The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: Events

Events

16 June 2015 Last Tuesday Society
22 March 2015 Nature and Language
18 Jan 2015 Inspired by Blake
30 October 2014 Event for the German edition
25 October 2014 Plymouth International Book Festival
23 October 2014 The Wonder Cure
4 October 2014 BookCourt
30 September 2014 Porter Square Books
10 August 2014: Wilderness Festival
5 August 2014: Crowdshed, London
18 June 2014: Living with Wonder in Uncertain Times, The School of Life, London
9 June 2014: Cultivate, Oxford
3 June 2014: Green Voices Research Group, Worcester
16 & 18 May 2014: Atlantide: Festival des Littératures de Nantes
8 May 2014: Reading at Stadtbibliothek, Nürnberg by Lawrence Davies
7 May 2014: London Philosophy Club
4 May 2014: Athens Science Festival
24 April 2014: Wonder in Uncertain Times, The School of Life, London
19 March 2014: Wonder: Varieties of Intensified Experience, Durham
25 February 2014: GV Art and Mind Symposium
23 January 2014: Eunoia Society Lecture, Bloxham School
9 December 2013: Barter Books, Alnwick
3 December 2013: What sort of story is climate change? Free Word Centre
25 November 2013: Royal Society Winton prize award ceremony
16 November 2013: signing copies at Compton Verney
30 October 2013: Blackwell, Oxford
29 October 2013: Manchester Science Festival
26 October 2013: talks at Horniman Museum, London
3 October 2013: UK paperback launch
23 August 2013: Edinburgh Festival
17 August 2013: Uncivilisation
3 August 2013: Bestival
26 June 2013: Timed Out: evolving to extinction, London
26 June 2013: Nature Table, Open University, Milton Keynes
25 June 2013: Midsummer Event, Diss Publishing, Norfolk
12 June 2013: Quarterhorse, Oxford
8 June 2013: Charles Causley Festival
19 May 2013: Wood Festival
14 May 2013: On Point, NPR
29 April 2013: US edition published
14 April 2013: Aye Write!, Glasgow
24 March 2013: South Oxford Farmers' Market: Book Day
21 March 2013: Oxford Literary Festival
16 March 2013: Talking on Water, Essex Book Festival
7 February 2013: Heffers, Cambridge
18 January 2013: Little Atoms podcast
17 January 2013: Futerra, London
12 December 2012: Blackwell, Oxford (and see blog and podcast)
5 December 2012: talk at Oxfam
25 October 2012: reading at The Albion Beatnik, Oxford
17 October 2012: London launch at Daunt Books, Holland Park
15 October 2012: Great Oak Bookshop, Llanidloes
3 October 2012: Salon London
1 October 2012: Wigtown Book Festival
25 September 2012: Oxford launch at the Hub
August 2012: Preview at The Wilderness Festival

No comments:

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)

Most real creatures that we think we know embody wonders we have hardly dreamed of. And there are other beings, equally real, which for most of human experience have been beyond imagining. As Zhuangzi wrote some 2,300 years ago, “all the creatures in this world have dimensions that cannot be calculated.”

The Book of Barely Imagined Beings by Caspar Henderson is published by Granta in the UK and by Chicago University Press in the US. In 2013 it was shortlisted for the Royal Society Winton prize for science books, a Society of Biology award, and the British Book Design Awards. The Estonian edition is published by AS Äripäev, the French edition by Les Belles Lettres, the German one by Matthes & Seitz, the Italian by Adelphi, the Japanese by X Knowledge Co, the Korean by EunHaeng NaMu Publishing Co, the Polish by Marginesy, the Russian by Alpina, the Spanish by Atico de los Libros.

Reviews here and here. Articles here and here. Chapter by chapter notes here (1) and here (2). What others say here. Podcasts here, here and here. Video here and here (from 43.00)

Caspar Henderson's most recent book is A New Map of Wonders.

The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
misattributed to Bertrand Russell

Since we cannot predict how ethics will develop, it is not irrational to have high hopes.
Derek Parfit

We are never 'at home': we are always outside ourselves.
Michel de Montaigne

We are monkeys with money and guns.
Tom Waits

All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike – and yet it is the most precious thing we have.

Albert Einstein

If you look into infinity what do you see? Your backside!
Tristan Tzara

Imagine a child playing in a woodland stream, poking a stick into an eddy in the flowing current, thereby disrupting it. But the eddy quickly reforms. The child disperses it again. Again it reforms, and the fascinating game goes on. There you have it! Organisms are resilient patterns in a turbulent flow.

Carl Woese

When you're young, all evolution lies before you...If you compare yourself with the limitations that came afterwards, if you think how one form excludes other forms, of the monotonous routine where you finally feel trapped, well, I don't mind saying, life was beautiful in those days.
'Qfwfq'

75 percent to 90 percent of all living species may remain unknown to science.
IIES

Human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future.
Roger Revelle (1957)

The rate of change of ocean acidity is many times faster than anything experienced in the last 55 million years.
EPOCA

One cannot reasonably compare the K/T extinction with the current human destruction of the biosphere. The first was a relatively minor setback.

J.C. Briggs

When the buffalo went away, the hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again. After this, nothing happened.

If we act now, maybe we have got a fighting chance.

The unfolding of intelligence and complexity still has immensely far to go here on earth and probably far beyond.
Martin Rees

Our quest, as a civilisation [is] to answer the question, how do we save ourselves from ourselves without losing ourselves?

Jaron Lanier

If you yourself want to become really happy...I suggest you save the albatross from extinction. It can be done.

Margaret Atwood

There is just one real problem -- the problem of human relations.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

The amazing wonder of the deep is its unfathomable cruelty.

Joseph Conrad

"I weep for you," the Walrus said:

"I deeply sympathize."

'The Walrus and the Carpenter'

We abandon our own language because we need extra words, for things we had never imagined; and because there are superfluous words in it, for things we cannot imagine any more.

'The Giant, O'Brien'

We take almost all of the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.

'Austerlitz'

Those were his first steps on a white sheet/Clutches of wriggling letters in black lead/Like tracks of worms on the Precambrian mud.

'Kaspar Hauser'

The mind does not err from the fact that it imagines.

Spinoza

We are as much automaton as mind.
Blaise Pascal

Much that is intelligent in us is not specifically human.
Alasdair MacIntyre

What knows he, this New England colt, of the black bisons of distant Oregon? Herman Melville

There is no counting the possible ways to the Millennium and the route to it.
Norman Cohn

By the time human beings start the global nuclear war that will destroy our civilization, there won’t be any great apes left for Earth to become the Planet of the Apes. But chances are there will still be plenty of rhesus macaques around.
Dario Maestripieri

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.
George Orwell

The astounding comes towards us, outrider of death and birth.
John Berger

We are so far from denying there is any Unicorn at all, that we affirm there are many kinds thereof.

Thomas Browne

Even that old horse

is something to see

this snow-covered morning

Matsuo Basho

We cannot see the visible except with the invisible.

Eckhart von Hochheim

You don't have to believe in God, but you should believe in the Book.
Paul Erdős

If, as the poets say, life is a dream, I am sure in a voyage these are the visions which serve best to pass away the long night.

Charles Darwin

But only when someone starts up the spiralling stairs is the A Bao A Qu brought to consciousness, and then it sticks close to the visitor's heels, keeping to the outside of the turning steps, where they are most warn by the generations of pilgrims.

Jorge Luis Borges

The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer