AHS Book Database 2008
Reading Our Lives
The Poetics of Growing Old
2008: William Lowell Randall, A. Elizabeth McKim
Oxford University Press
ISBN: 978-0-19-530687-3
Hardcover, eBook
English
Against the background of Socrates' insight that the unexamined life is not worth living, Reading Our Lives investigates the often overlooked inside dimensions of aging. Despite popular portrayals of mid and later life as entailing inevitable decline, this book looks at ageing as, potentially, a process of poeisis: a creative endevour of fashioning meaning from the ever-accumulating texts - memories and reflections - that constitute our inner worlds. At its centre is the conviction that although we are constantly reading our lives to some degree anyway, doing so in a mindful manner is critical to our development in the second half of life. Drawing on research in numerous disciplines - including cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and the psychology of ageing - this book presents a vision of aging that promises to accommodate such time-honoured concepts as wisdom and spirituality; one that understands aging as a matter not merely of getting old but of consciously growing old.
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The Expressive Body in Life, Art, and Therapy
Working with Movement, Metaphor and Meaning
2008: Daria Halprin
Jessica Kingsley Publishers
ISBN: 978-1-84310-737-8
Paperback, eBook
English
Many people feel that money and what we perceive as the psyche, or soul, are bitter enemies - do we choose money or soul, finance or feelings, markets or common humanity? This book traces the origins of these opposing concepts, and the feelings that money provokes. Economic ideas often stand out as being universal, globally valid and without cultural ties. But money is narrative and image just as much as it is a means of exchange and of preserving wealth. By viewing money as culture and philosophy, it becomes evident that the money of today is a system of symbols, something that society itself has devised over many centuries.
Having considered the nature of money and psyche, Per Espen Stoknes asks how our culture makes us feel and think about them; and proposes how the framework around money can be expanded. This develops the idea of extended accounting to include natural and social capital in addition to the manufactured capital we are used to entering in the accounts - currently to the exclusion of all else.
Money and Soul opens up new methods of looking at, thinking about and using money. It points to a future where our ideas about money will be greatly epxanded, and there will be different kinds of money, with different social purposes, in circulation.