The World Before


Ruth Montgomery - 1976
    Every one has come true! Now he returns with secret lore of the past and startling glimpses of the future.Here is the extraordinary story of Creation and the fabulous lost worlds of Atlantis and Mu, the past lives of Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Jackie Onassis, Richard Nixon, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and other celebrities. The World Before forecasts things to come, among them:- A solution to the world's energy problem- A reduction in crime throughout America- The rise of a new national leader--in GermanyThe World Before is a dramatic and exciting book that will capture the imagination of everyone who seeks a deeper understanding of the mysteries of life.

Why You Like It: The Science and Culture of Musical Taste


Nolan Gasser - 2019
    But what is it that makes music so universally beloved and have such a powerful effect on us?In this sweeping and authoritative book, Dr. Nolan Gasser―a composer, pianist, and musicologist, and the chief architect of the Music Genome Project, which powers Pandora Radio―breaks down what musical taste is, where it comes from, and what our favorite songs say about us.Dr. Gasser delves into the science, psychology, and sociology that explains why humans love music so much; how our brains process music; and why you may love Queen but your best friend loves Kiss. He sheds light on why babies can clap along to rhythmic patterns and reveals the reason behind why different cultures across the globe identify the same kinds of music as happy, sad, or scary. Using easy-to-follow notated musical scores, Dr. Gasser teaches music fans how to become engaged listeners and provides them with the tools to enhance their musical preferences. He takes readers under the hood of their favorite genres―pop, rock, jazz, hip hop, electronica, world music, and classical―and covers songs from Taylor Swift to Led Zeppelin to Kendrick Lamar to Bill Evans to Beethoven―and through their work, introduces the musical concepts behind why you hum along, tap your foot, and feel deeply.Why You Like It will teach you how to follow the musical discourse happening within a song and thereby empower your musical taste, so you will never hear music the same way again.

Extreme Cosmos: A Guided Tour of the Fastest, Brightest, Hottest, Heaviest,Oldest, and Most Amazing Aspects of Our Universe


Bryan Gaensler - 2011
    The universe is all about extremes, and in this engaging and thought-provoking book, astronomer Bryan Gaensler gives a whirlwind tour of the galaxies, with an emphasis on its fastest, hottest, heaviest, brightest, oldest, densest, and even loudest elements. From supernova explosions a billion times brighter than the sun to an asteroid the size of a beach ball, Extreme Cosmos offers a fascinating, fresh, and informed perspective of the remarkable richness of the universe, and the incredible physics that modern astronomy has revealed.

This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works


John BrockmanSean Carroll - 2013
    Why do we recognize patterns? Is there such a thing as positive stress? Are we genetically programmed to be in conflict with each other? Those are just some of the 150 questions that the world's best scientific minds answer with elegant simplicity.With contributions from Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, Nassim Taleb, Brian Eno, Steven Pinker, and more, everything is explained in fun, uncomplicated terms that make the most complex concepts easy to comprehend.

Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit


Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - 1807
    The Preface to Hegel's first major work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, lays the groundwork for all his other writing by explaining what is most innovative about Hegel's philosophy.This new translation combines readability with maximum precision, breaking Hegel's long sentences and simplifying their often complex structure. At the same time, it is more faithful to the original than any previous translation.The heart of the book is the detailed commentary, supported by an introductory essay. Together they offer a lucid and elegant explanation of the text and elucidate difficult issues in Hegel, making his claims and intentions intelligible to the beginner while offering interesting and original insights to the scholar and advanced student. The commentary often goes beyond the particular phrase in the text to provide systematic context and explain related topics in Hegel and his predecessors (including Kant, Spinoza, and Aristotle, as well as Fichte, Schelling, Holderlin, and others).The commentator refrains from playing down (as many interpreters do today) those aspects of Hegel's thought that are less acceptable in our time, and abstains from mixing his own philosophical preferences with his reading of Hegel's text. His approach is faithful to the historical Hegel while reconstructing Hegel's ideas within their own context."

Doctor You


Jeremy Howick - 2017
    One in ten people in developed countries take antidepressants. Millions of boys who can't sit still in school are prescribed methamphetamines. Modern medicine has been overused. Skyrocketing global healthcare costs render this overuse of medicine increasingly unaffordable. The wonders of modern medicine have also obscured the body's ability to heal itself. Your body produces its own drugs that can treat pain as well as drugs, cure some joint problems as well as a surgeon, and treat most mild depression as well as a psychologist. We've all heard of endorphins, but did you know 'endorphin' literally means 'morphine made by your body'? Besides the body's self-healing abilities, latest evidence clearly show that states of mind affect our health. Relaxing, positive thinking, and comfortable social environments can all improve our health as much as blockbuster drugs.Written using the latest, high quality, conventional evidence Doctor You arms you with knowledge that will empower you to make the right choices about what drugs to take, what drugs to give your children, and when you should let your body do its thing.

From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time


Sean Carroll - 2009
    In the hands of one of today’s hottest young physicists, that simple fact of breakfast becomes a doorway to understanding the Big Bang, the universe, and other universes, too. In From Eternity to Here, Sean Carroll argues that the arrow of time, pointing resolutely from the past to the future, owes its existence to conditions before the Big Bang itself, a period modern cosmology of which Einstein never dreamed. Increasingly, though, physicists are going out into realms that make the theory of relativity seem like child’s play. Carroll’s scenario is not only elegant, it’s laid out in the same easy-to- understand language that has made his group blog, Cosmic Variance, the most popular physics blog on the Net. From Eternity to Here uses ideas at the cutting edge of theoretical physics to explore how properties of spacetime before the Big Bang can explain the flow of time we experience in our everyday lives. Carroll suggests that we live in a baby universe, part of a large family of universes in which many of our siblings experience an arrow of time running in the opposite direction. It’s an ambitious, fascinating picture of the universe on an ultra-large scale, one that will captivate fans of popular physics blockbusters like Elegant Universe and A Brief History of Time.

The Physics of Miracles: Tapping in to the Field of Consciousness Potential


Richard Bartlett - 2009
    Bartlett builds upon his popular seminars to teach us how to access the discovery he has made -- a process that merges the science of subtle energy with our innate imaginations to produce measurable results. By applying forces known to modern physics, you will learn to tap into states of healthy awarenes from different moments -- in essence, travel in time -- and bring them into the present for immediate, profound results. As Dr. Bartlett shows, this practice requires no special training and produces transformation in the blink of an eye, giving you the key to a whole new level of power, awareness, and potential in your life. Filled with stories of success and discussing seemingly implausible topics such as alternate universes, invisibility, and levitation, The Physics of Miracles is not only fascinating but also instantly applicable. For millions of people looking for empowerment in an increasingly disconnected, impersonal world, Dr. Bartlett shares his experience with these phenomena that will reshape the way people think about their own place in the universe.

Manifestly Haraway


Donna J. Haraway - 2016
    The subsequent “Companion Species Manifesto,” which further questions the human–nonhuman disjunction, is no less urgently needed in our time of environmental crisis and profound polarization.Manifestly Haraway brings together these momentous manifestos to expose the continuity and ramifying force of Haraway’s thought, whose significance emerges with engaging immediacy in a sustained conversation between the author and her long-term friend and colleague Cary Wolfe. Reading cyborgs and companion species through and with each other, Haraway and Wolfe join in a wide-ranging exchange on the history and meaning of the manifestos in the context of biopolitics, feminism, Marxism, human–nonhuman relationships, making kin, literary tropes, material semiotics, the negative way of knowing, secular Catholicism, and more.The conversation ends by revealing the early stages of Haraway’s “Chthulucene Manifesto,” in tension with the teleologies of the doleful Anthropocene and the exterminationist Capitalocene. Deeply dedicated to a diverse and robust earthly flourishing, Manifestly Haraway promises to reignite needed discussion in and out of the academy about biologies, technologies, histories, and still possible futures.

Choices and Illusions: How Did I Get Where I Am, and How Do I Get Where I Want to Be?


Eldon Taylor - 2007
    Whether you’re interested in the science of thinking and beliefs, how your own mind works, how others control your thoughts, why things just don’t work out in your life, how you can create the life you’ve always wanted, or on a grander scale, how you can help make the world a better place, Choices and Illusions provides insights for all. Simply reading this book will open your eyes to new worlds of possibilities. Once exposed to the illusions most live under and by, you will change, and putting into practice any of these very simple teachings will open the door for you to achieve your highest potential.Choices and Illusions tells the story of one man’s journey into the workings of the human mind and our reason for being. The adventure is every bit as exciting as the best of scientific discoveries. Eldon Taylor’s approach is scientific and pragmatic, and his conclusions are inspirational and soul enhancing. Along the journey you’ll hear fantastic stories of divine intervention, learn why you think and do what you do not wish to do, and understand the very clear message that it’s never too late to be happy and succeed, regardless of your past actions.

Approaching the Natural: A Health Manifesto


Sid Garza-Hillman - 2012
    Sid’s philosophy is simple: the closer the human species moves by degrees to its natural design, the healthier and therefore happier it will be.In the years he has been a practicing nutritionist and health coach, Sid has honed an approach that makes achieving health and happiness a real possibility for virtually everyone. He has done this by addressing both the mental and physical aspects of achieving sustainable long-term health, and goes well beyond what any quick-fix diet/health plan can ever achieve. He passionately argues that health profoundly affects our happiness, and vice-versa, and applies his philosophy to nutrition, exercise, the mind, the family, and the world as a whole.Approaching the Natural: A Health Manifesto is accessible, clear, edgy and humorous. Sid distills his years of research into a book readers will want to carry with them as a quick reference when negotiating our most unnatural world – especially gen-x and gen-y’ers for whom there is a substantial lack of result-oriented health books that are this easy and actually fun to read.

The Interpretation of Dreams


Sigmund Freud - 1899
    Dreams, according to his theory, represent the hidden fulfillment of our unconscious wishes.

Exoplanets: The Search for Another Earth


Danielle George - 2020
    Those that have liquid water. And maybe even life.She wonders how we might be able to take the our first ever high resolution picture of an exoplanet using the microchips found in mobile phones. And she meets world-leading astrophysicists to ask if within our lifetimes humans might step foot on an earth-like planet.An ITN production for Audible Originals.

The Denial of Death


Ernest Becker - 1973
    In bold contrast to the predominant Freudian school of thought, Becker tackles the problem of the vital lie -- man's refusal to acknowledge his own mortality. In doing so, he sheds new light on the nature of humanity and issues a call to life and its living that still resonates more than twenty years after its writing.

The Prince


Niccolò Machiavelli
    Hence: Can Machiavelli, who makes the following observations, be Machiavellian as we understand the disparaging term? 1. So it is that to know the nature of a people, one need be a Prince; to know the nature of a Prince, one need to be of the people. 2. If a Prince is not given to vices that make him hated, it is unsusal for his subjects to show their affection for him. 3. Opportunity made Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus, and others; their virtue domi-nated the opportunity, making their homelands noble and happy. Armed prophets win; the disarmed lose. 4. Without faith and religion, man achieves power but not glory. 5. Prominent citizens want to command and oppress; the populace only wants to be free of oppression. 6. A Prince needs a friendly populace; otherwise in diversity there is no hope. 7. A Prince, who rules as a man of valor, avoids disasters, 8. Nations based on mercenary forces will never be solid or secure. 9. Mercenaries are dangerous because of their cowardice 10. There are two ways to fight: one with laws, the other with force. The first is rightly man’s way; the second, the way of beasts.