Classic Painting Atelier by Juliette Aristides
A Contemporary Guide to Traditional Studio Practice
Want to paint like Rembrandt– and not like “modern artists” like Pollock? Read this beautifully illustrated and exquisitely written book.
Between Parent and Child by Haim Ginott
“No parent wakes up in the morning planning to make a child’s life miserable. No mother or father says, ‘Today I’ll yell, nag, and humiliate my child whenever possible.’ On the contrary, in the morning many parents resolve, ‘This is going to be a peaceful day. No yelling, no arguing, and no fighting.’ Yet, in spite of good intentions, the unwanted war breaks out again.” […]
“What do we say to a guest who forgets her umbrella? Do we run after her and say “What is the matter with you? Every time you come to visit you forget something. If it’s not one thing it’s another. Why can’t you be like your sister? When she comes to visit, she knows how to behave. You’re forty-four years old! Will you never learn? I’m not a slave to pick up after you! I bet you’d forget your head if it weren’t attached to your shoulders.” That’s not what we say to a guest. We say “Here’s your umbrella, Alice,” without adding “scatterbrain.” Parents need to learn to respond to their children as they do to guests.” – Haim Ginott
According to Dr. Ginott’s parenting is a skill that can be learned via a series of communication techniques that allow the parent to:
- discipline without bribes, sarcasm, and punishment,
- criticize without demeaning,
- express anger without alienating,
- acknowledge rather than argue with a child’s feelings,
- respond so that children will learn to trust and develop self-confidence.
Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future By Johan Norberg
“Johan Norberg offers an illuminating and heartening analysis of just how far we have come in tackling the greatest problems facing humanity. In the face of fear-mongering, darkness and division, the facts are unequivocal: the golden age is now.”
The Innovators by Walter Isaacson
How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
The Innovators is the story of the people who created the computer and the Internet. Isaacson begins with Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter, who pioneered computer programming in the 1840s, moving on to Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, J.C.R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Robert Noyce, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Tim Berners-Lee, and Larry Page.
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orzcy
“Armed with only his wits and his cunning, one man recklessly defies the French revolutionaries and rescues scores of innocent men, women, and children from the deadly guillotine. His friends and foes know him only as the Scarlet Pimpernel. But the ruthless French agent Chauvelin is sworn to discover his identity and to hunt him down.”
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
An illuminating and entertaining “big picture” history of scientific discovery from the time of the ancient greeks to Einstein and the 20th century, from quarks to distant galaxies, covers topics from every scientific field from physics and chemistry to cosmology and evolution.
The Mad Scientists’ Club
“Take seven, lively, “normal” boys — one an inventive genius — give them a clubhouse for cooking up ideas, an electronics lab above the town hardware store, and a good supply of Army surplus equipment, and you, dear reader, have a boyhood dream come true and a situation that bears watching. In the hands of an author whose own work involved technological pioneering, the proceedings are well worth undivided attention, as the boys explore every conceivable possibility for high and happy adventure in the neighborhood of Mammoth Falls.”
The Mad Scientists’ Club by Bertrand Brinley presents the adventures of a group of scientific wiz-kids.
Ethnic America: A History
Thomas Sowell follows the history of nine American ethnic groups — the Irish, Germans, Jews, Italians, Chinese, African-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans, and their journey to become Americans.
The Logical Leap: Induction in Physics
Integrating philosophy with the history of science, David Harriman presents a solution to the problem of induction, based on Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts.
Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution
“In the tumultuous late 60s and early 70s, a social movement known as the “New Left” emerged as a major cultural influence, especially on the youth of America. It was a movement that embraced “flower-power” and psychedelic “consciousness-expansion,” that lionized Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro and launched the Black Panthers and the Theater of the Absurd.”
In Return Of The Primitive (originally published in 1971 as The New Left), Ayn Rand identified the intellectual roots of this movement. She urged people to repudiate its mindless nihilism and to uphold, instead, a philosophy of reason, individualism, capitalism, and technological progress. Return Of The Primitive includes additional essays by Peter Schwartz.