Franz Göll was a thoroughly typical Berliner. Fritzsche paints a deeply affecting portrait of a self-educated man seized by an untamable impulse to record, who stayed put for nearly 70 years as history thundered around him.

Franz Göll was a thoroughly typical Berliner. He worked as a clerk, sometimes as a postal employee, night watchman, or publisher's assistant. He enjoyed the movies, ate spice cake, wore a fedora, tamed sparrows, and drank beer or schnapps. He lived his entire life in a two-room apartment in Rote Insel, Berlin's famous working-class district. What makes Franz Göll different is that he left behind one of the most comprehensive diaries available from the maelstrom of twentieth-century German life. Deftly weaving in Göll’s voice from his diary entries, Fritzsche narrates the quest of an ordinary citizen to make sense of a violent and bewildering century. Peter Fritzsche paints a deeply affecting portrait of a self-educated man seized by an untamable impulse to record, who stayed put for nearly seventy years as history thundered around him. Determined to compose a “symphony” from the music of everyday life, Göll wrote of hungry winters during World War I, the bombing of Berlin, the rape of his neighbors by Russian soldiers in World War II, and the flexing of U.S. superpower during the Reagan years. In his early entries, Göll grappled with the intellectual shockwaves cast by Darwin, Freud, and Einstein, and later he struggled to engage with the strange lifestyles that marked Germany's transition to a fluid, dynamic, unmistakably modern society. With expert analysis, Fritzsche shows how one man's thoughts and desires can give poignant shape to the collective experience of twentieth-century life, registering its manifold shocks and rendering them legible.

Indexes the Times, Sunday times and magazine, Times literary supplement, Times educational supplement, Time educational supplement Scotland, and the Times higher education supplement.

Reproduces (translated into English) contemporary documents or writings with an introduction to each section.

Randy Ramal argues that philosophy’s main responsibility lies in providing intelligibility to the ordinary language of everyday life while dispelling unwarranted skepticism. Philosophers need to go the hard way to fulfill this responsibility because of the constant and dangerous temptation to turn philosophy into a normative discipline rather than keep it as a descriptively hermeneutical enterprise. In On Philosophy, Intelligibility, and the Ordinary: Going the Bloody Hard Way, the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead is central to Ramal’s endeavor to demonstrate the need to separate the hermeneutical responsibility of philosophy from the normative aspects of responsibility. While showing the futility of labeling Whitehead as a purely disinterested philosopher who abandons the idea that ordinariness is relevant to good philosophical thinking, Ramal frames this discussion within a larger, in-depth engagement with a vast number of thinkers, philosophers, and literary figures whose works touch on the question of the ordinary.

Puberty is a time of tumultuous transition from childhood to adulthood activated by rapid physical changes, hormonal development and explosive activity of neurons. This book explores puberty through the parent-teenager relationship, as a "normal state of crisis", lasting several years and with the teenager oscillating between childlike tendencies and their desire to become an adult. The more parents succeed in recognizing and experiencing these new challenges as an integral, ineluctable emotional transformative process, the more they can allow their children to become independent. In addition, parents who can also see this crisis as a chance for their own further development will be ultimately enriched by this painful process. They can face up to their own aging as they take leave of youth with its myriad possibilities, accepting and working through a newfound rivalry with their sexually mature children, thus experiencing a process of maturity, which in turn can set an example for their children. This book is based on rich clinical observations from international settings, unique within the field, and there is an emphasis placed by the author on the role of the body in self-awareness, identity crises and gender construction. It will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, parents and carers, as well as all those interacting with adolescents in self, family and society.

ONE OF THE MOST LOVED NOVELS OF THE DECADE. A long-lost book reappears, mysteriously connecting an old man searching for his son and a girl seeking a cure for her widowed mother's loneliness. Leo Gursky taps his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbor know he’s still alive. But it wasn’t always like this: in the Polish village of his youth, he fell in love and wrote a book…Sixty years later and half a world away, fourteen-year-old Alma, who was named after a character in that book, undertakes an adventure to find her namesake and save her family. With virtuosic skill and soaring imaginative power, Nicole Krauss gradually draws these stories together toward a climax of "extraordinary depth and beauty" (Newsday).