Two novels about the education of a young machine: “In a properly run universe Sladek’s Roderick would be considered a major American novel. Which it is.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Roderick is a robot who learns. He begins life looking like a toy tank, thinking like a child, and knowing nothing about human ways. But as he will discover, growing up and becoming fully human is no easy task in a world where many people seem to have little trouble giving up their humanity. The Complete Roderick—consisting of the Philip K. Dick Award nominee Roderick and Roderick at Random—is widely considered to be the most ambitious and genius work of a novelist described by The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction as “the most formally inventive, the funniest, and very nearly the most melancholy of modern US science fiction writers.” “A major comic talent . . . hilarious and serious.” —Sunday Times “Superb . . . comparable with early Kurt Vonnegut.” —Time Out “To the small band of science-fiction humorists who can actually make you laugh—my own list features, in alphabetical order, Douglas Adams and Robert Sheckley—please add the name of John Sladek.” —The New York Times Book Review
In 1959 journalist John Roderick joined the Tokyo bureau of the Associated Press. There, he befriended a Japanese family, the Takishitas. After musing offhandedly that he would like to one day have his own house in Japan, the family—unbeknownst to John—set out to grant his wish. They found Roderick a 250-year-old minka, or hand-built farmhouse, with a thatched roof and held together entirely by wooden pegs and joinery. It was about to be washed away by flooding and was being offered for only fourteen dollars. Roderick graciously bought the house, but was privately dismayed at the prospect of living in this enormous old relic lacking heating, bathing, plumbing, and proper kitchen facilities. So the minka was dismantled and stored, where Roderick secretly hoped it would stay, as it did for several years. But Roderick's reverence for natural materials and his appreciation of traditional Japanese and Shinto craftsmanship eventually got the better of him. Before long a team of experienced carpenters were hoisting massive beams, laying wide wooden floors, and attaching the split-bamboo ceiling. In just forty days they rebuilt the house on a hill overlooking Kamakura, the ancient capital of Japan. Working together, they renovated the farmhouse, adding features such as floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors and a modern kitchen, bath, and toilet. From these humble beginnings, Roderick's minka has become internationally known and has hosted such luminaries as President George H. W. Bush, and Senator Hillary Clinton. John Roderick's architectural memoir Minka tells the compelling and often poignant story of how one man fell in love with the people, culture, and ancient building traditions of Japan, and reminds us all about the importance of craftsmanship and the meaning of place and home in the process.
Roderik is a robot and he's on the run in the USA of the very near future. He's on the run for having been illicitly conceived and manufactured at the University of Minnetonka. He is also a 'learning machine' growing up in a complex technological age which threatens to submerge him in a mire of meaningless and mundane values. The older he gets and the more widely he travels, the more unable he is to comprehend the lost innocence of adults. He encounters the plastic lifestyles of middle-managers in rolling suburbia, confronts megalomaniac army officers and a hotch-potch assortment of ad-men, con-men, CIA agents, Mafiosi. Slowly but surely, in his attempt to become "humanized," Roderik wonders if in fact he should become more machine-like.
Two novels about the education of a young machine: “In a properly run universe Sladek’s Roderick would be considered a major American novel. Which it is.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Roderick is a robot who learns. He begins life looking like a toy tank, thinking like a child, and knowing nothing about human ways. But as he will discover, growing up and becoming fully human is no easy task in a world where many people seem to have little trouble giving up their humanity. The Complete Roderick—consisting of the Philip K. Dick Award nominee Roderick and Roderick at Random—is widely considered to be the most ambitious and genius work of a novelist described by The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction as “the most formally inventive, the funniest, and very nearly the most melancholy of modern US science fiction writers.” “A major comic talent . . . hilarious and serious.” —Sunday Times “Superb . . . comparable with early Kurt Vonnegut.” —Time Out “To the small band of science-fiction humorists who can actually make you laugh—my own list features, in alphabetical order, Douglas Adams and Robert Sheckley—please add the name of John Sladek.” —The New York Times Book Review
A central political figure in the first post-Revolutionary generation, Felix Grundy (1775--1840) epitomized the "American democrat" who so famously fascinated Alexis de Tocqueville. Born and reared on the isolated frontier, Grundy rose largely by his own ability to become the Old Southwest's greatest criminal lawyer and one of the first radical political reformers in the fledgling United States. In Democracy's Lawyer, the first comprehensive biography of Grundy since 1940, J. Roderick Heller reveals how Grundy's life typifies the archetypal, post--founding fathers generation that forged America's culture and institutions. After his birth in Virginia, Grundy moved west at age five to the region that would become Kentucky, where he lost three brothers in Indian wars. He earned a law degree, joined the legislature, and quickly became Henry Clay's main rival. At age thirty-one, after rising to become chief justice of Kentucky, Grundy moved to Tennessee, where voters soon elected him to Congress. In Washington, Grundy proved so voracious a proponent of the War of 1812 that a popular slogan of the day blamed the war on "Madison, Grundy, and the Devil." A pivotal U.S. senator during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, Grundy also served as Martin Van Buren's attorney general and developed a close association with his law student and political protégé James K. Polk. Grundy championed the ideals of the American West, and as Heller demonstrates, his dominating belief -- equality in access to power -- motivated many of his political battles. Aristocratic federalism threatened the principles of the Revolution, Grundy asserted, and he opposed fetters on freedom of opportunity, whether from government or entrenched economic elites. Although widely known as a politician, Grundy achieved even greater fame as a criminal lawyer. Of the purported 185 murder defendants that he represented, only one was hanged. At a time when criminal trials served as popular entertainment, Grundy's mere appearance in a courtroom drew spectators from miles around, and his legal reputation soon spread nationwide. One nineteenth-century Nashvillian declared that Grundy "could stand on a street corner and talk the cobblestones into life." Shifting seamlessly within the worlds of law, entrepreneurship, and politics, Felix Grundy exemplified the questing, mobile society of early nineteenth-century America. With Democracy's Lawyer, Heller firmly establishes Grundy as a powerful player and personality in early American law and politics.
Here is the continuing and uproarious saga of Roderick, a robot and "learning machine" growing up in an America in the near future. The mild-mannered robot is confronted with an ever-widening cast of madcap characters who typify the artificial values endemic in modern America.
Roderick Firth's writings on epistemology amount to an exceptionally careful and cogent defense of an account of perceptual knowledge in the tradition Firth called "radical empiricism". This important book collects all of Firth's major works on epistemology; it also contains his only publication in ethics, the extremely influential essay on "Ethical Absolutism and the Ideal Observer". In addition, the book includes a number of important previously unpublished essays. Together, these writings constitute the most finished and compelling version of traditional empiricist epistemology. This book will be of value to students and scholars of epistemology, phenomenalism, and ethics.
A collection of 33 letters from seven Confederate soldiers sent to Lucretia Caroline Barrett McMahan and her husband between 1861 and 1864. The letters are published with their original spelling and punctuation intact and illustrate the experiences of the common soldier of the Confederacy.
Jacob Burckhardt and the Crisis of Modernity -- the first major study in English dedicated entirely to Burckhardt -- offers a compelling and timely analysis of Burckhardt's challenge to the values and assumptions of modern society. Unlike conventional accounts, which characterize him as an apolitical aesthete, John Hinde shows that Burckhardt was a thinker of profound importance whose conservative anti-modernism ranks him with Friedrich Nietzsche. Book jacket.
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