Inventing the Truth PDF Download

Author: Russell Baker
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780395901502
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
In this perfect companion for anyone beguiled by memoirs or embarking on writing one, nine distinguished authors -- Russell Baker, Jill Ker Conway, Annie Dillard, Ian Frazier, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alfred Kazin, Frank McCourt, Toni Morrison, and Eileen Simpson -- reflect on the writing process.

Author: Lucien L Agosta PhD
Publisher: BookLocker.com, Inc.
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
INVENTING THE TRUTH: MEMORY AND ITS TRICKS offers a collection of essays dealing with the author's life experiences as a gay man. Because exact accuracy is alien to the way memory works, the verifiable fictions in this book are, necessarily, inventions of the truth. Included essays examine the author's early cross-dressing and other childhood challenges to his birth gender, the important formative influences on him of his Catholic parish and school and the local public library, and his belated and complicated coming out as a gay man. Another essay offers a dialectic between lust and love. Defining himself as a "Promiscuous Hedonist" for most of his adult life, the author at long last discovered that love was real and that he could love another man in his own gay way. Subsequent essays investigate the influence on the author of his two immigrant grandfathers and the unsavory memories of a racist past growing up in Louisiana in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. A further essay explores the author's primal fears of darkness and death and how he achieved a satisfactory resolution of those fears. A final essay explores the reams of war-time letters that constituted the courtship of the author's parents who maintained their connection through letters for the nearly three years they were apart during WWII. These letters focus on the challenging beginnings of a 54-year love affair as well as on conditions during the war of a soldier overseas and his intended at home in Ohio whom he was courting by near-daily correspondence. The essays in this book offer accounts of seminal remembered experiences in the author's past now interpreted in a language unavailable to him at the time those experiences were occurring. In these reliable accounts, the author tells the truth about his gay life in the most honest way he knows how to invent it.

Author: David Nyberg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226610528
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Everyone says that lying is wrong. But when we say that lying is bad and hurtful and that we would never intentionally tell a lie, are we really deceiving anyone? In this wise and insightful book, David Nyberg exposes the tacit truth underneath our collective pretense and reveals that an occasional lie can be helpful, healthy, creative, and, in some situations, even downright moral. Through familiar and often entertaining examples, Nyberg explores the purposes deception serves, from the social kindness of the white lie to the political ends of diplomacy to the avoidance of pain or unpleasantness. He looks at the lies we tell ourselves as well, and contrary to the scolding of psychologists demonstrates that self-deception is a necessary function of mental health, one of the mind's many weapons against stress, uncertainty, and chaos. Deception is in our nature, Nyberg tells us. In civilization, just as in the wilderness, survival does not favor the fully exposed or conspicuously transparent self. As our minds have evolved, as practical intelligence has become more refined, as we have learned the subtleties of substituting words and symbols for weapons and violence, deception has come to play a central and complex role in social life. The Varnished Truth takes us beyond philosophical speculation and clinical analysis to give a sense of what it really means to tell the truth. As Nyberg lays out the complexities involved in leading a morally decent life, he compels us to see the spectrum of alternatives to telling the truth and telling a clear-cut lie. A life without self-deception would be intolerable and a world of unconditional truth telling unlivable. His argument that deception and self-deception are valuable to both social stability and individual mental health boldly challenges popular theories on deception, including those held by Sissela Bok and Daniel Goleman. Yet while Nyberg argues that we deceive, among other reasons, so that we might not perish of the truth, he also cautions that we deceive carelessly, thoughtlessly, inhumanely, and selfishly at our own peril.

Author: Malcolm Bull
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691138842
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
How the philosophy of Giambattista Vico was influenced by eighteenth-century Neopolitan painting Can painting transform philosophy? In Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth, Malcolm Bull looks at Neapolitan art around 1700 through the eyes of the philosopher Giambattista Vico. Surrounded by extravagant examples of late Baroque painting by artists like Luca Giordano and Francesco Solimena, Vico concluded that human truth was a product of the imagination. Truth was not something that could be observed: instead, it was something made in the way that paintings were made--through the exercise of fantasy. Juxtaposing paintings and texts, Bull presents the masterpieces of late Baroque painting in early eighteenth-century Naples from an entirely new perspective. Revealing the close connections between the arguments of the philosophers and the arguments of the painters, he shows how Vico drew on both in his influential philosophy of history, The New Science. Bull suggests that painting can serve not just as an illustration for philosophical arguments, but also as the model for them--that painting itself has sometimes been a form of epistemological experiment, and that, perhaps surprisingly, the Neapolitan Baroque may have been one of the routes through which modern consciousness was formed.

Author: William Hogeland
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
A historian's call to make the celebration of America's past more honest.

Author: Russell Baker
Publisher: Mariner Books
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., reveals his liberating decision to write Colored People without a white censor looking over his shoulder. Jill Ker Conway recalls how her memoir of her Australian girlhood, The Road from Coorain, became a call to young women everywhere to take charge of their lives.

Author: Edward G. Lengel
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061875538
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
An entertaining and erudite history that offers a fresh look at America's first founding father, the creation of his legend, and what it means for our nation and ourselves George Washington's death on December 14, 1799, dealt a dreadful blow to public morale. For three decades, Americans had depended on his leadership to guide them through every trial. At the cusp of a new century, the fledgling nation, caught in another war (this time with its former ally France), desperately needed to believe that Washington was—and would continue to be—there for them. Thus began the extraordinary immortalization of this towering historical figure. In Inventing George Washington, historian Edward G. Lengel shows how the late president and war hero continued to serve his nation on two distinct levels. The public Washington evolved into an eternal symbol as Father of His Country, while the private man remained at the periphery of the national vision—always just out of reach—for successive generations yearning to know him as never before. Both images, public and private, were vital to perceptions Americans had of their nation and themselves. Yet over time, as Lengel shows, the contrasting and simultaneous urges to deify Washington and to understand him as a man have produced tensions that have played out in every generation. As some exalted him, others sought to bring him down to earth, creating a series of competing mythologies that depicted Washington as every sort of human being imaginable. Inventing George Washington explores these representations, shedding new light on this national emblem, our nation itself, and who we are.

Author: Kevin O'Leary
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
ISBN: 038567175X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Kevin O’Leary shares invaluable secrets on entrepreneurship, business, money and life. Can you make millions just by “visualizing yourself rich” as some business prophets suggest? Don’t buy it, says Kevin O’Leary. If you want to be a successful entrepreneur and amass wealth, you’re going to have to work for it. But the good news is: with the right guidance, focus and perseverance, you can turn entrepreneurial vision into lucrative reality and have the personal freedom that only wealth can buy. Kevin O’Leary would know. The much-feared and revered Dragon on the immensely popular show Dragons’ Den (and Shark Tank in the U.S.) started his company in his basement with a $10,000 loan from his financially savvy mother. A few years later, Kevin sold that company for more than four billion dollars. In this compelling, candid and, above all else, brutally honest business memoir, Kevin provides engaging, practical advice and lessons that will give anyone a distinct competitive edge.

Author: Jennifer Bannan
Publisher: Carnegie-Mellon University Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Jennifer Bannan, the young author of Inventing Victor, explores with fresh wit the battlefield of truth and lies. Sometimes as hazy as a summer day in Pittsburgh, other times bustling with the celebrity of a Miami vomitorium on opening night, the stories deftly depict the lure of irresponsibility. The characters stoke the flames of artifice in trying to close in on their desires: teenaged Dacia lets her need for popularity lead her to self-destruction, and Orthodox Leah is too busy wanting a child to see that she's already a terrible mother. Middle-aged Mark is vicious to his wife in protecting a romantic past he's no longer sure he lived. When these characters are finally face-to-face with reality, they may succumb to it, but not without a regretful glance over the shoulder. A brave look at American lives in lurid moments of ambition and self-trickery, Inventing Victor provides just a flicker of hope: that the guiltiest among us can see the truth laid out, if only in the instant that dreams go up in smoke.

Author: Alister E McGrath
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
ISBN: 1444798472
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
We just can't stop talking about the big questions around science and faith. They haven't gone away, as some predicted they might; in fact, we seem to talk about them more than ever. Far from being a spent force, religion continues to grow around the world. Meanwhile, Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists argue that religion is at war with science - and that we have to choose between them. It's time to consider a different way of looking at these two great cultural forces. What if science and faith might enrich each other? What if they can together give us a deep and satisfying understanding of life? Alister McGrath, one of the world's leading authorities on science and religion, engages with the big questions that Dawkins and others have raised - including origins, the burden of proof, the meaning of life, the existence of God and our place in the universe. Informed by the best and latest scholarship, Inventing the Universe is a groundbreaking new primer for the complex yet fascinating relationship between science and faith.