Лучшие книги Барри Шварца

Проблема выбора существовала всегда. Буриданов осел выбирал когда-то между двумя стогами сена; современный человек, обладающий свободой воли и большим количеством альтернатив, может запросто впасть в депрессию, выбирая, какие джинсы купить, что

В этой книге заключен крайне своевременный призыв руководствоваться важнейшим человеческим качеством, уже практически вытесненным из нашей жизни, ? мудростью. Авторы своеобразной книги-провокации Барри Шварц и Кеннет Шарп предлагают рациональный и обоснованный подход к жизни, позволяющий сохранять баланс между стремлением к успеху и чувством долга, открывающий секрет полноценной и гармоничной жизни. Книга "Практическая мудрость" помогает выявить и развить присущую человеку от рождения мудрость и, используя ее в работе и повседневности, добиться успеха и гармонии в профессиональной и личной жизни. Книга адресована всем, кто хочет…

Abraham Lincoln has long dominated the pantheon of American presidents. From his lavish memorial in Washington and immortalization on Mount Rushmore, one might assume he was a national hero rather than a controversial president who came close to losing his 1864 bid for reelection. In Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory, Barry Schwartz aims at these contradictions in his study of Lincoln's reputation, from the president's death through the industrial revolution to his apotheosis during the Progressive Era and First World War.

Schwartz draws on a wide array of materials—painting and sculpture, popular magazines and school textbooks, newspapers and oratory—to examine the role that Lincoln's memory has played in American life. He explains, for example, how dramatic funeral rites elevated Lincoln's reputation even while funeral eulogists questioned his presidential actions, and how his reputation diminished and grew over the next four decades. Schwartz links transformations of Lincoln's image to changes in the society. Commemorating Lincoln helped Americans to think about their country's development from a rural republic to an industrial democracy and to articulate the way economic and political reform, military power, ethnic and race relations, and nationalism enhanced their conception of themselves as one people.

Lincoln's memory assumed a double aspect of "mirror" and "lamp," acting at once as a reflection of the nation's concerns and an illumination of its ideals, and Schwartz offers a fascinating view of these two functions as they were realized in the commemorative symbols of an ever-widening circle of ethnic, religious, political, and regional communities. The first part of a study that will continue through the present, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory is the story of how America has shaped its past selectively and imaginatively around images rooted in a real person whose character and achievements helped shape his country's future.

We all value freedom, family, friends, work, education, health, and leisure-"the best things in life." But the pressure we experience to chase the dollar in order to satisfy both the demands of the bottom line and the demands of our seemingly insatiable desire to consume are eroding these best things in life. Our children now value profit centers, not sports heroes. Our educational system is fast becoming nothing more than a financial investment where students are encouraged to expend more energy on making the grade than on learning about their world. Our business leaders are turning young idealists into cynics when they cut corners and explain that "everybody's doing it." The need to achieve in our careers intrudes so greatly on our personal world that we find ourselves weighing the "costs" of enjoying friendships rather than working. In this book, psychologist Barry Schwartz unravels how market freedom has insidiously expanded its reach into domains where it does not belong. He shows how this trend developed from a misguided application of the American value of individuality and self-pursuit, and how it was aided by our turning away from the basic social institutions that once offered traditional community values. These developments have left us within an overall framework for living where worth is measured entirely by usefulness in the marketplace. The more we allow market considerations to guide our lives, the more we will continue to incur the real costs of living, among them disappointment and loneliness.

“Provocative and richly textured. . . .Schwartz’s analyses of the inadequacies of contemporary scientific views of human nature are compelling, but the consequences are even more worthy of note.” ― Los Angeles Times Out of the investigations and speculations of contemporary science, a challenging view of human behavior and society has emerged and gained strength. It is a view that equates “human nature” utterly and unalterably with the pursuit of self-interest. Influenced by this view, people increasingly appeal to natural imperatives, instead of moral ones, to explain and justify their actions and those of others.