We are born crying, but those cries signal the first stirring of language. Within a year or so, infants master the sound system of their language; a few years after that, they are engaging in conversations. This remarkable, species-specific ability to acquire any human language - "the language faculty"--Raises important biological questions about language, including how it has evolved. This book by two distinguished scholars - a computer scientist and a linguist - addresses the enduring question of the evolution of language. Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky explain that until recently the evolutionary question could not be properly posed, because we did not have a clear idea of how to define "language" and therefore what it was that had evolved. But since the Minimalist Program, developed by Chomsky and others, we know the key ingredients of language and can put together an account of the evolution of human language and what distinguishes us from all other animals. Berwick and Chomsky discuss the biolinguistic perspective on language, which views language as a particular object of the biological world; the computational efficiency of language as a system of thought and understanding; the tension between Darwin's idea of gradual change and our contemporary understanding about evolutionary change and language; and evidence from nonhuman animals, in particular vocal learning in songbirds. -- from dust jacket

Although Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy probably only met once in their lives, their names will be linked forever in the history of American literary feuds: they were legendary enemies, especially after McCarthy famously announced to the world that every word Hellman wrote was a lie, "including 'and' and 'the.'" The public battle, and the legal squabbling, that ensued ended, unsatisfactorily for all, with Hellman's death. In Imaginary Friends," Nora Ephron brilliantly and hilariously resuscitates these two bigger-than-life women to give them a post-mortem second act, and the chance to really air their differences.

Leah Baer has been shuffled to and from various parents and households for years, and now shes back at her fathers house with his new wife. This latest move seems as though it might be a lasting one, but Leah feels out of place both at home and at school. Then an unconventional boy named Will befriends Leah and persuades her to try acting to express her ideas and feelings. As Leah begins to learn more about herself, she also begins to see how she fits in her family members lives, and gradually finds out what it means to be home. Nora Raleigh Baskins stirring and heartfelt novel resonates with emotional truths.

Cataloging based on CIP information. Cataloging based on CIP information."Published in large print"--Verso t.p. Bibliography: page.

"Using the engaging tools in this skillfully crafted workbook, sufferers of seasonal affective disorder (SAD) can create their own blueprint for greater well-being all year long. Simple checklists, fill-in-the-blank forms, and nuggets of information help readers monitor their symptoms; determine which treatments to try (including light therapy, meditation, and other self-help options, as well as antidepressants and psychotherapy); and keep track of what works. Readers can download and print additional copies of the worksheets and forms. Individuals with SAD will return to this book repeatedly as they test out Dr. Rosenthal's proven strategies for overcoming low moods, fatigue, sleep problems, and food cravings. See also Dr. Rosenthal's Winter Blues, Fourth Edition, which provides a comprehensive overview of SAD and its treatment"--

Surveys the history of the Middle Ages, describes the most influential political and social forces, and looks at everyday life.

"Why Mahler? Why does his music affect us in the way it does? Norman Lebrecht, one of the world's most widely read cultural commentators, has been wrestling obsessively with Mahler for half his life. Pacing out his every footstep from birthplace to grave, scrutinizing his manuscripts, talking to those who knew him, Lebrecht constructs a compelling new portrait of Mahler as a man who lived determinedly outside his own times. Mahler was - along with Picasso, Einstein, Freud, Kafka, and Joyce - a maker of our modern world."--Book jacket.

Ancient Evenings, a dazzlingly rich, deeply evocative novel, recreates the long-lost civilisation of Ancient Egypt. Mailer breathes life into the figures of that era; the eighteenth dynasty Pharaoh Rameses and his wife, Queen Nefertiti; Menenhetet, their creature, lover and victim; and the gods and mortals that surround them in intimate and telepathic communion. His hero, three times reincarnated during the novel, moves in the bright sunlight of white temples, in the exquisite gardens of the royal harem, along the majestic flow of the Nile and in the terrifying clash of battle. An outstanding work of creative imagination, Ancient Evenings displays Mailer's obsession with magic, violence and eroticism and lives on in the mind long after the last page has been turned.

Story of CIA intelligence officer Harry Hubbard, and his mentor Hugh Tremont Montague code name Harlot.

Mailer plunges into the broil over womanhood, explores many facets of love and variations, examines studies and the literature of SCUM (The Society for Cutting Up Men), and provides frank, abrasive, and witty observations. A wonderful first edition, first state book.

First Edition. Stated. Book condition is very good. DJ condition is Good with small tears and creases. The upper right hand corner is clipped, but the price of $5.95 is still there on the bottom.

Norman Mailer's The Time of Our Time is a giant retrospective, a rich, boisterous portrait of our times seen through the fiction and reportage of one of America's greatest writers. Mailer selected and edited the contents of this work to create an ongoing narrative of events large and small that have shaped America over the last fifty years. Included are passages from The Naked and the Dead, The Deer Park, An American Dream, The Armies of the Night, The Executioner's Song, Ancient Evenings, and Harlot's Ghost as well as portraits of Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, JFK, Marilyn Monroe, Lee Harvey Oswald, Madonna, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and Richard Nixon as they appeared in some of his best magazine pieces. How readable is the result! It is as if one is being drawn into a fabulous novel with extraordinary characters, real and fictional, who appear and reappear through the years until a vast mural of America as a nation comes into focus, full of follies and blunders, surprisingly elegant and often crazy--tragic in its losses and large in its triumphs. On display here are Mailer's enormous energies, his vast curiosity, and his powers of delineation. Here too are his errors of judgment and deed, both personal and literary. As a writer, Mailer eschews all limits. He goes at the world like a tiger. What will surprise many readers of The Time of Our Time is what a shrewd and stylish tiger he has been. "From the Hardcover edition."

Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer -- all are ex-friends of Norman Podhoretz, the renowned editor and critic and leading member of the group of New York intellectuals who came to be known as "the Family." As only a family member could, Podhoretz tells the story of these friendships, once central to his life, and shows how the political and cultural struggles of the past fifty years made them impossible to sustain. With wit, piercing insight, and startling honesty, we are introduced as never before to a type of person for whom ideas were often matters of life and death, and whose passing from the scene has left so large a gap in American culture. Podhoretz was the trailblazer of the now-famous journey of a number of his fellow intellectuals from radicalism to conservatism -- a journey through which they came to exercise both cultural and political influence far beyond their number. With this fascinating account of his once happy and finally troubled relations with these cultural icons, Podhoretz helps us understand why that journey was undertaken and just how consequential it became. In the process we get a brilliantly illuminating picture of the writers and intellectuals who have done so much to shape our world. Combining a personal memoir with literary, social, and political history, this unique gallery of stern and affectionate portraits is as entertaining as a novel and at the same time more instructive about postwar American culture than a formal scholarly study. Interwoven with these tales of some of the most quixotic and scintillating of contemporary American thinkers are themes that are introduced, developed, and redeveloped in a variety of contexts, with each appearance enriching the others, like a fugue in music. It is all here: the perversity of brilliance; the misuse of the mind; the benightedness of people usually considered especially enlightened; their human foibles and olympian detachment; the rigors to be endured and the prizes to be won and the prices to be paid for the reflective life. Most people live their lives in a very different way, and at one point, in a defiantly provocative defense of the indifference shown to the things by which intellectuals are obsessed, Norman Podhoretz says that Socrates' assertion that the unexamined life was not worth living was one of the biggest lies ever propagated by a philosopher. And yet, one comes away from Ex-Friends feeling wistful for a day when ideas really mattered and when there were people around who cared more deeply about them than about anything else. Reading of a time when the finest minds of a generation regularly gathered in New York living rooms to debate one another with an articulateness, a passion, and a level of erudition almost extinct, we come to realize how enviable it can be to live a life as poignantly and purposefully examined as Norman Podhoretz's is in Ex-Friends.

Ch. 1 (pp. 7-40), "The Jews in Visigothic Spain, " relates that the conversion of the Visigoths to Catholicism took place in 587. Explains the intense antisemitism in Visigothic Christian Spain (up to the Muslim conquest in 711) - expressed in polemics, legislation, and forced conversion - as resulting from Byzantine Christian influence on the Visigoths. The attitude of the Eastern Church toward the Jews was much harsher than that of the Roman Church in this period. States that the Visigothic period produced the most vile polemic and the harshest legislation against Jews encountered at any time in medieval Europe. Stresses, though, that there was an almost total lack of impact of these attitudes and laws in later Christian Spain, which adopted a policy of cooperation ("convivencia"). The rest of the book deals with the Jews in Muslim Spain, and Jews and Muslims in Christian Spain. They generally had normal, cordial relations during and after the period of Muslim rule, with some exceptions (the Almoravid and Almohad persecutions).

Humor in math; story of line and dot falling in love A tongue in cheek fable