CONTENTS
PREFACE: The Humanistic Meanings of Life vi
1. The Tragic Sense of Life and the Dawn of Humanism — 3
Homer: The Iliad
2. Control Yourself — 23
Hinduism: Bhagavad-Gita
Buddhism: Dhammapada
3. What Do You Know? How Do You Know It? Why Should You Care? — 41
Plato: Euthyphro; Apology; Crito; Phaedo
4. Living the Good Life — 61
Aristotle: Ethics
5. The Moral Landscape of Hell — 78
Dante Alighieri: The Divine Comedy: The Inferno
6. Growing Up Naturally — 100
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Emile
7. Enough? Never! — 121
Johann von Goethe: Faust
8. From the Maggot Man to the Superman — 136
Friedrich Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morals
9. Condemned to Be Free
Fyodor Dostoevsky: “The Grand Inquisitor”
Jean-Paul Sartre: Existentialism
10. Find the Right Way, Do the Right Thing — 173
Confucianism: The Analects; The Great Learning;
The Doctrine of the Mean
Taoism: Tao te Ching; Chuang Tzu
11. How to Succeed in the Business of Life — 191
Niccoló Machiavelli: The Prince
12. So It Seems — 205
William Shakespeare: Hamlet; Othello; King Lear
Moliére: The Misanthrope
13. The Price of Mis-Education — 226
Voltaire: Candide
Charles Dickens: Hard Times
14. Democracy as a Way of Life — 249
James Madison: Federalist Paper #10
Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
John Stuart Mill: On Liberty
15. Through a Class Darkly — 280
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: The Communist Manifesto
16. We Shall Overcome — 293
Frederick Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Letter from the Birmingham Jail”
Elie Wiesel: Night
17. The Psychology of Everyday Life — 313
Sigmund Freud: Civilization and Its Discontents
18. It’s Party Time: The Ethics of Civility — 328
Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway
19. The Morality and Immorality of Art — 345
Plato: Republic
Aristotle: Politics; Poetics
Leo Tolstoy: What Is Art?
20. All Stories Are True — 371
Islamic Storytelling: The Arabian Nights
Ghanaian Folklore: “Why We Tell Stories About Spider”
21. How Beautiful, How Sad — 385
Murasaki Shikibu: The Tale of Genji
22. The Uses of Idealism — 405
Miguel de Cervantes: The Adventures of Don Quixote
23. The Gifts of Imagination — 426
William Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads; The Prelude
Percy Bysshe Shelley: “A Defense of Poetry”
24. Fantasies of Seduction and the Seductions of Fantasy — 446
Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary
25. Art for Life’s Sake — 459
Théophile Gautier: Preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin
Walter Pater: Conclusion to The Renaissance
Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Thomas Mann: “Death in Venice”
26. Of Love and Marriage, Passion and Aging — 480
Gabriel García Márquez: Love in the Time of the Cholera
NOTES — 501
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY — 523
INDEX — 529

Worldly Wisdom
Frederic C. Beil, Publisher
Worldly Wisdom leads readers through some fifty classic works of literature, philosophy, and political thought from Homer and Confucius to Jean-Paul Sartre and Gabriel García Márquez to draw out ideas valuable for understanding human life in this world and for living that life well. Engagingly written for anyone who thinks about such ideas, as well as for anyone curious to know what great authors have thought about them, Worldly Wisdom offers both an inviting liberal education and a usefully humanistic self-help book.
Worldly wisdom book reviews:

Excerpts

CONTENTS
HAWAI’I MEETS THE WEST
i. Aloha in Old Hawai’i?
ii. The West “Discovers” Hawai’i
iii. The Missionaries Descend and Meet Aloha
iv. Remaking Hawai’i
THE WEST ASCENDS
v. A Soft Invasion Begins: Tourists Appear and Reimagine Aloha
vi. Reaction and Revival, Decline and Fall
vii. Annexation vs Aloha ‘Aina
THE NEW HAWAI’I AND HAPA-HAOLE CULTURE: 1900-1920
viii. Territorial Politics and Aloha ‘oe to the Queen
ix. Tourism Rises
x. The Sport of Kings
xi. Hapa-Haole Culture Spreads Aloha
xii. Aloha Land
BETWEEN THE WARS: A GOLDEN AGE
xiii. The Twenties: Tourist Culture Arrives With Aloha
xiv. Hawai’i Calls
xv. Pilikia: The Dark Side
WAR TO STATEHOOD
xvi. Aloha in Wartime Hawai’i
xvii. Tourists Return With Aloha
xviii. Road to the Aloha State
WHAT IS THE ALOHA STATE AND WHOSE IS IT?: 1959-1980
xix. Growth Unboun
xx. Reaction, Aspiration, Renaissance
xxi. Culture Renaissance
xxii. Hawaiianness and Aloha
THE CULTURE OF ALOHA: 1980-2018
xxiii. From the Hawaiian Renaissance to the Culture of Aloha
xxiv. Inventing the Culture of Aloha
xxv. Exalting the Culture of Aloha
xxvi. Rewriting Hawaiian History and Criticizing the Culture of Aloha
EPILOGUE
THE CULTURE OF ALOHA
LEARNING TO LOVE IT AS TRADITION AND INVENTION

My Latest Publication
Aloha
Much of the world knows the word aloha as a Hawaiian greeting, and many people know it as a term for love. But you cannot be in Hawai’i long before you discover that these meanings are the least of it. Aloha is a way of life. And “live aloha” is a common creed. In many ways, Hawai’i is a culture of aloha. How aloha,/i> became an all-embracing culture in Hawai’i is an engaging and often surprising story. This book tells that story.
The Romance of Commerce and Culture:
Capitalism, Modernism, and the Chicago-Aspen Crusade for Cultural Reform
(University of Chicago Press,1983; paperback edition, 1986; second edition, University Press of Colorado, 2002)
This book tells the lively story of how consumer commerce, modernist aesthetics, the Great Books movement, and humanistic cultural criticism converged in a mid-twentieth century campaign to heal the wounds of World War II and shape American culture for the future. This campaign—involving such figures as Robert M. Hutchins, Mortimer J. Adler, Lazló Moholy-Nagy, and Ortega y Gasset, and bringing Albert Schweitzer to America for the only time—yielded many lasting consequences. Among these consequences are the eminent Aspen Institute and the making of Aspen, Colorado, as a social and cultural Mecca.
Reviews:
Selected by Choice as one of the Ten Best Books on Business of 1983.

CONTENTS
Preface to the second edition — ix
Acknowledgements — Xi
Introduction — xiii
I. MORDENIST CULTURE AND ITS CRITICS IN CHICAGO
1. Mordenist Marketing: The Consumer Revolution and the Container Corporation of America — 3
2. Marketing Modernism: Moholy-Nagy and the Bauhaus in America — 39
3. Great Books and Cultural Reform: The Chicago Bildungsideal — 83
II. HEALING THE WOUNDS OF WAR
4. The Magic Mountain: Discovering Aspen — 119
5. Selling the Postwar Goethe — 153
6. Celebrating the Postwar Goethe — 180
7. The Birth of the Aspen Idea — 208
III. ASPEN AND AMERICA IN THE FIFTIES — AND AFTER
8. Consensus, Criticism and the New American Elite — 237
9. The Aspen Muses an the Twilight of Modernism — 268
10. Epilogue: The Romance of Commerce and Culture, 2002 — 291
NOTES — 314
INDEX — 347

CONTENTS
Introduction: William James: A Philosopher for Our Times
“Habit” (from Psychology: The Briefer Course)
“The Laws of Habit” (from Talks to Teachers on Psychology)
“Genius and Old-Fogeyism” (from Psychology: The Briefer
Course)
“The Stream of Consciousness” (selections from Psychology: The Briefer
Course)
“Attention and Free-Will” (from Psychology: The Briefer Course)
“Will” (selections from Psychology: The Briefer Course)
“The Will” (from Talks to Teachers on Psychology)
“The Sentiment of Rationality” (selections)
“The Will To Believe” (selections)
“The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” (selections)
“On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” (selections)
The Varieties of Religious Experience , (selections)
“What Pragmatism Means” (selections)
“Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth” (selections)
A Pluralistic Universe, (selection)
The Meaning of Truth, (selection)
“On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake”
“The Energies of Men” (selections)
“The Moral Equivalent of War”
“What Makes a Life Significant”
“Is Life Worth Living?” (selection)
William James on Habit, Will, Truth, and the Meaning of Life
Edited with an Introduction by James Sloan Allen
Frederic C. Beil Publisher, 2014
297 pages
William James, the radical modern philosopher and father of American psychology (and brother of the novelist Henry James), found habit and will to be the secret of a good life. He elaborated this discovery into a philosophy of life that runs through his many scintillating writings, ranging from the classic Principles of Psychology and The Varieties of Religious Experience to the revolutionary Pragmatism and popular essays like “The Moral Equivalent of War.” Always he urged people to cultivate habits of mind—especially the habits of will, including the will to break bad habits—that give us self-mastery, alert us to truth, equip us to act, and lend zest and meaning to life.
The extensive Introduction shows how William James came to his philosophy and how he acted on it throughout his life in ideas and memorably readable works that have direct pertinence today. The selections then display James weaving this philosophy through enduring writings on habit and its uses, the stream of consciousness and the discipline of will, the efficacy of belief and clues to morality, the truths of experience, and the strenuous life and its rewards.
Reviews:
Life Line
A Novel of Romance and Rebirth
Accomplished New York book editor Rebecca Winters, on the threshold of forty and recently yet amiably divorced, looks into herself one day as never before and finds – nothing. Her contented life has gone empty.
Bewildered and fraught, she vacantly buries herself in work, trying to hide her distress from others. A few weeks later, as a favor to a colleague, she grudgingly meets an author with a book to propose. Although author Alex Rodgers unsettles Rebecca with his debonair, whimsical manner and rather aesthetic view of life, his intelligence, wit, and imagination induce her to see him again. And again. And her life begins to take some surprising turns.
Despite her ambivalence toward him, a romance grows as they share the pleasure of New York—in the shadow of 9/11—and talk of man things, revealing ever more of themselves to each other, and to themselves.
This romance also takes them to India, where they find their lives happily altered anew and then caught up in a tragedy that ultimately leads Rebecca to an understanding and affirmation of life she had never known.
Delving into art and religion, palm reading and gambling, perceptions and sentimentality, illusion and reality, and what makes life most worth living, Life Line is at once a novel of ideas and a love story, brining smiles, tears, and hope.

CONTENTS
1. Onto a Bridge of Dreams
2. A Perfect Life
3. Dilemma
4. A Way Out?
5. Flaneur
On a Bridge of Dreams (continued)
1. Shiva’s Dance
2. The City and the Night
3. Against the Grain
4. The Moon Illusion
On a Bridge of Dreams (continued)
1. Gotta Horse Right Here
2. Two Weeks
3. Eezzee to Luvv
4. Sentimental Intimacy
On a Bridge of Dreams (continued)
1. Against the odds
2. Palms and Coincidence
3. In Passing
On a Bridge of Dreams (continued)
1. Sweet Irony
2. City of Rebirth
3. Serene Elation
4. Romance and Reality
On a Bridge of Dreams (continued)
1. Give me paradise
2. A Deeper Well
3. Death Mark
4. Still Life
5. Into the Fantasy of the Night

CONTENTS
Essays 1
i. Reflections at the Edge of the World 3
ii. Signs of Shanghai, c. 1996 23
iii. The Mystery of the Smiling Elephant 33
iv. The Storytellers of Marrakech 59
Tales 85
i. Raffles 87
ii. Tango 107
iii. A Bon Vivant’s Dream 119
iv. The Dancer with the Fish-Shaped Eyes 141
v. London Millennimum 149
vi. Ciela 175
vii. Hadrian’s Moon 199
viii. And She Went to the Elephant Races 209
ix. Safari 229
x. On Parole in Aspen 253
xi. Saigon Night and the Gentle Man from Laos 261
xii. Livin the Dream 275
xiii. Hemingway’s Ghost 285
Dreamers, Runaways, and Mysteries:
A Traveler’s Tales and Essays
The tales tell of characters drawn to these places, sometimes for escape from the lives they had led, and of incidents that memorably mark their travels. In India, an intrepid lady adventurer charms an unhappy American; in Buenos Aires, a lonely tourist gets enraptured by a torrid story of tango dancers; in Botswana, a safari takes a surprising twist under an astonishing guide; in Singapore, fantasies of Somerset Maugham bewitch a yearning visitor; in Rio de Janiero, a buoyant lady of the night beguiles a disaffected businessman; in Saigon, a nostalgic journalist hears surprising secrets from a gentle Laotian. And many more.