An entertaining, impassioned polemic on the retreat of reason in the late 20th century. An intellectual call to arms, Francis Wheen's Sunday Times bestseller is one of 2004's most talked about books. In 1979 two events occurred that would shape the next twenty-five years. In Britain, an era of weary consensualist politics was displaced by the arrival of Margaret Thatcher, whose ambition was to reassert 'Victorian values'. In Iran, the fundamentalist cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini set out to restore a regime that had last existed almost 1,300 years ago. Between them they succeeded in bringing the twentieth century to a premature close. By 1989, Francis Fukuyama was declaring that we had now reached the End of History. What colonised the space recently vacated by notions of history, progress and reason? Cults, quackery, gurus, irrational panics, moral confusion and an epidemic of mumbo-jumbo. Modernity was challenged by a gruesome alliance of pre-modernists and post-modernists, medieval theocrats and New Age mystics. It was as if the Enlightenment had never happened. Francis Wheen, winner of the George Orwell prize, evokes the key personalities of the post-political era - including Princess Diana and Deepak Chopra, Osama Bin-Laden and Nancy Reagan's astrologer - while charting the extraordinary rise in superstition, relativism and emotional hysteria over the past quarter of a century. From UFO scares to dotcom mania, his hilarious and gloriously impassioned polemic describes a period in the world's history when everything began to stop making sense.

Maurice O'Sullivan was born on the Great Blasket in 1904, and 'Twenty Years A-Growing' tells the story of his youth and of a way of life which belonged to the Middle Ages. He wrote for his own pleasure and for the entertainment of his friends, without any thought of a wider public; his style is derived from folk-tales which he heard from his grandfather and sharpened by his own lively imagination. The Blasket Islands are three miles off Irelands Dingle Peninsula. Until their evacuation just after the Second World War, the lives of the 150 or so Blasket Islanders had remained unchanged for centuries. A rich oral tradition of story-telling, poetry, and folktales kept alive the legends and history of the islands, and has made their literature famous throughout the world. The 7 Blasket Island books published by OUP contain memoirs and reminiscences from within this literary tradition, evoking a way of life which has now vanished.

This collection of essays assesses the evolving fields of psychiatry and psychoanalysis. The topics covered in this updated and expanded edition include the use of Prozac, the nature of white racism, William Styron's Darkness Visible and van Gogh's fever of genius.

This treasury of selected passages from the writings and addresses of perhaps the most impressive leader of the Catholic Church the world has ever known offers, as its editor suggests, "a harvest from the mind and heart of Pope Wojtyla." And so here is a chance for the modern reader, engaged in various daily tasks, to spend a few moments with the Pope each day of the liturgical year, contemplating his reflections on the mystery and the example of Christ; and on the church, man, the family, the lives of the saints, the meaning of holidays, and the place of faith in daily life.

His personal concerns as expressed in these passages include such topics as "Sharing with Others," "To Be in Peace," "Consumer Society," "Family Prayer," and "The Great Divine Trial," about the meaning of his near-assassination. Through these pages of calm reflection each day of the year, all will find a moment of peaceful repose from the occupations of life.

The era between the Civil War and the end of World War I, marked by increasing nation-building, immigration, internal migration, and racial tension in the United States, saw the rise of local color literature that described through "lived experiences" the peculiarities of regional life. This anthology brings together works from every part of the country, written by men and women of many cultures, ethnicities, ideologies, and literary styles.

Organized geographically, American Local Color Writing features such familiar writers as Joel Chandler Harris, Kate Chopin, Hamlin Garland, and Sarah Orne Jewett, and introduces less well-known voices like Sui Sin Far, Abraham Cahan, and Zitkala-Sa. The writings sheds light on varying concepts of "the American identity": Charles Chesnutt, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Pauline Hopkins, and others present a distinct African-American experience; shifting notions of gender and sexuality come to light not only in pieces by women but also in nostalgic renditions of frontier life as the embodiment of masculine virtues and values; and racial, class, and ethnic stereotypes are reproduced and challenged in many of the stories.

Acclaimed personal writing from one of our most out-spoken essayists, on disability, on family, on being an impolite woman, and on the opporunities and "gifts" of a difficult life.

New York journalist Pete Hamill is among the last of a dying breed: the old-school generalist who writes about anything and everything, guided only by passionate and boundless curiosity. In this collection of his finest writings since 1970, Hamill tackles such diverse subjects as what television and crack have in common, how Mike Tyson spent his time in prison, and what it's like to realize you're middle-aged -- not to mention Octavio Paz, Brooklyn's Seventh Avenue, Frank Sinatra, American immigration policy, Northern Ireland, and Madonna. Piecework is Hamill at his very best.

A collection of personal essays on topics as diverse as the nature of allergies, a meditation on bats, and the significance of 1974, from a writer with a uniquely acute, subtle, and sophisticated voice.

You’ve Always Been Wrong is a collection of prose and poetic works by the French writer René Daumal (1908–1944). A fitful interloper among the Surrealists, Daumal rejected all forms of dogmatic thought, whether religious, philosophical, aesthetic, or political. Much like the Surrealists (and French theorists of more recent decades), Daumal saw in the strict forms and certainties of traditional metaphysics a type of thought that enslaves people even as it pretends to liberate them. These “cadavers of thought,� Daumal wrote with youthful bravado, “must be met with storms of doubt, blasphemes, and kerosene for the temples.�  Daumal tied Surrealism with mystical traditions. A devoted student of Eastern religions, philosophy, and literature, he combined his skepticism about Western metaphysics with a mystic’s effort to maintain intense wakefulness to the present moment and to the irreducible particularity of all objects and experience. Such wakefulness, according to Daumal, leads inevitably to an overwhelming (and redemptive) “vision of the absurd.� Daumal’s important place in French culture of the late 1920s and 1930s has been assured by both his writings and his role as cofounder of the avant-garde journal Le Grand Jeu. Written between 1928 and 1930, You’ve Always Been Wrong reveals Daumal’s thought as it was coalescing around the rejection of Western metaphysics and the countervailing allure of Eastern mysticism. Thomas Vosteen’s nuanced translation provides English-language readers with a provocative introduction to this iconoclastic author.

"[Eptein's readers] will find, in A Line Out for a Walk, every gratification to which he has accustomed them."—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World

"Mr Epstein is a winsome confidant. Not because his confessions are sensational, far from it. . . . On getting old. On slightness of stature. On becoming a windbag. . . . Money worries. Envy. And, in an essay with paralyzing comic impact, 'You Probably Don't Know Me,' Mr. Epstein has written about his modest lust for fame. Such moral intimations provide a charm and resonance. . . . More than just humorous, the Epstein sensibility is trustable: honest, open, human."—D. Keith Mano, New York Times Book Review

"[His] way with the familiar essay—that flexible, forgiving genre in which anything goes except charmlessness and anonymity—has much in common with that of Messrs. Beerbohm, Liebling, and Mencken. Each piece is exquisitely sustained, moving from point to point with the relaxed economy of a pro."—Wall Street Journal

"A writer at the top of his powers in these serious, funny, pleasantly unpredictable musings."—Publishers Weekly

For the first time, one book gives voice to the haunting, painful, tender, and healing tales of those who lost so much in America's least popular war.

In the pantheon of great sports literature, not a few poets have tried their hand at paying tribute to their love affair with the game—Walt Whitman, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams among them. This elegant volume collects Donald Hall’s prose about sports, concentrating on baseball but extending to basketball, football and Ping-Pong. The essays are a wonderful mixture of reminiscence and observation, of baseball and of fathers and sons, of how a game binds people together and bridges generations.