Product Description: Boccaccio's Decameron and the Ciceronian Renaissance is a path-breaking study of a timeless masterpiece. Based on new readings of Cicero's late works, De legibus, De re publica, and De officiis, Michaela Paasche Grudin and Robert Grudin show that Ciceronian social thought provided Boccaccio with the basis for a radical reconsideration of his own culture, inspiring his call in the Decameron for a new awareness based on reason, nature, and the autonomy of the individual...read more

Product Description: “If good design tells the truth,” writes Robert Grudin in this path-breaking book on esthetics and authority, “poor design  tells a lie,  a lie usually related . . . to the  getting or  abusing of power.”From the ornate cathedrals of Renaissance Europe to the much-maligned Ford Edsel of the late 1950s, all products of human design communicate much more than their mere intended functions...read more

A cautionary account of what the author believes to be the coarsening of America's consciousness identifies the ways in which politicians, marketers, and media exploiters easily mislead the public and have directly contributed to destructive ignorance, in a volume that makes strong recommendations on how to repair the damage of 'mass vulgarity.' Original.

Product Description: The Most Amazing Thing, is the extravagant narrative of Desmond Ruck, a midlife down-and-outer who stumbles into a big-crime shootout, escapes in a van filled with billions, and journeys across America in a series of bizarre encounters and close escapes...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

A collection of philosophical essays draws on examples from the Renaissance and modern science to explore how the use of dialogue can lead to creative thinking

Product Description: A hilarious murder mystery that skewers both publishing and academia with pure "old-fashioned comic storytelling" (Washington Post Book World). "Grudin . . . has . . . taken the genre of the academic satire . . . and run it through the post-structuralist dicer...read more

Examines the nature of creativity, exposes the inefficiencies of universities and corporations, and attacks the intolerance of liberalism

Product Description: Drawing on philosophy, science, literature, history, personal experience, and his own marvelously playful and inventive imagination, Grudin examines the concept of time from a variety of angles.

Contrariety in the words, characters, themes, and ideologies of Shakespeare's works are studied as a means of expression and function of structure, showing that his use of paradox is rooted in Renaissance philosophy