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Bruckner Remembered
Popular anecdotes represent Bruckner as a visionary simpleton, his life dominated by music and religion, but this bizarre figure is also widely held to have produced some the most original music written in the second half of the 19th century. The reminiscences collected here offer insights into a complicated and sometimes tormented mind. While some are content to dismiss him as a gifted country bumpkin, others describe a lively intellect, a compulsive student, and a meticulous musical theorist.
Extra Life
“Offers a useful reminder of the role of modern science in fundamentally transforming all of our lives.” —President Barack Obama (on Twitter) “An important book.” —Steven Pinker, The New York Times Book Review The surprising and important story of how humans gained what amounts to an extra life, from the bestselling author of How We Got to Now and Where Good Ideas Come From In 1920, at the end of the last major pandemic, global life expectancy was just over forty years. Today, in many parts of the world, human beings can expect to live more than eighty years. As a species we have doubled our life expectancy in just one century. There are few measures of human progress more astoni...
The Eighth
This “thrilling study of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No 8 . . . makes a strong case for its quality . . . we shall never listen to it in the same way again” (Guardian, UK). On September 12, 1910, Gustav Mahler’s Eighth Symphony had its world premiere at Munich’s new Musik Festhalle. It was the artistic breakthrough for which the composer had yearned all his life. An array of royals and stars from the musical and literary world were in attendance, including Thomas Mann and the young Arnold Schoenberg. Also present were Alma Mahler, the composer’s wife, and Alma’s longtime lover, the architect Walter Gropius. In The Eighth, Stephen Johnson provides a masterful account of the symphon...
The Ghost Map
In Ghost Map Steven Johnson tells the story of the terrifying cholera epidemic that engulfed London in 1854, and the two unlikely heroes – anaesthetist Doctor John Snow and affable clergyman Reverend Henry Whitehead – who defeated the disease through a combination of local knowledge, scientific research and map-making. In telling their extraordinary story, Johnson also explores a whole world of ideas and connections, from urban terror to microbes, ecosystems to the Great Stink, cultural phenomena to street life. Re-creating a London full of dirt, dust heaps, slaughterhouses and scavengers, Ghost Map is about how huge populations live together, how cities can kill – and how they can save us.
Stephen Johnson on Digital Photography
"We are in the Stone Age of digital photography. We've figured out how to make some tools, but it is just now beginning to dawn on us what we might do with them. I've often been frustrated at the concentration on the technical aspect of digital photography with so little discussion of the aesthetics and heart behind the image making. This book is essentially a distillation of what I've been teaching over the last 25 years." Master photographer Stephen Johnson has been taking beautiful landscape photography for decades, and teaching others the practical art of image making since 1977. While he started out with traditional film camera techniques, Johnson is widely recognized among his peers as...
Wonderland
"Everyone knows the old saying "necessity is the mother of invention," but if you do a paternity test on many of the modern world's most important ideas or institutions, you will find, invariably, that leisure and play were involved in the conception as well." Most history books don't concern themselves with delight. History is the serious business of war, treaties, governments and monarchs. This is a different kind of history book. Steven Johnson argues that if you want to understand how we got to now, you have to understand pleasure and play. A staggering amount of the landscape of modern life is populated by environments and technology designed to entertain and delight us. Here history of popular entertainment, arguing that the pursuit of novelty and wonder is a powerful driver of world-shaping technological change. Throughout history, he locates the cutting edge of innovation wherever people are working the hardest to keep themselves and others amused.He introduces us to the colorful innovators of leisure: the explorers, proprietors, showmen, and artists who changed the trajectory of history with their luxurious wares, exotic meals, taverns, gambling tables, and magic shows.
Where Good Ideas Come from
In this book, one of our most innovative, popular thinkers, Steven Johnson, takes on one of life's key questions: where do good ideas come from?
The Wrong Turning: Encounters with Ghosts
Introduced and edited by broadcaster Stephen Johnson, a curated selection of chilling ghost stories from world literature. Why do people love ghost stories, even if they don’t believe (or say they don’t believe) in ghosts? Is it simply the adrenaline rush that comes from being mesmerized and terrified by a great storyteller, or do these tales yield deeper meanings—telling us things about our own inner shadows? Stephen Johnson brings together some of the most memorable encounters with ghosts in world literature, from Europe, Russia, the United States, and China. Recurring themes and imagery are noted, interpretations suggested—but only suggested, since ambiguity and resistance to rati...
Farsighted
Plenty of books offer useful advice on how to get better at making quick-thinking, intuitive choices. But what about more consequential decisions, the ones that affect our lives for years, or centuries, to come? Our most powerful stories revolve around these kinds of decisions: where to live, whom to marry, what to believe, whether to start a company, how to end a war. Full of the beautifully crafted storytelling and novel insights that Steven Johnson's fans know to expect, Farsighted draws lessons from cognitive science, social psychology, military strategy, environmental planning, and great works of literature. Everyone thinks we are living in an age of short attention spans, but we've act...
Words Were Originally Magic
Looks at the role of language in psychotherapy, discusses the work of Lacan, Bateson, Ackerman, and Weakland, and examines the client-therapist conversation
