Wit S End

Author : James Geary
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2018-11-13
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780393254952

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Wit's End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It by James Geary Pdf

"A witty book about wit that steers an elegant path between waggishness and wisdom." —Stephen Fry Much more than a knack for snappy comebacks, wit is the quick, instinctive intelligence that allows us to think, say, or do the right thing at the right time in the right place. In this whimsical book, James Geary explores every facet of wittiness, from its role in innovation to why puns are the highest form of wit. Geary reasons that wit is both visual and verbal, physical and intellectual: there’s the serendipitous wit of scientists, the crafty wit of inventors, the optical wit of artists, and the metaphysical wit of philosophers. In Wit’s End, Geary embraces wit in every form by adopting a different style for each chapter; he writes the section on verbal repartee as a dramatic dialogue, the neuroscience of wit as a scientific paper, the spirituality of wit as a sermon, and other chapters in jive, rap, and the heroic couplets of Alexander Pope. Wit’s End agilely balances psychology, folktales, visual art, and literary history with lighthearted humor and acute insight, drawing upon traditions of wit from around the world. Entertaining, illuminating, and entirely unique, Wit’s End demonstrates that wit and wisdom are really the same thing.

Author : Edward Dutton,Michael A. Woodley of Menie
Publisher : Andrews UK Limited
Page : 302 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2018-12-20
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781845409968

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At Our Wits' End by Edward Dutton,Michael A. Woodley of Menie Pdf

We are becoming less intelligent. This is the shocking yet fascinating message of At Our Wits' End. The authors take us on a journey through the growing body of evidence that we are significantly less intelligent now than we were a hundred years ago. The research proving this is, at once, profoundly thought-provoking, highly controversial, and it's currently only read by academics. But the authors are passionate that it cannot remain ensconced in the ivory tower any longer. With At Our Wits' End, they present the first ever popular scientific book on this crucially important issue. They prove that intelligence — which is strongly genetic — was increasing up until the breakthrough of the Industrial Revolution, because we were subject to the rigors of Darwinian Selection, meaning that lots of surviving children was the preserve of the cleverest. But since then, they show, intelligence has gone into rapid decline, because large families are increasingly the preserve of the least intelligent. The book explores how this change has occurred and, crucially, what its consequences will be for the future. Can we find a way of reversing the decline of our IQ? Or will we witness the collapse of civilization and the rise of a new Dark Age?

Author : Erma Bombeck
Publisher : Fawcett
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2011-02-02
Category : Humor
ISBN : 9780307778246

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At Wit's End by Erma Bombeck Pdf

"America's irrepressible doyenne of domestic satire." THE BOSTON GLOBE Madcap, bittersweet humor in classic Erma Bombeck-style. You'll laugh until it hurts and love it! "Any mother with half a skull knows that when Daddy's little boy becomes Mommy's little boy, the kid is so wet, he's treading water. What do you mean you're a participle in the school play and you need a costume? Those rotten kids. If only they'd let me wake up in my own way. Why do they have to line up along my bed and stare at me like Moby Dick just washed up onto a beach somewhere?"

Author : Karen Joy Fowler
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 338 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2009-04-28
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780452290068

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Wit's End by Karen Joy Fowler Pdf

This “delightful and eccentric new tale”(The Boston Globe) from the bestselling author of The Jane Austen Book Club subverts the whodunit and gives us a thoroughly modern meta-mystery with wit, warmth, and heart. At loose ends and weary from her recent losses—the deaths of an inventive if at times irritating father and her beloved brother—Rima Lansill comes to Wit's End, the home of her legendary godmother, bestselling mystery writer Addison Early, to regroup...and in search of answers. For starters, why did Addison name one of her characters—a murderer—after Rima's father? But Addison is secretive and feisty, so consumed with protecting her famous fictional detective, Maxwell Lane, from the vagaries of the Internet rumor that she has writer's block. As one woman searches for truth, the other struggles to control the reality of her fiction. Rima soon becomes enmeshed in Addison's household of eccentrics: a formerly alcoholic cook and her irksome son, two quirky dog-walkers, a mysterious stalker, the tiny characters that populate Addison's dollhouse crime-scene replicas, and even Maxwell Lane himself. But, wrapped up in a mystery that may or may not be of her own creation, Rima discovers to her surprise that the ultimate solution to this puzzle is the new family she has found at the house called Wit's End. Here, Karen Joy Fowler delivers top-notch storytelling—creating characters both oddball and endearing in a voice that is utterly and memorably her own—in this clever, playful novel about finally allowing oneself to grow up-with a dash of mystery thrown in.

Author : St. Clair McKelway
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 640 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2010-07-22
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781608191239

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Reporting at Wit's End by St. Clair McKelway Pdf

"Why does A. J. Liebling remain a vibrant role model for writers while the superb, prolific St. Clair McKelway has been sorely forgotten?" James Wolcott asked this question in a recent review of the Complete New Yorker on DVD. Anyone who has read a single paragraph of McKelway's work would struggle to provide an answer. His articles for the New Yorker were defined by their clean language and incomporable wit, by his love of New York's rough edges and his affection for the working man (whether that work was come by honestly or not). Like Joseph Mitchell and A. J. Liebling, McKelway combined the unflagging curiosity of a great reporter with the narrative flair of a master storyteller. William Shawn, the magazine's long-time editor, described him as a writer with the "lightest of light touches." His style is so striking, Shawn went on to say, that "it was too odd to be imitated." The pieces collected here are drawn from two of McKelway's books--True Tales from the Annals of Crime and Rascality (1951) and The Big Little Man from Brooklyn (1969). His subjects are the small players who in their particulars defined life in New York during the 36 years McKelway wrote: the junkmen, boxing cornermen, counterfeiters, con artists, fire marshals, priests, and beat cops and detectives. The "rascals." An amazing portrait of a long forgotten New York by the reporter who helped establish and utterly defined New Yorker "fact writing," Untitled Collection is long overdue celebration of a truly gifted writer.

Author : Louis Kaplan
Publisher : Fordham University Press
Page : 315 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2020-05-05
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780823287574

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At Wit's End by Louis Kaplan Pdf

CHOICE: OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE A scholarly and thought-provoking work that places Jewish humor at the center of a discourse about Jewish and German relations through most of the twentieth century. At Wit’s End explores the fascinating discourse on Jewish wit in the twentieth century when the Jewish joke became the subject of serious humanistic inquiry and inserted itself into the cultural and political debates among Germans and Jews against the ideologically charged backdrop of anti-Semitism, the Jewish question, and the Holocaust. The first in-depth study to explore the Jewish joke as a crucial rhetorical figure in larger cultural debates in Germany, author Louis Kaplan presents an engrossing and lucid work of scholarship that examines how “der jüdische Witz” (referring to both Jewish wit and jokes) was utilized differently in a number of texts, from the Weimar Republic to the rise of National Socialism, and how it was re-introduced into the public sphere after the Holocaust with the controversial publication of Salcia Landmann’s collection of Jewish jokes in the reparations era (Wiedergutmachung). Kaplan reviews the claims made about the Jewish joke and its provocative laughter by notable writers from a variety of ideological perspectives, demonstrating how their reflections on this complex cultural trope enable a better understanding of German–Jewish intercultural relations and their eventual breakdown in the Third Reich. He also illustrates how selfcritical and self-ironic Jewish Witz maintained a fraught and ambivalent relationship with anti-Semitism. In reviewing this critical and traumatic moment in modern German–Jewish history through the deadly discourse on the Jewish joke, At Wit’s End includes chapters on the virulent Austrian anti-Semitic racial theorist Arthur Trebitsch, the Nazi racial propagandist Siegfried Kadner, the German Marxist cultural historian Eduard Fuchs, the Jewish diasporic historian Erich Kahler, and the Jewish cabaret impresario Kurt Robitschek, among others. Shedding new light on anti-Semitism and on the Jewish question leading up to the Holocaust, At Wit’s End provides readers with a unique perspective by which to gain important insights about this crucial historical period that reverberates into the present day, when potentially offensive humor coupled with a toxic political climate and xenophobia can have deadly consequences.

Author : Sue Scheff
Publisher : Health Communications, Inc.
Page : 194 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2008-04-29
Category : Family & Relationships
ISBN : 9780757306976

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Wit's End by Sue Scheff Pdf

A true story tells about a mother who, after realizing the damage done to her daughter upon returning home from a disciplinary educational institution, created an advocacy group to work through the problems of at-risk teenagers and found a way to reconnect with her rebellious daughter using proper methods based on love and understanding. Original. 25,000 first printing.

Author : Sean Zwagerman
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
Page : 255 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2010
Category : Humor
ISBN : 9780822973775

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Wit’s End by Sean Zwagerman Pdf

In Wit’s End, Sean Zwagerman offers an original perspective on women’s use of humor as a performative strategy as seen in works of twentieth-century American literature. He argues that women whose direct, explicit performative speech has been traditionally denied, or not taken seriously, have often turned to humor as a means of communicating with men. The book examines both the potential and limits of women’s humor as a rhetorical strategy in the writings of James Thurber, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy Parker, Edward Albee, Louise Erdrich, and others. For Zwagerman, these texts “talk back” to important arguments in humor studies and speech-act theory. He deconstructs the use of humor in select passages by employing the theories of J. L. Austin, John Searle, Jacques Derrida, Shoshana Felman, J. Hillis Miller, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Zwagerman offers arguments both for and against these approaches while advancing new thinking on humor as the “end”—both the goal and limit—of performative strategy, and as a means of expressing a full range of serious purposes. Zwagerman contends that women’s humor is not solely a subversive act, but instead it should be viewed in the total speech situation through context, motives, and intended audience. Not strictly a transgressive influence, women’s humor is seen as both a social corrective and a reinforcement of established ideologies. Humor has become an epistemology, an “attitude” or slant on one’s relation to society. Zwagerman seeks to broaden the scope of performativity theory beyond the logical pragmatism of deconstruction and looks to the use of humor in literature as a deliberate stylization of experiences found in real-world social structures, and as a tool for change.

Author : Karen Joy Fowler
Publisher : Penguin UK
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2015-03-12
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780141918389

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The Case of the Imaginary Detective by Karen Joy Fowler Pdf

Rima Lanisell has a habit of losing things - car keys, sunglasses, lovers, family members. Following the death of Rima's father, she goes to stay with her godmother Addison, a wildly successful, albeit eccentric, mystery writer. Addison's beach house seems the place to make sense of Rima's loss, yet she is soon caught up in a mystery of her own. Who stole a small and highly valuable object from Addison's kitchen? Why is Rima corresponding with an obsessive fan, using someone else's family name? Most importantly: what exactly was the relationship between Addison and Rima's father, and why did Addison name a murderer after him in one of her novels? A funny, sad and wise literary mystery from the author of The Jane Austen Book Club.

Author : Jeff Jay,Jerry A. Boriskin
Publisher : Hazelden Publishing
Page : 263 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 2007
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 1592853730

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At Wit's End by Jeff Jay,Jerry A. Boriskin Pdf

Presents guidance and encouragement for family members on ways to help loved ones suffering from both psychiatric and addictive disorders.

Author : Stan Brakhage
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 1989
Category : Experimental films
ISBN : UOM:39015015476453

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Film at Wit's End by Stan Brakhage Pdf

Based on lectures that Brakhage gave at the school of the Art Institute of Chicago, this volume portrays eight artists who have electrified American independent cinema across four decades. With characteristic directness, anecdotal style, and wry humor, Brakhage, himself an influential American independent filmmaker, brings into sharp focus the life and work of Jerome Hill, Marie Menken, James Brouhgton, Maya Deren, Ken Jacobs, Sidney Peterson, Bruce Conner, and Christopher MacLaine. He also portrays the art scenes of New York and San Francisco during times of ferment and controversy. ISBN 0-914232-99-1: $20.00.

Author : Stephanie S. Tolan
Publisher : Harper Collins
Page : 167 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2012-05-08
Category : Juvenile Fiction
ISBN : 9780062213372

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Applewhites at Wit's End by Stephanie S. Tolan Pdf

Jack Semple and E.D. Applewhite are back, in this middle-grade sequel to Stephanie S. Tolan’s Newbery Honor Book Surviving the Applewhites. Teenager E.D., the not so artistic, not at all eccentric member of the unconventional Applewhite clan, can't believe the plan her father has hatched to save the family from financial disaster. He’s decided to transform their rural North Carolina farm into a summer camp for creative children. Soon the farm is packed with temperamental artists, out-of-control campers, and an even more out-of-control goat. It's all a little too much for structure-loving E.D., even before threatening notes begin appearing in the family mailbox. Together with Jake Semple--the boy who survived his first year in the Applewhites' home school—she's determined to save the camp and the family from disaster. Like Carl Hiassan’s Chomp, Applewhites at Wit's End combines outrageous humor and the frustrations and joys of being part of a family.

Author : Stephanie S. Tolan
Publisher : Harper Collins
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2012-04-24
Category : Juvenile Fiction
ISBN : 9780062213365

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Surviving the Applewhites by Stephanie S. Tolan Pdf

The side-splittingly funny Newbery Honor Book about a rebellious boy who is sent to a home-schooling program run by one family—the creative, kooky, loud, and loving Applewhites! Jake Semple is notorious. Rumor has it he managed to get kicked out of every school in Rhode Island, and actually burned the last one down to the ground. Only one place will take him now, and that's a home school run by the Applewhites, a chaotic and hilarious family of artists: poet Lucille, theater director Randolph, dancer Cordelia, and dreamy Destiny. The only one who doesn't fit the Applewhite mold is E.D.—a smart, sensible girl who immediately clashes with the defiant Jake. Jake thinks surviving this new school will be a breeze . . . but is he really as tough or as bad as he seems?

Author : Allison Engel,Margaret Engel
Publisher : Samuel French, Incorporated
Page : 36 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2016
Category : Drama
ISBN : 0573705038

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Erma Bombeck by Allison Engel,Margaret Engel Pdf

"From the writers of the smash hit Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins comes a comic look at one of our country's most beloved voices. Erma Bombeck captured the frustrations of her generation by asking, "If life is a bowl of cherries, what am I doing in the pits?" Discover the story behind America's most beloved humorist who championed women's lives with wit that sprang from the most unexpected place of all - the truth."

Author : Stephen L. Newman
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 192 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 1984
Category : Liberalism
ISBN : UOM:39015008282454

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Liberalism at Wits' End by Stephen L. Newman Pdf