The Corner Bookstore

With just a few pen strokes and a poignantly sharp caption, cartoons have the power to inspire, seduce, outrage, and amuse. Some of today’s best cartoonists are also some of our keenest observers, and a great cartoon can provide, in addition to humor and well-needed levity, acute psychological and sociological insights. In I Think, Therefore I Draw: Understanding Philosophy Through Cartoons, Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, authors of the wildly fun international bestseller, Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar…, have culled dozens of cartoons, from magazines like The New Yorker and Punch, that shine a light on mankind’s perennial conundrums—such as “Is there a cosmic scheme?”; “Is there really a difference between girls and boys?”; and “What if your right is my wrong?”. Accompanied by wonderfully witty annotations that explain how these cartoons are profoundly useful in helping us make our way through life, I Think, Therefore I Draw is a Philosophy 101 course that will make readers think and laugh.

Looking for companionship after a near-fatal car crash, Elena Mannes, an award-winning television journalist and producer, decided to get her first dog. But what she found with her dog Brio shook the foundations of her physical and spiritual worlds, sending her on a quest to discover the nature of his spiritual origins and to contemplate and seek out the possibility of interspecies communication–even after death.

Soon after bringing her puppy home, Mannes realized that the master-companion relationship would not be possible with Brio, who quickly showed that he had a mind–and a spirit–of his own. A healer Mannes visited immediately focused on Brio, exclaiming that he was an old soul. Mannes’s growing curiosity about the intelligence, emotions, and consciousness of Brio and other dogs led her to contact an animal psychic in California who described, with amazing accuracy, Brio’s favorite walks and the author’s apartment from the dog’s point of view. Motivated by her experience, Mannes produced a filmed segment with Diane Sawyer featuring the same psychic, who described Sawyer’s country house and her dog’s favorite spots in the yard. Mannes’s skeptical journalist background compelled her to investigate further. She delved into the world of animal communicators, psychics, and scientists studying animal intelligence, including Rupert Sheldrake, to find answers to her multiplying questions: Do animals have thoughts and feelings? Consciousness? Souls? Is interspecies communication possible? Can animals reincarnate?

This book is about the denial in contemporary France of the period of German occupation and, in particular, about French disavowal of participation in the final solution. Using then and now pictures of places where terrible and momentous events occurred and of significant actors in the history of the time, it functions as a guidebook to the events that took place and as a guide to understanding how such atrocities could have happened in an eminently civilized nation.