Books about Fadiman from Amazon.com

Lia Lee was born in 1981 to a family of recent Hmong immigrants, and soon developed symptoms of epilepsy By 1988 she was living at home but was brain dead after a tragic cycle of misunderstanding, overmedication, and culture clash: "What the doctors viewed as clinical efficiency the Hmong viewed as frosty arrogance " The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions, written with the deepest of human feeling. Sherwin Nuland said of the account, "There are no villains in Fadiman's tale, just as there are no heroes. People are presented as she saw them, in their humility and their frailty--and their nobility." .
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With a newly revised and streamlined organization, the Sixth Edition maintains its cross-cultural, global, and gender-balanced perspectives while emphasizing humanistic and transpersonal psychologists in its exploration of the positive aspects of major personality theorists, stressing each one's relevance for personal understanding. Highly praised for its exceptionally well-written style and accessibility, this book encourages and supports readers in using themselves as the primary touchstone for each theory. Each chapter gives readers opportunities to validate their insights through direct experience, and, by observing their own reactions, come to their own conclusions about the utility and value of each theory.a newly revised, and a Companion Website For professionals with a career in psychology, sociology, and/or social work.

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Dr. Seuss's magic elixir may--or may not--prolong life, but it is a fact that it makes you feel a whole lot better! Here in one glorious volume are six of the good doctor's best prescriptions Not a word or a picture has been omitted or changed. Ranging from his very first book, And to Thing That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, to his prophetic The Lorax, Six by Seuss is the perfect collection to share with the entire family and to pass from generation to generation..
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The subtitle of Anne Fadiman's slim collection of essays is Confessions of a Common Reader, but if there is one thing Fadiman is not, it's common. In her previous work of nonfiction, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, she brought both skill and empathy to her balanced exploration of clashing cultures and medical tragedy. The subject matter here is lighter, but imbued with the same fine prose and big heart. Ex Libris is an extended love letter to language and to the wonders it performs. Fadiman is a woman who loves words; in "The Joy of Sesquipedalians" (very long words), she describes an entire family besotted with them: "When I was growing up, not only did my family walk around spouting sesquipedalians, but we viewed all forms of intellectual competition as a sacrament, a kind of holy water as it were, to be slathered on at every opportunity." From very long words it's just a short jump to literature, and Fadiman speaks joyfully of books, book collecting, and book ownership ("In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar"). In "Marrying Libraries" Fadiman describes the emotionally fraught task of merging her collection with her husband's: "After five years of marriage and a child, George and I finally resolved that we were ready for the more profound intimacy of library consolidation. It was unclear, however, how we were to find a meeting point between his English-garden approach and my French-garden one." Perhaps some marriages could not have stood the strain of such an ordeal, but for this one, the merging of books becomes a metaphor for the solidity of their relationship.

Over the course of 18 charming essays Fadiman ranges from the "odd shelf" ("a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection reveals a good deal about its owner") to plagiarism ("the more I've read about plagiarism, the more I've come to think that literature is one big recycling bin") to the pleasures of reading aloud ("When you read silently, only the writer performs. When you read aloud, the performance is collaborative"). Fadiman delivers these essays with the expectation that her readers will love and appreciate good books and the power of language as much as she does. Indeed, reading Ex Libris is likely to bring up warm memories of old favorites and a powerful urge to revisit one's own "odd shelf" pronto. --Alix Wilber.
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In print for almost 40 years, The Lifetime Reading Plan has long been a worthy addition to any serious reader's bookshelf, providing entertaining and informative introductions to the great works of Western civilization. Now, this "classic about classics" has been updated to reflect more diverse traditions. The New Lifetime Reading Plan recommends great literature from around the globe, including writers and works from Confucius to Chinua Achebe, Gabriel García Márquez to the Koran. Also new is an appendix profiling books by 100 important 20th-century authors--or "temporary classics," as coauthor John S. Major calls them.

Readers may argue with some of the selections (or, more likely, the omissions). Others may quarrel with the editors' opinions; they routinely analyze artists' "characters,"with occasionally prissy or patronizing results. (Of Walt Whitman, for instance, coauthor Clifton Fadiman declares that "He had an original temperament, a certain peasant shrewdness, but only a moderate amount of brains.") But no one can argue with the book's mission: promoting the classics as "life companions." "Once part of you, they work in and on and with you until you die," Fadiman writes in the introduction. Anyone seeking a guide to the vast riches of world literature need look no further than the The New Lifetime Reading Plan; it provides a gateway to the greatest achievements of the human mind..
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World Poetry is an incomparable collection in which the ancient and the contemporary are seamlessly interwoven; it is a cornucopia of surprises When you turn to the Dante section, instead of finding excerpts from well-known versions of the Commedia, there are selections by poets such as Shelley, Howard Nemerov, Susan Mitchell, and James Schuyler.

World Poetry can be read in the light of Ezra Pound's dicta: points define a periphery. The editors scoured the archives for versions that would stand as poems on their own. When nothing met their standards, as in the case of Victor Hugo, Maurice Scève, or Gottfried Benn, they commissioned new translations. Louis Simpson gives new life to Hugo's famous poem about Napoleon's armies, "Expiation":

It was snowing, always snowing! The cold lash
Whistled. These warriors had no bread to eat,
They walked across the ice with naked feet.
No longer living hearts, they seemed to be
A dream lost in a fog, a mystery,
A march of shadows under a black sky.
Vast solitudes, appalling to the eye,
Stretched out, mute and revengeful, everywhere.

Perhaps the greatest reward that lies in wait is discovering stunning poems by great and good poets who are almost entirely unknown in the English-speaking world, such as Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1786-1859), Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli (1791-1863), and the amazing Andreas Gryphius (1616-1664), who proves that Petrarch and the Elizabethans aren't the only great sonneteers.

What are we really? Pain's return address.
A ball for luck, blindfolded, to kick around.
A flick of the switch. A stage darkened by fear.
A candle doused, snow melting on bare ground.
Life slips away like gossip or last night's joke.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Whatever breathes will vanish into air.
Our graves are large and lonely. What's left to say?
We're smoke that the wind has caught, and blown away.
(from "Misery," trans. Christopher Benfey)

This book is different from other anthologies in its determination to enable us to experience all poetry as contemporaneous. You will encounter, in all likelihood for the first time, any number of anonymous masterpieces, such as "The Vigil of Venus" translated by David R. Slavitt (anonymous, circa A.D. 200) and "The Old Woman of Beare," translated by Brendan Kenneally (anonymous, circa A.D. 800). Both poems are rendered in elegant yet idiomatic English. "The Old Woman of Beare" is breathtaking: "The sea crawls from the shore / Leaving there / The despicable weed, / A corpse's hair. / In me, / The desolate withdrawing sea."

In the case of your favorite poets, you're bound to quarrel with the selection. It is thrilling to find the "At five in the afternoon" section of Lorca's great elegy to the bullfighter Ignacio Sénchez Mejías, but it seems inappropriate to publish half of Eugenio Montale's "Motets," instead of choosing several of his self-enclosed, dynamic, shorter poems. But arguing with the anthologists is part of the fun, and you're free to return with a vengeance to the poems that you think should have been included. World Poetry is an ideal book to have if you're going to be away from your own library for any amount of time. It is easy to get lost in its opulence, roaming the points of its compass..
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Sufis are celebrated in the West for their joy, humor, and devoted worship. Two students of Sufism, James Fadiman and Robert Frager, have collected some of the jewels of Sufic literature, polished them up a bit, and organized them for ready contemplation. Rumi's poems, Attar's stories, Mohammed's terse sayings, and even some moving pieces from contemporary Western devotees make Essential Sufism a treasury of Sufic literature. The extensive introduction provides practical context, and preambles to each section set the tone for what's to come. If you haven't encountered the wisdom of Sufi mysticism, the material in this book is a good place to start; if you have, it's a comfortable place for return..
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These short anecdotes provide remarkable insight into the human character. Ranging from the humorous to the tearful, they span classical history, recent politics, modern science, and the arts. Bartletts Book of Anecdotes is a gold mine for anyone who gives speeches, is doing research, or simply likes to browse..
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Clifton Fadiman's classic collection of mathematical stories, essays and anecdotes first published in 1958, is now back in print. Ranging from the poignant to the comical to the surreal, these selections include writing by Aldous Huxley, Martin Gardner, H.G. Wells, George Gamow, G.H. Hardy, Plato, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and many others. Humorous and mysterious, this collection will please mathematicians and everyone else who loves a good story full of stimulating ideas. In this intriguing collection of stories we learn of the young mathematician who chases his fiancee into the fourth dimension, how a group of Australian soldier's lives were saved by a lesson in basic topology, and of Mephisto's search for mathematical truth. Any interested reader will be amused, beguiled -- and perhaps even slightly instructed -- by this wonderfully diverse collection of writing. Clifton Fadiman's prolific career as an essayist, critic, anthologist, and radio show host has spanned the last five decades. His books include The Lifetime Reading Plan and a collection of essays, Party of One. He served for many years on the board of editors of the Book-of-the-Month Club..
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