Don't Panic: The Official Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion


Neil Gaiman - 1986
    Told in the same fanciful, irreverent style as the Hitchhiker trilogy, with scraps of scripts, letters and comments from Adams, Don't Panic is the perfect companion to one of the most successful series in publishing history.

Ptolemy: Tetrabiblos


Ptolemy
    100-178 CE) of Egypt consists of four books. The title given in some manuscripts meaning 'Mathematical Treatise in Four Books', in others 'The Prognostics addressed to Syrus'. The subject of the work is astrology, which in Ptolemy's time as down to the Renaissance was fused as a respectable science with astronomy. Translations and commentaries of the "Tetrabiblos" are few, and only three Greek texts had been printed (all in the 16th century) before the present text, begun by F. Boll and finished by Emilie Boer in 1940.

Fates Worse Than Death


Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - 1982
    Here we go again with real life and opinions made to look like one big, preposterous animal not unlike an invention by Dr. Seuss...--Kurt Vonnegut, from Fates Worse Than Death

Gates of Fire


Steven Pressfield - 1998
    Theirs was a suicide mission, to hold the pass against the invading millions of the mighty Persian army.Day after bloody day they withstood the terrible onslaught, buying time for the Greeks to rally their forces. Born into a cult of spiritual courage, physical endurance, and unmatched battle skill, the Spartans would be remembered for the greatest military stand in history—one that would not end until the rocks were awash with blood, leaving only one gravely injured Spartan squire to tell the tale. . . .“A novel that is intricate and arresting and, once begun, almost impossible to put down.”—Daily News “A timeless epic of man and war . . . Pressfield has created a new classic deserving a place beside the very best of the old.”—Stephen Coonts

The Ant and the Ferrari


Kerry Spackman - 2012
    this is one of those rare books that will change your beliefs - and in doing so will change your life. tHE ANt AND tHE FERRARI offers readers a clear, navigable path through the big questions that confront us all today. What is the meaning of life? Can we be ethical beings in today's world? Can we know if there is life after death? Is there such a thing as Absolute truth? What caused the Big Bang and why should you care?

Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity


J.E. Lendon - 2005
    E. Lendon surveys a millennium of warfare to discover how militaries change—and don’t change—and how an army’s greatness depends on its use of the past. Noting this was an age that witnessed few technological advances, J. E. Lendon shows us that the most successful armies were those that made the most effective use of cultural tradition. Ancient combat moved forward by looking backward for inspiration—the Greeks, to Homer; the Romans, to the Greeks and to their own heroic past. The best ancient armies recruited soldiers from societies with strong competitive traditions; and the best ancient leaders, from Alexander to Julius Caesar, called upon those traditions to encourage ferocious competition at every rank.Ranging from the Battle of Champions between Sparta and Argos in 550 B.C. through Julian’s invasion of Persia in A.D. 363, Soldiers and Ghosts brings to life the most decisive military contests of ancient Greece and Rome. Lendon places these battles, and the methods by which they were fought, in a sweeping narrative of ancient military history. On every battlefield, living soldiers fought alongside the ghosts of tradition—ghosts that would inspire greatness for almost a millennium before ultimately coming to stifle it.