Ancient Poetry

I remeber when for the first time I read Ancient Poetry and I was so entranced to how much is not changed in some aspects of the human connection, love, disappointments and hope.
Here is a short synopsis:

The Greek lyric, elegiac, and iambic poets of the two centuries from 650 to 450 B.C.–greats such as Sappho, Anacreon, and Simonides–produced some of the finest poetry of antiquity. Their poetry was perfect in form, spontaneous in expression, and reflected all the joys and anxieties of their personal lives and of the societies in which they lived. This new poetic translation by a leading expert captures the nuances of meaning and the whole spirit of this poetry as never before. Not merely a selection, it covers all the surviving poems and intelligible fragments (apart from the works of Pindar and Bacchylides) and includes a number of pieces not previously translated. Also included is an introduction offering a brief account of the poets, as well as explanatory notes on the texts.

Classical Literature

One of the all-time-classics is the masterpiece of Dostoevsky’s crime drama: “Crime and Punishment”.

The two years before he wrote Crime and Punishment (1866) had been bad ones for Dostoyevsky. His wife and brother had died; the magazine he and his brother had started, Epoch, collapsed under its load of debt; and he was threatened with debtor’s prison. With an advance that he managed to wangle for an unwritten novel, he fled to Wiesbaden, hoping to win enough at the roulette table to get himself out of debt. Instead, he lost all his money; he had to pawn his clothes and beg friends for loans to pay his hotel bill and get back to Russia. One of his begging letters went to a magazine editor, asking for an advance on yet another unwritten novel — which he described as Crime and Punishment.

Philosophy

There are too many great minds to be picked here, so I found this anthology with basic explanations of what formed the world of ideas from antiquity untill now.

Philosophy 101 cuts out the boring details and exhausting philosophical methodology, and instead, gives you a lesson in philosophy that keeps you engaged as you explore the fascinating history of human thought and inquisition.

From Aristotle and Heidegger to free will and metaphysics, Philosophy 101 is packed with hundreds of entertaining philosophical tidbits, illustrations, and thought puzzles that you won’t be able to find anywhere else.

Psychology

I was going to write about the Big Names like Freud or Kant, but in the other article the last point was “Be the Change”. So in this spirit, I recommend this book to extract the mind-pattern of building blocks if you use them correctly.

The Psychology Book is your visual guide to the complex and fascinating world of human behavior. Discover how we learn, become emotionally bonded with others, and develop coping mechanisms to deal with adversity, or conform in a group. Get to know key thinkers, from Freud and Jung to Elizabeth Loftus and Melanie Klein, and follow charts and timelines to make sense of it all and see how one theory influenced another.

With concise explanations of different schools of psychology including psychotherapy, cognitive psychology and behaviorism, this is an ideal reference whether you’re a student, or a general reader. It’s your authoritative guide to over 100 key ideas, theories and conditions, including the collective unconscious, the “selfish” gene, false memory, psychiatric disorders, and autism.

Science

Here I will give you one name… And what a name it is! It speaks for itself and I was fascinated with his theories. This is one of those Names that made me look in the night sky.
And I am placing here the longest presentation of this article:

In the years since its publication in 1988, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History Of Time has established itself as a landmark volume in scientific writing.  It has become an international publishing phenomenon, translated into forty languages and selling over nine million copies.  The book was on the cutting edge of what was then known about the nature of the universe, but since that time there have been extraordinary advances in the technology of macrocosmic worlds.  These observations have confirmed many of Professor Hawkin’s theoretical predictions in the first edition of his book, including the recent discoveries of the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite (COBE), which probed back in time to within 300,000 years of the fabric of space-time that he had projected.

Eager to bring to his original text the new knowledge revealed by these many observations, as well as his recent research, for this expanded edition Professor Hawking has prepared a new introduction to the book, written an entirely new chapter on the fascinating subject of wormholes and time travel, and updated the original chapters.

In addition, to heighten understanding of complex concepts that readers may have found difficult to grasp despite the clarity and wit of Professor Hawking’s writing, this edition is enhanced throughout with more than 240 full-color illustrations, including satellite images, photographs made made possible by spectacular technological advance such as the Hubble Space Telescope, and computer generated images of three and four-dimensional realities.  Detailed captions clarify these illustrations, enable readers to experience the vastness of intergalactic space, the nature of black holes, and the microcosmic world of particle physics in which matters and antimatter collide.

A classic work that now brings to the reader the latest understanding of cosmology, A Brief History Of Time is the story of the ongoing search for t he tantalizing secrets at the heart of time and space.