From the esoteric account of the evolution of the species to the occult roots of science, from the secrets of the Flood to the esoteric motives behind American foreign policy, here is a narrative history that shows the basic facts of human existence on this planet can be viewed from a very different angle. Everything in this history is upside down, inside out and the other way around.At the heart of "The Secret History of the World" is the belief that we can reach an altered state of consciousness in which we can see things about the way the world works that are hidden from us in our everyday, commonsensical consciousness. This history shows that by using secret techniques, people such as Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton and George Washington have worked themselves into this altered state - and been able to access supernatural levels of intelligence. There have been many books on the subject, but, extraordinarily, no-one has really listened to what the secret societies themselves say. The author has been helped in his researches by his friendship with a man who is an initiate of more than one secret society, and in one case an initiate of the highest level.

    

    Said offers impassioned pleas for the beleaguered Palestinian cause from one of its most eloquent spokesmen. These essays, which originally appeared in Cairo’s Al-Ahram Weekly, London’s Al-Hayat, and the London Review of Books, take us from the Oslo Accords through the U.S. led invasion of Iraq, and present information and perspectives too rarely visible in America.Said is unyielding in his call for truth and justice. He insists on truth about Israel's role as occupier and its treatment of the Palestinians. He pleads for new avenues of communication between progressive elements in Israel and Palestine. And he is equally forceful in his condemnation of Arab failures and the need for real leadership in the Arab world.

    How should Christians live their faith in the public arena? This updated edition of Charles Colson's blockbuster Kingdoms in Conflict includes a new foreword, new stories and recent court cases in place of older examples, and a revised opening that depicts today's current international climate marked by terrorism and the conflict with radical Islam.

    

    They’ve just hung out their shingle when a disturbing case falls in their laps. Three young women have been kidnapped and are being brutally tortured live on webcams from somewhere in Miami Beach. While Austin initially shirks the idea of investigating, believing the police are in the best position to solve the case, it soon becomes apparent there is more going on than meets the eye. A conspiracy in the police department and false leads drive Austin and Maria deep into the disturbing world of the dark web. And when one of the girls is murdered live on camera, Austin must determine how far he’s willing to go to seek justice.

    It is an area of great contrasts -- geographically beautiful, yet the underlying crust of the region is cracked along great tectonic fault lines. These natural fault lines pale in comparison to the borders made by man, which have added further layers of complexity to a region where war is frequent, horrors are unspeakable, and history is unfathomable. It is not an area of the world that many would care to visit -- unless they had been there before.Simon Winchester, a seasoned reporter, visited the region twenty years ago. During the recent Kosovo crisis, he remembered that first trip and the people he met, and he decided that parallel journeys might well be a device for explaining with sympathy the true nature of this fractured region. Two great capitals, Vienna and Istanbul, whose ceaseless imperial rivalries in the past played so profound a role in shaping the savage divisions of the region today, would anchor his second journey to the region.With the war under way, he enlisted the aid of a linguist friend and set off from Vienna on a long, scimitar-shaped adventure through Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Albania, Macedonia, Kosovo, Bulgaria, and Turkey, arriving at the Golden Horn just as the war was officially declared over. With luck, and through valuable personal contacts, Winchester managed to be in Macedonia on the day the NATO forces moved in to assume control of Kosovo -- and because the commanding general was an old friend, he rode in with the liberating columns of troops and armor.This is not a book about the war, but rather an intimate portrait of the region painted while the war was going on. It is also an attempt to understand what has led this region to violence -- now, in the past, and inevitably again in the future. Written with a keen sense of time and place, The Fracture Zone is at once current and timeless. It goes behind the headlines and gives us a true picture of a region that has always been on the brink. Simon Winchester's remarkable journey puts all the elements together -- the faults, the fractures, and the chaos -- and makes sense out of a seemingly senseless place.

    The professor is uniquely capable of arguing a position, while putting a premium on legal and ethical legitimacy, not its popularity. Bravo, Dershowitz!" – Chris Cuomo, anchor and reporter, CNN"This collection shows Alan Dershowitz at his best—passionate, fearless, and occasionally very wrong." – Jeffrey Toobin, bestselling author of The Nine, Too Close to Call, A Vast Conspiracy, and The Run of His Life. "Alan Dershowitz doesn’t twist the constitution to fit an agenda. He tells you what it REALLY means. That’s why he has always been my go-to guy on the law and the Constitution." – Greta Van Susteren, former anchor at CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC"This book will reinforce Alan Dershowitz’s well-earned reputation as a brilliant legal analyst who, although often swimming against the established current, is usually right. Dershowitz substitutes his trenchant legal analysis for the wishful thinking and self-aggrandizing moral superiority that is presented by many in the academy and media, as well as Trump’s political opponents. Dershowitz’s arguments should cause all rational citizens to take a deep breath and recognize, as Dershowitz demonstrates, that Trump may be many things, but, under current law and the known evidence, the President is not a criminal. His analysis seems flawless to me." – Harvey A. Silverglate, Criminal and civil liberties lawyer, author of Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the InnocentIn our current age of hyper-partisan politics, nearly everyone takes sides. This is especially true with regard to the Trump presidency. It has become difficult to have a reasonable discussion about the most controversial president in our recent history. For Trump zealots, their president has not only committed no crimes, he has done nothing wrong. For anti-Trump zealots, nothing Trump has done—even in foreign policy—is good. Everything he has done is wrong, and since it is wrong, it must necessarily be criminal. This deeply undemocratic fallacy—that political sins must be investigated and prosecuted as criminal—is an exceedingly dangerous trend.Hardening positions on both sides has been manifested by increasing demands to criminalize political differences. Both sides scream “lock ‘em up” instead of making substantive criticisms of opposing views.The real fear, as Alan Dershowitz argues, in this compelling collection, is that we have weakened our national commitment to civil liberties as the Left becomes ever more intolerant and the Right slips into authoritarian rhetoric. The vibrant center is weakening, with traditional liberalism and conservatism becoming further apart, not just in approach, but in their respect for Constitutional norms that have served us well for more than two centuries.While Donald Trump is not the only cause of this profound division, his election drew it to the surface and made it the dominant paradigm of political debate. Unless we as a nation begin to focus again on what unites us rather than on what divides us, America might not survive the next decade.

    Now, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner return with SuperFreakonomics, and fans and newcomers alike will find that the freakquel is even bolder, funnier, and more surprising than the first.Four years in the making, SuperFreakonomics asks not only the tough questions, but the unexpected ones: What's more dangerous, driving drunk or walking drunk? Why is chemotherapy prescribed so often if it's so ineffective? Can a sex change boost your salary?SuperFreakonomics challenges the way we think all over again, exploring the hidden side of everything with such questions as:How is a street prostitute like a department-store Santa?Why are doctors so bad at washing their hands?How much good do car seats do?What's the best way to catch a terrorist?Did TV cause a rise in crime?What do hurricanes, heart attacks, and highway deaths have in common?Are people hard-wired for altruism or selfishness?Can eating kangaroo save the planet?Which adds more value: a pimp or a Realtor?Levitt and Dubner mix smart thinking and great storytelling like no one else, whether investigating a solution to global warming or explaining why the price of oral sex has fallen so drastically. By examining how people respond to incentives, they show the world for what it really is – good, bad, ugly, and, in the final analysis, super freaky.Freakonomics has been imitated many times over – but only now, with SuperFreakonomics, has it met its match.

    Covert information warfare is being waged by world powers, rogue states—such as Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea—and even terrorist groups like ISIS. This conflict has been designed to defeat and ultimately destroy the United States. This new type of warfare is part of the Information Age that has come to dominate our lives. In iWar, Bill Gertz describes how technology has completely revolutionized modern warfare, how the Obama administration failed to meet this challenge, and what we can and must do to catch up and triumph over this timely and important struggle.

    In recent years he has also become a trenchant voice on current affairs, bringing a historian's deep knowledge of past conflicts to bear on the crises of the present, from 9/11 to Iran. "War," he writes, "is an entirely human enterprise." Ideologies change, technologies develop, new strategies are invented?but human nature is constant across time and space. The dynamics of warfare in the present age still remain comprehensible to us through careful study of the past. Though many have called the War on Terror unprecedented, its contours would have been quite familiar to Themistocles of Athens or William Tecumseh Sherman. And as we face the menace of a bin Laden or a Kim Jong-Il, we can prepare ourselves with knowledge of how such challenges have been met before.The Father of Us All brings together much of Hanson's finest writing on war and society, both ancient and modern. The author has gathered a range of essays, and combined and revised them into a richly textured new work that explores such topics as how technology shapes warfare, what constitutes the "American way of war," and why even those who abhor war need to study military history. "War is the father and king of us all," Heraclitus wrote in ancient Greece. And as Victor Davis Hanson shows, it is no less so today.

    But most people don't read their books before deciding whether to be religious. Instead, they inherit their faith from their parents, who often innoculate them against the elegant arguments of secularists. And what no one has noticed is that far from declining, the religious are expanding their share of the population: in fact, the more religious people are, the more children they have. The cumulative effect of immigration from religious countries, and religious fertility will be to reverse the secularisation process in the West. Not only will the religious eventually triumph over the non-religious, but it is those who are the most extreme in their beliefs who have the largest families.Within Judaism, the Ultra-Orthodox may achieve majority status over their liberal counterparts by mid-century. Islamist Muslims have won the culture war in much of the Muslim world, and their success provides a glimpse of what awaits the Christian West and Israel. Based on a wealth of demographic research, considering questions of multiculturalism and terrorism, Kaufmann examines the implications of the decline in liberal secularism as religious conservatism rises - and what this means for the future of western modernity.

    

    Although there are hundreds of books on Hinduism, there are only a few which provide a lucid, accessible, yet deeply layered account of the religion’s numerous belief systems, schools of thought, sects, tenets, scriptures, deities, rituals, customs, festivals and philosophies. This book is one of them. In the tradition of classics of the genre like K. M. Sen’s Hinduism and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s The Hindu View of Life, this book captures the essence of Hinduism with brevity, insight and an enviable grasp of the myriad layers and intricacies of one of the world’s greatest religions. It is a book that is especially timely given the rather controversial role that religion has played in countries around the world. The author tells us why Hinduism is a religion that is well-suited to the needs of the world today: ‘In the twenty-first century, Hinduism has many of the attributes of a universal religion—a religion that is personal and individualistic, privileges the individual and does not subordinate one to a collectivity; a religion that grants and respects complete freedom to the believer to find his or her own answers to the true meaning of life; a religion that offers a wide range of choice in religious practice, even in regard to the nature and form of the formless God; a religion that places great emphasis on one’s mind, and values one’s capacity for reflection, intellectual enquiry, and self-study; a religion that distances itself from dogma and holy writ, that is minimally prescriptive and yet offers an abundance of options, spiritual and philosophical texts and social and cultural practices to choose from. In a world where resistance to authority is growing, Hinduism imposes no authorities; in a world of networked individuals, Hinduism proposes no institutional hierarchies; in a world of open-source information-sharing, Hinduism accepts all paths as equally valid; in a world of rapid transformations and accelerating change, Hinduism is adaptable and flexible, which is why it has survived for nearly 4,000 years.The text of The Hindu Way is embellished with over a hundred photographs and illustrations, many of them in colour, on various aspects of the religion. Based on Dr. Tharoor’s extensive writing on the subject, including the bestselling Why I Am a Hindu, this book gives the reader an unrivaled understanding of Hinduism.

    Since 9/11, more than four million illegal immigrants have crossed our borders, and there are more coming every day. Our leaders in Washington lack the political will to uphold the rule of law. The Melting Pot is broken beyond repair, and the future of our nation is at stake.In this important book, Pat Buchanan reveals that, slowly but surely, the great American Southwest is being reconquered by Mexico. These lands---which many Mexicans believe are their birthright---are being detached ethnically, linguistically, and culturally from the United States by a deliberate policy of the Mexican regime. This is the "Aztlan Plot" for "La Reconquista," the recapture of the lands lost by Mexico in the Texas War of Independence and Mexican-American War. Comparing the immigrant invasion of America from across the Mexican border---and of Europe from across the Mediterranean---to the barbarian invasions that ended the Roman Empire, the author writes with passion and conviction that we have begun the final chapter of the Death of the West. Unless the invasion is halted now, Buchanan argues, by midcentury America will be a country unrecognizable to our parents, the Third World dystopia that Theodore Roosevelt warned against when he said we must never let America become a "polyglot boardinghouse" for the world. President Bush's failure to halt the invasion and secure America's border, Buchanan writes, is a dereliction of constitutional duty that, in other times, would have called forth articles of impeachment. In the final chapter, "Last Chance," he lays out a sweeping immigration reform and border security plan, which, he contends, if not pursued, means George W. Bush's legacy will be to have lost for America a Southwest that was the legacy of Sam Houston, Andrew Jackson, and James K. Polk. With an estimated ten to fifteen million "illegals" already here and tens of millions more poised to pour across our borders, few books could be as timely---or important---as "State of Emergency." It is essential reading for all Americans.