"According to the Hebrew Bible, God made the world with words. God just spoke and the world became reality. (The Aramaic for 'I create as I speak' is avara k'davara, or in magician's language, abracadabra.) ... This does not protect words from the numbing effects of overuse in any religious tradition.... We need to dust off the words, shake away the accretions, wonder again about what they originally might have meant and enable ourselves to live in the word." --from the Introduction With creativity and poetry (and occasional heresy) Kushner dusts off thirty classical Hebrew words, shakes them free of the effects of generations of overuse, "re-translates" them and liberates their ancient holy power. The result is a contemporary spiritual guide for your personal religious life. According to the Hebrew Bible, God made the world with words. God just spoke and the world came into being. Words therefore are not merely sounds signifying something else; they are instruments of creation, primary reality itself. They need only to be read, spoken and interpreted. And to know them is to know reality itself. Kushner has designed the book himself, seamlessly blending graphics and content. In doing so he evokes the aesthetics of an ancient manuscript and a vision of our power to shape the future. Each finely crafted chapter begins with a Hebrew word and Kushner's provocative English translation. At the bottom of the page is a transliteration of the Hebrew along with its more customary English rendering. In addition to his own intriguing definition, he includes a biblical citation anchoring the word, along with a more recent text showing the word's evolution. Finally, we are offered a personal, meditative exercise designed to enable you to "live in the word."

"In this long-awaited follow-up to his 2003 book on Genesis, humanist scholar Leon Kass explores how Exodus raises and then answers the central political questions of what defines a nation and how a nation should govern itself. Considered by some the most important book in the Hebrew Bible, Exodus tells the story of the Jewish people from their enslavement in Egypt, through their liberation under Moses's leadership, to the covenantal founding at Sinai and the building of the Tabernacle. In Kass's analysis, these events began the slow process of learning how to stop thinking like slaves and become an independent people. The Israelites ultimately founded their nation on three elements: a shared narrative that instills empathy for the poor and the suffering, the uplifting rule of a moral law, and devotion to a higher common purpose. These elements, Kass argues, remain the essential principles for any freedom-loving nation today." --

Book by Woolf, Leonard

The most recent, complete treatise written on THE GRUENFELD DEFENSE, this book clearly lays out the main lines with plenty of attention given to novelties and likely side paths. It contains many example games from the world's strongest players.

After a trip home to Moravia reveals that his father is not a businessman but actually a great composer, unsuccessful musician Leib Goldkorn returns to New York to launch a production of his father's opera "Rubezahl" to disastrous results.

The French Defense remains one of the most popular strategies to use against White King's pawn opening; top class grandmasters such as Korchnoi, Morozevich, Bareev, and Short continue to practice it with success. Grandmaster Lev Psakhis, a former Soviet champion who has written extensively on this gambit, now shows how to counter it. In the second volume of his three-part series on the French Defense, he covers the aggressive 1 e4 e6 2 d4 d5 3 e5 tactic, as well as a number of other "Anti-French" lines, including the King's Indian Attack and Exchange variations. A wealth of illustrated games as well as up-to-date theory also provide valuable instruction that will help chess players master these winning techniques.

Writing a Jewish Life chronicles novelist Lev Raphael's struggle to claim both his religious and sexual identities, and the happiness he subsequently found. Until he reached his mid-20s, the author felt alienated from other Jews, ambivalent about his homosexuality; or as he puts it, "twice strange ... in each [community], different, lesser, ashamed." A son of Holocaust survivors, Raphael grew up in an unmistakably Jewish but nonreligious home. However, as an adult he initiated his own affiliations with Judaism: He had a bar mitzvah at age 30, went to Israel twice, and fell in love with a Jewish man. It was "coming out as a Jew,' he writes, that "ultimately made it possible for me to come out as a gay man and then work at uniting the two identities." Attesting to his journey is the contrast between his confused childhood and the joyful domestic life he now shares with his lover, Gersh, and their two sons.

As the first book to analyze the work of Fanon as an existential-phenomenological of human sciences and liberation philosopher, Gordon deploys Fanon's work to illuminate how the bad faith of European science and civilization have philosophically stymied the project of liberation. Fanon's body of work serves as a critique of European science and society, and shows the ways in which the project of truth is compromised by Eurocentric artificially narrowed scope of humanity--a circumstance to which he refers as the crisis of European Man. In his examination of the roots of this crisis, Gordon explores the problems of historical salvation and the dynamics of oppression, the motivation behind contemporary European obstruction of the advancement of a racially just world, the forms of anonymity that pervade racist theorizing and contribute to seen invisibility, and the reasons behind the impossibility of a nonviolent transition from colonialism and neocolonialism to postcolonialism.

Sociologist and psychotherapist Yablonsky intensively interviewed more than 50 people and surveyed 410 people from all walks of life in several geographic locations of the US on attitudes toward their emotion connections to money. Here he reports on the results of his study. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

In the culminating volume of her nationalism trilogy, Greenfeld argues that we have overlooked the connection between egalitarian society and mental illness. Modern nationalism rests on principles of popular sovereignty, equality, and secularism. Citizens of the twenty-first century enjoy unprecedented freedom to become the authors of their personal destinies. Empowering as this is, it also places them under enormous psychic strain. They must constantly appraise their identities, manage their desires, and calibrate their place within society. For vulnerable individuals, this pressure is too much. Training her analytic eye on extensive case histories in manic depression and schizophrenia, Greenfeld contends that these illnesses are dysfunctions of selfhood caused by society's overburdening demands for self-realization. In her rigorous diagnosis, madness is a culturally constituted malady

In this provocative anthology of twelve essays, historians and literary scholars explore the work of women as healers and physicians. The essays range across centuries, nations, and cultures to focus on the ideological and practical obstacles women have faced in the world of medicine. Each examines the situation of women healers in a particular time and place through cases that are emblematic of larger issues and controversies in that period.

The distinguished playwright and memoirist recounts the intrusion of congressional and other witch-hunters, Red-baiters, and ideologues into her and Dashiell Hammett's lives in the 1950s and the losses and discomforts suffered. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

"A delightful book."— New York Times "I have studied with pleasure [this] new book…Beautiful examples…Illuminating. I am convinced that [Lieber's] original enterprise will get the recognition it so richly deserves."—Albert Einstein "The Liebers have written an ingenious, entertaining, and illuminating book."— Saturday Review of Literature "The book should be 'required reading' especially for non-mathematicians." —E.T. Bell, author of The Development of Mathematics First published in 1942, this whimsical exploration of how to think in a mathematical mood continues to delight math-lovers of all ages. Do you know that two times two is not always four; that the sum of the angles in a triangle does not always equal 180°; that sometimes it is possible to draw two parallel lines through the same point? In The Education of T. C. MITS , Lillian Lieber opens the door to the wonder of mathematical thinking and its application to everyday life. Lieber uses simple language and fanciful illustrations drawn by her husband, Hugh, to present fundamental mathematical concepts with a deft touch. The new foreword by Harvard University mathematics professor Barry Mazur is a tribute to the Liebers' influence on generations of mathematicians.

In her long career as a psychotherapist, acclaimed author Lillian Rubin occasionally encountered patients who demanded a very special, even unorthodox, therapeutic approach. For the first time, Dr. Rubin tells the stories of her most fascinating, most challenging cases from the other side of the couch, focusing not just on the patient, but on her own inner process as she confronts the issues each case raises.

In this provocative and wholly absorbing work, Lisa Jardine offers a radical interpretation of the Renaissance, arguing that the creation of culture during that time was inextricably tied to the creation of wealth -- that the expansion of commerce spurred the expansion of thought. As Jardine boldly states, The seeds of our own exuberant multiculturalism and bravura consumerism were planted in the European Renaissance. While Europe's royalty and merchants competed with each other to acquire works of art, vicious commercial battles were being fought over who should control the centers for trade around the globe. Jardine encompasses Renaissance culture from its western borders in Christendom to its eastern reaches in the Islamic Ottoman Empire, bringing this opulent epoch to life in all its material splendor and competitive acquisitiveness. A savvy, street-smart history of the Renaissance.--Dan Cryer, Newsday Jardine's lively book is specific and down-to-earth. A particularly fascinating section recalls how books suddenly ceased to be principally collector's items or aids to scholars and became the sixteenth century's Internet, dispensing fact and fancy to high and low.--The New Yorker

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"Abortion is a contentious issue in social life but it has rarely been subjected to careful scrutiny in the social sciences. While the legalization of abortion has brought it into the public domain, it still remains a sensitive topic in many cultures, often hidden from view and rarely spoken about, consigned to a shadowy existence."--