Late Night Thoughts On Listening To Mahler's Ninth Symphony
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good to fair. Jacket: good, worn/faded (refer to image). Page Condition: Good - possible tanning. Markings: possible previous owner inscription.
In the small hours of the night, with Mahler's haunting Ninth Symphony playing in the background, one of America's most celebrated physician-essayists confronts the unthinkable: a world undone by nuclear war. Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony is Lewis Thomas's third collection of essays, in which he channels the sweeping melancholy of Mahler's final completed symphony into a profound meditation on mortality, science, and the precarious future of humanity. With characteristic warmth and erudition, Thomas moves fluidly from the biology of the cell to the ethics of modern medicine, from the wonder of language to the terror of thermonuclear annihilation, binding each topic together with the unifying thread of a scientist who refuses to abandon hope. Thomas writes with the precision of a clinician and the soul of a poet, a combination that made his earlier collections — The Lives of a Cell and The Medusa and the Snail — essential reading for a generation of science enthusiasts. In this volume, his prose carries a new urgency and a darker undertow, reflecting the anxieties of the early 1980s without surrendering to despair. These essays argue, with quiet but devastating force, that the greatest threat to civilisation is not ignorance but the failure of imagination — and that music, science, and wonder remain our most powerful defences against it.
Author: Lewis Thomas
Format: Hardback
Published: 1983, Viking Press
Genre: Essays
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good to fair. Jacket: good, worn/faded (refer to image). Page Condition: Good - possible tanning. Markings: possible previous owner inscription.
In the small hours of the night, with Mahler's haunting Ninth Symphony playing in the background, one of America's most celebrated physician-essayists confronts the unthinkable: a world undone by nuclear war. Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony is Lewis Thomas's third collection of essays, in which he channels the sweeping melancholy of Mahler's final completed symphony into a profound meditation on mortality, science, and the precarious future of humanity. With characteristic warmth and erudition, Thomas moves fluidly from the biology of the cell to the ethics of modern medicine, from the wonder of language to the terror of thermonuclear annihilation, binding each topic together with the unifying thread of a scientist who refuses to abandon hope. Thomas writes with the precision of a clinician and the soul of a poet, a combination that made his earlier collections — The Lives of a Cell and The Medusa and the Snail — essential reading for a generation of science enthusiasts. In this volume, his prose carries a new urgency and a darker undertow, reflecting the anxieties of the early 1980s without surrendering to despair. These essays argue, with quiet but devastating force, that the greatest threat to civilisation is not ignorance but the failure of imagination — and that music, science, and wonder remain our most powerful defences against it.