Sought, the Sphinx seems everywhere, whether the guardian of the pyramids on Egypt's Giza plateau or the beautiful man-eater with a deadly riddle, to be approached with awful caution. The Sphinx, that icon painted, sculpted, engraved, and exalted in poetry, fiction, and music, so impressed the philosopher Hegel that he pronounced the creature the symbol of the symbolic itself. With a wealth of illustrations, Book of the Sphinx confirms Hegel's lofty judgment, finding the Sphinx everywhere: in tragedies, paintings, opera, murder mysteries, brothels, bars, and advertisements.Pursuing the...
Sought, the Sphinx seems everywhere, whether the guardian of the pyramids on Egypt's Giza plateau or the beautiful man-eater with a deadly riddle, to ...
Where would we be without flattery? Hobbes deemed it an honorable duty and Meredith called it the "finest of the arts." Alexander the Great applied it as imperial policy; Caesar and Cleopatra were masters of it; and Napoleon devoured it like candy. But flattery also has influential enemies. Cicero called flattery "the handmaid of vice" and Tacitus compared it to poison. In a work as erudite as it is entertaining, Willis Goth Regier looks into flattery as an element as flammable (and as taken for granted) as oxygen. Giving flattery light, attention, and care, Regier treats readers to hundreds...
Where would we be without flattery? Hobbes deemed it an honorable duty and Meredith called it the "finest of the arts." Alexander the Great applied it...
The five complete and unabridged works collected here are parts of a long and passionate testimony about American Indian culture as related by Indians themselves. Deep emotions and life-shaking crises converge in these pages concerning identity, family, community, caste, gender, nature, the future, the past, solitude, duty, trust, betrayal, leadership, war, and apocalypse. Each work is also regarded as a classic of Native literature and has much to teach.
The Life of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh (1847) by George Copway, a Canadian Ojibwe writer and lecturer, describes his...
The five complete and unabridged works collected here are parts of a long and passionate testimony about American Indian culture as relate...
Erasmus advised readers to learn quotations by heart and copy them everywhere: write them in the front and back of books; inscribe them on rings and cups; paint them on doors and walls, even on the glass of a window. Emerson noted that in Europe, every church is a kind of book or bible, so covered is it with inscriptions and pictures. In Arabic script as tall as a man, the Koran is quoted on the walls and domes of mosques.We quote to admire, provoke, commemorate, dispute, play, and inspire. Quotations signal class, club, clique, and alma mater. They animate wit, relay prophecies, guide...
Erasmus advised readers to learn quotations by heart and copy them everywhere: write them in the front and back of books; inscribe them on rings and c...
