In five distinct but interrelated arenas of our lives -- the spiritual, the external (i.e., our broader communities), the relational, the internal (i.e., the personal), and the financial -- we feel overworked yet unclear about our purpose.In F.I.R.E.S., Fortune 500 veteran Daniel Purdy takes readers on a step-by-step journey to personal transformation, professional growth, and multi-faceted success through harnessing life's fires. The F.I.R.E.S. system leverages the best planning p...

A wonderfully immersive collection of short stories describing the otherworldly beauty of Norway's arctic fjords and villages seasoned with the comedy of an inexperienced group of international volunteers trying to run a remote island hotel.The shockingly turquoise, almost tropical, water of the Norwegian Sea provides the background to these stories as they crash into the dark and foreboding mountains that form Norway's famously rugged fjords. There, nestled on the...

For the last 30 years, scholars have treated Enlightenment race theory and nineteenth-century German colonialism as two distinct events. In Colonialism and Enlightenment, editors Bettina Brandt and Daniel L. Purdy present perspectives from scholars across the fields of philosophy, postcolonialism, literature, and German and African American studies, who challenge this view, providing a critical examination of the historical connection between "scientific" racial theory in late-Enl...

Chinese Sympathies examines how Europeans—German-speaking writers and thinkers in particular—identified with Chinese intellectual and literary traditions following the circulation of Marco Polo's Travels**.** This sense of affinity expanded and deepened, Daniel Leonhard Purdy shows, as generations of Jesuit missionaries, baroque encyclopedists, Enlightenment moralists, and translators established intellectual regimes that...

Over the course of the eighteenth century, European intellectuals shifted from admiring China as a utopian place of wonder to despising it as a backwards and despotic state. That transformation had little to do with changes in China itself, and everything to do with Enlightenment conceptions of political identity and Europe’s own burgeoning global power.China in the German Enlightenment considers the place of German philosophy, particularly the work of Leibniz, Goethe, Her...

The eighteenth century struggled to define architecture as either an art or a science—the image of the architect as a grand figure who synthesizes all other disciplines within a single master plan emerged from this discourse. Immanuel Kant and Johann Wolfgang Goethe described the architect as their equal, a genius with godlike creativity. For writers from Descartes to Freud, architectural reasoning provided a method for critically examining consciousness. The architect, as...