Showing results by narrator "Neil Gardner" in All Categories

With his characteristic clarity and elegance A. C. Grayling takes the listener from the worldviews and moralities before the age of the Buddha, Confucius and Socrates, through Christianity's dominance of the European mind, to the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and on to Mill, Nietzsche, Sartre and philosophy today. And, since the story of philosophy is incomplete without mention of the great philosophical traditions of India, China and the Persian-Arabic world, he gives a comparative survey of them, too.

What do Christians hope for? To leave this wicked world and go to 'heaven'? For the 'kingdom of God' to grow gradually on earth? What do we mean by the 'resurrection of the body'? And how does all this affect the way we live in the here and now? Tom Wright addresses these questions in this lively and thoroughly biblical book. He describes the persistent confusion about 'the last things' in both Church and world.

Trust Fall isn't your typical 9-to-5 comedy. Created by Claire Friedman and featuring a cast that reads like a humor hall of fame—Colin Jost, Wanda Sykes, Chris Parnell, Neil Patrick Harris, Cecily Strong, and more—this is a sidesplitting adventure in the corporate circus.

On a sunny Friday morning in August 1945, a handful of tired people raised a homemade cotton flag and on behalf of 68 million compatriots announced the birth of a new nation. With the fourth largest population in the world, inhabiting islands that span an eighth of the globe, Indonesia became the first colonised country to declare its independence after the Second World War.

We hear all the time that we're moments from doomsday. Around us, crises interlock and escalate, threatening our collective survival. Protestors and politicians repeatedly call for action, but still we continue to drift towards disaster. We need to do something. But what if the only way for us to prevent catastrophe is to assume that it has already happened - to accept that we're already five minutes past zero hour? Too Late to Awaken sees Slavoj Žižek forge a vital new space for a radical emancipatory politics that could avert our course to self-destruction.

Drawing on years of work interpreting and explaining data about almost anything, renowned data journalist Kiko Llaneras offers practical tools and shortcuts to help you understand the numbers and make better decisions using a quantitative lens. Through a series of compelling examples, he reveals some of the surprising insights that a data-driven perspective can offer.

Ritual is perhaps the oldest, and certainly the most enigmatic, thread in human culture. Seemingly pointless ceremonies pervade every known society: from handshakes to hexes, hazings to parades, birthdays to graduations. And yet, though rituals exist in every culture and can persist nearly unchanged for centuries, their logic has remained a mystery until now. Today, a fearless new generation of anthropologists is venturing into this shadowy realm.

Harlan Ellison’s work shaped the science-fiction, fantasy, and horror genres in the twentieth century, and this collection of his best-known and most-acclaimed stories is a perfect treasury for old Ellison fans as well as listeners discovering this zany, polyphonic writer for the first time.

The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth was originally published in a condensed form (condensed by Harding) in 1952 and described by C.S. Lewis as "a work of the highest genius". This publication, and this audio version, now makes available the original huge work. It is clearly and beautifully written and read. This book opens your eyes to the universe as it is actually presented and opens your mind to the way it functions. One day, this book will be recognized as one of the greatest works of philosophy.

The Bible is held to be both universal and specific, the source of fundamental truths inscribed in words that are exact and sacred. For much of the history of Judaism and almost the entirety of Christianity, however, believers have overwhelmingly understood scripture not in the languages in which it was first written but rather in their own—in translation. This book examines how saints, scholars and interpreters from ancient times down to the present have produced versions of the Bible in the language of their day while remaining true to the original.

In an age where pleasing people, puffing up your ego and building your résumé are seen as the methods to "make it", the Apostle Paul calls us to find true rest in blessed self forgetfulness. In this short and punchy book, best selling author Timothy Keller, shows that gospel humility means we can stop connecting every experience, every conversation with ourselves and can thus be free from self condemnation. A truly gospel humble person is not a self-hating person or a self-loving person, but a self-forgetful person.

No city on earth has preserved its past as has Rome. Visitors stand on bridges that were crossed by Julius Caesar and Cicero, walk around temples visited by Roman emperors, and step into churches that have hardly changed since popes celebrated mass in them 16 centuries ago. These architectural survivals are all the more remarkable considering the violent disasters that have struck the city. Afflicted by earthquakes, floods, fires and plagues, it has most of all been repeatedly ravaged by roving armies.

Most of us face the same questions every day: What do I want? How can I get it? How can I live more happily and work more efficiently? This updated edition of the international bestseller distils into a single volume the fifty best decision-making models used on MBA courses, and elsewhere, that will help you tackle these important questions - from the well known (the Eisenhower matrix for time management) to the less familiar but equally useful (the Swiss Cheese model). It will even show you how to remember everything you'll have learned by the end of it.

Mountains, meridians, rivers and borders; these are some of the features that carve up the world on our maps and in our minds. But geography is far less set in stone than we might believe and, over time, we have become experts at reshaping our surroundings. From the Qhapaq Ñan, South America's 'Great Road', and the Panama Canal to Mozambique's railways and Korea's sacred Baekdu-daegan mountain range, Samson explores how we mould the world around us. And how, as we etch our needs onto the natural landscape, we alter the course of history.

Celebrating the 100th anniversary of the first issues of Weird Tales Magazine, 100 Years of Weird is a masterful compendium of new and classic stories, flash fiction, essays, and poems from the giants of speculative fiction, including R. L. Stine, Laurell K. Hamilton, Ray Bradbury, H. P. Lovecraft, Tennessee Williams, and Isaac Asimov.

Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America and winner of countless awards—including the Hugo, Nebula, Edgar Allan Poe, and Bram Stoker—Harlan Ellison proved once more that he was both unpredictable and irrepressible in this second collection of innovative science fiction. Again, Dangerous Visions—the middle installment in a planned three anthology series—includes award-winning stories from incomparable writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Gene Wolfe, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Piers Anthony, Dean Koontz, and James Tiptree, among many others.

Jerry White's London in the Nineteenth Century is the richest and most absorbing account of the city's greatest century by its leading expert. London in the nineteenth century was the greatest city mankind had ever seen. Its growth was stupendous. Its wealth was dazzling. Its horrors shocked the world. This was the London of Blake, Thackeray and Mayhew, of Nash, Faraday and Disraeli. Most of all it was the London of Dickens. As William Blake put it, London was 'a Human awful wonder of God'.

London in the eighteenth century had risen from the ashes. The city and its people had been brought to the brink by the Great Fire of 1666. But the century that followed was a period of vigorous expansion, of scientific and artistic genius, of blossoming reason, civility, elegance and manners. It was also an age of extremes: of starving poverty and exquisite fashion, of joy and despair, of sentiment and cruelty.

There is no real evidence that humans ever 'domesticated' cats. Rather, it seems that at some point cats saw the potential value to themselves of humans. John Gray's wonderful new book is an attempt to get to grips with the philosophical and moral issues around the uniquely strange relationship between ourselves and these remarkable animals. Feline Philosophy draws on centuries of philosophy, from Montaigne to Schopenhauer, to explore the complex and intimate links that have defined how we react to and behave with this most unlikely 'pet'.

Most of us give little thought to the back of the book - it's just where you go to look things up. But here, hiding in plain sight, is an unlikely realm of ambition and obsession, sparring and politicking, pleasure and play. Here we might find 'Butchers, to be avoided', or 'Cows that sh-te Fire', or even catch 'Calvin in his chamber with a Nonne'. This is the secret world of the index: an unsung but extraordinary everyday tool, with an illustrious but little-known past. Here, for the first time, its story is told.