Are you taking any philosophy courses as part of your degree this year? Or are you continuing with a second degree in philosophy? Then look no further for the best in philosophy research. We’ve brought together some of our most popular textbooks to help you prepare for the new academic year. From Plato to Descartes, ancient wisdom to modern philosophical issues, this list provides a great first stop for under-graduate and post-graduate students alike.
The post Back to philosophy: A reading list appeared first on OUPblog.
In no particular order, these were some of the wonderful picture books
that I found in my book bag this week! I loved them all.
Spinelli, Jerry. 2010.
I Can be Anything! Illustrated by Jimmy Liao. New York: Little, Brown.
A rhyming romp through all of the possibilities of the future - "cross-legged sitter, make-believe critter, deep-hole digger, lemonade swigger." Who knows? Bright and joyful illustrations!
Fuge, Charles. 2010.
Yip! Snap! Yap! New York: Sterling.
Another lively, rhyming romp! This one featuring delightfully goofy dogs!
Thomson, Bill. 2010.
Chalk. Tarrytown, NY: Marshall Cavendish.
The illustrator of the exquisitely illustrated,
Baseball Hour, Bill Thompson outdoes himself with
Chalk - a wordless book that tells the story of a magical, rainy day at the playground for three children and a mysterious bag of chalk. Let your imagination run wild and enjoy Bill Thomson's hand-crafted brilliance!
Geringer, Laura. 2010.
Boom Boom Go Away! Illustrated by Bagram Ibatoulline. New York: Atheneum.
Music lovers, noise makers, and children who don't want to go to bed will love
Boom Boom Go Away! Its cumulative rhyme is full of playfulness and imagination. The warm illustrations evoke picture books of an earlier era.
Jeffers, Oliver. 2010.
The Heart and the Bottle. New York: Philomel.
This is not a book for storytime. It's a serious book for a special child - perhaps a grieving child, a child with a profound loss, a child who may have placed her heart in a bott
A question I'm often asked when conducting picture book workshops is, "Do you think that e-readers will someday replace picture books?" I've always answered, "Never," perhaps too emphatically, hiding the bit of doubt that I actually felt. But then along comes a picture book that defies the possibility that this literature form will be replaced anytime soon.
The Best Family in the World, written by Susana López and illustrated by Ulises Wensell, is such a book. Young Carlota anxiously awaits the arrival of her new family, and in her sleep imagines the possibilities. What will they be like? Will they be pirates, or tiger tamers, or pastry chefs? None of the above, as it turns out. But her new, ordinary family, while not as fascinating and adventurous as any she imagined, is in many ways even better.
The Best Family in the World is what a picture book is meant to be. It first of all is slightly oversized, just begging to be shared aloud. Its saturated illustrations fill the pages, to the very edges in most cases, with purposeful blank spaces playing their roles in others. And its theme of possibilities is fully realized by the illustrator's generous use of whole page spreads. Reading this book on an electronic reader would be akin to viewing the Mona Lisa on a postage stamp, and arguing that the latter experience was equally satisfying and edifying.
But it doesn't stop there. Like all excellent picture books, this one works on a number of levels. As Carlota imagines each possible family, author Susana López describes that family in a lyrical paragraph, the language pattern of which is repeated throughout the book. When considering her future pirate parents, for example, Carlota imagines that
She'd live on a pirate ship! She'd sail the seven seas, decorate flags with skulls and crossbones and look for treasure troves of gold doubloons. She'd carry a monkey on her right shoulder and a parrot on her left. She'd have a patch over her eye and a wooden leg. Yes, a family of pirates would be the best family in the world!
Students could use these same sentence patterns to create their own imaginary "best family." In fact, I liked that simple idea so much that I created a
student activity sheet for that very purpose. Either individually or as a class, students imagine a new family for Carlota, and write about the things she'll be doing and wearing. If every student creates their own, this same activity could be turned into a guessing game. Each student in turn reads aloud what Carlota will be doing with her new family, and then classmates guess the identity of that family.
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Amanda Smith Barusch, PhD, has been teaching and researching in the field of aging for over 25 years. 
Most of those were spent on the faculty of the College of Social Work at the University of Utah. She now serves as Professor and Head of Department of Social Work and Community Development at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Her most recent book, Love Stories of Later Life: A Narrative Approach to Understanding Romance, uses original research to question what love and romance mean in seniors’ lives. The book is both a glimpse into a world many people didn’t know existed, that of romantic love in later life, and an important tool designed to increase self-awareness and relationship-building. In the post below we excerpt from the beginning of Love Stories of Later Life.
Romantic experiences define character in ways that are so subtle that they might go undetected and so varied that they defy generalization. Love opens the door to our potential and helps shape the people we become. The work reported in this book describes four ways that love shapes our lives and ourselves.
First, the intense unsettling experiences that come with romantic love create opportunities for personal insight. Coupled with self-reflection, intense romantic experiences can teach us about ourselves, our needs, our vulnerabilities, and our demons. …these lessons can change a person’s approach to life and to love.
Second, love is a training ground for relationship skills. We inevitably learn from interactions with our partners. Usually, these lessons are adaptive, teaching the value of compromise and the importance of reciprocity. We learn how to communicate our love. Particularly in late life, we confront the boundaries of our personal control and we learn about letting go. But damaging lessons arise when romantic interactions are marked by abuse, neglect or manipulation, which can teach us to devalue our selves and retreat from engagement with others.
Third, love stretches us beyond our comfort zones, revealing capabilities we did not know we had. We see this in the uncharacteristic acts committed when we are deeply infatuated. Desperately in love, we discover personal capacities we never knew were there. Love can also stretch us by exposing us to different ways of being, as when we meet a person unlike anyone else we have ever loved and, in loving them, are transformed.
Finally, love changes the very course of our lives. Our choice of romantic partners can determine what jobs we pursue, where we will live, whether or not we have children. In midlife, people who have not experienced love as they have long imagined it may set out on a quest – some might call it a “midlife crisis” — to satisfy this burning need.
As a gerontologist, I have long felt the most interesting part of human development takes place in late life. Some changes are so gentle and slow that we do not notice them for decades. And most young people have too much on their plates to spend time in contemplation. Besides that their reminiscences are awfully short! Late life provides the opportunity and the perspective to observe changes that romantic love has made in our lives and our persons. Then one day we turn around and realize that even in life’s final decades some of us are still changing!
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i went ot the italian grocery store in a hoodie and flip flops…..i kinda stood out.
VERY brave of you! Hee-hee…guess you’re gettin’ your Cali on, huh? CAN’T wait to see ya!