Duft und Pflege

Kurzbeschreibung

Produktbeschreibung

A Short History of Private Life
Erscheinungsjahr: 2011
Abmessung: 177 mm
Von Bryson, Bill

Nachdem er mit liebevoll-kritischen und unglaublich amüsant geschriebenen Betrachtungen über seine beiden Heimatländer, die USA und England, bekannt wurde, stürzte sich Bill Bryson sowohl auf andere Ländern als auch anderen Themengebiete. Ähnlich wie in "A Short History of Nearly Everything" widmet sich Bryson hier wieder dem Allgemeinwissen: den Dingen des alltäglichen Lebens und wie sie geworden sind, was sie sind. Von keinem lassen wir uns lieber die Welt erklären!

From one of the most beloved authors of our time--more than six million copies of his books have been sold in this country alone--a fascinating excursion into the history behind the place we call home.
"Houses aren''t refuges from history. They are where history ends up."
Bill Bryson and his family live in a Victorian parsonage in a part of England where nothing of any great significance has happened since the Romans decamped. Yet one day, he began to consider how very little he knew about the ordinary things of life as he found it in that comfortable home. To remedy this, he formed the idea of journeying about his house from room to room to "write a history of the world without leaving home." The bathroom provides the occasion for a history of hygiene; the bedroom, sex, death, and sleep; the kitchen, nutrition and the spice trade; and so on, as Bryson shows how each has fig-ured in the evolution of private life. Whatever happens in the world, he demonstrates, ends up in our house, in the paint and the pipes and the pillows and every item of furniture.
Bill Bryson has one of the liveliest, most inquisitive minds on the planet, and he is a master at turning the seemingly isolated or mundane fact i

Amazon.com

Sherry Turkle is rapidly becoming the sociologist of the Internet, and that's beginning to seem like a good thing. While her first outing, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, made groundless assertions and seemed to be carried along more by her affection for certain theories than by a careful look at our current situation, Life on the Screen is a balanced and nuanced look at some of the ways that cyberculture helps us comment upon real life (what the cybercrowd sometimes calls RL). Instead of giving in to any one theory on construction of identity, Turkle looks at the way various netizens have used the Internet, and especially MUDs (Multi-User Dimensions), to learn more about the possibilities available in apprehending the world. One of the most interesting sections deals with gender, a topic prone to rash and partisan pronouncements. Taking as her motto William James's maxim "Philosophy is the art of imagining alternatives," Turkle shows how playing with gender in cyberspace can shape a person's real-life understanding of gender. Especially telling are the examples of the man who finds it easier to be assertive when playing a woman, because he believes male assertiveness is now frowned upon while female assertiveness is considered hip, and the woman who has the opposite response, believing that it is easier to be aggressive when she plays a male, because as a woman she would be considered "bitchy." Without taking sides, Turkle points out how both have expanded their emotional range. Other topics, such as artificial life, receive an equally calm and sage response, and the first-person accounts from many Internet users provide compelling reading and good source material for readers to draw their own conclusions.