Grade 3 Up–While other books on the topic go into more depth on specific sports, athletes, or historical events, none are as enthusiastically broad or as enjoyable to read as this one. And, it's superbly illustrated with colorful, well-chosen, and enticing photographs. Following a foreword from sportscaster Bob Costas, Macy shares her own young Olympic dreams to represent the appeal of the Games and how they have changed over time. She tells of the rebirth of the Olympic movement in the late 1800s, the changing status of female participants, and the triumph of the thousands of "awe-inspiring athletic performances." Different personalities throughout the years emerge; likewise, fair attention is given to some of the controversies and tragedies that have befallen the event. Nary a spread goes by without dynamic photographs and artifacts, both contemporary and historical; some show, and photo galleries present, compilations of diverse athletes competing, excelling, and celebrating. A world map indicating Summe

The "Meditations" of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius are areadable exposition of the system of metaphysics known as stoicism.Stoics maintained that by putting aside great passions, unjustthoughts and indulgence, man could acquire virtue and live at onewith nature.

We waited by the hunting car for it to be light enough to start and we were all solemn and deadly. Ngui nearly always had an evil temper in the very early morning so he was solemn, deadly and sullen. Charo was solemn, deadly but faintly cheerful. He was like a man going to a funeral who did not really feel too deeply about the deceased. Mthuka was happy as always in his deafness watching with his wonderful eyes for the start of the lightening of the darkness. We were all hunters and it was the start of that wonderful thing, the hunt. Written when Hemingway returned from his 1953 safari, but only recently edited by his son Patrick, True at First Light is a rich blend of autobiography and fiction, a breathtaking final work from one of this century's most beloved and important writers. The book opens on the day Hemngway's close friend, Pop, a legendary hunter, leaves him in charge of the camp. Meanwhile, tensions are heightening among the various tribes and news arrives of a potential attack. Hemingw

Rene Descartes(1569-1650),the 'father' of modern philosophy,is without doubt one of the greatest thinkers in history:his genius lies at the core of our contemporary intellectual identity.Breaking with the conventions of his own time and suffering persecution by the Church as a consequence,Descartes in his writings-most of which are philosophical classics-attempted to answer the central questions surrounding the self,God,free-will and knowledge,using the science of thought as opposed to received wisdom based on the tenets of faith.This edition,the most comprehensive one-volume selection of Descartes' works available in English,includes his great essay,Discourse on Method.

In Symposium, a group of Athenian aristocrats attend a party and talk about love, until the drunken Alcibiades bursts in and decides to discuss Socrates instead. Symposium gives an unsurpassed picture of the sparkling society that was Athens at the height of her empire. The setting of the other dialogues is more sombre. Socrates is put on trial for impiety, and sentenced to death. Euthyphro discusses the nature of piety, Apology is Socrates' speech in his own defence, Crito explains his refusal to escape punishment, and Phaedo gives an account of Socrates' last day. These dialogues have never been offered in one volume before. Tom Griffith's Symposium has been described as 'possibly the finest translation of any Platonic dialogue'. All the other translations are new.

Benedict de Spinoza lived a life of blameless simplicity as alens-grinder in Holland. And yet in his lifetime, he was expelledfrom the Jewish community in Amsterdam as a heretic, and after hisdeath his words were first banned by the Christian authorities asatheistic, then hailed by humanists as the gospel of Pantheism. His"Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order" shows us the realitybehind this enigmatic figure. First published by his friends afterhis premature death at the age of 44, the "Ethics" uses the methodsof Euclid to describe a single entity, properly called both "God"and "Nature", of which mind and matter are two manifestations. Fromthis follow, in ways that are strikingly modern, the identity ofmind and body, the necessary causation of events and actions, andthe illusory nature of free will.

Whether we love or hate Sigmund Freud, we all have to admit that he revolutionized the way we think about ourselves. Much of this revolution can be traced to The Interpretation of Dreams, the turn-of-the-century tour de force that outlined his theory of unconscious forces in the context of dream analysis. Introducing the id, the superego, and their problem child, the ego, Freud advanced scientific understanding of the mind immeasurably by exposing motivations normally invisible to our consciousness. While there's no question that his own biases and neuroses influenced his observations, the details are less important than the paradigm shift as a whole. After Freud, our interior lives became richer and vastly more mysterious. These mysteries clearly bothered him--he went to great (often absurd) lengths to explain dream imagery in terms of childhood sexual trauma, a component of his theory jettisoned mid-century, though now popular among recovered-memory therapists. His dispassionate analyses of his own dr

Aristotle (384-322BC) is the philosopher who has most influence on the development of western culture, writing on a wide variety of subjects including the natural sciences as well as the more strictly philosophical topics of logic, metaphysics and ethics. To the poet Dante, he was simply 'the master of those who know'. The Ethics contains his views on what makes a good human life. While the work continues to stimulate and challenge modern philosophers, the general course of the argument is easily accessible to the non-specialist. Both as a key influence in the history of ideas and as a work containing unique insights into the human condition, this is a book that simply demands to be read.

The "Meditations" of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius are a readable exposition of the system of metaphysics known as stoicism. Stoics maintained that by putting aside great passions, unjust thoughts and indulgence, man could acquire virtue and live at one with nature.