The great board game revolution is here-- What do these games tell us about our society, our relationships, and ourselves? "Games, Jonathan Kay and Joan Moriarity show in this lively and insightful book, are not just fun and games: they allow us to explore the complexities of the world, from evolution to war to climate." - STEVEN PINKER, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress "Kay and Moriarity are both skilled writers and elucidators, and their voices are distinct enough to provide the book with a pleasing yin and yang. It's a far more perceptive and intriguing book than it appears at first blush, particularly for those readers who have never thought of games as an artistic medium - at least not one that comments on society." - KIRKUS REVIEWS Board games are among our most ancient and beloved art forms. During the rise of digital media, they fell from prominence for a decade or two but today they are in a new golden age. They're ingeniously designed, beautiful to look at, and exhilarating to play. Games are reclaiming their place in our culture, as entertainment, social activity, and intellectual workout equipment. Alone among all art forms, games require their audience (called "players") to participate. If nobody's playing, there is no game. As a result, games can tell far more about us than our TV shows, movies or music ever could. How does The Game of Life illustrate our changing attitudes about virtue? How does a World War II conflict simulation game explain the shortcomings of a failed novelist? Each chapter of Your Move examines one game, and what it reveals about our culture, history, society, and relationships. The book's two co-authors bring the perspectives of a writer who plays, and a player who writes. Before Jonathan Kay began his distinguished career as an author and commentator, he had a passion for games, and in recent years he has rediscovered them. Meanwhile, Joan Moriarity's career has been spent designing, developing, distributing, art directing, recommending and teaching board games and, recently, writing about them for a wider audience. With its short, punchy essays, and beautiful photographs of the games themselves, every chapter will be a worthwhile read in itself, and the book overall will leave you inspired to discover the truths of your own inner and outer world through play -- whether you're a seasoned veteran or a total newcomer.

An unprecedented glimpse into the formation of the legendary talent of Leonard Cohen. Before the celebrated late-career world tours, before the Grammy awards, before the chart-topping albums, before 'Hallelujah' and 'So Long, Marianne' and 'Famous Blue Raincoat', the young Leonard Cohen wrote poetry and fiction and yearned for literary stardom. [Bokinfo]

We all know the headiness and excitement of the early days of love. But what comes after? In Edinburgh, a couple, Rabih and Kirsten, fall in love. They get married, they have children--but no long-term relationship is as simple as 2happily ever after. 3The Course of Love is a novel that explores what happens after the birth of love, what it takes to maintain love, and what happens to our original ideals under the pressures of an average existence. You experience, along with Rabih and Kirsten, the first flush of infatuation, the effortlessness of falling into romantic love, and the course of life thereafter. Interwoven with their story and its challenges is an overlay of philosophy--an annotation and a guide to what we are reading. This is a Romantic novel in the true sense, one interested in exploring how love can survive and thrive in the long term. The result is a sensory experience--fictional, philosophical, psychological--that urges us to identify deeply with these characters, and to reflect on his and her own experiences in love.

PETER BERGER, renowned sociologist and social critic, theologian and novelist, here brings his many gifts to bear on the endlessly interesting, if also painful, predicament of living in the modern world. In discussions ranging all the way from such private experiences as marriage and psychoanalysis to such public issues as the secularization of religion, the corruptions of pornography, or the growing indifference to murder, he brilliantly demonstrates how that predicament has grown out of the modern disbelief in God and the weakening of the institutions of community. The modernity which constitutes the central preoccupation of this book raises questions of both a very general and a very particular kind: "How," in Peter Berger's own words, "can one understand that peculiar reality we know as modern society?" Beyond understanding it, how can one actually engage in meaningful political action in its American version? And how does modernity constrain or condition a man's religious quest? The author's answers, based on a sure sense of history combined with an infinitely patient yet toughminded grasp of the way societies actually work, bring new illumination to virtually every page. For those who have not accepted Peter Berger's views about the nature of our present predicament as well as for those who have-indeed, for everyone concerned with understanding himself as a modern person and as a citizen of a modern state-Facing Up to Modernity is an experience in self- discovery

A one-man think-tank for the New Left, Paul Goodman wrote over thirty books, most of them before his decade of fame as a social critic in the Sixties. A Paul Goodman Reader that does him justice must be a compendious volume, with excerpts not only from best-sellers like Growing Up Absurd, but also from his landmark books on education, community planning, anarchism, psychotherapy, language theory, and poetics. Samples as well from The Empire City, a comic novel reviewers compared to Don Quixote, prize-winning short stories, and scores of poems that led America's most respected poetry reviewer, Hayden Carruth, to exclaim, "Not one dull page. It's almost unbelievable." Goodman called himself as an old-fashioned man of letters, which meant that all these various disciplines and occasions added up to a single abiding concern for the human plight in perilous times, and for human promise and achieved grandeur, love and hope.

Kurt Wolff seeks to answer a large ques­tion: what are the justifications and tasks of sociology at a time when hu­mankind and its planet are in jeop­ardy? Since his youth in Germany, where he was a student ofthelate, great Karl Mannheim, the author has ori­ented much of his work to the sociology of sociology. Survival and Sociology takes into ac­count that this age, for the first time in history, extends to society what was only in the province of nature and god—the ability to destroy as well as create life. That being the case, the concern of so­ciology must shift from everyday issues to ideas and policies aimed at averting human extinction. The act of "surrendering" to our novel condition may give us a clue. In any case, it re-establishes our continuity with such founding figures as Max We­ber. Max Scheler. Alfred Schutz, Emile Durkheim. Georg Simmel, and Mann­heim himself. As a result. Wolffs work can be seen as both innovative and continuing a grand tradition of analysis. The an­swers given are very much in terms of specific American conditions, but also provide the sort of theoretical scaffold­ing that underwrites current East-West negotiations on practical issues relat­ing to arms negotiations and peace set­tlements. It is thus a work that should have wide appeal to students of the his­tory of ideas, sociologists of knowledge, and people interested in the philosoph­ical foundations of war and peace.