Helen Plum Library

"As David Brooks observes, "There is one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen--to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood." And yet we humans don't do this well. All around us are people who feel invisible, unseen, misunderstood. In How to Know a Person, Brooks sets out to help us do better,...

A philosophy grounded not in a transcendent divinity, afterlife, or individualism, but in a rooted communal life.--

"Lessons of connection, alliance, and adaptation from encounters with and observations of a wide variety of animals"--

"Rubin loves the beautiful sounds that are played by the orchestra. He wants to learn to play the violin and make his own music. But when Rubin plays, it doesn't sound like he imagines it should. Rubin goes into the forest to practice alone and despite only getting the violin to screech, he finds an unlikely audience that loves his unique style"--

"From the 2021 Nobel Prize winner in Physics, an enlightening and personal journey into the practice of groundbreaking science. In a Flight of Starlings, already a #1 bestseller in his native Italy, celebrated physicist Giorgio Parisi guides us through his unorthodox yet exhilarating work: investigating the principles of physics by observing the flight of flocks of birds. Studying the movements of these communities, he has realized, proves an illuminating...

Discover all the many ways that nothing is really something! This mind-bendingly clever picture book about a visit to the Museum of Nothing will have curious readers marveling and laughing along

"Over Plato's Academy in ancient Athens, it is said, hung a sign: "Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here." Plato thought no one could do philosophy without also doing mathematics. In The Waltz of Reason, mathematician and philosopher Karl Sigmund shows us why. Charting an epic story spanning millennia and continents, Sigmund shows that philosophy and mathematics are inextricably intertwined, mutual partners in a reeling search for truth. Beginning...

"In this luminous narrative, the story of the Moon traverses time and space, rendering a range of human experiences--from the beliefs of ancient cultures to the science of Galileo's telescopic discoveries, from the obsessions of colorful 19th-century 'selenographers' to the astronauts of Apollo and now, Artemis. Still as Bright also traces Christopher Cokino's own lunar pilgrimage. With his backyard telescope, he explores the surface of the Moon,...

Since its original publication in 1929, Martin Heidegger's provocative book on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason has attracted much attention both as an important contribution to twentieth-century Kant scholarship and as a pivotal work in Heidegger's own development after Being and Time. This fifth, enlarged edition includes marginal notations made by Heidegger in his personal copy of the book and four new appendices-Heidegger's post publication notes...