This book shows how, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Gospel of the free market became the only world-religion of universal validity. The belief that all value needs to be quantifiable was extended to human beings, whose value became dependent on their rating on the various ranking-scales in the global infotainment system.

In The Fear of Insignificance Carlo Strenger diagnoses the wide-spread fear of the global educated class of leading insignificant lives. Making use of cutting-edge psychological, philosophical, sociological, and economic theory, he shows how these fears are generated by infotainment’s craze for rating human beings. The book is a unique blend of an interpretation of the historical present and a poignant description of contemporary individual experience, anxiety, and hopes, in which Strenger makes use of his decades of clinical experience in existential psychotherapy. Without falling into the trap of simplistic self-help advice, Strenger shows how a process he calls active self-acceptance, together with serious intellectual investment in our worldviews, can provide us with stable identity and meaning.

“There's no writer alive like de Botton” (Chicago Tribune), and now this internationally heralded author turns his attention to the insatiable human quest for status—a quest that has less to do with material comfort than love. Anyone who’s ever lost sleep over an unreturned phone call or the neighbor’s Lexus had better read Alain de Botton’s irresistibly clear-headed new book, immediately. For in its pages, a master explicator of our civilization and its discontents explores the notion that our pursuit of status is actually a pursuit of love, ranging through Western history and thought from St. Augustine to Andrew Carnegie and Machiavelli to Anthony Robbins. Whether it’s assessing the class-consciousness of Christianity or the convulsions of consumer capitalism, dueling or home-furnishing, Status Anxiety is infallibly entertaining. And when it examines the virtues of informed misanthropy, art appreciation, or walking a lobster on a leash, it is not only wise but helpful.

Summoned from Vienna to Frankfurt to testify at the Auschwitz trials, Heiner meets Lena, who is working at the court as a translator. During the trial, he describes his experiences of being deported to Auschwitz as a young man. Afterward, the two begin a cautious love affair, but both are unsure whether their feelings will be strong enough to persevere in the shadow of his earlier ordeals. Heiner knows that if they are to stay together, Lena will have to accept the memories of Auschwitz that mark him and build a new life amid the debris of his past. In this moving novel, Monika Held draws on first-hand reports by Auschwitz survivors to paint an emotive picture of life and love governed by trauma. Throughout, Heiner’s suffering is omnipresent, and Lena’s struggle to hold her own in a relationship dominated by his past is deeply moving. His stories are horrific and disturbing, but they are a part of his identity; he cannot survive without them. And slowly, Lena learns to cherish her own past despite its apparent insignificance. With its sensitive treatment of two people struggling to confront the Holocaust’s atrocities from very different vantage points, This Place Holds No Fear is a powerful novel of finding love after experiencing unimaginable loss.

"The lurking fear" by H. P. Lovecraft. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

"This book is about dying, not about death. We are always dying a big, always giving things up, always having things taken away. Is there a person alive who isn't really curious about what dying is for them? Is there a person alive who wouldn't like to go to their dying full of excitement, without fear and without morbidity? This books tells you how." -- Front cover.

In our time nobody is content to stop with faith but wants to go further. It would perhaps be rash to ask where these people are going, but it is surely a sign of breeding and culture for me to assume that everybody has faith, for otherwise it would be queer for them to be . . . going further. In those old days it was different, then faith was a task for a whole lifetime, because it was assumed that dexterity in faith is not acquired in a few days or weeks. When the tried oldster drew near to his last hour, having fought the good fight and kept the faith, his heart was still young enough not to have forgotten that fear and trembling which chastened the youth, which the man indeed held in check, but which no man quite outgrows. . . except as he might succeed at the earliest opportunity in going further. Where these revered figures arrived, that is the point where everybody in our day begins to go further.