Wit's End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Wit's End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It PDF full book. Access full book title Wit's End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It by James Geary. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: James Geary Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 039325495X Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 128
Book Description
"A witty book about wit that steers an elegant path between waggishness and wisdom." —Stephen Fry Much more than a knack for snappy comebacks, wit is the quick, instinctive intelligence that allows us to think, say, or do the right thing at the right time in the right place. In this whimsical book, James Geary explores every facet of wittiness, from its role in innovation to why puns are the highest form of wit. Geary reasons that wit is both visual and verbal, physical and intellectual: there’s the serendipitous wit of scientists, the crafty wit of inventors, the optical wit of artists, and the metaphysical wit of philosophers. In Wit’s End, Geary embraces wit in every form by adopting a different style for each chapter; he writes the section on verbal repartee as a dramatic dialogue, the neuroscience of wit as a scientific paper, the spirituality of wit as a sermon, and other chapters in jive, rap, and the heroic couplets of Alexander Pope. Wit’s End agilely balances psychology, folktales, visual art, and literary history with lighthearted humor and acute insight, drawing upon traditions of wit from around the world. Entertaining, illuminating, and entirely unique, Wit’s End demonstrates that wit and wisdom are really the same thing.
Author: James Geary Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 039325495X Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 128
Book Description
"A witty book about wit that steers an elegant path between waggishness and wisdom." —Stephen Fry Much more than a knack for snappy comebacks, wit is the quick, instinctive intelligence that allows us to think, say, or do the right thing at the right time in the right place. In this whimsical book, James Geary explores every facet of wittiness, from its role in innovation to why puns are the highest form of wit. Geary reasons that wit is both visual and verbal, physical and intellectual: there’s the serendipitous wit of scientists, the crafty wit of inventors, the optical wit of artists, and the metaphysical wit of philosophers. In Wit’s End, Geary embraces wit in every form by adopting a different style for each chapter; he writes the section on verbal repartee as a dramatic dialogue, the neuroscience of wit as a scientific paper, the spirituality of wit as a sermon, and other chapters in jive, rap, and the heroic couplets of Alexander Pope. Wit’s End agilely balances psychology, folktales, visual art, and literary history with lighthearted humor and acute insight, drawing upon traditions of wit from around the world. Entertaining, illuminating, and entirely unique, Wit’s End demonstrates that wit and wisdom are really the same thing.
Author: Erma Bombeck Publisher: Fawcett ISBN: 030777824X Category : Humor Languages : en Pages : 225
Book Description
"America's irrepressible doyenne of domestic satire." THE BOSTON GLOBE Madcap, bittersweet humor in classic Erma Bombeck-style. You'll laugh until it hurts and love it! "Any mother with half a skull knows that when Daddy's little boy becomes Mommy's little boy, the kid is so wet, he's treading water. What do you mean you're a participle in the school play and you need a costume? Those rotten kids. If only they'd let me wake up in my own way. Why do they have to line up along my bed and stare at me like Moby Dick just washed up onto a beach somewhere?"
Author: Jeff Jay Publisher: Hazelden Publishing ISBN: 9781592853731 Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 263
Book Description
Presents guidance and encouragement for family members on ways to help loved ones suffering from both psychiatric and addictive disorders.
Author: Karen Joy Fowler Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0452290066 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 338
Book Description
This “delightful and eccentric new tale”(The Boston Globe) from the bestselling author of The Jane Austen Book Club subverts the whodunit and gives us a thoroughly modern meta-mystery with wit, warmth, and heart. At loose ends and weary from her recent losses—the deaths of an inventive if at times irritating father and her beloved brother—Rima Lansill comes to Wit's End, the home of her legendary godmother, bestselling mystery writer Addison Early, to regroup...and in search of answers. For starters, why did Addison name one of her characters—a murderer—after Rima's father? But Addison is secretive and feisty, so consumed with protecting her famous fictional detective, Maxwell Lane, from the vagaries of the Internet rumor that she has writer's block. As one woman searches for truth, the other struggles to control the reality of her fiction. Rima soon becomes enmeshed in Addison's household of eccentrics: a formerly alcoholic cook and her irksome son, two quirky dog-walkers, a mysterious stalker, the tiny characters that populate Addison's dollhouse crime-scene replicas, and even Maxwell Lane himself. But, wrapped up in a mystery that may or may not be of her own creation, Rima discovers to her surprise that the ultimate solution to this puzzle is the new family she has found at the house called Wit's End. Here, Karen Joy Fowler delivers top-notch storytelling—creating characters both oddball and endearing in a voice that is utterly and memorably her own—in this clever, playful novel about finally allowing oneself to grow up-with a dash of mystery thrown in.
Author: Sue Scheff Publisher: Health Communications, Inc. ISBN: 0757306977 Category : Family & Relationships Languages : en Pages : 194
Book Description
A true story tells about a mother who, after realizing the damage done to her daughter upon returning home from a disciplinary educational institution, created an advocacy group to work through the problems of at-risk teenagers and found a way to reconnect with her rebellious daughter using proper methods based on love and understanding. Original. 25,000 first printing.
Author: Edward Dutton Publisher: Andrews UK Limited ISBN: 1845409965 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 302
Book Description
We are becoming less intelligent. This is the shocking yet fascinating message of At Our Wits' End. The authors take us on a journey through the growing body of evidence that we are significantly less intelligent now than we were a hundred years ago. The research proving this is, at once, profoundly thought-provoking, highly controversial, and it's currently only read by academics. But the authors are passionate that it cannot remain ensconced in the ivory tower any longer. With At Our Wits' End, they present the first ever popular scientific book on this crucially important issue. They prove that intelligence — which is strongly genetic — was increasing up until the breakthrough of the Industrial Revolution, because we were subject to the rigors of Darwinian Selection, meaning that lots of surviving children was the preserve of the cleverest. But since then, they show, intelligence has gone into rapid decline, because large families are increasingly the preserve of the least intelligent. The book explores how this change has occurred and, crucially, what its consequences will be for the future. Can we find a way of reversing the decline of our IQ? Or will we witness the collapse of civilization and the rise of a new Dark Age?
Author: St. Clair McKelway Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 1608191230 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 640
Book Description
"Why does A. J. Liebling remain a vibrant role model for writers while the superb, prolific St. Clair McKelway has been sorely forgotten?" James Wolcott asked this question in a recent review of the Complete New Yorker on DVD. Anyone who has read a single paragraph of McKelway's work would struggle to provide an answer. His articles for the New Yorker were defined by their clean language and incomporable wit, by his love of New York's rough edges and his affection for the working man (whether that work was come by honestly or not). Like Joseph Mitchell and A. J. Liebling, McKelway combined the unflagging curiosity of a great reporter with the narrative flair of a master storyteller. William Shawn, the magazine's long-time editor, described him as a writer with the "lightest of light touches." His style is so striking, Shawn went on to say, that "it was too odd to be imitated." The pieces collected here are drawn from two of McKelway's books--True Tales from the Annals of Crime and Rascality (1951) and The Big Little Man from Brooklyn (1969). His subjects are the small players who in their particulars defined life in New York during the 36 years McKelway wrote: the junkmen, boxing cornermen, counterfeiters, con artists, fire marshals, priests, and beat cops and detectives. The "rascals." An amazing portrait of a long forgotten New York by the reporter who helped establish and utterly defined New Yorker "fact writing," Untitled Collection is long overdue celebration of a truly gifted writer.
Author: John Kim Publisher: Parallax Press ISBN: 1941529623 Category : Self-Help Languages : en Pages : 168
Book Description
Tackling relationships, career, and family issues, John Kim, LMFT, thinks of himself as a life-styledesigner, not a therapist. His radical new approach, that he sometimes calls “self-help in a shot glass” is easy, real, and to the point. He helps people make changes to their lives so that personal growth happens organically, just by living. Let’s face it, therapy is a luxury. Few of us have the time or money to devote to going to an office every week. With anecdotes illustrating principles in action (in relatable and sometimes irreverent fashion) and stand-alone practices and exercises, Kim gives readers the tools and directions to focus on what's right with them instead of what's wrong. When John Kim was going through the end of a relationship, he began blogging as The Angry Therapist, documenting his personal journey post-divorce. Traditional therapists avoid transparency, but Kim preferred the language of "me too" as opposed to "you should." He blogged about his own shortcomings, revelations, views on relationships, and the world. He spoke a different therapeutic language —open, raw, and at times subversive — and people responded. The Angry Therapist blog, that inspired this book, has been featured in The Atlantic Monthly and on NPR.
Author: Sean Zwagerman Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press ISBN: 0822973774 Category : Humor Languages : en Pages : 255
Book Description
In Wit’s End, Sean Zwagerman offers an original perspective on women’s use of humor as a performative strategy as seen in works of twentieth-century American literature. He argues that women whose direct, explicit performative speech has been traditionally denied, or not taken seriously, have often turned to humor as a means of communicating with men. The book examines both the potential and limits of women’s humor as a rhetorical strategy in the writings of James Thurber, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy Parker, Edward Albee, Louise Erdrich, and others. For Zwagerman, these texts “talk back” to important arguments in humor studies and speech-act theory. He deconstructs the use of humor in select passages by employing the theories of J. L. Austin, John Searle, Jacques Derrida, Shoshana Felman, J. Hillis Miller, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Zwagerman offers arguments both for and against these approaches while advancing new thinking on humor as the “end”—both the goal and limit—of performative strategy, and as a means of expressing a full range of serious purposes. Zwagerman contends that women’s humor is not solely a subversive act, but instead it should be viewed in the total speech situation through context, motives, and intended audience. Not strictly a transgressive influence, women’s humor is seen as both a social corrective and a reinforcement of established ideologies. Humor has become an epistemology, an “attitude” or slant on one’s relation to society. Zwagerman seeks to broaden the scope of performativity theory beyond the logical pragmatism of deconstruction and looks to the use of humor in literature as a deliberate stylization of experiences found in real-world social structures, and as a tool for change.
Author: James Geary Publisher: National Geographic Books ISBN: 0393357597 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Entertaining, illuminating, and entirely unique, Wit’s End “convey[s] the power of wit to refresh the mind” (Henry Hitchings, Wall Street Journal). In “this inventive and playful book” (Tom Beer, Newsday), James Geary explores every facet of wittiness, from its role in innovation to why puns are the highest form of wit. Adopting a different style for each chapter—from dramatic dialogue to sermon, heroic couplets to a barroom monologue—Geary embodies wit in all its forms. Wit’s End agilely balances psychology, folktale, visual art, and literary history with lighthearted humor and acute insight, demonstrating that wit and wisdom are really the same thing.
Author: James Geary
Author: James Geary
Author: Erma Bombeck
Author: Jeff Jay
Author: Karen Joy Fowler
Author: Sue Scheff
Author: Edward Dutton
Author: St. Clair McKelway
Author: John Kim
Author: Sean Zwagerman
Author: James Geary