W333: A Bibliography of the Science-Fantasy Novel is a bibliography of English science fiction and fantasy books compiled and edited by Joseph H. Crawford, Jr., James J. Donahue and Donald M. Grant. It was first published by The Grandon Company in an edition of 450 paperback and 50 hardback copies. The hardback was issued without jacket. The book gives plot descriptions of 333 novels published prior to 1951.
WAmateur Telescope Making (ATM) is a series of three books edited by Albert G. Ingalls between 1926 and 1953 while he was an associate editor at Scientific American. The books cover various aspects of telescope construction and observational technique, sometimes at quite an advanced level, but always in a way that is accessible to the intelligent amateur. The caliber of the contributions is uniformly high and the books have remained in constant use by both amateurs and professionals.
WBorges on Martín Fierro concerns Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges's comments on José Hernández's nineteenth century poem Martín Fierro. Like most of his compatriots, Borges was a great admirer of this work, which he often characterized as the one clearly great work in Argentine literature. Because Martín Fierro has been widely considered the fountainhead or pinnacle of Argentine literature, Argentina's Don Quixote or Divine Comedy, and because Borges was certainly Argentina's greatest twentieth-century writer, Borges's 1953 book of essays about the poem and its critical and popular reception - El "Martín Fierro" - gives insight into Borges's identity as an Argentine.
WThe Captive Mind is a 1953 work of non-fiction by Polish writer, poet, academic and Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz. It was first published in English translation by Secker and Warburg in 1953. The work was written soon after the author's defection from Stalinist Poland in 1951. While writing The Captive Mind Milosz drew upon his experiences as an illegal author during the Nazi Occupation and of being a member of the ruling class of the postwar People's Republic of Poland. The book attempts to explain the allure of Stalinism to intellectuals, the thought processes of those who believe in it, and the existence of both dissent and collaboration within the post-war Soviet Bloc. Miłosz describes the book as having been written "under great inner conflict".
WContract Bridge For Beginners is a book written by Charles Goren on the rules and basic strategies of contract bridge. First published by Simon & Schuster Inc. of New York in 1953 and by Eyre & Spottiswoode of London in 1959, each has been reprinted numerous times. The book contains an introduction to the then relatively new bidding system condensed from Goren's historically significant 1947 book Point Count Bidding in Contract Bridge.
WEarly Netherlandish Painting, Its Origins and Character, is a 1953 book on art history by Erwin Panofsky, derived from the 1947–48 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. The book had a wide impact on studies of Renaissance art and Early Netherlandish painting in particular, but also studies in iconography, art history, and intellectual history in general. The book is particularly well-known for its iconographic treatment of Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait as a kind of marriage contract, a hypothesis advanced by Panofsky as early as 1934. The book remains influential despite its reliance on black-and-white reproductions of paintings, which led to some errors of analysis.
WMilton Friedman's book Essays in Positive Economics (1953) is a collection of earlier articles by the author with as its lead an original essay "The Methodology of Positive Economics." This essay posits Friedman's famous, but controversial, principle that assumptions need not be "realistic" to serve as scientific hypotheses; they merely need to make significant predictions.
WEthnologue: Languages of the World is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It was first issued in 1951, and is now published annually by SIL International, a U.S.-based, worldwide, Christian non-profit organization. SIL's main purpose is to study, develop and document languages to promote literacy and for religious purposes.
WThe Facts of Life is a book published in 1953 by C. D. Darlington of the subject of race, heredity and evolution. Darlington was a major contributor to the field of genetics around the time of the Modern synthesis.
WFlying Saucers from Outer Space is a non-fiction book by Donald Keyhoe about unidentified flying objects, aka UFOs.
WThe Hedgehog and the Fox is an essay by philosopher Isaiah Berlin—one of his most popular essays with the general public—which was published as a book in 1953. However, Berlin said, "I never meant it very seriously. I meant it as a kind of enjoyable intellectual game, but it was taken seriously. Every classification throws light on something".
WThe Hill of Devi is an account by E. M. Forster of two visits to India in 1912–1913 and 1921, during which he worked as the private secretary to Tukojirao III, the Maharaja of the state of Dewas Senior. The book was first published in 1953 and is dedicated to Forster's friend, the Indian Civil Service administrator Malcolm Lyall Darling with whom he had been a contemporary at King's College, Cambridge as a student.
WA History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity refers to one of three books written by British mathematician Sir Edmund Taylor Whittaker FRS FRSE on the history of electromagnetic theory, covering the development of classical electromagnetism, optics, and aether theories. The book's first edition, subtitled from the Age of Descartes to the Close of the Nineteenth Century, was published in 1910 by Longmans, Green. The book covers the history of aether theories and the development of electromagnetic theory up to the 20th century. A second, extended and revised, edition consisting of two volumes was released in the early 1950s by Thomas Nelson, expanding the book's scope to include the first quarter of the 20th century. The first volume, subtitled The Classical Theories, was published in 1951 and served as a revised and updated edition to the first book. The second volume, subtitled The Modern Theories (1900–1926), was published two years later in 1953, extended this work covering the years 1900 to 1926. Notwithstanding a notorious controversy on Whitaker's views on the history of special relativity, covered in volume two of the second edition, the books are considered authoritative references on the history of electricity and magnetism as well as classics in the history of physics.
WPearl "Polly" Adler was an American madam and author, best known for her work A House Is Not a Home, which was posthumously adapted into a film of the same name.
WIntroduction to Metaphysics is a revised and edited 1935 lecture course by Martin Heidegger first published in 1953. Heidegger suggested the work relates to the unwritten "second half" of his 1927 magnum opus Being and Time. The work is also notable for a discussion of the Presocratics and for illustrating Heidegger's supposed "Kehre," or turn in thought beginning in the 1930s—as well as for its mention of the "inner greatness" of Nazism.
WIntroduction to Solid State Physics is a classic condensed matter physics textbook originally written by American physicist Charles Kittel in 1953. The book has been highly influential and has seen widespread adoption; Marvin L. Cohen remarked in 2019 that Kittel's content choices in the original edition played a large role in defining the field of solid-state physics. It was also the first proper textbook covering this new field of physics. The book is published by John Wiley and Sons and, as of 2018, it is in its ninth edition and has been reprinted many times as well as translated into over a dozen languages, including Chinese, French, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. In some later editions, the eighteenth chapter, titled Nanostructures, was written by Paul McEuen.
WThe Kinsey Reports are two scholarly books on human sexual behavior, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), written by Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy, Clyde Martin, and Paul Gebhard and published by W.B. Saunders. The two best-selling books were immediately controversial, both within the scientific community and the general public, because they challenged conventional beliefs about sexuality and discussed subjects that had previously been taboo. The validity of Kinsey's methods were also called into question. Kinsey was a zoologist at Indiana University and the founder of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.
WThe Life and Work of Sigmund Freud is a biography of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, by the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones. The most famous and influential biography of Freud, the work was originally published in three volumes by Hogarth Press; a one-volume edition abridged by literary critics Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus followed in 1961. When first published, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud was acclaimed, and sales exceeded expectations. Although the biography has retained its status as a classic, Jones has been criticized for presenting an overly favorable image of Freud. Jones has also been criticized for being biased in his treatment of rival psychoanalysts such as Otto Rank and Sándor Ferenczi.
WEin Leben für Ungarn are the memoirs of Nikolaus von Horthy, Regent of Hungary. They were published in German under the name of Nikolaus von Horthy when he was exiled in Portugal after World War II.
WThe Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization is a 1953 jazz music theory book written by George Russell. The book is the founding text of the Lydian Chromatic Concept (LCC), or Lydian Chromatic Theory (LCT). Russell's work postulates that all music is based on the tonal gravity of the Lydian mode.
WNeue Deutsche Biographie is a biographical reference work. It is the successor to the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie. The 26 volumes published thus far cover more than 22,500 individuals and families who lived in the German language area.
WOld Men Forget is a 1953 autobiography by Duff Cooper, Viscount Norwich, detailing his Victorian childhood, Edwardian youth, and work in literature and politics.
WThe Overloaded Ark, first published in 1953, is the debut book by British naturalist Gerald Durrell. It is the chronicle of a six-month collecting trip, from December 1947 to August 1948, to the West African colony of British Cameroon - now Cameroon - that Durrell made with aviculturist and ornithologist John Yealland.
WPerforming Flea is a non-fiction book, based on a series of letters written by P. G. Wodehouse to William Townend, a friend of Wodehouse's since their schooldays together at Dulwich College. It was originally published in the United Kingdom on 9 October 1953 by Herbert Jenkins, London. The title alludes to a disparaging comment by the playwright Seán O'Casey, who, in a letter to The Daily Telegraph in July 1941, referring to Wodehouse's radio broadcasts from Berlin, wrote that "If England has any dignity left in the way of literature, she will forget for ever the pitiful antics of English literature's performing flea".
WPhilosophical Investigations is a work by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The book was published posthumously in 1953. Wittgenstein discusses numerous problems and puzzles in the fields of semantics, logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of action, and philosophy of mind, putting forth the view that conceptual confusions surrounding language use are at the root of most philosophical problems. Wittgenstein alleges that the problems are traceable to a set of related assumptions about the nature of language, which themselves presuppose a particular conception of the essence of language. This conception is considered and ultimately rejected for being too general; that is, as an essentialist account of the nature of language it is simply too narrow to be able to account for the variety of things we do with language. This view can be seen to contradict or discard much of what he argued in his earlier work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921).
WThe Principal Upanishads is a 1953 book written by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975), then Vice President of India, about the main Upanishads, which carry central teachings of the Vedanta. Originally published in 1953 by Harper, the book has been republished several times.
WRemarks on the Foundations of Mathematics is a book of Ludwig Wittgenstein's notes on the philosophy of mathematics. It has been translated from German to English by G.E.M. Anscombe, edited by G.H. von Wright and Rush Rhees, and published first in 1956. The text has been produced from passages in various sources by selection and editing. The notes have been written during the years 1937-1944 and a few passages are incorporated in the Philosophical Investigations which were composed later. When the book appeared it received many negative reviews mostly from working logicians and mathematicians, among them Michael Dummett, Paul Bernays, and Georg Kreisel. Today Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics is read mostly by philosophers sympathetic to Wittgenstein and they tend to adopt a more positive stance.
WThe Rommel Papers is the collected writings by the German World War II field marshal Erwin Rommel published in 1953.
WSartre: Romantic Rationalist is a book by Iris Murdoch. Published in 1953 by Bowes & Bowes of Cambridge, it was Murdoch's first book and the first book about Jean-Paul Sartre's work to be published in English.
WScience-Fiction Handbook, subtitled The Writing of Imaginative Fiction, is a guide to writing and marketing science fiction and fantasy by L. Sprague de Camp, "one of the earliest books about modern sf." The original edition was published in hardcover by Hermitage House in 1953 as a volume in its Professional Writers Library series. A revised edition, by L. Sprague de Camp and Catherine Crook de Camp, titled Science Fiction Handbook, Revised, was published in hardcover by Owlswick Press in 1975 and as a trade paperback by McGraw-Hill in 1977. An E-book version of the revised edition was published by Gollancz's SF Gateway imprint on April 30, 2014.
WThe Second World War is a history of the period from the end of the First World War to July 1945, written by Winston Churchill. Churchill labelled the "moral of the work" as follows: "In War: Resolution, In Defeat: Defiance, In Victory: Magnanimity, In Peace: Goodwill".
WThe Kinsey Reports are two scholarly books on human sexual behavior, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), written by Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy, Clyde Martin, and Paul Gebhard and published by W.B. Saunders. The two best-selling books were immediately controversial, both within the scientific community and the general public, because they challenged conventional beliefs about sexuality and discussed subjects that had previously been taboo. The validity of Kinsey's methods were also called into question. Kinsey was a zoologist at Indiana University and the founder of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.
WThe Silent World is a 1953 book co-authored by Captain Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Frédéric Dumas, and edited by James Dugan.
WThe Spirit of St. Louis is an autobiographical account by Charles Lindbergh about the events leading up to and including his 1927 solo trans-Atlantic flight in the Spirit of St. Louis, a custom-built, single engine, single-seat monoplane. The book was published on September 14, 1953, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1954.
WA Stillness at Appomattox (1953) is a non-fiction book written by Bruce Catton. It recounts the American Civil War's final year, describing the campaigns of Ulysses S. Grant in Virginia during 1864 to the end of the war in 1865. It is the final volume of the Army of the Potomac trilogy that includes Mr. Lincoln's Army (1951) and Glory Road (1952).
WStraight and Crooked Thinking, first published in 1930 and revised in 1953, is a book by Robert H. Thouless which describes, assesses and critically analyses flaws in reasoning and argument. Thouless describes it as a practical manual, rather than a theoretical one.
WA Tally of Types is a book on typography authored by the type designer Stanley Morison. It was first published in 1953, and showcases significant typeface designs produced during Morison's tenure at the Lanston Monotype Corporation for their hot-metal typesetting machines during the 1920s and 1930s in England.
WA Time to Keep Silence (1953) is a travel book by British author Patrick Leigh Fermor. It describes Fermor's sojourns in monasteries across Europe, and is praised by William Dalrymple as a "sublime masterpiece".
WTwelve Steps and Twelve Traditions is a 1953 book, which explains the 24 basic principles of Alcoholics Anonymous and their application. The book dedicates a chapter to each step and each tradition, providing a detailed interpretation of these principles for personal recovery and the organization of the group. Bill W. began work on this project in early 1952. By 1957, 50,000 copies were in circulation.
WWaffen-SS im Einsatz is a 1953 book in German by Paul Hausser, a former high-ranking Waffen-SS member and a leader of the Waffen-SS lobby group HIAG. As part of the organisation's revisionist agenda, it advanced the idea of the purely military role of the Waffen-SS.
WWhen Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World is a classic work of social psychology by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter published in 1956, which studied a small UFO religion in Chicago called the Seekers that believed in an imminent apocalypse and its coping mechanisms after the event did not occur. Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance can account for the psychological consequences of disconfirmed expectations. One of the first published cases of dissonance was reported in this book.
WWriting Degree Zero is a book of literary criticism by Roland Barthes. First published in 1953, it was Barthes' first full-length book and was intended, as Barthes writes in the introduction, as "no more than an Introduction to what a History of Writing might be."