Books about Trembling from Amazon.com

How can Buffy’s religious symbolism be squared with creator Joss Whedon’s professed atheism? Is Buffy truly a Kierkegaardian knight of faith? Do Faith’s corruption and return to the good life demonstrate Platonic eudaimonism? Or do they illustrate the flaws in Nietzsche’s superman concept? What does the show’s treatment of vampires, demons, and other entities say about ethical attitudes toward nonhumans? These are some of the questions asked and answered in this lively collection of essays that link classical philosophy to the long-running series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy’s status as the leading vehicle for exploring the evil underlying everyday life has made it ripe for the kind of witty, penetrating philosophical analysis this book delivers -- fully disintering the intellectual issues that underlie this cult favorite.

According to ancient Japanese protocol, foreigners deigning to approach the emperor did so only with fear and trembling Terror and self-abasement conveyed respect. Amélie, our well-intentioned and eager young Western heroine, goes to Japan to spend a year working at the Yumimoto Corporation. Returning to the land where she was born is the fulfillment of a dream for Amélie; working there turns into comic nightmare.

Alternately disturbing and hilarious, unbelievable and shatteringly convincing, Fear and Trembling will keep readers clutching tight to the pages of this taut little novel, caught up in the throes of fear, trembling, and, ultimately, delight.

A round-the-world detective story about rediscovering vanished species

Three or four times an hour, eighty or more times a day, a unique species of plant or animal vanishes forever. It is, scientists say, the worst global extinction crisis in the last sixty-five million years -- the hemorrhage of thirty thousand irreplaceable life-forms each year. And yet, every so often one of these lost species resurfaces, such as the Indian forest owlet, considered extinct for more than a century when it was rediscovered in 1997. Like heirlooms plucked from a burning house, they are gifts to an increasingly impoverished world.

In The Ghost with Trembling Wings, naturalist Scott Weidensaul pursues these stories of loss and recovery, of endurance against the odds, and of surprising resurrections. The search takes Weidensaul to the rain forests of the Caribbean and Brazil in pursuit of long-lost birds, to the rugged mountains of Tasmania for the striped, wolflike marsupial known as the thylacine, to cloning laboratories where scientists struggle to re-create long-extinct animals, and even to the moorlands and tidy farms of England on the trail of mysterious black panthers whose existence seems to depend on the faith of those looking for them. The Ghost with Trembling Wings is a book of exploration and a survey of the frontiers of modern science and wildlife biology. It is, in the end, the story of our desire for a wilder, bigger, more complete world.