As a professor of Classics at the University of Chicago, I’m conditioned to inquire into the meaning of life! But also, I was raised in many different countries and cultures—the UK, Iran, Fiji, Indonesia, Switzerland, the US, plus recent stints studying in China—so I’ve sampled a stewpot of worldviews. The result is that I have a passion for this topic. But I am no truth-telling guru myself (except that I know that dogs are GOOD). I can only speak about the meaning of life for me and hope it will make sense to others. These books have helped me construct that meaning.
Published in 1946, this book asks us to think about the meaning of life from the point of view of the victims of the concentration camps—where Frankl himself struggled for life. It is a grim backdrop, but out of it Frankl distills a challenge to all of us. Quoting Nietzsche’s words, “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,” he suggests that we ask, not what we expect from life, but what life expects from us. Reading Frankl helped me switch from “what is the meaning of it all?” (midlife crisis question!) to “now I will consciously and purposefully make my life meaningful.”
One of the outstanding classics to emerge from the Holocaust, Man's Search for Meaning is Viktor Frankl's story of his struggle for survival in Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps. Today, this remarkable tribute to hope offers us an avenue to finding greater meaning and purpose in our own lives.
If you think too much and you’re not religious, you may have bumped up against a question that troubled much of my existence: on the one hand, I want (and sometimes fail) to live a life I can call morally good, but on the other hand, I don’t have any sort of theories or transcendental claims to base my “morally good” on. It’s hard to say you believe in X when your answer to “Why do you believe in X?” is, “because it’s X!” Rorty (on my reading) reminds us we don’t need to be torn apart by the intrusion of intellectual skepticism into our desire to act in a moral manner. To borrow from Nike, just do it.
In this 1989 book Rorty argues that thinkers such as Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein have enabled societies to see themselves as historical contingencies, rather than as expressions of underlying, ahistorical human nature or as realizations of suprahistorical goals. This ironic perspective on the human condition is valuable on a private level, although it cannot advance the social or political goals of liberalism. In fact Rorty believes that it is literature not philosophy that can do this, by promoting a genuine sense of human solidarity. A truly liberal culture, acutely aware of its own historical contingency, would fuse the private, individual…
Willem and Jurriaan have a miserable childhood thanks to their cruel, controlling mother—Louisa Veldkamp, a world-renowned pianist. Dad turns a blind eye. One day, Louisa vanishes without a trace during a family vacation.
Adoptee Anneliese Bakker survives a toxic childhood and leaves home, vowing never to return. While searching for…
What is the meaning of life? We could take the question further by disposing of our blinkers and asking, what is the meaning of the other lives that may not look like ours? These lives consist of the millions of animals who die in the factory farms built to conceal their suffering and turn them into fungible objects, not lives. Safran’s book is an eye-opening exposition of how we have enslaved animals for food that we don’t even need in the 21st century—damaging ourselves and the environment in the process. One meaning of life: the value of letting other lives have meaning too.
To reduce risk of pandemics for ourselves, our gaze needs to turn to the health of animals. Discover Jonathan Safran Foer's eye-opening and life-changing account of the meat we eat.
'Should be compulsory reading. A genuine masterwork. Read this book. It will change you' Time Out
Eating Animals is the most original and urgent book on the subject of food written this century. It will change the way you think, and change the way you eat. For good.
Whether you're flirting with veganuary, trying to cut back on animal consumption, or a lifelong meat-eater, you need to read this book.…
This book is a profound description of the customs and life of the Igbo tribe of Nigeria before the political and religious changes brought by the British. Through Achebe’s work we see the philosophy, poetry, and even democratic practice of the Igbo—a salutary counter to assumptions that western culture is automatically superior. Are the Igbo “primitive”? What does this word mean? Maybe it seems strange to worship wooden idols, but to the Igbos it seems strange to say that God has a son when he has no wife. I found the Igbo’s meaning-making practices as profound as any.
Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and accomplishments that two Chinese brothers - American Immigrants - experience as they travel to California to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
My book club found this book depressing and shook their heads at my choice. I found it a fascinating account of a life that is meaningful for its owner. The protagonist is a woman dying in an abandoned mental hospital after years of abuse and neglect. And yet, she has a psychological condition that makes her infinitely compassionate towards others: she can only perceive goodwill and love. When she tells the story of her “happy life,” she even feels bad for her rapist. You will love or hate this book. But it will make you think.
At the opening of My Happy Life, the unnamed narrator has been abandoned in a locked room of a deserted mental hospital. She hasn't seen the nice man who brings her food in days; so she's eaten the soap, the toothpaste, and even tried to eat the plaster on her walls — a dietary adventure that ended none too well. This woman's story, covering decades and spanning continents, is tragic, yet she is curiously at peace, even happy. Despite a lifetime of neglect, physical abuse, and loss, she's incapable of perceiving slight or injury. She has infinite faith in the…
A fresh and faithful translation of Vergil's Aeneid restores the epic's spare language and fast pace and sheds new light on one of the cornerstone narratives of Western culture. "The best version of the Aeneid in modern English: concise, readable and beautiful, but also as accurate and faithful to Vergil's Latin as possible." --James J. O'Hara, George L. Paddison Professor of Latin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Seeker: As societies grow increasingly fragmented, hopelessness, nihilism, division, and despair are on the rise. But there is another way—a way of mystery and magic, of wholeness and transformation. Do you dare take the first step? Our path is not for the faint-hearted, but for seekers of ancient truths...
Bright but unassuming Marilyn Jones has some grown-up decisions to make, especially after Mama goes to prison for drugs and larceny. With no one to take care of them, Marilyn and her younger, mentally challenged brother, Carol, get tossed into the foster care…
