Modern Science

Ropa dropped out of school to become a ghostalker - and they sure do love to talk. Now she speaks to Edinburgh’s dead, carrying messages to those they left behind. A girl’s gotta earn a living, and it seems harmless enough. Until, that is, the dead whisper that someone’s bewitching children - leaving them husks, empty of joy and strength. It’s on Ropa’s patch, so she feels honor-bound to investigate. But what she learns will rock her world.

In the widening grey zone between life and death, doctors fight with doctors, families feel pressured to make tough decisions about their loved ones and lawyers are left to argue life-and-death cases in the courts. Meanwhile, intensive care patients are caught in purgatory, attached to machines and unable to speak for themselves. In Death Interrupted, Dr Blair Bigham seeks to help listeners understand the options facing them at the end of their lives.

Qu'elles soient joyeuses ou tragiques, visibles ou non, les ruptures rythment notre existence, nous transforment, nous remettent profondément en question. Comment conjuguer ces "bifurcations" de nos vies que sont les ruptures avec l'idée de notre identité, une et constante ? Nous révèlent-elles la multiplicité de nos identités possibles, ou le fait que nous nous affirmions progressivement, au fur et à mesure de ces "accidents" de la vie ? Nous épurent-elles ou nous démolissent-elles ?

In 1962, the young Eugene Rose - the future Hieromonk Seraphim - undertook to write a monumental chronicle of the abandonment of truth in the modern age. Of the hundreds of pages of materials he compiled for this work, only the present essay, on nihilism, has come down to us in completed form. Here Eugene reveals the core of all modern thought and life - the belief that all truth is relative - and shows how this belief has been translated into action in our era. Today, more than half a century after he wrote it, this essay is more timely than ever.

Vaclav Smil's mission is to make facts matter. An environmental scientist, policy analyst, and a hugely prolific author, he is Bill Gates' go-to guy for making sense of our world. In Numbers Don't Lie, Smil answers questions such as: What's worse for the environment - your car or your phone? How much do the world's cows weigh (and what does it matter)? And what makes people happy?

When Colin returns to the Hellpocalypse to right wrongs and repair the timeline, he quickly discovers that he's bitten off more than he can chew. With his druid magic diminished and allies few and far between, can he defeat a master vampire to protect the survivors he returned to save?

Recent years have brought deeply disturbing developments around the globe. American sentiment seems to be leaning increasingly toward withdrawal in the face of such disarray. In this powerful, urgent essay, Robert Kagan elucidates the reasons why American withdrawal would be the worst possible response, based as it is on a fundamental and dangerous misreading of the world. Like a jungle that keeps growing back after being cut down, the world has always been full of dangerous actors who, left unchecked, possess the desire and ability to make things worse.

Humanism is an expansive tradition of thought that places shared humanity, cultural vibrancy, and moral responsibility at the center of our lives. For centuries, this worldview has inspired people to make their choices by principles of freethinking, intellectual inquiry, fellow feeling, and optimism. In this sweeping new history, Sarah Bakewell, herself a lifelong humanist, illuminates the very personal, individual, and, well, human matter of humanism and takes listeners on a grand intellectual adventure.

Ecce homo, "behold the man", are the words Friedrich Nietzsche chose as the title for his literary self-portrait. A main purpose of the book was to offer Nietzsche's own perspective on his work as a philosopher and human being. Ecce Homo also forcefully repudiates those interpretations of his previous works purporting to find support there for imperialism, anti-Semitism, militarism, and Social Darwinism.

In this insightful travelogue, Robert D. Kaplan, geopolitical expert and bestselling author of Balkan Ghosts and The Revenge of Geography, turns his perceptive eye to a region that for centuries has been a meeting point of cultures, trade, and ideas. He undertakes a journey around the Adriatic Sea, through Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, Albania, and Greece, to reveal that far more is happening in the region than most news stories let on.

This is a story that starts off close and goes very big. The initial part of the story might sound familiar at first: it is about a platoon of mostly 19-year-old boys sent to Afghanistan, and an experience that ends abruptly in catastrophe. Their part of the story folds into the next: inexorably linked to those soldiers and never comprehensively reported before is the US Department of Defense’s quest to build the world’s most powerful biometrics database, with the ability to identify, monitor, catalog, and police people all over the world.

Fantasy fans rejoice! Seven years after writer and editor Robert Silverberg made publishing history with Legends, the acclaimed anthology of original short novels by some of the greatest writers in fantasy fiction, the long-awaited second volume is here.

More than perhaps any other book, this collection by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era captures the unique time and place of Joan Didion’s focus, exploring subjects such as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up in California and the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.

Deep down, most people think that happiness comes from having or doing something. Here, in Alan Watts’s groundbreaking third book (originally published in 1940), he offers a more challenging thesis: authentic happiness comes from embracing life as a whole in all its contradictions and paradoxes, an attitude that Watts calls the “way of acceptance.” Drawing on Eastern philosophy, Western mysticism, and analytic psychology, Watts demonstrates that happiness comes from accepting both the outer world around us and the inner world inside us,

Kant is arguably the most influential modern philosopher, but also one of the most difficult. Roger Scruton tackles his exceptionally complex subject with a strong hand, exploring the background to Kant's work and showing why the Critique of Pure Reason has proved so enduring.

Popular Lost Cities author David Hatcher Childress takes us into the amazing world of ancient technology, from computers in antiquity to the flying machines of the gods. Childress looks at the technology that was allegedly used in Atlantis and the theory that the Great Pyramid of Egypt was originally a gigantic power station. He examines tales of ancient flight and the technology that it involved; how the ancients used electricity; megalithic building techniques; the use of crystal lenses and the fire from the gods; and more.

By calling everything into doubt, Descartes laid the foundations of modern philosophy. With the celebrated words "I think therefore I am," his compelling argument swept aside ancient and medieval traditions. He deduced that human beings consist of minds and bodies; that these are totally distinct "substances"; that God exists and that He ensures we can trust the evidence of our senses.

Enter the Druidverse® and discover a world of magic, mythology, and urban fantasy! This set contains three short story collections and three novellas: Blood Scent (a prequel novella), Druid Blood (a prequel novella), Blood Circus (a short story collection), Blood Ties (a short story collection), Blood Bound (a short story collection), and Colin McCool Saves Christmas (a Christmas novella). The novellas primarily focus on everyone’s favorite down-on-his-luck druid, Colin McCool, while many of the short stories feature supporting characters.

Land - whether meadow or mountainside, desert or peat bog, parkland or pasture, suburb or city - is central to our existence. It quite literally underlies and underpins everything. Employing the keen intellect, insatiable curiosity, and narrative verve that are the foundations of his previous bestselling works, Simon Winchester examines what we human beings are doing - and have done - with the billions of acres that together make up the solid surface of our planet.

If I’m to restore the druids to their former glory, I’ll need a safe place to train my recruits. Ideally, someplace where they won’t get curb-stomped by the gods. I can’t think of a better place to hide out than an alternate timeline where the gods and fae are too busy fighting a civil war to bother with little old me. So, it’s time to head back, settle old scores, clear the alternate timeline Earth of the undead, and plant some new druid groves.