The Illusion of Permanence


Book Description

By combining the techniques of intellectual history and social psychology Professor Hutchins provides a new perspective for an understanding of the intellectual atmosphere of British imperialism in India in the nineteenth century. The author stresses that the illusion of permanence began some years before the Great Mutiny of 1857, although it was the Mutiny that made the subsequent imperialistic attitude rigid. His source materials include the writings of travelers, diarists, civil servants, soldiers, and retired officials; such literature as Jane Eyre, A Passage to India, Oakfield by William Arnold, the Works of Kipling; letters, essays, newspaper articles, and records of the Parliamentary hearings following the Mutiny. Originally published in 1967. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.




The Undefeated Mind


Book Description

Legions of self-help authors rightly urge personal development as the key to happiness, but they typically fail to focus on its most important objective: hardiness. Though that which doesn't kill us can make us stronger, as Nietzsche tells us, few authors today offer any insight into just how to springboard from adversity to strength. It doesn't just happen automatically, and it takes practice. New scientific research suggests that resilience isn't something with which only a fortunate few of us have been born, but rather something we can all take specific action to develop. To build strength out of adversity, we need a catalyst. What we need, according to Dr. Alex Lickerman, is wisdom—wisdom that adversity has the potential to teach us. Lickerman's underlying premise is that our ability to control what happens to us in life may be limited, but we have the ability to establish a life-state to surmount the suffering life brings us. The Undefeated Mind distills the wisdom we need to create true resilience into nine core principles, including: --A new definition of victory and its relevance to happiness --The concept of the changing of poison into medicine --A way to view prayer as a vow we make to ourselves. --A method of setting expectations that enhances our ability to endure disappointment and minimizes the likelihood of quitting --An approach to taking personal responsibility and moral action that enhances resilience --A process to managing pain—both physical and emotional—that enables us to push through obstacles that might otherwise prevent us from attaining out goals --A method of leveraging our relationships with others that helps us manifest our strongest selves Through stories of patients who have used these principles to overcome suffering caused by unemployment, unwanted weight gain, addiction, rejection, chronic pain, retirement, illness, loss, and even death, Dr. Lickerman shows how we too can make these principles function within our own lives, enabling us to develop for ourselves the resilience we need to achieve indestructible happiness. At its core, The Undefeated Mind urges us to stop hoping for easy lives and focus instead on cultivating the inner strength we need to enjoy the difficult lives we all have.




I Will Destroy You


Book Description

The newest collection from Nick Flynn, whose “songs of experience hum with immediacy” (The New York Times) Beginning with a poem called “Confessional” and ending with a poem titled “Saint Augustine,” Nick Flynn's I Will Destroy You interrogates the potential of art to be redemptive, to remake and reform. But first the maker of art must claim responsibility for his past, his actions, his propensity to destroy others and himself. “Begin by descending,” Augustine says, and the poems delve into the deepest, most defeating parts of the self: addiction, temptation, infidelity, and repressed memory. These are poems of profound self-scrutiny and lyric intensity, jagged and probing. I Will Destroy You is an honest accounting of all that love must transcend and what we must risk for its truth.




Ephemeral Urbanism


Book Description

"As one of the outcomes of the Ephemeral City Research Project conceived in the Harvard Graduate School of Design with the aim of bringing to light the idea that nonpermanent configurations of the urban landscape are legitimate within the discourse on cities this book describes temporary settlements from all over the world that challenge the illusion of the permanence of the urban landscape. Ephemeral Urbanism invites us to ponder over aspects of material impermanence such as dematerialization and disassembly as an integral part of the designand construction processes of cities. Ranging from the scale of the small temporary infill within the urban, to the scale of the ephemeral mega cities, this book gives an overview of hundreds of cases, analyzing settlements or configurations that are constructed for a limited period of time. Through diagrams, photographs and aerial images, this preliminary survey presents an exploration of ome interesting prototypes of flexible urban planning and design. Texts by Richard Sennett and Ricky Burdett give the appropriate framework to understand the relevance of this book."--Provider.




Four Illusions


Book Description

Candrakrti, who lived in India in the 7th century CE, is a major Mahayana Buddhist scholar whose works are studied in modern western universities and traditional Tibetan Buddhist monasteries. This is a translation of the first four chapters of Candrakrti's commentary on Aryadeva's 400 Stanzas.




Living with the Stars


Book Description

Living with the Stars tells the fascinating story of what truly makes the human body. The body that is with us all our lives is always changing. We are quite literally not who we were years, weeks, or even days ago: our cells die and are replaced by new ones at an astonishing pace. The entire body continually rebuilds itself, time and again, using the food and water that flow through us as fuel and as construction material. What persists over time is not fixed but merely a pattern in flux. We rebuild using elements captured from our surroundings, and are thereby connected to animals and plants around us, and to the bacteria within us that help digest them, and to geological processes such as continental drift and volcanism here on Earth. We are also intimately linked to the Sun's nuclear furnace and to the solar wind, to collisions with asteroids and to the cycles of the birth of stars and their deaths in cataclysmic supernovae, and ultimately to the beginning of the universe. Our bodies are made of the burned out embers of stars that were released into the galaxy in massive explosions billions of years ago, mixed with atoms that formed only recently as ultrafast rays slammed into Earth's atmosphere. All of that is not just remote history but part of us now: our human body is inseparable from nature all around us and intertwined with the history of the universe.




The Perils of Interpreting


Book Description

A fascinating history of China’s relations with the West—told through the lives of two eighteenth-century translators The 1793 British embassy to China, which led to Lord George Macartney’s fraught encounter with the Qianlong emperor, has often been viewed as a clash of cultures fueled by the East’s lack of interest in the West. In The Perils of Interpreting, Henrietta Harrison presents a more nuanced picture, ingeniously shifting the historical lens to focus on Macartney’s two interpreters at that meeting—Li Zibiao and George Thomas Staunton. Who were these two men? How did they intervene in the exchanges that they mediated? And what did these exchanges mean for them? From Galway to Chengde, and from political intrigues to personal encounters, Harrison reassesses a pivotal moment in relations between China and Britain. She shows that there were Chinese who were familiar with the West, but growing tensions endangered those who embraced both cultures and would eventually culminate in the Opium Wars. Harrison demonstrates that the Qing court’s ignorance about the British did not simply happen, but was manufactured through the repression of cultural go-betweens like Li and Staunton. She traces Li’s influence as Macartney’s interpreter, the pressures Li faced in China as a result, and his later years in hiding. Staunton interpreted successfully for the British East India Company in Canton, but as Chinese anger grew against British imperial expansion in South Asia, he was compelled to flee to England. Harrison contends that in silencing expert voices, the Qing court missed an opportunity to gain insights that might have prevented a losing conflict with Britain. Uncovering the lives of two overlooked figures, The Perils of Interpreting offers an empathic argument for cross-cultural understanding in a connected world.




The Salt House


Book Description

A woman writer's lyrical memoir of a summer with her artist husband in a remote Cape Cod dune shack




Option B


Book Description

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From authors of Lean In and Originals: a powerful, inspiring, and practical book about building resilience and moving forward after life’s inevitable setbacks After the sudden death of her husband, Sheryl Sandberg felt certain that she and her children would never feel pure joy again. “I was in ‘the void,’” she writes, “a vast emptiness that fills your heart and lungs and restricts your ability to think or even breathe.” Her friend Adam Grant, a psychologist at Wharton, told her there are concrete steps people can take to recover and rebound from life-shattering experiences. We are not born with a fixed amount of resilience. It is a muscle that everyone can build. Option B combines Sheryl’s personal insights with Adam’s eye-opening research on finding strength in the face of adversity. Beginning with the gut-wrenching moment when she finds her husband, Dave Goldberg, collapsed on a gym floor, Sheryl opens up her heart—and her journal—to describe the acute grief and isolation she felt in the wake of his death. But Option B goes beyond Sheryl’s loss to explore how a broad range of people have overcome hardships including illness, job loss, sexual assault, natural disasters, and the violence of war. Their stories reveal the capacity of the human spirit to persevere . . . and to rediscover joy. Resilience comes from deep within us and from support outside us. Even after the most devastating events, it is possible to grow by finding deeper meaning and gaining greater appreciation in our lives. Option B illuminates how to help others in crisis, develop compassion for ourselves, raise strong children, and create resilient families, communities, and workplaces. Many of these lessons can be applied to everyday struggles, allowing us to brave whatever lies ahead. Two weeks after losing her husband, Sheryl was preparing for a father-child activity. “I want Dave,” she cried. Her friend replied, “Option A is not available,” and then promised to help her make the most of Option B. We all live some form of Option B. This book will help us all make the most of it.




Illusions on the Path


Book Description

Buddhism is often touted as a religion that is a perfect fit for modern times offering valuable insights that can relieve much of the stress and problems we face in our busy lives. If however we scrutinise some of the more traditional Buddhist practices and beliefs the common depiction of Buddhism as a rational or even scientific path can seem quite untenable. Far from being a path ideal for current times you may find yourself experiencing difficulties integrating teachings and ideas into your normal life. You may encounter aspects of Buddhist thought that don't sit comfortably with your modern sensibilities or may even seem regressive. In this situation how can we proceed with confidence and discern a path that is acceptable and safe for us to travel on? How can we, for example, avoid getting drawn into personality cults that have left many sincere followers open to abuse? Do we have to believe in ideas like reincarnation and assent to faith in supernatural beings to be real Buddhists? Is becoming a Buddhist even necessary? In ILLUSIONS ON THE PATH, these questions and more are examined in a critical way that uncovers how some traditional Buddhist practices and ideas have evolved in ways that are clearly at odds with modern western values and at times even with the original word of the Buddha. Cutting through these obstacles the author reveals a pragmatic approach that invites the reader to come and see for themselves the value if any in the Buddha's insights. Illusions on the Path clears away superfluous beliefs and reveals a path that invites scepticism, rational thought and self discovery. It provides valuable insights that help us avoid the problems and confusion that afflicts both newcomers to Buddhism and long-term practitioners alike. "ILLUSIONS ON THE PATH examines the cultural add-ons, removes all unnecessary jargon, cuts through the mysticism and leaves you with a practical and pragmatic approach to Buddhism. It will be a breath of fresh air to everyone confused about what they should believe, what they should be doing and what can be left to one side. Highlighting the many pitfalls, misunderstandings and obstacles you may encounter on the path, it is a must read for any serious Western Buddhist practitioner." - from the foreword by Karma Yeshe Rabgye FREE AUDIO MEDITATIONS To enhance your appreciation of the book, all the meditations contained in it have been recorded by Karma Yeshe Rabgye and are freely available online. More details in the book.