In this international bestseller, originally published in 1959, Jacques Barzun, acclaimed author of From Dawn to Decadence, takes on the whole intellectual -- or pseudo-intellectual -- world, attacking it for its betrayal of Intellect. "Intellect is despised and neglected," Barzun says, "yet intellectuals are well paid and riding high." He details this great betrayal in such areas as public administrations, communications, conversation and home life, education, business, and scholarship. In this edition's new Preface, Jacques Barzun discussess the intense -- and controversial -- reaction the world had to The House of Intellect.

Six kids on the run must face a villain who threatens the future of human existence . . . but winning comes at a high price. Six children have escaped horrifying government experiments, a childhood in captivity, and a frightening brush with death. Living out in the world for the first time, they yearn to be reunited with Kit and Frannie, the couple who saved their lives. And Max, the leader of the flock, is seized by an overpowering fear that the kids are about to face a danger greater than any they've ever known. All that the children want is to return to the one place they have ever felt truly protected: the waterfront cabin known as the Lake House. But in order to get there, they must thwart the sinister plans of a survivor from their worst nightmare -- plans that not only keep Kit, Frannie, and the children in constant peril, but threaten the future of human existence. And it's a battle they must be willing to pay any price to win.

This is the story of Sasha Abramsky's grandparents, Chimen and Miriam Abramsky, and of their unique home at 5 Hillway, around the corner from Hampstead Heath. In their semi-detached house, so deceptively ordinary from the outside, the Abramskys created a remarkable House of Books. It became the repository for Chimen's collection of thousands upon thousands of books, manuscripts and other printed, handwritten and painted documents, representing his journey through the great political, philosophical, religious and ethical debates that have shaped the western world. Chimen Abramsky was barely a teenager when his father, a famous rabbi, was arrested by Stalin's secret police and sentenced to five years hard labour in Siberia, and fifteen when his family was exiled to London. Lacking a university degree, he nevertheless became a polymath, always obsessed with collecting ideas, with capturing the meanderings of the human soul through the world of great thoughts and thinkers. Rejecting his father's Orthodoxy, he became a Communist, made his living as a book-dealer and amassed a huge, and astonishingly rare, library of socialist literature and memorabilia. Disillusioned with Communism and belatedly recognising the barbarity at the core of Stalin's project, he transformed himself once more, this time into a liberal and a humanist. To his socialist library was added a vastrove of Jewish history volumes. Chimen ended his career as Professor of Hebrew and Jewish studies at UCL, London and rare manuscripts expert for Sotheby's. With his wife Miriam, Chimen made their house a focal point for left-wing intellectual Jewish life: hundreds of the world's leading thinkers, from at their table. The House of Twenty Thousand Books brings alive this latter-day salon by telling the story of Chimen Abramsky's love affair with ideas and with the world of books and of Miriam's obsession with being a hostess and with entertaining. Room by room, book by book, idea by idea, the world of these politically engaged intellectuals, autodidacts and dreamers is lovingly resurrected. In this extraordinary elegy to a lost world, Sasha Abramsky's passionate narrative brings to life once more not just the Hillway salon, but the ideas, the conflicts, the personalities and the human yearnings that animated it. 'The sheer richness of this marvellous book - in terms of its style, think Borges, Perec - amply complements the wondrous complexity of the family - in terms of its subject-matter, think the Eitingons, the Ephrussi - about which Sasha Abramsky writes so lovingly. And as a portrait of London's left-wing Jewish intellectual life it is surely without equal.' Simon Winchester 'I loved this touching and heartfelt celebration of a scholar, teacher and bibliophile, a man whose profound learning was fine-tempered by humane wisdom and self-knowledge. We might all of us envy Sasha Abramsky in possessing such a remarkable grandfather, heroic in his integrity and evoked for us here with real eloquence and affection.' Jonathan Keates 'Sasha Abramsky has combined four kinds of history - familial, political, Jewish, and literary - into one brilliant and compelling book. With him as an erudite and sensitive guide, any reader will be grateful for the opportunity to be immersed into the house of twenty thousand books.' Samuel Freedman 'The House of Twenty Thousand Books is a grandson's elegy for the vanished world of his grandparents' house in London and the exuberant, passionate jostling of two traditions - Jewish and Marxist - that intertwined in his growing up. It is a fascinating memoir of the fatal encounter between Russian Jewish yearning for freedom and the Stalinist creed, a grandson's unsparing, but loving reckoning with a conflicted inheritance. In the digital age, it will also make you long for the smell of old books, the dust on shelves and the collector's passions, all on display in The House of Twenty Thousand Books.' Michael Ignatieff

New York Intellect is Thomas Bender's remarkable look at the connections between the life of a city and the life of the mind. New York has never been comfortable or convenient as a milieu for art and intellect, Bender notes. Yet New Yorkers have always struggled to create institutions and styles of thought and writing that reflect the special character of the city, its boundless energies and deep divisions.

The works published by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget and his associates during the past forty years constitute the largest repository of knowledge about the cognitive development of children that is available anywhere, and Piaget's general theory of intellectual development rivals, in scope and comprehensiveness, Freud's theory of personality development Here is a self-contained general summary of Piaget's theory, written at a relatively nontechnical level. It is suitable for use in a variety of courses in psychology and education -- child psychology, child development, educational psychology, learning, psychological systems, general psychology, and others. It will also interest professionals and educated laymen as a timely exposition of ideas that are attracting the attention of increasing numbers of American psychologists. In order to convey the complexities of the theory to readers who have had no previous contact with it, the author uses a number of unusual pedagogical devices. He first outlines the theory in an introduction that students can reread with increasing comprehension as they study the text. The main part of the book is an elucidation of the Piagetian periods of intellectual development, with enough illustrations of Piaget's research activities to give the theory meaning. The author frequently reproduces passages from Piaget's clinical observations with Piaget's interpretations deleted, so that the reader can assess his own understanding and better appreciate Piaget's style of inquiry. In an epilogue, the author discusses the educational implications of Piaget's work.

A novel centered on the journey of the Turner family and its thirteen siblings, particularly the eldest and youngest, as they face the ghosts of their pasts--both an actual haint and the specter of addiction--the imminent loss of their mother, and the necessary abandonment of their family home in struggling Detroit.

Thresholes is both a doorway and an absence, a roadmap and a remembering. In this almanac of place and memory, Lara Mimosa Montes writes of her family’s past, returning to the Bronx of the 70s and 80s and the artistry that flourished there. What is the threshold between now and then, and how can the poet be the bridge between the two?

Between 1979 and 1997, a quarter of Britain’s regional theaters closed their doors forever. Those that survived found themselves constantly on the brink, forced to radically reduce their programs and shut down for extended periods. Bringing Down the House examines how and why this crisis occurred, from the British government’s scant regard for the arts after World War II to the onset of Thatcherism and its long-lasting effects on the theater industry. This timely read for theater and cultural history scholars unearths a catalog of recurring problems that ensured the fragility of the British regional stage.

A haunting gothic tale by master mysery writer John Bellairs--soon to be a major motion picture starring Cate Blanchett and Jack Black! "The House With a Clock in Its Walls will cast its spell for a long time."--The New York Times Book Review When Lewis Barnavelt, an orphan. comes to stay with his uncle Jonathan, he expects to meet an ordinary person. But he is wrong. Uncle Jonathan and his next-door neighbor, Mrs. Zimmermann, are both magicians! Lewis is thrilled. At first, watchng magic is enough. Then Lewis experiments with magic himself and unknowingly resurrects the former owner of the house: a woman named Selenna Izard. It seems that Selenna and her husband built a timepiece into the walls--a clock that could obliterate humankind. And only the Barnavelts can stop it!