Mary Austin and John Muir

The early twentieth-century works by Mary Austin and John Muir are nature-writing classics. Austin and Muir both adopted the American West as their home and wrote about its grand and wild landscapes in ways that came to define the genre of western nature writing.

Click here to view on Amazon

Chris Mercogliano

A passionate essay by a maverick educator on the need to protect the unique spark—the "inner wildness"—that animates every child.

"An encouraging success story that demonstrates an alternative to the ever-growing use of drugs for ever-younger children."

Library Journal

Chris Mercogliano has been a teacher at the Albany Free School, a unique, freedom-based, inner-city alternative school, since 1973. He became codirector in 1985.

Click here to view on Amazon

Jürgen Habermas

Jürgen Habermas, professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt, was hailed as the “foremost social and political thinker in Germany today” (Times Literary Supplement). Included here are essays on his theories of communication, socialization, social evolution, and the development of law and morality.

Click here to view on Amazon

Herbert Marcuse

“A philosophical critique of psychoanalysis that takes psychoanalysis seriously but not as unchallengeable dogma. . . . The most significant general treatment of psychoanalytic theory since Freud himself ceased publication.” –Clyde Kluckhohn, The New York Times

Click here to view on Amazon

Viktor E. Frankl

Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Between 1942 and 1945 Frankl labored in four different camps, including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished. Based on his own experience and the experiences of those he treated in his practice, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. Frankl's theory—known as logotherapy, from the Greek word logos ("meaning")—holds that our primary drive in life is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful. At the time of Frankl's death, Man's Search for Meaning had sold more than 10 million copies in twenty-four languages.

Born in Vienna in 1905, Viktor E. Frankl earned an M.D. and a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna. He published more than thirty books on theoretical and clinical psychology and served as a visiting professor and lecturer at Harvard, Stanford, and elsewhere. In 1977 a fellow survivor, Joseph Fabry, founded the Viktor Frankl Institute of Logotherapy. Frankl died in 1997.

Click here to view on Amazon

Herbert Marcuse

Originally published in 1964, One-Dimensional Man quickly became one of the most important texts in the ensuing decade of radical political change. This second edition, newly introduced by Marcuse scholar Douglas Kellner, presents Marcuse's best-selling work to another generation of readers in the context of contemporary events.

"Marcuse shows himself to be one of the most radical and forceful thinkers of this time."
—The Nation

 

Click here to view on Amazon

John Dewey

For those of us trying to make sense of the world and the institutions we devise to cope with it, John Dewey's Reconstruction in Philosophy offers tremendous insight. The highly regarded American philosopher chose to embrace the modern sense of scientific optimism and apply it to the search for truth. He argued forcefully that our philosophical constructions are not based in reason, but only use higher thinking to justify themselves, and that we might find better ways of living if we examine our deepest beliefs and feelings with an eye toward their ultimate effects on us and others.

Click here to view on Amazon

Andrew Feenberg and William Leiss; editors

The best essays by one of the most important political philosophers of the twentieth century.

Andrew Feenberg is a Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Technology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. William Leiss, O.C., Ph.D., FRSC, has been a professor at seven Canadian universities. Both Feenberg and Leiss worked under Herbert Marcuse as graduate students at the University of California, San Diego.

Click here to view on Amazon

Gaston Bachelard

Among the physicist-turned philosopher’s most famous works, The Psychoanalysis of Fire probes the human perception and experience of fire, throughout history, in symbols and literature, and in daily life. One of the 20th century’s great phenomenologists, Bachelard is hailed for his ability to explore the ordinary with provocative originality.

Click here to view on Amazon

Mary Oliver

Winner of a 1991 Christopher Award Winner of the 1991 Boston Globe Lawrence L. Winship Award This collection of poems by Mary Oliver once again invites the reader to step across the threshold of ordinary life into a world of natural and spiritual luminosity. “Oliver’s poems are thoroughly convincing — as genuine, moving, and implausible as the first caressing breeze of spring.” –The New York Times Book Review

Click here to view on Amazon