — even those regarded as enemies." To date, it's been signed by over 48,000 people on the Web, including such figures as The Dal...

In this bestselling new book, his first in seventeen years, Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, takes us on a poignant and passionate journey as mysterious and compelling as his first life-changing work.Instead of a motorcycle, a sailboat carries his philosopher-narrator Phaedrus down the Hudson River as winter closes in. Along the way he picks up a most unlikely traveling companion: a woman named Lila who in her desperate sexuality, host...

Diana Butler Bass, one of contemporary Christianity’s leading trend-spotters, exposes how the failings of the church today are giving rise to a new “spiritual but not religious” movement. Using evidence from the latest national polls and from her own cutting-edge research, Bass, the visionary author of A People’s History of Christianity, continues the conversation began in books like Brian D. McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity and Harvey Cox’s The Future of Faith, examining the connectio...

A collection of the very best in contemporary first-person journalism compiled by the award-winning former Washington Post reporter and author.Great journalists, at one time or another, have all been characters in their own stories: people with personalities that shaped what they saw and reported, and were touched and changed by the experiences about which they wrote; and innovators who borrowed the storytelling techniques of fiction. The Beholder's Eye...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this “brilliantly lucid, splendidly readable book” (The Sunday Times), one of Britain’s foremost commentators on religion explores how people have perceived and experienced God throughout history, from the time of Abraham to the present.“An admirable and impressive work of synthesis that will give insight and satisfaction to thousands of lay readers.”—The Washington Post Book WorldWh...

New York Times bestselling author and Bible expert Bart Ehrman reveals how Jesus’s divinity became dogma in the first few centuries of the early Church.The claim at the heart of the Christian faith is that Jesus of Nazareth was, and is, God. But this is not what the original disciples believed during Jesus’s lifetime—and it is not what Jesus claimed about himself. How Jesus Became God tells the story of an idea that shaped Christianity, and of the evolution of a belief tha...

Matthieu Ricard trained as a molecular biologist, working in the lab of a Nobel prize—winning scientist, but when he read some Buddhist philosophy, he became drawn to Buddhism. Eventually he left his life in science to study with Tibetan teachers, and he is now a Buddhist monk and translator for the Dalai Lama, living in the Shechen monastery near Kathmandu in Nepal. Trinh Thuan was born into a Buddhist family in Vietnam but became intrigued by the explosion of discoveries in astronomy dur...

A profound exploration of the Bible's most controversial book—from the bestselling author of Beyond Belief and The Gnostic GospelsThe strangest book of the New Testament, filled with visions of the Rapture, the whore of Babylon, and apocalyptic writing of the end of times, the Book of Revelation has fascinated readers for more than two thousand years, but where did it come from? And what are the meanings of its surreal images of dragons, monsters,...