I am an honorary senior fellow at Keele University and have written books on philosophy, art history, and archaeology. In philosophy one of my main interests is the comparative analysis of a wide range of philosophical approaches to the question of the meaning of life.
This book provides short summaries of the views of about one hundred philosophers of the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries.
Only one earlier philosopher is included, “the most prominent pessimist of the entire western philosophical tradition,” Arthur Schopenhauer.
One of the interesting features of the book – partly because it has rarely been attempted – is a taxonomy of the different answers that have been given to the question.
The Meaning of Life: Religious, Philosophical, Transhumanist, and Scientific Perspectives is the first book to summarize the writings of the important contemporary theologians, philosophers, and scientists on the question of the meaning of life. In addition the book deals with the relevance of death for the question as well the huge importance that the potential scientific elimination of death will have for humanity’s concern regarding meaning. Finally the book considers the question in the context of cosmic evolution and deep time, offering in the end an answer to the question of whether life is or is not ultimately meaningful. Show…
I grew up in Yorkshire and spent many happy hours as a teenager wandering about the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, looking at giant Henry Moores in the rolling landscape. I subsequently trained as an art historian and have spent the last thirty years writing about art, from the YBAs to our prehistoric roots. A Little History of Art was borne out of this journey. Increasingly I have been drawn to researching what art can tell us about British history. My bookshelves groan with monographs but these five volumes have helped me think more deeply about Britain’s landscapes and its past. I hope they will do the same for you.
I first read this book when I was trying to pull together all the disparate locations, time periods, and art movements for my book.
This task was a little overwhelming and Digging Up Britaintaught me how to make choices about what to include and what to leave out, how to weave it all into a narrative that makes sense, and how to bring prehistory to life.
Unusually, this book travels back in time as we travel through it. It is like an archaeological dig – we start with the Vikings and then the Staffordshire Hoard but end up with the Star Carr deer hunters and a million years of history.
It is a book you can dip into or read cover to cover (as I did) and it has some good illustrations and maps throughout.
Britain has long been fascinated with its own history and identity, as an island nation besieged by invaders from beyond the seas: the Romans, Vikings and Normans. The long saga of prehistory is often forgotten - but our understanding of our past is changing.
Mike Pitts presents ten astounding archaeological discoveries that shed new light on those who came before us, and radically altered the way we think about our history. His compelling, sometimes teasing, archaeological odyssey illustrates the diversity, complexity and sheer strangeness of the lives that represent Britain's past.
I am a holistic adult and child psychiatrist, astrologer, shamanic practitioner, and energy healer who has been in practice for 35 years. I am thoroughly familiar with the conventional paradigm for treating psychiatric illness, but I no longer endorse it and, in fact, believe that it causes harm. I am convinced that there is an urgent need for a paradigm shift in medicine at this time of collapse and breakdown on the planet. The sacred's vital role in healing needs to be acknowledged, as does the role of nutrition and lifestyle, as well as a need to identify and treat the root causes of illness rather than simply suppressing symptoms with pharmaceuticals.
I love this author’s voice, which feels very authentic and fresh. The writing is beautiful, both magical and earthy, and I loved the description of her spiritual journey growing up with atheist parents and her discovery of the helpful real presence of the ancestors in her life.
The author’s description of the presence of the dead in her life, her relationships with them, and their influence on her life have the potential to open up the reader to their experience of their ancestor’s presence in their own lives, which can be both so enormously helpful, enriching and comforting. I loved the description of the evolution of her relationship with her complicated father, both over the course of her lifetime and then as the years passed after he was gone.
The book models a reality, which I share, that our relationships with our loved ones continue in a very alive way…
"Finn weaves a spellbinding meditation . . . an affecting ode to the power of the unseen." -Publisher's Weekly
What if you could live in a world where the guidance of those who were gone was available, right at your very fingertips? It's possible, if we are open to it. Anyone can reclaim the forgotten guidance of the dead, and anyone can return to the realm of magic and miracles. In Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World, author, spiritual teacher, and co-founder of The Way of the Rose Perdita Finn reveals that life is beginningless, love is…
I’m a science journalist in Colorado, living in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains that were raised by millions of years of mountain-building. I studied geology in college and now write about the earth and space sciences, primarily for the journal Nature. On reporting trips I’ve camped on floating Arctic sea ice and visited earthquake-ravaged mountains in Sichuan, China. But my favorite journey into deep time — the planet’s unfathomably long geologic history, as preserved in rocks — will always be a raft trip with scientists along a section of the Colorado River in Arizona.
This gorgeously illustrated coffee-table volume draws on Black’s expertise in science writing and paleontology. She begins with the Big Bang that created the universe 13.8 billion years ago, then moves in short chapters through milestones of the rise of life on Earth. Prehistoric plants harden into coal in the Carboniferous Period, 359 million years ago; dinosaurs roam the Morrison Formation of the western US, 156 million years ago; and small blobs of molten glass from Laos reveal a powerful meteorite impact 790,000 years ago. You’ll never see the timeline of life the same way again.
Deep time is the timescale of the geological events that have shaped our planet. Whilst so immense as to challenge human understanding, its evidence is nonetheless visible all around us.
Through explanations of the latest research and over 200 fascinating images, Deep Time explores this evidence, from the visible layers in ancient rock to the hiss of static on the radio, and from fossilized shark's teeth to underwater forests. These relics of ancient epochs, many of which we can see and touch today, connect our present to the distant past and answer broader questions about our place in the timeline…
I’m a science journalist in Colorado, living in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains that were raised by millions of years of mountain-building. I studied geology in college and now write about the earth and space sciences, primarily for the journal Nature. On reporting trips I’ve camped on floating Arctic sea ice and visited earthquake-ravaged mountains in Sichuan, China. But my favorite journey into deep time — the planet’s unfathomably long geologic history, as preserved in rocks — will always be a raft trip with scientists along a section of the Colorado River in Arizona.
This is the classic book on the deep history of the Earth. Hutton is known as the father of modern geology, because he understood that today’s rocks represent the accumulation of changes over incredibly long geologic epochs. In publishing his ideas he went against the then-popular notion of catastrophism, which held that sudden, violent events such as floods had shaped most of the Earth’s surface. Hutton instead argued for slow changes over time — a concept known as uniformitarianism — and, crucially, recognized that two rock types at Siccar Point, Scotland, had formed at different times separated by many millions of years. “The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time,” one of Hutton’s companions said. That realization set the stage for future scientists to explore the ramifications of a deep geologic past.
This collection of literature attempts to compile many of the classic works that have stood the test of time and offer them at a reduced, affordable price, in an attractive volume so that everyone can enjoy them.
I have been intrigued by the stranger, lesser-known parts of the natural world for as long as I can remember and have been continuing to explore those themes in my own work. I love that humans haven’t learned all there is to know about the natural forces that have ruled this planet for longer than we’ve been here. I enjoy books that peel back a layer into these mysteries by writers who have an appreciation for their existence, their ingenuity, and their importance. I have dedicated much of my career to synthesizing big topics into accessible, engaging, and fun information that creates curiosity and a desire to understand the world around us.
I found this bookto be a fascinating journey into realms of the world below the surface I had never thought about or even known existed. Cave diving is my worst nightmare, so one particular section stands out about the wild, terrifying, and utterly unrelatable passion of cave divers and the perils one faces when stuck very, very underground.
The mixture of purely natural environments and human-created ones, such as underground tunnels and cities, all held my attention as pieces of information I had read very little about in the past, all collected into one unifying theme. Having such a broad but specific topic all in one read was a fun, dynamic journey.
In Underland, Robert Macfarlane delivers an epic exploration of the Earth's underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself. Traveling through the dizzying expanse of geologic time-from prehistoric art in Norwegian sea caves, to the blue depths of the Greenland ice cap, to a deep-sunk "hiding place" where nuclear waste will be stored for 100,000 years to come-Underland takes us on an extraordinary journey into our relationship with darkness, burial, and what lies beneath the surface of both place and mind.
Global in its geography and written with great lyricism, Underland speaks powerfully to our present…
When I was young, I worked on fishing boats in Alaska and developed an affection for weird sea creatures. All manner of unusual marine life would come up on the line, like wild-looking sea stars, pointy-nosed skates, and alien-looking ratfish. Later, I graduated from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks with a degree in Communications. One of my early jobs was with the Washington Department of Wildlife public information department, writing about fish, as well as other wildlife-related topics. When I moved to Bozeman, Montana, I had the opportunity to create content for a museum exhibit on early life forms. That hooked me on all things paleo. It is a joy to write about and share the things I love—like oddball creatures from deep time.
Evolution, extinction, evo-devo, a “vampire squid from hell”—what more could a paleo-curious reader ask for? Staaf keeps it interesting and breezy as she takes a deep dive into the mysteries of that most ancient and fascinating group, the cephalopods. The fossil record for this extraordinary, important, and long-surviving class (which includes ammonoids and nautiloids as well as the shell-free squids and octopuses) goes back 500 million years. The book is full of “wows,” like a 20-foot-long fossil shell, and the fact that ink has been reconstituted from fossil belemnites and used for illustration. Just wow.
An epic and fun history spanning from the mollusks that invented swimming to the octopuses and other intelligent cephalopods of today Publisher's Note: Monarchs of the Sea was previously published in hardcover as Squid Empire.
Before mammals, there were dinosaurs. And before dinosaurs, there were cephalopods--the ancestors of modern squid, octopuses, and more creatures--Earth's first truly substantial animals. Essentially inventing the act of swimming, cephalopods presided over an undersea empire for millions of years--until fish evolved jaws, and cephalopods had to step up their game or risk being eaten. To keep up, some streamlined their shells and added defensive spines,…
When I was young, I worked on fishing boats in Alaska and developed an affection for weird sea creatures. All manner of unusual marine life would come up on the line, like wild-looking sea stars, pointy-nosed skates, and alien-looking ratfish. Later, I graduated from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks with a degree in Communications. One of my early jobs was with the Washington Department of Wildlife public information department, writing about fish, as well as other wildlife-related topics. When I moved to Bozeman, Montana, I had the opportunity to create content for a museum exhibit on early life forms. That hooked me on all things paleo. It is a joy to write about and share the things I love—like oddball creatures from deep time.
This fascinating, nail-biter of a tale has all the elements of a novel: quirky characters, chance encounters, a determined female curator, chase scenes, mystery, and hunt for something that scientists believed existed only in the fossil record. The story begins in 1938 in South Africa on the deck of a trawler, with young Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer picking through a pile of sharks, starfish, and ratfish—to uncover a beautiful, five-foot-long fish with hard iridescent scales and limb-like fins. Weinberg brings the story, and the coelacanth, to life, weaving a narrative as breathtaking as the fish itself. I enjoyed this book immensely!
A gripping story of obsession, adventure and the search for our oldest surviving ancestor - 400 million years old - a four-limbed dinofish!
In 1938, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, a young South African museum curator, caught sight of a specimen among a fisherman's trawl that she knew was special. With limb-like protuberances culminating in fins the strange fish was unlike anything she had ever seen. The museum board members dismissed it as a common lungfish, but when Marjorie eventually contacted Professor JLB Smith, he immediately identified her fish as a coelacanth - a species known to have lived 400 million years ago,…
I grew up in Yorkshire and spent many happy hours as a teenager wandering about the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, looking at giant Henry Moores in the rolling landscape. I subsequently trained as an art historian and have spent the last thirty years writing about art, from the YBAs to our prehistoric roots. A Little History of Art was borne out of this journey. Increasingly I have been drawn to researching what art can tell us about British history. My bookshelves groan with monographs but these five volumes have helped me think more deeply about Britain’s landscapes and its past. I hope they will do the same for you.
This book expanded how I thought about time and about the landscape we take for granted.
It opened up the prehistoric world from a contemporary perspective, showing how a sense of deep geological time can help us understand our own place in the world better today.
Gordon explains why categories of things can be useful in deepening our understanding of a place: as she says, ‘a named landscape thickens.’
I also found this book so useful in working out how to cram 100,000 years of history into one volume for my book!
'Astounding ... To call this a "history" does not do justice to Helen Gordon's ambition' Simon Ings, Daily Telegraph
'Awe-inspiring ... She has imbued geological tales with a beauty and humanity' Shaoni Bhattacharya-Woodward, Mail on Sunday
The story of the Earth is written into our landscape: it's there in the curves of hills, the colours of stone, surprising eruptions of vegetation. Wanting a fresh perspective on her own life, the writer Helen Gordon set out to read that epic narrative.
Her odyssey takes her from the secret fossils of London to the 3-billion-year-old rocks of the Scottish Highlands, and from…
When I was young, I worked on fishing boats in Alaska and developed an affection for weird sea creatures. All manner of unusual marine life would come up on the line, like wild-looking sea stars, pointy-nosed skates, and alien-looking ratfish. Later, I graduated from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks with a degree in Communications. One of my early jobs was with the Washington Department of Wildlife public information department, writing about fish, as well as other wildlife-related topics. When I moved to Bozeman, Montana, I had the opportunity to create content for a museum exhibit on early life forms. That hooked me on all things paleo. It is a joy to write about and share the things I love—like oddball creatures from deep time.
From the time the first primitive vertebrates arose in the Cambrian to the appearance of early amphibians around the late Devonian, fishes were by far the dominant life form on the planet. Follow the journey in the highly readable, generously illustrated Rise of Fishes. This fascinating immersion into the diversification of early fishes was written by esteemed Australian paleontologist John Long. Long is also the author of The Dawn of the Deed: The Prehistoric Origins of Sex, and Swimming in Stone: The Amazing Gogo Fossils of the Kimberley, both of which could also go on your list.
Fishes that walk, fishes that breathe air, fishes that look like-and are-monsters from the deep. These and many more strange creatures swim through The Rise of Fishes, John A. Long's richly illustrated tour of the past 500 million years. Long has updated his classic work with illustrations of recent fossil discoveries and new interpretations based on genetic analyses. He reveals how fishes evolved from ancient, jawless animals, explains why fishes have survived on the Earth for so long, and describes how they have become the dominant aquatic life-form. Indeed, to take things a step further, we learn much about ourselves…
