Yours from the premise press... reprints in stock for 2018

HOPE: The General Theory of Improvement Setback and Forethought

David Anthony Turner

£ 6.99    pp.264    paperback

ISBN 978-0-9555215-0-8                                 Published:  2007

Bright  Lively  Short.   But could be your BIGGEST read in years....

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HOPE NOT HYPE                                                                                     

HOPE is extremely short (60,000 words), but it sets out to ask some far-reaching  questions about  our human experience of setback, misfortune, distress.   And The most important of all is:  "Are we tackling it as well as we might?"    This book's answer  may prove one of the most subversive ideas  of its time.

HOPE wants to launch a new field of study,  EUTYCHICS. ( Say it to rhyme with  "you tyke!", or rather  like "psyche". It comes from the Greek word eutuchei, meaning "to turn out well".)  Once Its pet name was Snagology: but now its formal definition is  "the critical study of applied forethought". And when it comes to studying forethought the twenty-first century may prove the critical era.

The world's misery may be open to study and understanding in just the same way as once happened with money.  For centuries people had used money.  They coined it, exchanged it, traded with it, forged it.  In fact they did everything with it except understand it.

Then one Scottish scholar moved from Fife to Glagow, became a University professor there, and wrote THE WEALTH OF NATIONS.  The great Adam Smith had introduced the world  to ECONOMICS.

Human misery is far more shadowy than even the most complicated share options or financial derivatives.  It has vexed scholars and preachers since books began.  It has taxed some of the finest minds who ever put pen to paper.  And several who never did.  Socrates wrote nothing.  Neither did the Buddha. 

Yet misery is also something that human beings exchange between themselves.  Perhaps  there is room to learn more about precisely how they do it. 

Beneath its simple, approachable surface this book sounds depths that have challenged human beings for as long as they have had wit enough to worry.

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QUOTES QUOTA:

". . . . Whatever they say on their masthead, all newspapers are like the Fat Boy in Dickens, with the same mission statement: ' I wants to make your flesh creep' . . ." (Ch 19 Herd Harms)

"......Wherever reason wilts, only charlatans flourish. When Reason is out for a duck, send in the quacks...." (Ch 11 No Good Reason)

"....  Alice felt perplexed by the Wonderland tea-party where there was no room for her, despite most of the vast table being empty.  But that was being run by a Hatter.  And he was mad.. " (Ch 22 Doubting Darwin)

"....A whole separate world took wing and flew......The fixed geography of lands and oceans faded to a vague blur, in an exclusive, uniform world of identical convenience......Welcome to the St Troposphere......"  (Ch 22 Doubting Darwin)

"....The Egyptians elaborately preserved a Pharaoh's outer appearance, but dumped in canopic jars what we now know were his vital organs. In the same way, anxiety over the disappointments and unpredictability of human relationships may get transferred into chronic unease about the incalculable, the changed, the future........." (Ch 23  Hope)

© Premise Books 2007

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HOPE was selected to stock at The Economist Bookshop on the Campus of the London School of Economics, and other leading Waterstone's branches: in Oxford, Cambridge, St Andrews, Dublin, Belfast, Bristol, Glasgow, Leeds, Sheffield, Nottingham, Lancaster, Winchester, King's Lynn, Plymouth, and Aberystwyth.

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