Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck

2012-02-14 Social Science

Author : Eric G. Wilson
Release : 2012-02-14
Genre : Social Science
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 482/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck by : Eric G. Wilson

Download or read book Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck written by Eric G. Wilson. This book was released on 2012-02-14. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why can't we look away? Whether we admit it or not, we're fascinated by evil. Dark fantasies, morbid curiosities, Schadenfreude: As conventional wisdom has it, these are the symptoms of our wicked side, and we succumb to them at our own peril. But we're still compelled to look whenever we pass a grisly accident on the highway, and there's no slaking our thirst for gory entertainments like horror movies and police procedurals. What makes these spectacles so irresistible? In Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck, the scholar Eric G. Wilson sets out to discover the source of our attraction to the caustic, drawing on the findings of biologists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, theologians, and artists. A professor of English literature and a lifelong student of the macabre, Wilson believes there's something nourishing in darkness. "To repress death is to lose the feeling of life," he writes. "A closeness to death discloses our most fertile energies." His examples are legion, and startling in their diversity. Citing everything from elephant graveyards and Susan Sontag's On Photography to the Tiger Woods sex scandal and Steel Magnolias, Wilson finds heartening truths wherever he confronts death. In Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck, the perverse is never far from the sublime. The result is a powerful and delightfully provocative defense of what it means to be human—for better and for worse.

Against Happiness

2008-01-22 Social Science

Author : Eric G. Wilson
Release : 2008-01-22
Genre : Social Science
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 218/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Against Happiness by : Eric G. Wilson

Download or read book Against Happiness written by Eric G. Wilson. This book was released on 2008-01-22. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans are addicted to happiness. When we're not popping pills, we leaf through scientific studies that take for granted our quest for happiness, or read self-help books by everyone from armchair philosophers and clinical psychologists to the Dalai Lama on how to achieve a trouble-free life: Stumbling on Happiness; Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment; The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living. The titles themselves draw a stark portrait of the war on melancholy. More than any other generation, Americans of today believe in the transformative power of positive thinking. But who says we're supposed to be happy? Where does it say that in the Bible, or in the Constitution? In Against Happiness, the scholar Eric G. Wilson argues that melancholia is necessary to any thriving culture, that it is the muse of great literature, painting, music, and innovation—and that it is the force underlying original insights. Francisco Goya, Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, and Abraham Lincoln were all confirmed melancholics. So enough Prozac-ing of our brains. Let's embrace our depressive sides as the wellspring of creativity. What most people take for contentment, Wilson argues, is living death, and what the majority takes for depression is a vital force. In Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, Wilson suggests it would be better to relish the blues that make humans people.

Paddle Your Own Canoe

2013-10-01 Humor

Author : Nick Offerman
Release : 2013-10-01
Genre : Humor
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 325/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Paddle Your Own Canoe by : Nick Offerman

Download or read book Paddle Your Own Canoe written by Nick Offerman. This book was released on 2013-10-01. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Parks and Recreation actor and Making It co-host Nick Offerman shares his humorous fulminations on life, manliness, meat, and much more in this New York Times bestseller. Growing a perfect moustache, grilling red meat, wooing a woman—who better to deliver this tutelage than the always charming, always manly Nick Offerman, best known as Parks and Recreation’s Ron Swanson? Combining his trademark comic voice and very real expertise in woodworking—he runs his own woodshop—Paddle Your Own Canoe features tales from Offerman’s childhood in small-town Minooka, Illinois—“I grew up literally in the middle of a cornfield”—to his theater days in Chicago, beginnings as a carpenter/actor and the hilarious and magnificent seduction of his now-wife Megan Mullally. It also offers hard-bitten battle strategies in the arenas of manliness, love, style, religion, woodworking, and outdoor recreation, among many other savory entrees. A mix of amusing anecdotes, opinionated lessons and rants, sprinkled with offbeat gaiety, Paddle Your Own Canoe will not only tickle readers pink but may also rouse them to put down their smart phones, study a few sycamore leaves, and maybe even hand craft (and paddle) their own canoes.

Keep It Fake

2015-05-05 Biography & Autobiography

Author : Eric Wilson
Release : 2015-05-05
Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 020/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Keep It Fake by : Eric Wilson

Download or read book Keep It Fake written by Eric Wilson. This book was released on 2015-05-05. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that there is no authentic self, that reality is people continually remaking themselves to look like the people they want to be, and that there is nothing inherently wrong with that.

Dream-Child

2022-01-04 Biography & Autobiography

Author : Eric G. Wilson
Release : 2022-01-04
Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 493/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Dream-Child by : Eric G. Wilson

Download or read book Dream-Child written by Eric G. Wilson. This book was released on 2022-01-04. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth look into the life of Romantic essayist Charles Lamb and the legacy of his work A pioneer of urban Romanticism, essayist Charles Lamb (1775–1834) found inspiration in London’s markets, theaters, prostitutes, and bookshops. He prized the city’s literary scene, too, where he was a star wit. He counted among his admirers Mary Shelley, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His friends valued in his conversation what distinguished his writing style: a highly original blend of irony, whimsy, and melancholy. Eric G. Wilson captures Lamb’s strange charm in this meticulously researched and engagingly written biography. He demonstrates how Lamb’s humor helped him cope with a life‑defining tragedy: in a fit of madness, his sister Mary murdered their mother. Arranging to care for her himself, Lamb saved her from the gallows. Delightful when sane, Mary became Charles’s muse, and she collaborated with him on children’s books. In exploring Mary’s presence in Charles’s darkly comical essays, Wilson also shows how Lamb reverberates in today’s experimental literature.

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