On The Contrary

Paul and Patricia Churchland take on their criticsâ__with verve,combativeness, and generosity.

On The Contrary contains a balance of writings by men and women. The essays are presented in pairs, a man and a woman writing on each topic. This balanced juxtaposition allows students to discuss, think, and write about changing roles and relationships without being forced into either a feminist or traditionalist party line. The essays in each section reverberate suggestively with each other and this effect is reinforced by the discussion questions, writing topics, and introductory material. An additional table of contents arranges the essays according to rhetorical rubrics.

DIVDIVMary McCarthy, one of our most brilliant and beloved authors, serves up wit, insight, and her unique worldview in this diverse collection of essays/divDIV In provocatively titled pieces such as “The Contagion of Ideas,” “Tyranny of the Orgasm,” and “No News, or,What Killed the Dog,” Mary McCarthy expresses her frank, unflinching, often contrarian point of view./divDIV Nothing—and no one—is safe from her merciless writer’s eye—from politics to the ever-changing social scene to the strengths and weaknesses of her native country, where she believes “passivity and not aggressiveness is the dominant trait of the American character.” On the Contrary also features a cast of memorable characters. In “Naming Names,” Arthur Miller’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee results in an indictment for contempt of Congress. McCarthy reviews The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt’s breakthrough book, and despairs of finding a “really American place” to take a visiting existentialist—a thinly disguised Simone de Beauvoir? /divDIV From Dickens to Gandhi to the Kinsey Reports, with pithy and wide-ranging articles on everything from fashion to fiction, the human condition, religion, and sex, On the Contrary raises controversial questions to which, even today, there are no easy answers./div This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author’s estate. /div

The memoirs of former Opposition leader Tony Leon provide a unique glimpse into the political life of South Africa in the democratic era. In incisive, finely focused prose, On the Contrary records Leon's thirteen-year leadership of the Democratic Alliance and its predecessor, the Democratic Party, years in which the party grew from its marginal position on the brink of political extinction into the second largest political force in South Africa. This is an adventure in ideas that involves vivid real people - friends, colleagues and enemies alike. There is new light shed on many of the figures who have shaped modern South Africa, including Nelson Mandela, FW de Klerk and Thabo Mbeki. A trained lawyer, Tony Leon entered Parliament at age 32 at the dawn of South Africa's period of revolution and reform. He actively participated in the constitutional negotiations that led to the birth of the democratic South Africa.

Mark A. Henry's acclaimed debut novel takes place in the thin slice of time between the present day and the dystopian future we've been reading so much about. Chris Dawkins, a young man of uncertain everything, finds himself in the FBI's crosshairs when he accidentally signs the online Terms and Conditions to join an Islamic extremist group. (And I suppose YOU read all the fine print?) With the help of his billionaire boss Jasper Wiles and badass attorney Biz Byner, Chris must thread a narrow path to freedom, squeezing through the colliding worlds of law enforcement, the news media, Silicon Valley, entrepreneurial jihadists, teenage dark web nuclear arms dealers, rogue military officers, street hustlers and side hustlers, living their own truths all. One part thriller, one part action-adventure, one part buddy comedy and nine parts social and political satire, Lacking Evidence to the Contrary examines the age-old struggle between uncertainty and conviction in a postmodern world where nothing is as it seems.

This remarkable collection of letters reveals the debate over universal human rights. Prominent mid-twentieth-century intellectuals and leaders--including Gandhi, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Arnold Schoenberg--engaged with the question of universal human rights. Letters to the Contrary presents the foundation of the intellectual struggles and ideological doubts still present in today's human rights debates. Since its adoption in 1948, historians and human rights scholars have claimed that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was influenced by UNESCO's 1947-48 global survey of intellectuals, theologians, and cultural and political leaders, that supposedly demonstrated a truly universal consensus on human rights. Based on meticulous archival research, Letters to the Contrary provides a curated history of the UNESCO human rights survey and demonstrates its relevance to contemporary debates over the origins, legitimacy, and universality of human rights. In collecting, annotating, and analyzing these responses, including letters and responses that were omitted and polite refusals to respond, Mark Goodale shows that the UNESCO human rights survey was much less than supposed, but also much more. In many ways, the intellectual struggles, moral questions, and ideological doubts among the different participants who both organized and responded to the survey reveal a strikingly critical and contemporary orientation, raising similar questions at the center of current debates surrounding human rights scholarship and practice. This volume contains letters and survey responses from Jacques Havet, Jacques Maritain, Arnold J. Lien, Richard P. Mckeon, Quincy Wright, Levi Carneiro, Arthur H. Compton, Charles E. Merriam, Lewis Mumford, E. H. Carr, John Lewis, Harold J. Laski, Serge Hessen, John Somerville, Boris Tchechko, Luc Somerhausen, Hyman Levy, Ture Nerman, R. Palme Dutt, Maurice Dobb, Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, Marcel De Corte, Pedro Troncoso Sánchez, Mahatma Gandhi, Chung-Shu Lo, Kurt Riezler, Inocenc Arnost Bláha, Hubert Frère, M. Nicolay, W. Albert Noyes, Jr., Aldous Huxley, Ralph W. Gerard, Johannes M. Burgers, Humayun Kabir, A. P. Elkin, S. V. Puntambekar, Leonard Barnes, Benedetto Croce, Jean Haesart, F. S. C. Northrop, Peter Skov, Emmanuel Mounier, Maurice Webb, John Macmurray, Julius Moór, L. Horváth, Alfred Weber, Don Salvador De Madariaga, Frank R. Scott, Jawaharlal Nehru, Margery Fry, Isaac Leon Kandel, René Maheu, Albert Szent-Györgyi, Morris L. Ernst, Arnold Schoenberg, W. H. Auden, Melville Herskovits, Theodore Johannes Haarhoff, Ernest Henry Burgmann, Herbert Read, and T. S. Eliot.

Coriander the contrary hen sits, refusing to move, in the middle of the road causing a traffic jam until one clever little girl comes up with a solution.