Reading for Life
A Crash Course in Figuring Out Your Passion and Purpose Through the World's Great Works
Book
Hardback
256 pages
978-0-06-282584-1 (ISBN)
Description
Drawing on the wisdom of history's greatest intellects, from Aristotle and Augustine to Simone de Beauvoir and Barack Obama, an entertaining and inspirational manual for cultivating a satisfying life-and a timely and thoughtful defense of the liberal arts-based on Stanford University's popular Education as Self-Fashioning Program.
Education has long helped men and women around the world widen their understanding, improve their circumstances, and ultimately develop a satisfying conception of life itself. By following the examples set forth in the great works of civilization, the curious and adventurous, the intrepid and determined alike, have discovered how to cultivate and enjoy gratifying lives of curiosity, passion, purpose, and endless opportunity. Today, however, when a liberal arts education is overwhelmingly dismissed as impractical and elitist, the examination of timeless and tested ideas is considered a roadblock for students pursuing good-paying jobs, rather than an invaluable key to future success and a model for a gratifying existence.
In Reading for Life, Stanford University Professors Blair Hoxby and Caroline Hoxby show how-and why-these lessons in the art of living not only still apply, but are arguably more important than ever. Building on their interdisciplinary Education as Self-Fashioning Program at Stanford, which invites undergraduate students to wrestle with the world's greatest thinkers as they embark on their own specialized fields of study, the Hoxbys take readers on a guided tour through the world's greatest minds in literature, mathematics, philosophy, economics, and political science to offer insight and practical takeaways on how to develop a satisfying and sustainable concept of life. Throughout, they interweaves personal and professional anecdotes and contemporary stories from politics, pop culture, and social movements to illustrate how timeless ideals continue to be put into practice today.
Practical, informative, and inspiring, Reading for Life calls on readers to design their own self-defined principles for living a fulfilling existence and offers a blueprint for pursuing and perfecting that life in rewarding ways, at any age or any stage.
Education has long helped men and women around the world widen their understanding, improve their circumstances, and ultimately develop a satisfying conception of life itself. By following the examples set forth in the great works of civilization, the curious and adventurous, the intrepid and determined alike, have discovered how to cultivate and enjoy gratifying lives of curiosity, passion, purpose, and endless opportunity. Today, however, when a liberal arts education is overwhelmingly dismissed as impractical and elitist, the examination of timeless and tested ideas is considered a roadblock for students pursuing good-paying jobs, rather than an invaluable key to future success and a model for a gratifying existence.
In Reading for Life, Stanford University Professors Blair Hoxby and Caroline Hoxby show how-and why-these lessons in the art of living not only still apply, but are arguably more important than ever. Building on their interdisciplinary Education as Self-Fashioning Program at Stanford, which invites undergraduate students to wrestle with the world's greatest thinkers as they embark on their own specialized fields of study, the Hoxbys take readers on a guided tour through the world's greatest minds in literature, mathematics, philosophy, economics, and political science to offer insight and practical takeaways on how to develop a satisfying and sustainable concept of life. Throughout, they interweaves personal and professional anecdotes and contemporary stories from politics, pop culture, and social movements to illustrate how timeless ideals continue to be put into practice today.
Practical, informative, and inspiring, Reading for Life calls on readers to design their own self-defined principles for living a fulfilling existence and offers a blueprint for pursuing and perfecting that life in rewarding ways, at any age or any stage.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Publishing group
HarperCollins Publishers Inc
Dimensions
Height: 210 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 23 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-06-282584-1 (9780062825841)
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
BLAIR HOXBY is a professor at Stanford University, where he runs the school's popular Education as Self-Fashioning Program for undergraduates. He is the author of What Was Tragedy? Theory and the Early Modern Canon (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Mammon's Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton (Yale University Press, 2002), and editor of Milton in the Long Restoration (Oxford University Press, May 2016), a collection of twenty-nine original essays that analyze the way authors writing from 1650 to 1750 interpreted, imitated, and parodied Milton. A graduate of Harvard University, he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where he earned his master's degree in English, before earning his doctoral degree in English and American literature at Yale University.
CAROLINE HOXBY is an award-winning professor of Economics at Stanford University, a world leading scholar in the Economics of Education, and one of the architects of Stanford's Education as Self-Fashioning program. She is also the Director of the Economics of Education Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Caroline has received multiple honors, including the John and Lydia Pearce Mitchell University Fellowship, Stanford Economics Teacher of the Year, and a Phi Beta Kappa prize. She has a Ph.D. from MIT, has studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and obtained her baccalaureate degree from Harvard University.
CAROLINE HOXBY is an award-winning professor of Economics at Stanford University, a world leading scholar in the Economics of Education, and one of the architects of Stanford's Education as Self-Fashioning program. She is also the Director of the Economics of Education Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Caroline has received multiple honors, including the John and Lydia Pearce Mitchell University Fellowship, Stanford Economics Teacher of the Year, and a Phi Beta Kappa prize. She has a Ph.D. from MIT, has studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and obtained her baccalaureate degree from Harvard University.