Wits End

Author : James Geary
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 039325495X
Total Pages : 128 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Wit's End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It written by James Geary and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A witty book about wit that steers an elegant path between waggishness and wisdom." —Stephen Fry Much more than a knack for snappy comebacks, wit is the quick, instinctive intelligence that allows us to think, say, or do the right thing at the right time in the right place. In this whimsical book, James Geary explores every facet of wittiness, from its role in innovation to why puns are the highest form of wit. Geary reasons that wit is both visual and verbal, physical and intellectual: there’s the serendipitous wit of scientists, the crafty wit of inventors, the optical wit of artists, and the metaphysical wit of philosophers. In Wit’s End, Geary embraces wit in every form by adopting a different style for each chapter; he writes the section on verbal repartee as a dramatic dialogue, the neuroscience of wit as a scientific paper, the spirituality of wit as a sermon, and other chapters in jive, rap, and the heroic couplets of Alexander Pope. Wit’s End agilely balances psychology, folktales, visual art, and literary history with lighthearted humor and acute insight, drawing upon traditions of wit from around the world. Entertaining, illuminating, and entirely unique, Wit’s End demonstrates that wit and wisdom are really the same thing.

Author : Erma Bombeck
Publisher : Fawcett
ISBN 13 : 030777824X
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book At Wit's End written by Erma Bombeck and published by Fawcett. This book was released on 2011-02-02 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "America's irrepressible doyenne of domestic satire." THE BOSTON GLOBE Madcap, bittersweet humor in classic Erma Bombeck-style. You'll laugh until it hurts and love it! "Any mother with half a skull knows that when Daddy's little boy becomes Mommy's little boy, the kid is so wet, he's treading water. What do you mean you're a participle in the school play and you need a costume? Those rotten kids. If only they'd let me wake up in my own way. Why do they have to line up along my bed and stare at me like Moby Dick just washed up onto a beach somewhere?"

Author : St. Clair McKelway
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1608191230
Total Pages : 640 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Reporting at Wit's End written by St. Clair McKelway and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-07-22 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Why does A. J. Liebling remain a vibrant role model for writers while the superb, prolific St. Clair McKelway has been sorely forgotten?" James Wolcott asked this question in a recent review of the Complete New Yorker on DVD. Anyone who has read a single paragraph of McKelway's work would struggle to provide an answer. His articles for the New Yorker were defined by their clean language and incomporable wit, by his love of New York's rough edges and his affection for the working man (whether that work was come by honestly or not). Like Joseph Mitchell and A. J. Liebling, McKelway combined the unflagging curiosity of a great reporter with the narrative flair of a master storyteller. William Shawn, the magazine's long-time editor, described him as a writer with the "lightest of light touches." His style is so striking, Shawn went on to say, that "it was too odd to be imitated." The pieces collected here are drawn from two of McKelway's books--True Tales from the Annals of Crime and Rascality (1951) and The Big Little Man from Brooklyn (1969). His subjects are the small players who in their particulars defined life in New York during the 36 years McKelway wrote: the junkmen, boxing cornermen, counterfeiters, con artists, fire marshals, priests, and beat cops and detectives. The "rascals." An amazing portrait of a long forgotten New York by the reporter who helped establish and utterly defined New Yorker "fact writing," Untitled Collection is long overdue celebration of a truly gifted writer.

Author : Karen Joy Fowler
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0452290066
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Wit's End written by Karen Joy Fowler and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-04-28 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “delightful and eccentric new tale”(The Boston Globe) from the bestselling author of The Jane Austen Book Club subverts the whodunit and gives us a thoroughly modern meta-mystery with wit, warmth, and heart. At loose ends and weary from her recent losses—the deaths of an inventive if at times irritating father and her beloved brother—Rima Lansill comes to Wit's End, the home of her legendary godmother, bestselling mystery writer Addison Early, to regroup...and in search of answers. For starters, why did Addison name one of her characters—a murderer—after Rima's father? But Addison is secretive and feisty, so consumed with protecting her famous fictional detective, Maxwell Lane, from the vagaries of the Internet rumor that she has writer's block. As one woman searches for truth, the other struggles to control the reality of her fiction. Rima soon becomes enmeshed in Addison's household of eccentrics: a formerly alcoholic cook and her irksome son, two quirky dog-walkers, a mysterious stalker, the tiny characters that populate Addison's dollhouse crime-scene replicas, and even Maxwell Lane himself. But, wrapped up in a mystery that may or may not be of her own creation, Rima discovers to her surprise that the ultimate solution to this puzzle is the new family she has found at the house called Wit's End. Here, Karen Joy Fowler delivers top-notch storytelling—creating characters both oddball and endearing in a voice that is utterly and memorably her own—in this clever, playful novel about finally allowing oneself to grow up-with a dash of mystery thrown in.

Author : Sue Scheff
Publisher : Health Communications, Inc.
ISBN 13 : 0757306977
Total Pages : 194 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Wit's End written by Sue Scheff and published by Health Communications, Inc.. This book was released on 2008-04-29 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A true story tells about a mother who, after realizing the damage done to her daughter upon returning home from a disciplinary educational institution, created an advocacy group to work through the problems of at-risk teenagers and found a way to reconnect with her rebellious daughter using proper methods based on love and understanding. Original. 25,000 first printing.

Author : Edward Dutton
Publisher : Andrews UK Limited
ISBN 13 : 1845409965
Total Pages : 302 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book At Our Wits' End written by Edward Dutton and published by Andrews UK Limited. This book was released on 2018-12-20 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are becoming less intelligent. This is the shocking yet fascinating message of At Our Wits' End. The authors take us on a journey through the growing body of evidence that we are significantly less intelligent now than we were a hundred years ago. The research proving this is, at once, profoundly thought-provoking, highly controversial, and it's currently only read by academics. But the authors are passionate that it cannot remain ensconced in the ivory tower any longer. With At Our Wits' End, they present the first ever popular scientific book on this crucially important issue. They prove that intelligence — which is strongly genetic — was increasing up until the breakthrough of the Industrial Revolution, because we were subject to the rigors of Darwinian Selection, meaning that lots of surviving children was the preserve of the cleverest. But since then, they show, intelligence has gone into rapid decline, because large families are increasingly the preserve of the least intelligent. The book explores how this change has occurred and, crucially, what its consequences will be for the future. Can we find a way of reversing the decline of our IQ? Or will we witness the collapse of civilization and the rise of a new Dark Age?

Author : Jeff Jay
Publisher : Hazelden Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9781592853731
Total Pages : 263 pages
Book Rating : 4.30/5 ( download)

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Download or read book At Wit's End written by Jeff Jay and published by Hazelden Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents guidance and encouragement for family members on ways to help loved ones suffering from both psychiatric and addictive disorders.

Author : Karen Joy Fowler
Publisher : Penguin UK
ISBN 13 : 0141918381
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Case of the Imaginary Detective written by Karen Joy Fowler and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2015-03-12 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rima Lanisell has a habit of losing things - car keys, sunglasses, lovers, family members. Following the death of Rima's father, she goes to stay with her godmother Addison, a wildly successful, albeit eccentric, mystery writer. Addison's beach house seems the place to make sense of Rima's loss, yet she is soon caught up in a mystery of her own. Who stole a small and highly valuable object from Addison's kitchen? Why is Rima corresponding with an obsessive fan, using someone else's family name? Most importantly: what exactly was the relationship between Addison and Rima's father, and why did Addison name a murderer after him in one of her novels? A funny, sad and wise literary mystery from the author of The Jane Austen Book Club.

Author : Stephanie S. Tolan
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 0062213377
Total Pages : 167 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Applewhites at Wit's End written by Stephanie S. Tolan and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-05-08 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jack Semple and E.D. Applewhite are back, in this middle-grade sequel to Stephanie S. Tolan’s Newbery Honor Book Surviving the Applewhites. Teenager E.D., the not so artistic, not at all eccentric member of the unconventional Applewhite clan, can't believe the plan her father has hatched to save the family from financial disaster. He’s decided to transform their rural North Carolina farm into a summer camp for creative children. Soon the farm is packed with temperamental artists, out-of-control campers, and an even more out-of-control goat. It's all a little too much for structure-loving E.D., even before threatening notes begin appearing in the family mailbox. Together with Jake Semple--the boy who survived his first year in the Applewhites' home school—she's determined to save the camp and the family from disaster. Like Carl Hiassan’s Chomp, Applewhites at Wit's End combines outrageous humor and the frustrations and joys of being part of a family.

Author : Sean Zwagerman
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN 13 : 0822973774
Total Pages : 255 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Wit’s End written by Sean Zwagerman and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Wit’s End, Sean Zwagerman offers an original perspective on women’s use of humor as a performative strategy as seen in works of twentieth-century American literature. He argues that women whose direct, explicit performative speech has been traditionally denied, or not taken seriously, have often turned to humor as a means of communicating with men. The book examines both the potential and limits of women’s humor as a rhetorical strategy in the writings of James Thurber, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy Parker, Edward Albee, Louise Erdrich, and others. For Zwagerman, these texts “talk back” to important arguments in humor studies and speech-act theory. He deconstructs the use of humor in select passages by employing the theories of J. L. Austin, John Searle, Jacques Derrida, Shoshana Felman, J. Hillis Miller, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Zwagerman offers arguments both for and against these approaches while advancing new thinking on humor as the “end”—both the goal and limit—of performative strategy, and as a means of expressing a full range of serious purposes. Zwagerman contends that women’s humor is not solely a subversive act, but instead it should be viewed in the total speech situation through context, motives, and intended audience. Not strictly a transgressive influence, women’s humor is seen as both a social corrective and a reinforcement of established ideologies. Humor has become an epistemology, an “attitude” or slant on one’s relation to society. Zwagerman seeks to broaden the scope of performativity theory beyond the logical pragmatism of deconstruction and looks to the use of humor in literature as a deliberate stylization of experiences found in real-world social structures, and as a tool for change.