Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: A Short History of Nearly Everything, the Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, a Walk in the Woods, Notes From a Small Island, Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe, Shakespeare: the World as Stage, the Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America, the Mother Tongue, Notes From a Big Country, Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words, Down Under, Made in America, Bill Bryson's African Diary. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: A Short History of Nearly Everything (ISBN 0-7679-0817-1) is a general science book by Bill Bryson, which explains some areas of science, using a style of language more accessible to the general public than many other books dedicated to the subject. It was the bestselling popular science book of 2005 in the UK, selling over 300,000 copies. A Short History deviates from Bryson's popular travel book genre, instead describing general sciences such as chemistry, paleontology, astronomy, and particle physics. In it, he explores time from the Big Bang to the discovery of quantum mechanics, via evolution and geology. Bryson tells the story of science through the stories of the people who made the discoveries, such as Edwin Hubble, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein. Bill Bryson wrote this book because he was dissatisfied with his scientific knowledge that was, not much at all. He writes that science was a distant, unexplained subject at school. Textbooks and teachers alike did not ignite the passion for knowledge in him, mainly because they never delved in the whys, hows, and whens. "It was as if wanted to keep the good stuff secret by making all of it soberly unfathomable." Bryson, on the state of science books used within his school. It was in his later years that he realized with stunning shame ...More: http: //booksllc.net/?id=101240

    In one afterlife, you may find that God is the size of a microbe and unaware of your existence. In another version, you work as a background character in other people’s dreams. Or you may find that God is a married couple, or that the universe is running backward, or that you are forced to live out your afterlife with annoying versions of who you could have been. With a probing imagination and deep understanding of the human condition, acclaimed neuroscientist David Eagleman offers wonderfully imagined tales that shine a brilliant light on the here and now.

    On this occasion, their ringleader is inspired to rebellion after reading some books on philosophy and science.Anatole France's 1914 satire of war, government, and religion offers an ever-resonant protest against violence and tyranny.

    Peter Watson's hugely ambitious and stimulating history of ideas from deep antiquity to the present day—from the invention of writing, mathematics, science, and philosophy to the rise of such concepts as the law, sacrifice, democracy, and the soul—offers an illuminated path to a greater understanding of our world and ourselves.

    This work was deemed to be so radically nihilistic, or so radically idealistic, that publishers shied away from it for decades. This new English translation brings to life the heartfelt text of the precocious Italian-Jewish writer, poet, and painter, who, refusing to compromise with life, remained loyal to his ideal of a perfect world. Keenly aware of the inevitable catastrophe that the values of his time held in store for humanity, Carlo Michelstaedter, with Persuasion and Rhetoric, also provides a pithy - albeit idiosyncratic - synthesis of the major currents of philosophical thought that held sway at the beginning of the 20th century. Its searing honesty and mordant critique have not lost any immediacy, almost a century after the work was completed as a university thesis. The reader is challenged to re-examine the dull norms, conventions, and patterns of thought all too readily adopted as humanity willingly, pathetically courts its own demise. And yet, amidst this gloomy vision, Michelstaedter forces the reader to re-appraise the here-and-now, to summon the courage to live a life worthy of being lived.

    We also learn how Dalí draws inspiration from excrement, rotten fish and Vermeer's Lacemaker to enter his "rhinocerontic" period, preaching his post-holocaustal gospels of nuclear mysticism and cosmogenic atavism; and we follow the labyrinthine mental journeys that lead to the creation of such paintings as the Assumption, and his film script The Flesh Wheelbarrow.This new expanded edition includes a brilliant and revelatory essay on Salvador Dalí, and the importance of his art to the 20th century, by the author J. G. Ballard.

    A loosely formed autobiography by Andy Warhol, told with his trademark blend of irony and detachmentIn The Philosophy of Andy Warhol—which, with the subtitle "(From A to B and Back Again)," is less a memoir than a collection of riffs and reflections—he talks about love, sex, food, beauty, fame, work, money, and success; about New York, America, and his childhood in McKeesport, Pennsylvania; about his good times and bad in New York, the explosion of his career in the sixties, and his life among celebrities.

    By means of words, signs, drawings. Mescaline, the subject explored." In Miserable Miracle, the great French poet and artist Henri Michaux, a confirmed teetotaler, tells of his life-transforming first encounters with a powerful hallucinogenic drug. At once lacerating and weirdly funny, challenging and Chaplinesque, his book is a breathtaking vision of interior space and a piece of stunning writing wrested from the grip of the unspeakable.Includes forty pages of black-and-white drawings.

    Here he recounts in his inimitable voice his experience trading ideas on atomic physics with Einstein and Bohr and ideas on gambling with Nick the Greek; cracking the uncrackable safes guarding the most deeply held nuclear secrets; accompanying a ballet on his bongo drums; painting a naked female toreador. In short, here is Feynman's life in all its eccentric—a combustible mixture of high intelligence, unlimited curiosity, and raging chutzpah.

    Exploring issues that range from faith to prayer to evil to immortality, and far beyond, Garnder challenges the discerning reader with fundamental questions of classical philosophy and life's greater meanings.Recalling such philosophers was Wittgenstein and Arendt, The Whys of Philosophical Scrivener embodies Martin Garner's unceasing interest and joy in the impenetrable mysteries of life.

    It’ll have you scratching your head wondering why we even bother to go to school.Think Magellan was the first man to circumnavigate the globe, baseball was invented in America, Henry VIII had six wives, Mount Everest is the tallest mountain? Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong again. You’ll be surprised at how much you don’t know! Check out THE BOOK OF GENERAL IGNORANCE for more fun entries and complete answers to the following:How long can a chicken live without its head?About two years.What do chameleons do?They don’t change color to match the background. Never have; never will. Complete myth. Utter fabrication. Total Lie. They change color as a result of different emotional states.How many legs does a centipede have?Not a hundred.How many toes has a two-toed sloth?It’s either six or eight.Who was the first American president?Peyton Randolph.What were George Washington’s false teeth made from?Mostly hippopotamus.What was James Bond’s favorite drink?Not the vodka martini.

    In Coleman Barks′ delightful and wise renderings, these poems will open your heart and soul to the lover inside and out.′There are lovers content with longing.I′m not one of them.′Rumi is best known for his poems expressing the ecstasies and mysteries of love of all kinds - erotic, divine, friendship -and Coleman Barks collects here the best of those poems, ranging from the ′wholeness′ one experiences with a true lover, to the grief of a lover′s loss, and all the states in between: from the madness of sudden love to the shifting of a romance to deep friendship - these poems cover all ′the magnificent regions of the heart′.

    The larger, louder half of legendary magic act Penn & Teller, and New York Times bestselling author of GOD, NO!, is back with a new collection of spiritual rants and hilarious ravings -- the perfect year-round gift, when you consider that EVERY DAY IS AN ATHEIST HOLIDAY.

    15 new, extremely funny, pieces by the author of "Please Don't Eat the Daisies." These stories run the gamut from home entertaining to Twiggy with a laugh every step of the way.

    A scholar, wit, lawyer and statesman, he wrote widely on politics, philosophy and science - declaring early in his career that 'I have taken all knowledge as my province'. In this, his most famous work, he considers a diverse range of subjects, such as death and marriage, ambition and atheism, in prose that is vibrant and rich in Renaissance learning. Bacon believed that rhetoric - the force of eloquence and persuasion - could lead the mind to the pure light of reason, and his own rhetorical genius is nowhere better expressed than in these vivid essays.