John Kaag

John Kaag is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and author of American Philosophy: A Love Story. It is a story of lost library, a lost American intellectual tradition and a lost person--and their simultaneous recovery.

Kaag is a dispirited young philosopher at sea in his marriage and his career when he stumbles upon West Wind, a ruin of an estate in the hinterlands of New Hampshire that belonged to the eminent Harvard philosopher William Ernest Hocking. Hocking was one of the last true giants of American philosophy and a direct intellectual descendent of William James, the father of American philosophy and psychology, with whom Kaag feels a deep kinship. It is James’s question “Is life worth living?” that gu

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Joan Didion

Joan Didion was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.
Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Over the course of her career, Didion wrote essays for many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United Stat
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Steven Johnson

Steven Johnson is the bestselling author of twelve books, including Enemy of All Mankind, Farsighted, Wonderland, How We Got to Now, Where Good Ideas Come From, The Invention of Air, The Ghost Map, and Everything Bad Is Good for You.
He's the host of the podcast American Innovations, and the host and co-creator of the PBS and BBC series How We Got to Now. Johnson lives in Marin County, California, and Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and three sons.
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Erik Larson

Erik Larson is the author of nine books and one audio-only novella. His latest book, The Demon of Unrest, is a non-fiction thriller about the five months between Lincoln’s election and the start of the Civil War. Six of his books became New York Times bestsellers. Two of these, The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz and Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, both hit no. 1 on the list soon after launch. His chronicle of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, The Devil in the White City, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and won an Edgar Award for fact-crime writing. It lingered on various Times bestseller lists for the better part of a decade and is currently in development at Disn
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Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant was an 18th-century philosopher from Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He's regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of modern Europe & of the late Enlightenment. His most important work is The Critique of Pure Reason, an investigation of reason itself. It encompasses an attack on traditional metaphysics & epistemology, & highlights his own contribution to these areas. Other main works of his maturity are The Critique of Practical Reason, which is about ethics, & The Critique of Judgment, about esthetics & teleology.

Pursuing metaphysics involves asking questions about the ultimate nature of reality. Kant suggested that metaphysics can be reformed thru epistemology. He suggested that by understanding the so
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Martin Amis

Martin Amis was an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His works included the novels Money, London Fields and The Information.

The Guardian writes that "all his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis [his father] complained of as a 'terrible compulsive vividness in his style... that constant demonstrating of his command of English'; and it's true that the Amis-ness of Amis will be recognisable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop."

Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition with its grotesque caricatures. He has thus sometimes been portrayed as the undisputed master of what the New York Times has called "the new unpleasantness."
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Simon Winchester

Simon Winchester, OBE, is a British writer, journalist and broadcaster who resides in the United States. Through his career at The Guardian, Winchester covered numerous significant events including Bloody Sunday and the Watergate Scandal. As an author, Simon Winchester has written or contributed to over a dozen nonfiction books and authored one novel, and his articles appear in several travel publications including Condé Nast Traveler, Smithsonian Magazine, and National Geographic.

In 1969, Winchester joined The Guardian, first as regional correspondent based in Newcastle upon Tyne, but was later assigned to be the Northern Ireland Correspondent. Winchester's time in Northern Ireland placed him around several events of The Troubles, includi
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William James

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist who was also trained as a physician. The first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States, James was one of the leading thinkers of the late nineteenth century and is believed by many to be one of the most influential philosophers the United States has ever produced, while others have labelled him the "Father of American psychology". Along with Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, he is considered to be one of the greatest figures associated with the philosophical school known as pragmatism, and is also cited as one of the founders of the func
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Daniel Klein

Daniel Klein is the co-author of the international bestseller Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar. He is a Harvard graduate in philosophy and an acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction. When not enjoying the slow life on Greek islands, he lives in Massachusetts with his wife. He is seventy-five years old.
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Catherine Wilson

Librarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name

Current Academic Position:
Distinguished Professor of Philosophy
Andrew Heiskell Research Scholar

Education:
Ph.D. Princeton University
B.Phil. University of Oxford
B.A. Yale University

Research Interests:
17th and 18th Century History and Philosophy of Science
Moral and Social Theory
Philosophy of Literature

Courses Recently Taught:
Biology and Morality (Spring 2008)
Empiricism: Bacon to Hume (Fall 2007)
Egalitarianism: For & Against (Spring 2007)
Rationalists (Fall 2006)
Evolution and Ethics (Spring 2006)
Materialism, Politics and Morals in 17th Century Philosophy (Fall 2005)

Representative Publications:
Moral Animals: Ideals and Constraints in Moral Theory. Ox
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Václav Havel

Václav Havel was a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician. He was the tenth and last President of Czechoslovakia (1989–92) and the first President of the Czech Republic (1993–2003). He wrote over twenty plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally. He received the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Philadelphia Liberty Medal, the Order of Canada, the freedom medal of the Four Freedoms Award, and the Ambassador of Conscience Award. He was also voted 4th in Prospect Magazine's 2005 global poll of the world's top 100 intellectuals. He was a founding signatory of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism.

Beginning in the 1960s, his work turned to focus on the politics of Czechoslovaki
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Keith Thomson

Keith Thomson has been a semi-pro baseball player in France an editorial cartoonist for Newsday and a screenwriter. Now a resident of Alabama, he writes about intelligence and other matters for The Huffington Post. His novels include Once a Spy, a New York Times Best Seller, Twice a Spy and Pirates of Pensacola.
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Chuck Hogan

Chuck Hogan is an American author. His story "Two Thousand Volts" appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories 2009. He is the co-author of The Strain Trilogy with Guillermo del Toro. His 2004 novel Prince of Thieves was adapted to film as the Ben Affleck directed The Town in 2010.
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Sue Prideaux

Sue Prideaux is an Anglo-Norwegian novelist and biographer. She has strong links to Norway and her godmother was painted by Edvard Munch, whose biography she later wrote under the title Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream. Prior to taking up writing she trained as an art historian in Florence, Paris, and London.

(from Wikipedia)
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Dean Jobb

"Jobb's true crime stories are not to be missed" – CrimeReads

I specialize in true crime and I'm drawn to overlooked or forgotten stories. My new book, A Gentleman and a Thief, coming in June 2024, tells the incredible story of Arthur Barry, one of the world’s most successful jewel thieves, who charmed the elite of 1920s New York, brazenly swiped gems worth millions of dollars from their posh country estates, and outfoxed the police and private detectives on his trail.

My previous books include The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream , winner of the inaugural CrimeCon CLUE Award for Best True Crime Book of 2021 and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. It recreates Scotland Yard's hunt for a Victorian Era seria
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Charles Lachman

Charles Lachman is Executive Producer of the television news magazine show, Inside Edition. Previously he was Managing Editor of the nightly news broadcasts at WNYW-TV in New York City and was a reporter for the New York Post.

Lachman is the author of In the Name of the Law, The Last Lincolns: The Rise and Fall of a Great American Family, A Secret Life: The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland and most recently Footsteps in the Snow.
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Erling Kagge

Erling Kagge is a Norwegian explorer, lawyer, art collector, entrepreneur, politician, author and publisher.
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Sarah Bakewell

Sarah Bakewell was a bookseller and a curator of early printed books at the Wellcome Library before publishing her highly acclaimed biographies The Smart, The English Dane, and the best-selling How to Live: A Life of Montaigne, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. In addition to writing, she now teaches in the Masters of Studies in Creative Writing at Kellogg College, University of Oxford. She lives in London.
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Mark Synnott

Excerpt from Mark's official website:

"Mark Synnott is a New York Times bestselling author, a pioneering big wall climber and one of the most prolific adventurers of his generation. His search for unclimbed and unexplored rock walls has taken him on more than 30 expeditions to places like Alaska, Baffin Island, Greenland, Iceland, Newfoundland, Patagonia, Guyana, Venezuela, Pakistan, Nepal, India, China, Tibet, Uzbekistan, Russia, Cameroon, Chad, Borneo, Oman and Pitcairn Island. Closer to home, Mark has climbed Yosemite’s El Capitan 24 times, including several one-day ascents."

Author image: © Paul Reitano, used here by permission of the author
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Ryan Holiday

Ryan Holiday is media strategist for notorious clients like Tucker Max and Dov Charney. After dropping out of college at 19 to apprentice under the strategist Robert Greene, he went on to advise many bestselling authors and multi-platinum musicians. He is the Director of Marketing at American Apparel, where his work in advertising was internationally known. His strategies are used as case studies by Twitter, YouTube, and Google, and have been written about in AdAge, the New York Times, Gawker, and Fast Company. He is the author is *Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator*, which is due out in July. He currently lives in New Orleans, with his rebellious puppy, Hanno.
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Eric Weiner

Eric Weiner is best-selling author of such books as THE GEOGRAPHY OF BLISS, THE GEOGRAPHY OF GENIUS, MAN SEEKS GOD and THE SOCRATES EXPRESS. His latest book, BEN & ME, is out now.

His books have been translated into more than 20 languages. A number of high schools and universities have incorporated them into their curricula. Weiner is the recipient of the Borders Original Voices Award, and a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Award.

As a long-time foreign correspondent for NPR, Eric reported from more than 30 nations, from Iraq to Indonesia, covering some of the major international events of recent times.

The Wall Street Journal said of Eric: "There are some writers whose company is worth keeping, whatever the subject… And Mr. Weiner
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Michael Taylor

Michael Taylor is an historian of colonial slavery, the British Empire and the British Isles. He graduated with a double first in history from the University of Cambridge, where he earned his PhD (2015) - and also won University Challenge. He has since been Lecturer in Modern British History at Balliol College, Oxford, and he is currently a Visiting Fellow at the British Library's Eccles Centre for American Studies.

(courtsey of Penguin Books, 2020.)

Librarian note: There are other authors on Goodreads with this name. This profile takes 8 spaces:Michael^^^^^^^^Taylor
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Salman Khan

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
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Sarah Bakewell

Sarah Bakewell was a bookseller and a curator of early printed books at the Wellcome Library before publishing her highly acclaimed biographies The Smart, The English Dane, and the best-selling How to Live: A Life of Montaigne, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. In addition to writing, she now teaches in the Masters of Studies in Creative Writing at Kellogg College, University of Oxford. She lives in London.
Buy books on Amazon
Eric Weiner

Eric Weiner is best-selling author of such books as THE GEOGRAPHY OF BLISS, THE GEOGRAPHY OF GENIUS, MAN SEEKS GOD and THE SOCRATES EXPRESS. His latest book, BEN & ME, is out now.

His books have been translated into more than 20 languages. A number of high schools and universities have incorporated them into their curricula. Weiner is the recipient of the Borders Original Voices Award, and a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Award.

As a long-time foreign correspondent for NPR, Eric reported from more than 30 nations, from Iraq to Indonesia, covering some of the major international events of recent times.

The Wall Street Journal said of Eric: "There are some writers whose company is worth keeping, whatever the subject… And Mr. Weiner
Buy books on Amazon
Sue Prideaux

Sue Prideaux is an Anglo-Norwegian novelist and biographer. She has strong links to Norway and her godmother was painted by Edvard Munch, whose biography she later wrote under the title Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream. Prior to taking up writing she trained as an art historian in Florence, Paris, and London.

(from Wikipedia)
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Dietrich Eckart

Early member of the Nazi Party and participant of the Beerhall putsch.

Eckart initially studied medicine in Munich, but decided in 1891 to work as a poet, playwright and journalist.

He died of a heart attack in Berchtesgaden on 26 December 1923
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Walter Kaufmann

Walter Arnold Kaufmann was a German-American philosopher, translator, and poet. A prolific author, he wrote extensively on a broad range of subjects, such as authenticity and death, moral philosophy and existentialism, theism and atheism, Christianity and Judaism, as well as philosophy and literature. He served for over 30 years as a Professor at Princeton University.

He is renowned as a scholar and translator of Nietzsche. He also wrote a 1965 book on Hegel, and a translation of most of Goethe's Faust.
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Skye Cleary

Skye C. Cleary, PhD MBA is a philosopher. She is the author of "How to Be Authentic: Simone de Beauvoir and the Quest for Fulfillment" (2022), "Existentialism and Romantic Love" (2015) and co-editor of "How to Live a Good Life" (2020). Skye teaches at Columbia University and the City College of New York. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Aeon, The Times Literary Supplement, TED-Ed, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other outlets. She was a MacDowell Fellow (2021), awarded the 2021 Stanford Calderwood Fellowship, and won a New Philosopher magazine Writers’ Award (2017). She lives in New York City with her partner and son.
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Catherine Wilson

Librarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name

Current Academic Position:
Distinguished Professor of Philosophy
Andrew Heiskell Research Scholar

Education:
Ph.D. Princeton University
B.Phil. University of Oxford
B.A. Yale University

Research Interests:
17th and 18th Century History and Philosophy of Science
Moral and Social Theory
Philosophy of Literature

Courses Recently Taught:
Biology and Morality (Spring 2008)
Empiricism: Bacon to Hume (Fall 2007)
Egalitarianism: For & Against (Spring 2007)
Rationalists (Fall 2006)
Evolution and Ethics (Spring 2006)
Materialism, Politics and Morals in 17th Century Philosophy (Fall 2005)

Representative Publications:
Moral Animals: Ideals and Constraints in Moral Theory. Ox
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Avram Alpert

I am a generalist in the humanities. I work to understand what values we should live by in our connected, chaotic, and potentially catastrophic times. I am currently completing two nonfiction books and two novels. I am a Lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program and Co-Director of the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program
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