The first English-language biography of Henri Bergson, the French philosopher who defined individual creativity and transformed twentieth-century thought--a fascinating biography and magnificent revival of this brilliant thinker (Skye Cleary, author of How to Be Authentic)

Named a Best Book of 2024 by the New Statesman

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Henri Bergson (1859-1941) became the most famous philosopher on earth. Where prior thinkers sketched out a deterministic, predictable universe, he asserted the transformative power of consciousness and creativity. An international celebrity, he made headlines around the world debating luminaries like Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein about free will and time. The vision of creative evolution and freedom he presented was so disruptive that the New York Times branded him the most dangerous man in the world.

In Herald of a Restless World, Emily Herring recovers how Bergson captivated a society in flux. She shows how his celebration of the time-bending uniqueness of individual experience struck a chord with those shaken by modern technological and social change. Long after he faded from public view, his insights into memory, time, laughter, and creativity continue to shape how we see the world around us.

Herald of a Restless World is an electrifying portrait of a singular intellect. Bergson's extraordinary insight into life's fundamental questions remains urgent and relevant to this day.

One of The New York Times's 100 Notable Books of 2024
One of the Washington Post's 50 Best Nonfiction Books of 2024

Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography

Named a best book of 2024 by The New Yorker Vulture Los Angeles Review of Books Foreign Affairs The New Republic

Longlisted for the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction

Nimble and engrossing . . . [An] exemplary work of public intellectualism. --Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post

Undoubtedly the best [biography of Fanon] . . . A remarkable achievement. --Robert J. C. Young, Los Angeles Review of Books

A revelatory biography of the writer-activist who inspired today's movements for social and racial justice.

In the era of Black Lives Matter, Frantz Fanon's shadow looms larger than ever. He was the intellectual activist of the postcolonial era, and his writings about race, revolution, and the psychology of power continue to shape radical movements across the world. In this searching biography, Adam Shatz tells the story of Fanon's stunning journey, which has all the twists of a Cold War-era thriller. Fanon left his modest home in Martinique to fight in the French Army during World War II; when the war was over, he fell under the influence of Existentialism while studying medicine in Lyon and trying to make sense of his experiences as a Black man in a white city. Fanon went on to practice a novel psychiatry of dis-alienation in rural France and Algeria, and then join the Algerian independence struggle, where he became a spokesman, diplomat, and clandestine strategist. He died in 1961, while under the care of the CIA in a Maryland hospital.

Today, Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth have become canonical texts of the Black and global radical imagination, comparable to James Baldwin's essays in their influence. And yet they are little understood. In The Rebel's Clinic, Shatz offers a dramatic reconstruction of Fanon's extraordinary life--and a guide to the books that underlie today's most vital efforts to challenge white supremacy and racial capitalism.

Includes 8 pages of black-and-white photographs

Joseph Campbell, arguably the greatest mythologist of the twentieth century, was certainly one of our greatest storytellers. This masterfully crafted book interweaves conversations between Campbell and some of the people he inspired, including poet Robert Bly, anthropologist Angeles Arrien, filmmaker David Kennard, Doors drummer John Densmore, psychiatric pioneer Stanislov Grof, Nobel laureate Roger Guillemen, and others. Campbell reflects on subjects ranging from the origins and functions of myth, the role of the artist, and the need for ritual to the ordeals of love and romance. With poetry and humor, Campbell recounts his own quest and conveys the excitement of his lifelong exploration of our mythic traditions, what he called the one great story of mankind.

One of The New York Times's 100 Notable Books of 2024
One of the Washington Post's 50 Best Nonfiction Books of 2024

Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography

Named a best book of 2024 by The New Yorker Vulture Los Angeles Review of Books Foreign Affairs The New Republic

Longlisted for the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction

Nimble and engrossing . . . [An] exemplary work of public intellectualism. --Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post

Undoubtedly the best [biography of Fanon] . . . A remarkable achievement. --Robert J. C. Young, Los Angeles Review of Books

A revelatory biography of the writer-activist who inspired today's movements for social and racial justice.

In the era of Black Lives Matter, Frantz Fanon's shadow looms larger than ever. He was the intellectual activist of the postcolonial era, and his writings about race, revolution, and the psychology of power continue to shape radical movements across the world. In this searching biography, Adam Shatz tells the story of Fanon's stunning journey, which has all the twists of a Cold War-era thriller. Fanon left his modest home in Martinique to fight in the French Army during World War II; when the war was over, he fell under the influence of Existentialism while studying medicine in Lyon and trying to make sense of his experiences as a Black man in a white city. Fanon went on to practice a novel psychiatry of dis-alienation in rural France and Algeria, and then join the Algerian independence struggle, where he became a spokesman, diplomat, and clandestine strategist. He died in 1961, while under the care of the CIA in a Maryland hospital.

Today, Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth have become canonical texts of the Black and global radical imagination, comparable to James Baldwin's essays in their influence. And yet they are little understood. In The Rebel's Clinic, Shatz offers a dramatic reconstruction of Fanon's extraordinary life--and a guide to the books that underlie today's most vital efforts to challenge white supremacy and racial capitalism.

Includes 8 pages of black-and-white photographs

A timely guide on how to live--and think--through the challenges of our century drawn from the life and thought of political theorist Hannah Arendt, one of the twentieth century's foremost opponents of totalitarianism

We are free to change the world and to start something new in it.--Hannah Arendt

The violent unease of today's world would have been familiar to Hannah Arendt. Tyranny, occupation, disenchantment, post-truth politics, conspiracy theories, racism, mass migration: She lived through them all.

Born in the first decade of the last century, she escaped fascist Europe to make a new life for herself in America, where she became one of its most influential--and controversial--public intellectuals. She wrote about power and terror, exile and love, and above all, about freedom. Questioning--thinking--was her first defense against tyranny. She advocated a politics of action and plurality, courage and, when necessary, disobedience.

We Are Free to Change the World is a book about the Arendt we need for the twenty-first century. It tells us how and why Arendt came to think the way she did, and how to think when our own politics goes off the rails. Both a guide to Arendt's life and work, and its dialogue with our troubled present, We Are Free to Change the World is an urgent call for us to think, as Hannah Arendt did--unflinchingly, lovingly, and defiantly--through our own unpredictable times.

Named one of the Ten Best Books of 2016 by the New York Times, a spirited account of a major intellectual movement of the twentieth century and the revolutionary thinkers who came to shape it, by the best-selling author of How to Live and Humanly Possible Sarah Bakewell.

Paris, 1933: three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called Phenomenology. You see, he says, if you are a phenomenologist you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!
It was this simple phrase that would ignite a movement, inspiring Sartre to integrate Phenomenology into his own French, humanistic sensibility, thereby creating an entirely new philosophical approach inspired by themes of radical freedom, authentic being, and political activism. This movement would sweep through the jazz clubs and cafés of the Left Bank before making its way across the world as Existentialism.
Featuring not only philosophers, but also playwrights, anthropologists, convicts, and revolutionaries, At the Existentialist Café follows the existentialists' story, from the first rebellious spark through the Second World War, to its role in postwar liberation movements such as anti-colonialism, feminism, and gay rights. Interweaving biography and philosophy, it is the epic account of passionate encounters--fights, love affairs, mentorships, rebellions, and long partnerships--and a vital investigation into what the existentialists have to offer us today, at a moment when we are once again confronting the major questions of freedom, global responsibility, and human authenticity in a fractious and technology-driven world.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) was the Benjamin Franklin of Europe, a universal genius who ranged across many fields and made breakthroughs in most of them. Leibniz invented calculus (independently from Isaac Newton), conceptualized the modern computer, and developed the famous thesis that the existing world is the best that God could have created.

In The Best of All Possible Worlds, historian and Leibniz expert Michael Kempe takes us on a journey into the mind and inventions of a man whose contributions are perhaps without parallel in human history. Structured around seven crucial days in Leibniz's life, Kempe's account allows us to observe him in the act of thinking and creating, and gives us a deeper understanding of his broad-reaching intellectual endeavors. On October 29, 1675, we find him in Paris, diligently working from his bed amid a sea of notes, and committing the integral symbol--the basis of his calculus--to paper. On April 17, 1703, Leibniz is in Berlin, writing a letter reporting that a Jesuit priest living in China has discovered how to use Leibniz's binary number system to decipher an ancient Chinese system of writing. One day in August 1714, Leibniz enjoys a Viennese coffee while drawing new connections among ontology and biology and mathematics.

The Best of All Possible Worlds transports us to an age defined by rational optimism and a belief in progress, and will endure as one of the few authoritative accounts of Leibniz's life available in English.

Ian Buruma explores the life and death of Baruch Spinoza, the Enlightenment thinker whose belief in freedom of thought and speech resonates in our own time

A New Yorker Best Book of 2024 Selection

An elegant, relevant biography of a vital thinker.--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Baruch (Benedictus) Spinoza (1632-1677) was a radical free thinker who led a life guided by strong moral principles despite his disbelief in an all-seeing God. Seen by many--Christians as well as Jews--as Satan's disciple during his lifetime, Spinoza has been regarded as a secular saint since his death. Many contradictory beliefs have been attached to his name: rationalism or metaphysics, atheism or pantheism, liberalism or despotism, Jewishness or anti-Semitism. However, there is no question that he viewed freedom of thought and speech as essential to an open and free society.

In this insightful account, the award-winning author Ian Buruma stresses the importance of the time and place that shaped Spinoza, beginning with the Sephardim of Amsterdam and followed by the politics of the Dutch Republic. Though Spinoza rejected the basic assumptions of his family's faith, and was consequently expelled from his Sephardic community, Buruma argues that Spinoza did indeed lead a Jewish life: a modern Jewish life. To Heine, Hess, Marx, Freud, and no doubt many others today, Spinoza exemplified how to be Jewish without believing in Judaism. His defense of universal freedom is as important for our own time as it was in his.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, from the author of Humanly Possible

How to get along with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love--such questions arise in most people's lives. They are all versions of a bigger question: How do you live? This question obsessed Renaissance writers, none more than Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, considered by many to be the first truly modern individual. He wrote free-roaming explorations of his thoughts and experience, unlike anything written before. More than four hundred years later, Montaigne's honesty and charm still draw people to him. Readers come to him in search of companionship, wisdom, and entertainment --and in search of themselves. Just as they will to this spirited and singular biography.

A NEW YORK TIMES AND NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR - A poet, a physicist, and a philosopher explored the greatest enigmas in the universe--the nature of free will, the strange fabric of the cosmos, the true limits of the mind--and each in their own way uncovered a revelatory truth about our place in the world

[A] mind-expanding book. . . . Elegantly written. --The New York Times

A remarkable synthesis of the thoughts, ideas, and discoveries of three of the greatest minds that our species has produced. --John Banville, The Wall Street Journal

Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges was madly in love when his life was shattered by painful heartbreak. But the breakdown that followed illuminated an incontrovertible truth--that love is necessarily imbued with loss, that the one doesn't exist without the other. German physicist Werner Heisenberg was fighting with the scientific establishment on the meaning of the quantum realm's absurdity when he had his own epiphany--that there is no such thing as a complete, perfect description of reality. Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant pushed the assumptions of human reason to their mind-bending conclusions, but emerged with an idea that crowned a towering philosophical system--that the human mind has fundamental limits, and those limits undergird both our greatest achievements as well as our missteps.

Through fiction, science, and philosophy, the work of these three thinkers coalesced around the powerful, haunting fact that there is an irreconcilable difference between reality out there and reality as we experience it. Out of this profound truth comes a multitude of galvanizing ideas: the notion of selfhood, free will, and purpose in human life; the roots of morality, aesthetics, and reason; and the origins and nature of the cosmos itself.

As each of these thinkers shows, every one of us has an incomplete picture of the world. But it's only as mortal, finite beings are we able to experience the world in its richness and breathtaking majesty. A soaring and lucid reflection on the lives and work of Borges, Heisenberg, and Kant, The Rigor of Angels movingly demonstrates that the mysteries of our place in the world may always loom over us--not as a threat, but as a reminder of our humble humanity.

The author Sri 'M' is an extraordinary individual. His uniqueness lies not only in the fact that at the young age of 19 and a half, he travelled to snow clad Himalayas from Kerala, and there he met and lived for several years with a 'real-time' yogi, Babaji, but also that he should undertake such an unusual and adventurous exploration, given his non-Hindu birth and antecedents.

The metamorphosis of Mumtaz Ali Khan into Sri 'M', a yogi with profound knowledge of the Upanishads and deep personal insights, born of first hand experiences with higher levels of consciousness is indeed a fascinating story.

Sri M was born in Tiruvananthapuram, Kerala. At the age of nineteen and a half, attracted by a strange and irresistible urge to go to the Himalayas, he left home.

At the Vyasa Cave, beyond the Himalayan shrine of Badrinath, he met his Master and lived with him for three and a half years, wandering freely, the length and breadth of the snow clad Himalayan region. What he learnt from his Master Maheshwarnath Babaji, transformed his consciousness totally.

Back in the plains, he, as instructed by his Master, lived a normal life, working for a living, fulfilling his social commitments and at the same time preparing himself to teach all that he had learnt and experienced. At a signal from his Master he entered the teaching phase of his life. Today, he travels all over the world to share his experiences and knowledge.

Equally at home in the religious teachings of most major religions, Sri M, born as Mumtaz Ali Khan, often says Go to the core. Theories are of no use

Sri M is married and has two children. He leads a simple life - teaching and heading the Satsang Foundation, a charitable concern promoting excellence in education. At present he lives in Madanapalle, Andhra Pradesh, just three hours from Bangalore.

For more information about Sri M, please visit: http: //www.satsang-foundation.org

Love's Work is at once a memoir and a work of philosophy. Written by the English philosopher Gillian Rose as she was dying of cancer, it is a book about both the fallibility and the endurance of love, love that becomes real and lasting through an ongoing reckoning with its own limitations. Rose looks back on her childhood, the complications of her parents' divorce and her dyslexia, and her deep and divided feelings about what it means to be Jewish. She tells the stories of several friends also laboring under the sentence of death. From the sometimes conflicting vantage points of her own and her friends' tales, she seeks to work out (seeks, because the work can never be complete--to be alive means to be incomplete) a distinctive outlook on life, one that will do justice to our yearning both for autonomy and for connection to others. With droll self-knowledge (I am highly qualified in unhappy love affairs, Rose writes, My earliest unhappy love affair was with Roy Rogers) and with unsettling wisdom (To live, to love, is to be failed), Rose has written a beautiful, tender, tough, and intricately wrought survival kit packed with necessary but unanswerable questions.

The three texts this book, all written in vastly different eras --The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Marx and Engels, Reform or Revolution (1899) by Rosa Luxemburg and Socialism and Man in Cuba (1965) by Ernesto Che Guevara--illuminate socialist ideas of the 19th and 20th centuries.

For a new generation of activists, these are classic revolutionary writings by four famous rebels, including The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels; Reform or Revolution by Rosa Luxemburg; and Che Guevara's Socialism and Man in Cuba. Includes an introduction by Cuban Marxist intellectual Armando Hart and a preface by US radical poet Adrienne Rich.

The essays in this book, Manifesto, were written by three relatively young people--Karl Marx when he was 30, Rosa Luxemburg at 27, Che Guevara at the age of 37. Born into different historical moments and different generations, they shared an energy of hope, an engagement with history, a belief that critical thinking must inform action, and a passion for the world and its human possibilities. Here are urgent conversations from the past that are still being carried on, among new voices, throughout the world.

This workbook for recovering alcoholics is a great resource for anyone who wants to quit drinking alcohol for good! It follows a 12-step program that contains actionable advice, helpful activities, and useful prayers for recovery. This quit lit book is also based on the author's experience recovering and working with Alcoholic Anonymous, an organization devoted to abstinence-based recovery from alcoholism.

A NEW YORK TIMES AND NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR - A poet, a physicist, and a philosopher explored the greatest enigmas in the universe--the nature of free will, the strange fabric of the cosmos, the true limits of the mind--and each in their own way uncovered a revelatory truth about our place in the world

[A] mind-expanding book. . . . Elegantly written. --The New York Times

A remarkable synthesis of the thoughts, ideas, and discoveries of three of the greatest minds that our species has produced. --John Banville, The Wall Street Journal

Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges was madly in love when his life was shattered by painful heartbreak. But the breakdown that followed illuminated an incontrovertible truth--that love is necessarily imbued with loss, that the one doesn't exist without the other. German physicist Werner Heisenberg was fighting with the scientific establishment on the meaning of the quantum realm's absurdity when he had his own epiphany--that there is no such thing as a complete, perfect description of reality. Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant pushed the assumptions of human reason to their mind-bending conclusions, but emerged with an idea that crowned a towering philosophical system--that the human mind has fundamental limits, and those limits undergird both our greatest achievements as well as our missteps.

Through fiction, science, and philosophy, the work of these three thinkers coalesced around the powerful, haunting fact that there is an irreconcilable difference between reality out there and reality as we experience it. Out of this profound truth comes a multitude of galvanizing ideas: the notion of selfhood, free will, and purpose in human life; the roots of morality, aesthetics, and reason; and the origins and nature of the cosmos itself.

As each of these thinkers shows, every one of us has a fundamentally incomplete picture of the world. But this is to be expected. Only as mortal, finite beings are we able to experience the world in all its richness and breathtaking majesty. We are stranded in a gulf of vast extremes, between the astronomical and the quantum, an abyss of freedom and absolute determinism, and it is in that center where we must make our home. A soaring and lucid reflection on the lives and work of Borges, Heisenberg, and Kant, The Rigor of Angels movingly demonstrates that the mysteries of our place in the world may always loom over us--not as a threat, but as a reminder of our humble humanity.

In DOWN-BACK: Personal Essays and Poetic Thoughts from a Good Ole Boy, the outdoors serves as both physical and metaphorical teachers, guiding Terry Lovelette's journey of personal growth and self-discovery.

The mountains are more than scenic backdrops-they are transformative spaces where the author learns life's most profound lessons. Whether hiking the White Mountains, traversing the Teton Crest Trail, or exploring the Sierra Nevada, each mountain journey becomes a meditation on presence, humility, and spiritual awareness. Lovelette describes mountain experiences as opportunities to be fully present, where stillness finds you and racing thoughts dissolve into a gentle, appreciative consciousness.

Through essays that blend personal memoir with philosophical reflection, the book celebrates the wisdom found in natural settings. Mountains teach lessons about ego, resilience, and interconnectedness-revealing how wilderness experiences can strip away external distractions and invite deeper self-understanding.

Dedicated to childhood friends and mentors, DOWN-BACK is a compassionate exploration of living authentically, finding joy in life's nuanced moments, and recognizing the profound connections that bind human experience to the natural world.

In the late fourth and early fifth centuries of our era, Hypatia of Alexandria was the world's greatest living mathematician and astronomer. A strikingly beautiful woman and a devoted celibate, she lived in a city as turbulent and troubled as Baghdad or Beirut is today. She achieved fame not only in her special field, but also as a philosopher, religious thinker, and teacher who attracted a large popular following. Her life ended tragically in violence at the hands of a rampaging mob of Christian fanatics, who killed her for her pagan beliefs, some say at the instigation of St. Cyril of Alexandria.This is the first biography of Hypatia to integrate all aspects of her life. Mathematician Michael Deakin emphasizes that, though she was a philosopher, she was first and foremost a mathematician and astronomer of great accomplishment. In a fascinating narrative that brings to life a richly diverse ancient society, he describes her work so that the mathematics, presented in straightforward terms, finds its true place in the context of her life as a whole. Deakin supplies full detail on the historical, intellectual, and religious context of Hypatia's times. He also analyzes the pattern of her life and thought, and finally gives an account of the events leading up to her lynch-mob execution. Although this outrageous crime has made Hypatia a powerful symbol of intellectual freedom and feminist aspiration to this day, Deakin makes clear that the important intellectual contributions of her life's work should not be overshadowed by her tragic death.

The 1st-century challenge and 21st-century relevance in the biography of the Jewish Messianic-Christic visionary Paul the Pharisee.

A sweeping intellectual biography that restores the Enlightenment polymath to the intellectual, scientific, and courtly worlds that shaped his early life and thought

Described by Voltaire as perhaps a man of the most universal learning in Europe, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) is often portrayed as a rationalist and philosopher who was wholly detached from the worldly concerns of his fellow men. Leibniz in His World provides a groundbreaking reassessment of Leibniz, telling the story of his trials and tribulations as an aspiring scientist and courtier navigating the learned and courtly circles of early modern Europe and the Republic of Letters.

Drawing on extensive correspondence by Leibniz and many leading figures of the age, Audrey Borowski paints a nuanced portrait of Leibniz in the 1670s, during his Paris sojourn as a young diplomat and in Germany at the court of Duke Johann Friedrich of Hanover. She challenges the image of Leibniz as an isolated genius, revealing instead a man of multiple identities whose thought was shaped by a deep engagement with the social and intellectual milieus of his time. Borowski shows us Leibniz as he was known to his contemporaries, enabling us to rediscover him as an enigmatic young man who was complex and all too human.

An exhilarating work of scholarship, Leibniz in His World demonstrates how this uncommon intellect, torn between his ideals and the necessity to work for absolutist states, struggled to make a name for himself during his formative years.

In late 1888, only weeks before his final collapse into madness, Nietzsche (1844-1900) set out to compose his autobiography, and Ecce Homo remains one of the most intriguing yet bizarre examples of the genre ever written. In this extraordinary work Nietzsche traces his life, work and development as a philosopher, examines the heroes he has identified with, struggled against and then overcome - Schopenhauer, Wagner, Socrates, Christ - and predicts the cataclysmic impact of his 'forthcoming revelation of all values'. Both self-celebrating and self-mocking, penetrating and strange, Ecce Homo gives the final, definitive expression to Nietzsche's main beliefs and is in every way his last testament.