Benjamin Books

01/24/2019

Welcome to the Weird Book Room on AbeBooks, where you'll find some of the most funny and bizarre books, the world has ever known.

01/21/2019

LOGOS Journal, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2018), Walter Benjamin: https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&nv=1&rurl=translate.google.ca&sl=ru&sp=nmt4&tl=en&u=http://logosjournal.ru/cgi-bin/arch.pl%3Faction%3Dshow%26id%3D98%26lang%3Dru&xid=17259,15700002,15700019,15700124,15700126,15700186,15700190,15700201,15700248&usg=ALkJrhhV6Ha8XEINArDfnQwCjK5Y0orRwQ

01/16/2019

Each of these titles represents an energizing alternative to the ripped-apart illogic of our contemporary reality.

01/14/2019

Tidying guru Marie Kondo advises us to ditch reading we don’t find joyful. But one’s personal library should do much more than anthologise warm feelings

01/11/2019

Mladen Dolar is a senior research fellow in the department of philosophy at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, and a writer on a huge array of cultural topics. Along with Slavoj Žižek and…

01/11/2019

How should we read great literature from the past whose moral blind spots offend us?

01/11/2019

Blisteringly ironic review of a pile of nonsense!

“There’s a rich irony at the heart of the old radical campus cliché. During the postwar period, conservatives feared that higher education was fomenting leftist revolution. In reality, elite institutions like Berkeley and Yale were enshrining meritocracy as the official rule of American life, while more quietly preserving the advantages that come with money. Higher education prepares students to succeed within a competitive, stratified American society, not change it. The fear is always that today’s radicals will implement their ideas tomorrow. Or, in Mac Donald’s words, “a pipeline now channels left-wing academic theorizing into the highest reaches of government and the media.” But will those who attain “the highest reaches of government and media” really be interested in tearing the heights down? It didn’t happen in the 1960s. It didn’t happen in the 1990s. Don’t count on it this time, either.
“So why does Mac Donald insist otherwise? Why are conservatives still so afraid of higher education after all these years? Most obviously, demagoging higher education works political wonders. It’s not only Buckley and Mac Donald who sell books against higher education; politicians from Nixon and Reagan to Scott Walker and Donald Trump have sold their campaigns that way, too. While lambasting egg-headed professors, they can both pose as populists and promise tax cuts for the rich.”

A book predicting the imminent threat to American civilization from its own universities is only the latest rewrite of an old falsehood.

01/04/2019

Get ready to curl up with a bumper crop of new thrillers, romcoms, memoirs and thought-provoking commentary.

01/04/2019

We asked CanLit's most buzzed about authors to pick their favourite reads this year

01/01/2019

Happy New Year!

Works by Marcel Proust, Willa Cather, D.H. Lawrence, Agatha Christie and Robert Frost are entering the public domain on Jan. 1. And that’s just the first wave.