National Network for Equitable Library Service

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.

In the real world, exploitation exists. In the real world, there is a huge and unjust gap between rich and poor. The question, from a Buddhist perspective, is how should we deal with inequality and social injustice? His Holiness the Dalai Lama teaches that it is wrong for a spiritual person to remain indifferent; we must struggle to solve these problems. These problems are brought to our consciousness because they anger us, and this little book teaches us how to deal with that anger.

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.

In this unique and exhilarating autobiography, Allan Jones - Canada's first blind diplomat - vividly describes how an untreatable eye disease slowly decimated his visual world, most challengingly during his postings in Tokyo and New Delhi, and how he discovered and took to heart the revelatory Indian philosophy that changed his life. Advaita Vedanta, the most iconoclastic and liberating of the classical Indian philosophies, profoundly altered the author's experience of self and world.

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.

There was no Reichstag fire. No storming of the Bastille. No mutiny on the Aurora. Instead, the mediocre have seized power without firing a single shot. They rose to power on the tide of an economy where workers produce assembly-line meals without knowing how to cook at home, give customers instructions over the phone that they themselves don't understand, or sell books and newspapers that they never read. Canadian intellectual juggernaut Alain Deneault has taken on all kinds of evildoers: mining companies, tax-dodgers, and corporate criminals.

Johnson draws from little-known resources to construct a fascinating account of one of history's greatest thinkers. Socrates transcended class limitations in Athens during the fifth century B.C. to develop ideas that still shape the way we think about the human body and soul, including the workings of the human mind.