Ce regroupe six recueils de «Réflexions» parus en 1999 aux éditions Fleuve Noir:

Once in a generation a book, a vision, a writer, capture the imagination and emotions of millions. was such a book. Richard Bach’s unique vision again shines forth, touching with magic the drama of life in all its limitless horizons. Once again Richard Bach has written a masterpiece to help you touch that part of your home that is the sky.

  .

For all who wish to rise above their earth-bound existences to feast on the freedom and adventure that Richard Bach knows and loves and recreates so magnificently, this book offers—

Militant atheism is on the rise. In recent years Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens have produced a steady stream of best-selling books denigrating religious belief. These authors are merely the leading edge of a larger movement that includes much of the scientific community.

In response, mathematician David Berlinski, himself a secular Jew, delivers a biting defense of religious thought. is a brilliant, incisive, and funny book that explores the limits of science and the pretensions of those who insist it is the ultimate touchstone for understanding our world.

In a wide-ranging intellectual career, Michel de Montaigne found no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well. By casting her biography of the writer as 20 chapters, each focused on a different answer to the question How to live? Bakewell limns Montaigne’s ceaseless pursuit of this most elusive knowledge. Embedded in the 20 life-knowledge responses, readers will find essential facts — when and where Montaigne was born, how and whom he married, how he became mayor of Bordeaux, how he managed a public life in a time of lethal religious and political passions. But Bakewell keeps the focus on the inner evolution of the acute mind informing Montaigne’s charmingly digressive and tolerantly skeptical essays. Flexible and curious, this was a mind at home contemplating the morality of cannibals, the meaning of his own near-death experience, and the puzzlingly human behavior of animals. And though Montaigne has identified his own personality as his overarching topic, Bakewell marvels at the way Montaigne’s prose has enchanted diverse readers — Hazlitt and Sterne, Woolf and Gide — with their own reflections. Because Montaigne’s capacious mirror still captivates many, this insightful life study will win high praise from both scholars and general readers. -Bryce Christensen

“This charming biography shuffles incidents from Montaigne’s life and essays into twenty thematic chapters… Bakewell clearly relishes the anthropological anecdotes that enliven Montaigne’s work, but she handles equally well both his philosophical influences and the readers and interpreters who have guided the reception of the essays.”

—

“Serious, engaging, and so infectiously in love with its subject that I found myself racing to finish so I could start rereading the Essays themselves… It is hard to imagine a better introduction — or reintroduction — to Montaigne than Bakewell’s book.”

—Lorin Stein,

“Ms. Bakewell’s new book, , is a biography, but in the form of a delightful conversation across the centuries.”

—

“So artful is Bakewell’s account of [Montaigne] that even skeptical readers may well come to share her admiration.”

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“Extraordinary… a miracle of complex, revelatory organization, for as Bakewell moves along she provides a brilliant demonstration of the alchemy of historical viewpoint.”

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“Well, is a superb book, original, engaging, thorough, ambitious, and wise.”

—Nick Hornby, in the November/December 2010 issue of

“In , an affectionate introduction to the author, Bakewell argues that, far from being a dusty old philosopher, Montaigne has never been more relevant — a 16th-century blogger, as she would have it — and so must be read, quite simply, ‘in order to live’… Bakewell is a wry and intelligent guide.”

—

“Witty, unorthodox… is a history of ideas told entirely on the ground, never divorced from the people thinking them. It hews close to Montaigne’s own preoccupations, especially his playful uncertainty — Bakewell is a stickler for what we can’t know… is a delight…”

—

“This book will have new readers excited to be acquainted to Montaigne’s life and ideas, and may even stir their curiosity to read more about the ancient Greek philosophers who influenced his writing. is a great companion to Montaigne’s essays, and even a great stand-alone.”

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“A bright, genial, and generous introduction to the master’s methods.”

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“[Bakewell reveals] one of literature's enduring figures as an idiosyncratic, humane, and surprisingly modern force.”

— (starred)

“As described by Sarah Bakewell in her suavely enlightening Montaigne is, with Walt Whitman, among the most congenial of literary giants, inclined to shrug over the inevitability of human failings and the last man to accuse anyone of self-absorption. His great subject, after all, was himself.”

—Laura Miller,

“Lively and fascinating… takes its place as the most enjoyable introduction to Montaigne in the English language.”

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“Splendidly conceived and exquisitely written… enormously absorbing.”

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“ will delight and illuminate.”

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“It is ultimately [Montaigne’s] life-loving vivacity that Bakewell succeeds in communicating to her readers.”

—The Observer

“This subtle and surprising book manages the trick of conversing in a frank and friendly manner with its centuries-old literary giant, as with a contemporary, while helpfully placing Montaigne in a historical context. The affection of the author for her subject is palpable and infectious.”

—Phillip Lopate, author of

“An intellectually lively treatment of a Renaissance giant and his world.”

—

“Like recent books on Proust, Joyce, and Austen, skillfully plucks a life-guide from the incessant flux of Montaigne’s prose… A superb, spirited introduction to the master.”

—

In a wide-ranging intellectual career, Michel de Montaigne found no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well. By casting her biography of the writer as 20 chapters, each focused on a different answer to the question How to live? Bakewell limns Montaigne’s ceaseless pursuit of this most elusive knowledge. Embedded in the 20 life-knowledge responses, readers will find essential facts — when and where Montaigne was born, how and whom he married, how he became mayor of Bordeaux, how he managed a public life in a time of lethal religious and political passions. But Bakewell keeps the focus on the inner evolution of the acute mind informing Montaigne’s charmingly digressive and tolerantly skeptical essays. Flexible and curious, this was a mind at home contemplating the morality of cannibals, the meaning of his own near-death experience, and the puzzlingly human behavior of animals. And though Montaigne has identified his own personality as his overarching topic, Bakewell marvels at the way Montaigne’s prose has enchanted diverse readers — Hazlitt and Sterne, Woolf and Gide — with their own reflections. Because Montaigne’s capacious mirror still captivates many, this insightful life study will win high praise from both scholars and general readers. -Bryce Christensen Named one of Library Journal’s Top Ten Best Books of 2010 In a wide-ranging intellectual career, Michel de Montaigne found no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well. By casting her biography of the writer as 20 chapters, each focused on a different answer to the question How to live? Bakewell limns Montaigne’s ceaseless pursuit of this most elusive knowledge. Embedded in the 20 life-knowledge responses, readers will find essential facts — when and where Montaigne was born, how and whom he married, how he became mayor of Bordeaux, how he managed a public life in a time of lethal religious and political passions. But Bakewell keeps the focus on the inner evolution of the acute mind informing Montaigne’s charmingly digressive and tolerantly skeptical essays. Flexible and curious, this was a mind at home contemplating the morality of cannibals, the meaning of his own near-death experience, and the puzzlingly human behavior of animals. And though Montaigne has identified his own personality as his overarching topic, Bakewell marvels at the way Montaigne’s prose has enchanted diverse readers — Hazlitt and Sterne, Woolf and Gide — with their own reflections. Because Montaigne’s capacious mirror still captivates many, this insightful life study will win high praise from both scholars and general readers.

—Bryce Christensen

Sarah Bakewells Buch ist ein Geniestreich: Auf höchst elegante und unterhaltsame Weise erzählt sie das Leben Montaignes und beantwortet zugleich unsere Fragen nach einem guten Leben. Authentischer und aktueller wurde noch nie über den großen Philosophen und Essayisten geschrieben. Das Buch wurde in den USA mit dem „National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography“ und in Großbritannien mit dem „Duff Cooper Prize for Non-Fiction“ ausgezeichnet und stand auf den Shortlists des „Costa Biographie Award“ und des „Marsh Biography Award“.

Lies viel, vergiss das meiste wieder, und sei schwer von Begriff! — Habe ein Hinterzimmer in deinem Geschäft! — Tu etwas, was noch nie zuvor jemand getan hat! — Mach deinen Job gut, aber nicht zu gut! — Philosophiere nur zufällig! — Bedenke alles, bereue nichts! — Mit diesen und anderen Antworten auf die Frage „Wie soll ich leben?“ führt Sarah Bakewell durch das ungewöhnliche Leben des Weingutbesitzers, Liebhabers, Essayisten, Bürgermeisters und Reisenden Michel de Montaigne. Dabei gelingt ihr das Kunststück, ihn ganz im 16. Jahrhundert, im Zeitalter der Religionskriege, zu verorten und gerade dadurch für unsere Zeit verständlich zu machen. Wie soll man Montaigne lesen? Nicht wie ein Kind, um sich zu amüsieren, und nicht wie die Ehrgeizigen, um sich zu belehren. „Nein. Lesen sie ihn, um zu leben!“, empfahl der große Flaubert.

„Eine bezaubernde Einführung in Leben und Denken Montaignes und ein großes Lesevergnügen. Hier ist eine Autorin, deren Liebe zu ihrem Gegenstand ansteckend ist.“

„Eine Mischung aus Biographie und Alain-de-Bottonesker Lebensphilosophie, … die erfreulichste Einführung in Montaigne in englischer Sprache, … eine überzeugende Verbindung von Literatur und Leben.“

„Montaigne hat hier die Biographie, die er verdient, und hätte seine Freude an ihrem unkonventionellen Aufbau.“

„Eine wunderbar souveräne und klare Einführung … Man kann Sarah Bakewell nur dazu gratulieren, dass sie den Lesern einen so reizvollen Zugang zu Montaigne eröffnet.“

„Glänzend konzipiert und vorzüglich geschrieben. … Sarah Bakewell bringt eine neue Generation dazu, sich in Montaigne zu verlieben …, enorm fesselnd …, rühmenswert.“

„Das Buch schöpft gekonnt eine Lebenskunst aus dem breiten Strom der Montaigne'schen Prosa. … Eine überragende, begnadete Einführung in den Meister!“

The pocket in question is a small pocket of resistance. A pocket is formed when two or more people come together in agreement. The resistance is against the inhumanity of the New World Economic Order. The people coming together are the reader, me, and those the essays are about — Rembrandt, Paleolithic cave painters, a Romanian peasant, ancient Egyptians, an expert in the loneliness of a certain hotel bedroom, dogs at dusk, a man in a radio station. And unexpectedly, our exchanges strengthen each of us in our conviction that what is happening in the world today is wrong, and that what is often said about it is a lie. I’ve never written a book with a greater sense of urgency.

— John Berger

Gass writes:

Of the colors, blue and green have the greatest emotional range. Sad reds and melancholy yellows are difficult to turn up. Among the ancient elements, blue occurs everywhere: in ice and water, in the flame as purely as in the flower, overhead and inside caves, covering fruit and oozing out of clay. Although green enlivens the earth and mixes in the ocean, and we find it, copperish, in fire; green air, green skies, are rare. Gray and brown are widely distributed, but there are no joyful swatches of either, or any of the exuberant black, sullen pink, or acquiescent orange. Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life. Whether slick light sharp high bright think quick sour new and cool or low deep sweet dark soft slow smooth heavy old and warm: blue moves easily among them all, and all profoundly qualify our states of feeling.

From the #1 best-selling author of , a provocative and entertaining guided tour of atheist and agnostic thought through the ages—with never-before-published pieces by Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Christopher Hitchens continues to make the case for a splendidly godless universe in this first-ever gathering of the influential voices—past and present—that have shaped his side of the current (and raging) God/no-god debate. With Hitchens as your erudite and witty guide, you'll be led through a wealth of philosophy, literature, and scientific inquiry, including generous portions of the words of Lucretius, Benedict de Spinoza, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Mark Twain, George Eliot, Bertrand Russell, Emma Goldman, H. L. Mencken, Albert Einstein, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and many others well-known and lesser known. And they’re all set in context and commented upon as only Christopher Hitchens—“political and literary journalist extraordinaire” ().

Atheist? Believer? Uncertain? No matter: will speak to you and engage you every step of the way.

A dazzling philosophical investigation of the challenge of living in the present, by a brilliant practitioner of the new essay.

In her third book, which continues to define the contours of the contemporary essay, Sarah Manguso confronts a meticulous diary that she has kept for twenty-five years. "I wanted to end each day with a record of everything that had ever happened," she explains. But this simple statement belies a terror that she might forget something, that she might miss something important. Maintaining that diary, now 800,000 words, had become, until recently, a kind of spiritual practice.

Then Manguso became pregnant and had a child, and these two Copernican events generated an amnesia that put her into a different relationship with the need to document herself amid ongoing time.

Ongoingness is a spare, meditative work that stands in stark contrast to the volubility of the diary — it is a haunting account of mortality and impermanence, of how we struggle to find clarity in the chaos of time that rushes around and over and through us.

Автор на основе обследований огромного числа пациентов в области неврологии доходчиво, увлекательно и остроумно объясняет загадочные неврологические и психиатрические симптомы, приходя к выводу о том, что наука о мозге способна разрешать также и классические вопросы философии. Его исследования - это последние достижения в области изучения эволюционного развития мозга.

В.С.Рамачандран рассказывает о своей работе, просвещая и развлекая нас. Книга рассчитана на самый широкий крут читателей..

Вилейанур С.Рамачандран, доктор медицины, доктор философии, является директором Центра мозга и познания, профессором психологии и нейрофизиологии Калифорнийского университета (Сан-Диего), адъюнкт профессором биологии Солковского института. Рамачандран получил медицинское образование, а впоследствии — степень доктора философии в колледже Тринити (Trinity College) Кембриджского университета. Он имеет множество званий и наград, включая звание члена совета Аll Soul's College Оксфордского университета, почетную степень доктора Коннектикутского колледжа, Aliens Kappers золотую медаль Нидерландской королевской академии наук за заметный вклад в нейрофизиологию, золотую медаль Австралийского национального университета и почетное президентское звание Американской академии неврологии Прочел цикл лекций о работе мозга на праздновании двадцатипятилетней годовщины (серебряный юбилей) Общества нейрофизиологов (1995); сделал вступительные доклады на конференции по работе мозга, организованной Национальным институтом психического здоровья (NIMH) в библиотеке Конгресса, на Доркасских* чтениях в Колд-Спринг-Харборе (Cold Spring Harbor), на Адамсовских чтениях в Массачусетской клинике в Гарварде и чтениях, посвященных памяти Джонаса Солка, в Солковском институте».

Рамачандран опубликовал более 120 статей в научных журналах (включая «Scientific American»), Он является автором нашумевшей книги «Phantoms in the Brain» («Фантомы мозга»), которая была переведена на восемь языков и стала основой для двухсерийного фильма на Channel 4 Британского телевидения и на PBS в США. Журнал «Newsweek» недавно назвал его членом «клуба века» — одним из сотни самых выдающихся людей XXI столетия.

“A mock self-help book designed not to help but to provoke; a chapbook to inveigle us into thinking about who we are and how we got into this mess.” —

Published at the height of the 1980s self-help boom, is Percy’s unforgettable riff on the trend that swept the nation. Filled with quizzes, essays, short stories, and diagrams, is a laugh-out-loud spin on a familiar genre that also pushes readers to serious contemplation of life’s biggest questions. One part parody and two parts philosophy, is an enlightening guide to the dilemmas of human existence, and an unrivaled spin on self-help manuals by one of modern America’s greatest literary masters.