The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox

The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox Review

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The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox Feature

The award-winning president of the National Book Critics Circle examines the astonishing growth of email—and how it is changing our lives, not always for the better.

John  Freeman  is  one  of  America’s  pre-eminent  literary critics; now in this, his first book, he presents an elegant and erudite investigation into a technology that has revolutionized the way we work, communicate, and even think.

There’s no question that email is an explosive phenomenon. The first email, developed for military use, was sent less than forty years ago; by 2011, there will be 3.2 billion users. The average corporate employee now receives upwards of 130 emails per day; by 2009 that number is expected to reach nearly 200. And the flood of messages is ceaseless: for increasing numbers of people, email means work now occupies home time as well as office hours.

Drawing extensively on the research of linguists, behavioral scientists, cultural critics, and philosophers, Freeman examines the way email is taking a mounting toll on a variety of behavior, reducing time for leisure and contemplation, despoiling subtlety and expression in language, and separating us from each other in the unending and lonely battle with the overfull inbox. He enters a plea for communication which is slower, more nuanced, and, above all, more sociable.

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Zoölogical Cience, or, Nature in Living forms Electronic Resource] Adapted to Elucidate

Zoölogical Cience, or, Nature in Living forms Electronic Resource] Adapted to Elucidate Review

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Zoölogical Cience, or, Nature in Living forms Electronic Resource] Adapted to Elucidate Feature

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. This text refers to the Bibliobazaar edition.

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Freedom of Simplicity

Freedom of Simplicity Review

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Freedom of Simplicity Feature

Written in the same warm, accessible style as Richard Foster's best-selling Celebration of Discipline, Freedom of Simplicity articulates a creative, more human style of living and points the way for Christians to make their lives "models of simplicity." Foster provides a way to rethink our priorities and to "seek first God's kingdom and his righteousness." He shows us how to live in harmony with the rich complexity of life while stressing the relation of simplicity to prayer, solitude, and all the Christian Disciplines.

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Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour"

Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" Review

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Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" Feature

A behind-the-scenes look at the rise and fall of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour -- the provocative, politically charged program that shocked the censors, outraged the White House, and forever changed the face of television.

Decades before The Daily Show, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour proved there was a place on television for no-holds-barred political comedy with a decidedly antiauthoritarian point of view. In this explosive, revealing history of the show, veteran entertainment journalist David Bianculli tells the fascinating story of its three-year network run -- and the cultural impact that's still being felt today.

Before it was suddenly removed from the CBS lineup (reportedly under pressure from the Nixon administration), The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour was a ratings powerhouse. It helped launch the careers of comedy legends such as Steve Martin and Rob Reiner, featured groundbreaking musical acts like the Beatles and the Who, and served as a cultural touchstone for the antiwar movement of the late 1960s.

Drawing on extensive original interviews with Tom and Dick Smothers and dozens of other key players -- as well as more than a decade's worth of original research -- Dangerously Funny brings readers behind the scenes for all the battles over censorship, mind-blowing musical performances, and unforgettable sketches that defined the show and its era.

David Bianculli delves deep into this riveting story, to find out what really happened and to reveal why this show remains so significant to this day.

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Oxford in English Literature: The Making, and Undoing, of the English Athens

Oxford in English Literature: The Making, and Undoing, of the English Athens Review

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Oxford in English Literature: The Making, and Undoing, of the English Athens Feature

As 'the English Athens', Oxford has long been central to the country's cultural life. For over six centuries the city has been lauded, slighted and analysed in the pages of English literature. While it has been hailed as a bastion of excellence, beauty and truth on the one hand, it has also been denigrated for its elitism, exclusivity and insularity on the other. Oxford in English Literature provides for the first time a detailed overview of the literary representations, ranging from Chaucer's account of medieval students to modern-day detective stories. The book begins with the legend of the eighth-century Princess Frideswide, the city's patron saint. Praise for an English Athens first arose in the glad springtime of Elizabethan times, and after the disruptions of the Civil War the university settled back on its laurels, leading to the virulent denunciations of the eighteenth-century. The popularity of the Oxford Novel in the early nineteenth century coincided with a Romantic upsurge in affection for the university, culminating in Matthew Arnold's eulogy and the Oxford Myth of the early twentieth century. The underlying argument of Dougill's work is that the defining symbol of the literature is as much the college wall as the dreaming spire, for writings about Oxford have been shaped by the enclosed nature of the collegiate structure. In literary terms it was depicted as a world of its own - secluded, conservative, and eccentric. Idealised, it became a cloistered utopia, an Athenian city-state, or an Arcadian idyll. The privileged circumstance led to resentment from those on the outside, first evident in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. With greater egalitarian and meritocratic values in the twentieth century, élitism came under attack and with it the notion of a sheltered paradise. At the same time the loosening of college ties led to diversification as writers turned to previously unexamined parts of the city.

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Mission Magic Bubble

Mission Magic Bubble Review

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Mission Magic Bubble Feature

Cupboard Bears live on the planet Cupboard and are normally a bright yellow or orange, with green or sometimes blue luminous ears. They work very hard, spending most of their time making bubbles of different sorts and sizes. One sort is a magic kind and must be always kept under lock and key.The cupboard bears were told that a bubble had gone missing, and what was worse, it was magic one. This was very serious because magic bubbles can change one thing into another, and they get up to all sorts of mischief. a young cupboard bear was chosen to go on a mission to find and bring back the magic bubble, and this is where the adventure begins, full of adventure the bear meets new friends and has to save some pets, will he make it in time before the magic bubble causes to much mischief? only you will find out when you take a trip with cupboard bear on this adventure...

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Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates

Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates Review

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Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates Feature

Since the rise of Napster and other file-sharing services in its wake, most of us have assumed that intellectual piracy is a product of the digital age and that it threatens creative expression as never before. The Motion Picture Association of America, for instance, claimed that in 2005 the film industry lost $2.3 billion in revenue to piracy online. But here Adrian Johns shows that piracy has a much longer and more vital history than we have realized—one that has been largely forgotten and is little understood.

Piracy explores the intellectual property wars from the advent of print culture in the fifteenth century to the reign of the Internet in the twenty-first. Brimming with broader implications for today’s debates over open access, fair use, free culture, and the like, Johns’s book ultimately argues that piracy has always stood at the center of our attempts to reconcile creativity and commerce—and that piracy has been an engine of social, technological, and intellectual innovations as often as it has been their adversary. From Cervantes to Sonny Bono, from Maria Callas to Microsoft, from Grub Street to Google, no chapter in the story of piracy evades Johns’s graceful analysis in what will be the definitive history of the subject for years to come.

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Listen to the Wind

Listen to the Wind Review

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Listen to the Wind Feature

Award-winning Amarillo Globe-News columnist David Horsley is back with another collection of his personal essays from the newspaper. This time David's readers have selected over 100 of his best columns on topics ranging from the humorous to the serious to the sublime.Here are light-hearted favorites such as Chaw McCuddy's review of violinist Itzhak Perlman, David's encounter with a feral cat named Osama and the women who defended it, The Colonoscopy Chronicles, the true story of a black bra and how it inflamed readers' imaginations, and fantasies such as the Magnetron-an imaginary device for disabling loud car stereos.Serious subjects close to David's heart proved popular with readers as well, such as his reflections on the death of his father and the tragedy of the space shuttle Columbia. Included are essays about parenting, computers, handguns, and a requiem for Gus the dog.Topics of global significance are treated as well: 9/11, war, terrorism, and homelessness. David writes honestly about religion and politics in this volume, examining the proper role of critical thinking in religion and exploring the implications of public prayer.This book will have you laughing one minute and crying the next, which might be why Texas Panhandle readers voted him Amarillo's most popular newspaper columnist.

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A Throne in Brussels

A Throne in Brussels Review

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A Throne in Brussels Feature

Paul Belien argues that the pan-European super-state currently in the making will resemble a 'Greater Belgium' rather than a 'Greater Switzerland', since Europe will also be an artificial construct. Belgium has infected EU political attitudes and acts as a model for the EU -- a failed attempt to'construct a nation' out of different peoples with separate languages and traditions. To learn what the EU as a single state might be like, take up this highly readable mix of history, analysis and warning. You'll never feel the same about Belgium or Europe again.

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Mirror Mirror: A Novel

Mirror Mirror: A Novel Review

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Mirror Mirror: A Novel Feature

The year is 1502, and seven-year-old Bianca de Nevada lives perched high above the rolling hills and valleys of Tuscany and Umbria at Montefiore, the farm of her beloved father, Don Vicente. But one day a noble entourage makes its way up the winding slopes to the farm -- and the world comes to Montefiore.

In the presence of Cesare Borgia and his sister, the lovely and vain Lucrezia -- decadent children of a wicked pope -- no one can claim innocence for very long. When Borgia sends Don Vicente on a years-long quest, he leaves Bianca under the care -- so to speak -- of Lucrezia.

She plots a dire fate for the young girl in the woods below the farm, but in the dark forest salvation can be found as well ...

A lyrical work of stunning creative vision, Mirror Mirror gives fresh life to the classic story of Snow White -- and has a truth and beauty all its own.

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