The Suicide of Reason


Book Description

Whether by choice or not, the West finds itself in a low-grade yet bitter war with Islamic fanaticism. It is a war the West is singularly ill-equipped to fight. The foe is resistant to any of the normal methods of conflict resolution such as negotiation, economic sanctions, or conventional armed confrontation. Since the Enlightenment, the West has forgotten how to oppose fanaticism, and it is Lee Harris's goal to remind us what we are up against. In The Suicide of Reason, he explains the logic of fanatical movements from the Crusades through Nazism to radical Islam; describes how the Enlightenment overcame fanatical thinking in the West; shows why most Western attempts to address the problem are doomed to fail; and offers strategies by which liberal internationalism can defend itself without becoming a mirror of the tribal forces it is trying to defeat.




When Reason Breaks


Book Description

Elizabeth Davis and Emily Delgado seem to have little in common except Ms. Diaz's English class and the solace they find in the words of Emily Dickinson, but both are struggling with to cope with monumental secrets and tumultuous emotions that will lead one to attempt suicide.




The Suicide Index


Book Description

National Book Award Finalist: “Wickersham has journeyed into the dark underworld inside her father and herself and emerged with a powerful, gripping story.” —The Boston Globe One winter morning in 1991, Joan Wickersham’s father shot himself in the head. The father she loved would never have killed himself, and yet he had. His death made a mystery of his entire life. Who was he? Why did he do it? And what was the impact of his death on the people who loved him? Using an index—the most formal and orderly of structures—Wickersham explores this chaotic and incomprehensible reality. Every bit of family history, every encounter with friends, doctors, and other survivors, exposes another facet of elusive truth. Dark, funny, sad, and gripping, at once a philosophical and a deeply personal exploration, The Suicide Index is, finally, a daughter’s anguished, loving elegy to her father.




Where Reasons End


Book Description

A fearless writer confronts grief and transforms it into art, in a book of surprising beauty and love, "a masterpiece by a master” (Elizabeth McCracken, Vanity Fair). "Li has converted the messy and devastating stuff of life into a remarkable work of art.”—The Wall Street Journal WINNER OF THE PEN/JEAN STEIN AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST FICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Parul Seghal, The New York Times • NPR • The Guardian • The Paris Review The narrator of Where Reasons End writes, “I had but one delusion, which I held on to with all my willpower: We once gave Nikolai a life of flesh and blood; and I’m doing it over again, this time by words.” Yiyun Li meets life’s deepest sorrows as she imagines a conversation between a mother and child in a timeless world. Composed in the months after she lost a child to suicide, Where Reasons End trespasses into the space between life and death as mother and child talk, free from old images and narratives. Deeply moving, these conversations portray the love and complexity of a relationship. Written with originality, precision, and poise, Where Reasons End is suffused with intimacy, inescapable pain, and fierce love.




Living Your Dying


Book Description

"This book is about dying, not about death. We are always dying a big, always giving things up, always having things taken away. Is there a person alive who isn't really curious about what dying is for them? Is there a person alive who wouldn't like to go to their dying full of excitement, without fear and without morbidity? This books tells you how." -- Front cover.




Reasons to Stay Alive


Book Description

THE NUMBER ONE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO FEEL TRULY ALIVE? Aged 24, Matt Haig's world caved in. He could see no way to go on living. This is the true story of how he came through crisis, triumphed over an illness that almost destroyed him and learned to live again. A moving, funny and joyous exploration of how to live better, love better and feel more alive, Reasons to Stay Alive is more than a memoir. It is a book about making the most of your time on earth. 'I wrote this book because the oldest clichés remain the truest. Time heals. The bottom of the valley never provides the clearest view. The tunnel does have light at the end of it, even if we haven't been able to see it . . . Words, just sometimes, really can set you free.'




Legend of a Suicide


Book Description

"In "Ichthyology," a young boy watches his father spiral from divorce to suicide. The story is told obliquely, often through the boy's observations of his tropical fish, yet also reveals his father's last desperate moves, including quitting dentistry for commercial fishing in the Bering Sea. "Rhoda" goes back to the beginning of the father's second marriage and the boy's fascination with his stepmother, who has one partially closed eye. This eye becomes a metaphor for the adult world the boy can't yet see into, including sexuality and despair, which feel like the key initiating elements of the father's eventual suicide. "A Legend of Good Men" tells the story of the boy's life with his mother after his father's death through the series of men she dates." "In "Sukkwan Island," an extraordinary novella, the father invites the boy homesteading for a year on a remote island in the southeastern Alaskan wilderness. As the situation spins out of control, the son witnesses his father's despair and takes matters into his own hands. In "Ketchikan," the boy is now thirty years old, searching for the origin of ruin. He tracks down Gloria, the woman his father first cheated with, and is left with the sense of "a world held in place, as it turned out, by nothing at all." Set in Fairbanks, where the author's father actually killed himself, "The Higher Blue" provides an epilogue to the collection."--BOOK JACKET.




Suicide Notes


Book Description

An unforgettable coming of age novel for fans of 13 Reasons Why, It’s Kind of a Funny Story, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Fifteen-year-old Jeff wakes up on New Year’s Day to find himself in the hospital—specifically, in the psychiatric ward. Despite the bandages on his wrists, he’s positive this is all some huge mistake. Jeff is perfectly fine, perfectly normal; not like the other kids in the hospital with him. But over the course of the next forty-five days, Jeff begins to understand why he ended up here—and realizes he has more in common with the other kids than he thought. “With a sprinkling of dark humor and a full measure of humanness, Suicide Notes is quirky, surprising, and a riveting read.” —Ellen Hopkins, author of The You I’ve Never Known and Love Lies Beneath “Like the very best teen novels, Suicide Notes is both classic and edgy, timeless and provocative.” —Brent Hartinger, author of Geography Club “Makes a powerful emotional impact.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Jeff’s wit and self-discovery are refreshing, poignant, and, at times, laugh-out-loud funny.” —School Library Journal




Suicide of the West


Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An urgent argument that America and other democracies are in peril because they have lost the will to defend the values and institutions that sustain freedom and prosperity. Now updated with a new preface! “Epic and debate-shifting.”—David Brooks, New York Times Only once in the last 250,000 years have humans stumbled upon a way to lift ourselves out of the endless cycle of poverty, hunger, and war that defines most of history. If democracy, individualism, and the free market were humankind’s destiny, they should have appeared and taken hold a bit earlier in the evolutionary record. The emergence of freedom and prosperity was nothing short of a miracle. As Americans we are doubly blessed, because the radical ideas that made the miracle possible were written not just into the Constitution but in our hearts, laying the groundwork for our uniquely prosperous society. Those ideas are: • Our rights come from God, not from the government. • The government belongs to us; we do not belong to it. • The individual is sovereign. We are all captains of our own souls, not bound by the circumstances of our birth. • The fruits of our labors belong to us. In the last few decades, these political virtues have been turned into vices. As we are increasingly taught to view our traditions as a system of oppression, exploitation, and privilege, the principles of liberty and the rule of law are under attack from left and right. For the West to survive, we must renew our sense of gratitude for what our civilization has given us and rediscover the ideals and habits of the heart that led us out of the bloody muck of the past—or back to the muck we will go.




Suicide of a Superpower


Book Description

The New York Times–bestselling conservative author explains why he believes certain social trends will lead to the downfall of the United States. America is disintegrating. The “one Nation under God, indivisible” of the Pledge of Allegiance is passing away. In a few decades, that America will be gone forever. In its place will arise a country unrecognizable to our parents. This is the thrust of Pat Buchanan’s Suicide of a Superpower, his most controversial and thought-provoking book to date. Buchanan traces the disintegration to three historic changes: America’s loss of her cradle faith, Christianity; the moral, social, and cultural collapse that have followed from that loss; and the slow death of the people who created and ruled the nation. And as our nation disintegrates, our government is failing in its fundamental duties, unable to defend our borders, balance our budgets, or win our wars. How Americans are killing the country they profess to love, and the fate that awaits us if we do not turn around, is what Suicide of a Superpower is all about. Praise for Suicide of a Superpower “Suicide of a Superpower traces the changes in governance and culture in America that foreshadow a decline of epic proportions. . . . Buchanan is no stranger to controversy. Nor is he prone to exaggerate. The crises he describes are real, and he is not afraid to say they ‘may prove too much for our democracy to cope with.’” —Jack Kenny, The New American Magazine “Progressives may recoil at these assertions as well as his positions on immigration, affirmative action and morality, though they may share his sentiments regarding war and America’s unnecessary military presence around the world. Not to disappoint his loyal followers, Buchanan reveals the essence of conservative thought and its origins with clarity and precision.” —Publishers Weekly