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The Body in Pain
- The Making and Unmaking of the World
- Narrated by: Joyce Bean
- Length: 18 hrs and 32 mins
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Publisher's summary
Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury trials, and military and strategic writings by such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, Liddell Hart, and Kissinger. She weaves these into her discussion with an eloquence, humanity, and insight that recall the writings of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Scarry begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility. Not only is physical pain enormously difficult to describe in words - confronted with it, Virginia Woolf once noted, "language runs dry" - it also actively destroys language, reducing sufferers in the most extreme instances to an inarticulate state of cries and moans. Scarry analyzes the political ramifications of deliberately inflicted pain, specifically in the cases of torture and warfare, and shows how to be fictive. From these actions of "unmaking" Scarry turns finally to the actions of "making" - the examples of artistic and cultural creation that work against pain and the debased uses that are made of it. Challenging and inventive, The Body in Pain is landmark work that promises to spark widespread debate.
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- A Philosophy of Literature
- By: Ayn Rand
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In this beautifully written and brilliantly reasoned collection of essays, Ayn Rand throws new light on the nature of art and its purpose in human life. Once again, she demonstrates her bold originality and her refusal to let conventional ideas define her sense of the truth. Rand eloquently asserts that one cannot create art without infusing it with one's own value judgments and personal philosophy - even an attempt to withhold moral overtones only results in a deterministic or naturalistic message.
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Essential AYN
- By Mica on 07-15-08
By: Ayn Rand
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The Ascent of Humanity
- Civilization and the Human Sense of Self
- By: Charles Eisenstein
- Narrated by: Steve Wojtas
- Length: 27 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Charles Eisenstein explores the history and potential future of civilization, tracing the converging crises of our age to the illusion of the separate self. He argues that our disconnection from one another and the natural world has mislaid the foundations of science, religion, money, technology, economics, medicine, and education as we know them. It has fired our near-pathological pursuit of technological Utopias even as we push ourselves and our planet to the brink of collapse.
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I love this author!
- By Tamara Smith on 12-03-17
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On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason
- By: Arthur Schopenhauer
- Narrated by: Leighton Pugh
- Length: 6 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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There is a cause, or a reason, behind everything that happens. This is the fundamental view behind the classical proposition the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which, in 1813, Schopenhauer chose as his subject for further examination in his doctoral dissertation On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason....
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I’ve enjoyed this program
- By M.Biblioswine on 04-23-20
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The Social Construction of Reality
- A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge
- By: Peter L. Berger, Thomas Luckmann
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
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Called the "fifth-most important sociological book of the 20th century" by the International Sociological Association, this groundbreaking study of knowledge introduces the concept of "social construction" into the social sciences for the first time. In it, Berger and Luckmann reformulate the task of the sociological subdiscipline that, since Max Scheler, has been known as the sociology of knowledge.
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Overwhelming the first listen
- By Fabian on 04-24-18
By: Peter L. Berger, and others
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The Hedgehog and the Fox (Second Edition)
- An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History
- By: Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy - editor, Michael Ignatieff - foreword
- Narrated by: Peter Kenny
- Length: 2 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." This ancient Greek aphorism, preserved in a fragment from the poet Archilochus, describes the central thesis of Isaiah Berlin's masterly essay on Leo Tolstoy and the philosophy of history, the subject of the epilogue to War and Peace. Although there have been many interpretations of the adage, Berlin uses it to mark a fundamental distinction between human beings who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things and those who relate everything to a central, all-embracing system.
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The Fox Who Tried To Be A Hedgehog
- By Rich S. on 12-14-21
By: Isaiah Berlin, and others
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New Self, New World
- Recovering Our Senses in the Twenty-First Century
- By: Philip Shepherd, Andrew Harvey
- Narrated by: Philip Shepherd
- Length: 22 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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New Self, New World challenges the primary story of what it means to be human, the random and materialistic lifestyle that author Philip Shepherd calls our "shattered reality". This reality encourages us to live in our heads, self-absorbed in our own anxieties. Drawing on diverse sources and inspiration, New Self, New World reveals that our state of head-consciousness falsely teaches us to see the body as something we possess and to try to take care of it without ever really learning how to inhabit it.
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Deep dive into our embodied human experience
- By Marshall White on 01-20-20
By: Philip Shepherd, and others
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Stories We Tell Ourselves
- Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
- By: Richard Holloway
- Narrated by: Richard Holloway
- Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Throughout history we have told ourselves stories to try and make sense of what it all means: our place in a small corner of one of billions of galaxies, at the end of billions of years of existence. In this new book Richard Holloway takes us on a personal, scientific and philosophical journey to explore what he believes the answers to the biggest of questions are.
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Effortlessly profound
- By Consi on 09-28-21
By: Richard Holloway
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Miracles
- By: C. S. Lewis
- Narrated by: Julian Rhind-Tutt
- Length: 7 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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"The central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation. They say that God became Man. Every other miracle prepares the way for this, or results from this." This is the key statement of Miracles, in which C. S. Lewis shows that a Christian must not only accept but rejoice in miracles as a testimony of the unique personal involvement of God in his creation.
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sound, shrewd, well articulated, and well read.
- By Andrew on 09-17-15
By: C. S. Lewis
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The Art of the Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Linda Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Kundera brilliantly examines the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Musil. He is especially penetrating on Hermann Broch, and his exploration of the world of Kafka's novels vividly reveals the comic terror of Kafka's bureaucratized universe. Kundera's discussion of his own work includes his views on the role of historical events in fiction, the meaning of action, and the creation of character in the postpsychological novel.
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Informative and Inspiring
- By Mo on 11-27-21
By: Milan Kundera, and others
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The Life of the Mind
- By: Hannah Arendt
- Narrated by: Laural Merlington
- Length: 20 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Considered by many to be Hannah Arendt's greatest work, published as she neared the end of her life, The Life of the Mind investigates thought itself, as it exists in contemplative life. In a shift from her previous writings, most of which focus on the world outside the mind, this work was planned as three volumes that would explore the activities of the mind considered by Arendt to be fundamental. What emerged is a rich, challenging analysis of human mental activity, considered in terms of thinking, willing, and judging.
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English only please
- By angela cozea on 11-20-19
By: Hannah Arendt
What listeners say about The Body in Pain
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Rayout
- 06-10-21
The body In pain; Reviewed by someone in pain
This book is highly academic - I having a BA in communication find it a fairly difficult read — so i purchased the audio book and IT IS VERY ROBOTIC sounding which is fairly upsetting but hopefully I will get over that
This book does have a great layout to help those in chronic pain to understand their pain
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2 people found this helpful
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- Matthew
- 11-15-22
Not really a book on pain
This is really not a book on pain as only about 5% is on pain. This is more an anti-war book dealing with ridding the world of war and torture as a means to an end. I was very disappointed. I do not recommend.
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- paul j.
- 11-12-21
Long on words short on thesis
A lot of saying the obvious and predicting the subject of other chapters. Even listening becomes tedious.
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