National Network for Equitable Library Service

Should we believe in God? In this brisk introduction to modern atheism, one of the world's greatest science writers tells us why we shouldn't. Richard Dawkins was fifteen when he stopped believing in God. Deeply impressed by the beauty and complexity of living things, he'd felt certain they must have had a designer. Learning about evolution changed his mind. Now one of the world's best and bestselling science communicators, Dawkins has given readers, young and old, the same opportunity to rethink the big questions.

Walden is a classic of American philosophy that describes Thoreau's concepts of self-reliance and individualism. In "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience," he develops the philosophy of nonviolent political protest.

Alain de Botton draws on the work of six of the world's most uncommonly brilliant thinkers to offer this panoply of accessible, entertaining wisdom to guide us through our most common problems.

One of the great, but often unmentioned, causes of both happiness and misery is the quality of our environment: the kinds of chairs, walls, buildings, and streets that surround us. And yet, a concern for architecture is too often described as frivolous, even self-indulgent. Alain de Botton starts from the idea that where we are heavily influences who we can be, and argues that it is architecture's task to stand as an eloquent reminder of our full potential.

Alain de Botton examines the origins of status anxiety--the universal anxiety about what others think of us--and reveals ingenious ways in which people have been able to overcome their worries in the search for happiness.

This is a hilarious take on the philosophy, theology, and psychology of mortality, Death, the Big D. Humorists have kept pace with philosophers by creating gags about dying. Death's funny that way: it gets everybody's attention.

A collection of essays grounded in the author's belief that our largest problems have grown from the earth's remotest corners as well as from our own backyards, and that answers may lie in those places, too.

This original and insightful book establishes a reciprocal relationship between Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of ethics and the experience of war. It puts forth an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s early moral philosophy that relates it to the philosopher’s own war experience and applies Wittgenstein’s ethics of silence to analyze the ethical dimension of literary and artistic representations of the Great War.

Does the world we inhabit offer us hospitality or indifference? This question is central to the spiritual literature of all cultures. In We Find Ourselves Put to the Test James Crooks returns to the Bible's book of Job to explore the enduring relevance of that question and its philosophical dimensions. Beginning with the puzzle of Job's famous stoicism and nihilism in the face of loss, Crooks explores the contradictions of suffering as dramatized in the dialogue between Job and his friends.

In the follow-up to his first book, Lost and Found, Jamey Glasnovic ventures into the Himalaya to get away from the monotony of the workaday grind, searching for direction, inspiration and for his place in the world.