The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True
Description Magic takes many forms. Supernatural magic is what our ancestors used in order to explain the world before they developed the scientific method. The ancient Egyptians explained the night by suggesting the goddess Nut swallowed the sun. The Vikings believed a rainbow was the gods’ bridge to earth. The Japanese used to explain earthquakes […]
The Lurker at the Threshold
Ambrose Dewart returns to his ancestral estate and sets about restoring the mansion to his own tastes. In the process he comes across a document signed by his great grandfather invoking a sinister injunction to future generations: “Do not invite he who lurks at the threshold!”
The Loved Dead : And Other Revisions
H.P. Lovecraft, aside from devising his own works in his Cthulhu Mythos cycle, also collaborated in his day with many younger writers of the uncanny and eerie. Available for the first time in paperback, this collection features stories to which the master of horror added his own ingenious touch.
The Lost Gospel : The Book of Q & Christian Origins
A reconstructed collection of sayings attributed to Jesus reveals Jesus as a Jewish sage who was later mythologized into the “Christ” revered by the world’s Christian communities.
The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
Sequel to Holistic Detective Agency. After a Heathrow Airport ticket counter explodes, intergalactic sleuth Dirk Gently finds himself up against a heavenly host of foes–from the IRA to the Norse Gods. When a passenger check-in desk at London’s Heathrow Airport disappears in a ball of orange flame, the explosion is deemed an act of God. […]
The Light of Other Days (Unabridged Audio Cassette)
The crowning achievement of any professional writer is to get paid twice for the same material: write a piece for one publisher and then tweak it just enough that you can turn around and sell it to someone else. While it’s specious to accuse Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clarke of this, fans of both […]
The Light of Other Days (Abridged Audio Cassette)
The crowning achievement of any professional writer is to get paid twice for the same material: write a piece for one publisher and then tweak it just enough that you can turn around and sell it to someone else. While it’s specious to accuse Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clarke of this, fans of both […]
The Light of Other Days
The crowning achievement of any professional writer is to get paid twice for the same material: write a piece for one publisher and then tweak it just enough that you can turn around and sell it to someone else. While it’s specious to accuse Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clarke of this, fans of both […]
The Life of the Cosmos
Lee Smolin is not afraid to think big–really, really big. His theory of cosmic evolution by the natural selection of black-hole universes makes what we can experience into an infinitesimal, yet crucial, part of an ever-larger whole. Smolin says, “the new view of the universe is light, in all its senses, because what Darwin has […]
The Life of David Hume
Mossner’s Life of David Hume remains the standard biography of this great thinker and writer. First published in 1954, and updated in 1980, it is now reissued in paperback, in response to increased interest in Hume.
The Lessons of History
This historical essay updates, corrects and further explains the Durants’ previous Story of Civilization series, offering insights into some of its major themes, events and characters. Originally written in 1968, this book predicts that “a generation of peace” would lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1969, President Richard Nixon began a peace […]
The Legend of Saint Peter
THE LEGEND OF SAINT PETER contains a foreword by the translator, Frank R. Zindler; a foreword by the author, Arthur Drews; and 5 chapters: Peter in the New Testament, The mythical background of the Peter figure, Peter and Mithra, Peter in Rome, and Peter, Prince of Apostles. “The Peter of the Acts and of the […]
The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims
Description This book reveals how, for well over a millennium, across three continents—Asia, Africa, and Europe—non-Muslims who were vanquished by jihad wars, became forced tributaries (called dhimmi in Arabic), in lieu of being slain. Under the dhimmi religious caste system, non-Muslims were subjected to legal and financial oppression, as well as social isolation. Extensive primary […]
The Last Word
If there is such a thing as reason, it has to be universal–it must work the same way for everyone. Reason must reflect objective principles whose validity is independent of our point of view. To reason is to think systematically in ways that anyone with enough intelligence ought to be able to recognize as correct. […]
The Last Three Minutes
Subtitled “Conjectures About the Ultimate Fate of the Universe” from the Science Masters Series, Davies presents various alternatives for what happens when the universe reaches its final destiny. The only downside is that this book, dating from 1997, predates the recent discovery of facts tending to lead to the conclusion of a positive cosmological constant, […]
The Last Temptation of Christ
Hailed as a masterpiece by critics worldwide, The Last Temptation of Christ is a monumental reinterpretation of the Gospels by one of the giants of modern literature. Nikos Kazantzakis, renowned author of Zorba the Greek, brilliantly fleshes out the story of Christ’s passion, giving it a dynamic spiritual freshness. Kazantzakis’s Jesus is gloriously divine, yet […]
The Jesus the Jews Never Knew
The ancient Jews never heard of Jesus of Nazareth. Indeed, they never heard of Nazareth either. That is the startling conclusion of a comprehensive investigation of Jewish records surviving from antiquity. Every literary source ever advanced by serious scholars as being a reference to the historical Jesus is examined and found to be nothing of […]
The Jesus Seminar and Its Critics
Written with uncommon clarity, engaging logic, and disarming candor, this book enables you to draw your own conclusions about the Jesus Seminar and the historical Jesus. The pioneering work of The Jesus Seminar has come in for high praise as well as searing denunciation from the press, the clergy, the scholars. Now, a veteran member […]
The Jesus Puzzle
A new presentation of the argument that no historical Jesus existed. A full and comprehensive survey of the question through an examination of the early Christian record, canonical and non-canonical, from Q to the Gospels, from the earliest Pauline epistles to the second century apologists, along with Jewish, Gnostic, and Greco-Roman documents of the time. […]
The Jesus Myth
“In The Jesus Myth, the latest in G.A. Wells’s series of eagle-eyed scrutinies of the Gospels and of contemporary New Testament scholarship, the author once again takes the role of the Diogenes of the theologians. Charitable yet unflinching, Well’s analysis forces one to the inevitable conclusion that the apologists for the historical Jesus are less […]
The Jesus Mysteries: Was the ‘Original Jesus’ a Pagan God?
According to the book itself: “What if for thousands of years before Christianity Pagans had also worshipped a Son of God? What if this Pagan saviour was also born of a virgin on the 25th of December before three shepherds, turned water into wine, died and resurrected at Easter, and offered his body and blood […]
The Jesus Legend
In The Jesus Legend, G. A. Wells explains how the story of Jesus developed through telling and re-telling, from an early version in the letters of Paul (who does not mention Jesus in connection with any specific time or place) to the more elaborate and detailed pictures later presented in the New Testament gospels.
The Jesus Dynasty : The Hidden History of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity
Based on a careful analysis of the earliest Christian documents and recent archaeological discoveries, The Jesus Dynasty offers a bold new interpretation of the life of Jesus and the origins of Christianity. The story is surprising, controversial, and exciting as only a long-lost history can be when it is at last recovered. In The Jesus […]
The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?
A leading scholar of Islam analyzes the challenge of political Islam, offering insight into the sources and diversity of Muslim politics, and surveys the key Islamic movements and crises in the world today.
The Inflationary Universe
Just about everyone in the scientific community accepts the theory that our universe began in a “big bang” — but that theory leaves numerous unanswered questions about why the cosmos formed in just the manner we observe today. In The Inflationary Universe, physicist Alan Guth recounts his and others’ struggle to expound a theory that […]
The Infernova
Description A young man’s struggle to find his path in a world of human illusion and error is the theme of The Infernova. A novel in verse, this secular parody of Dante’s classic takes the reader through a new Hell—an abyss devised not to punish those damned by Christian doctrine, but rather those greater agents […]
The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable Is the Gospel Tradition?
Scholars have dissected the Gospels and other stories about Jesus for more than a century, attempting to determine their historical accuracy. Many experts today believe that the writings of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John cannot be taken as revelatory. A group of more than 100 scholars called the Jesus Seminar concluded that only about 18 […]
The Improbability of God
Book Description A growing number of powerful arguments have been formulated by philosophers and logicians in recent years demonstrating that the existence of God is improbable. These arguments assume that God’s existence is possible but argue that the weight of the empirical evidence is against God’s actual existence. This unique anthology collects most of the […]
The Impossibility of God
Most people, believers and nonbelievers alike, are unacquainted with the variety and force of arguments for the nonexistence of God. In fact, the very mention of such an argument is usually a source of amusement, if not derision. Indeed, how can there be a serious argument for the nonexistence of God, let alone for the […]
