Jun 28·edited Jun 28Liked by NE - nakedemperor.substack.com
Influential people and academia, not to mention new world religionists, have been very publicly, with the aid of msm, promoting psychedelics fervently for the last couple of years. They place worms on the hooks to grab different people's attention and give a gloss of legitimacy to what they're promoting, such as linking the drug to religious worship, or women being treated unfairly; it is so woke and such a giveaway. This is part of the agenda to weaken people and cultures.
Actually, this author is a Catholic, and the evidence is very scientific. I think we have a weird Puritan heritage, especially in the states, which is utterly abetted by corporate forces that desire to keep prescribing lucrative products, which makes a false categorical difference between experiences induced by drugs and mystical or paranormal experiences, the drug experiences making one a slacker, the mystic and paranormal making one a liar or a borderline personality or, if a scientist, a fringe wacko that must leave the polite paradigm for the pale. You may be right and there is a promotion of psychedelics to weaken culture, but this book isn't in the least woke, nor does it promote anything. It is an academic detective story.
I have a theory that the great Dante may have actually participated in a vestigial cult on the Italian coast. Plato and Pindar went to the Mysteries, and there's a sign on Mt Athos in Greek that says "if you die before you die, you will not die when you die" I just read Sebastian Junger's book on his NDE, and though he tried to make sense of what happened to him through science and the materialist paradigm, he couldn't find anyone that could explain why the dead always come for you, why that experience is so universal. And, though this has been wokeified, with that young global horror woman in Scotland apologizing, you gotta admit the centuries of witch hunts and the inquisitions, sucked pretty badly. Naked Emperor should start a book club!
These people should NOT be trusted. They are seeking immortality through technology and wish to convince others to leave old religious understandings behind and embrace their new theological philosophies. Theology in Universities around western countries has been corrupted and conquered by new world order idealists. Globalist wealth has been happy to assist in this effort since the time Rockefeller founded the University of Chicago over 100 years ago.
This takeover/transformation of Christianity has been taking place since the reformation and its dilution has reached its peak by completely losing the original religious meaning as traditionally understood. The ecumenism movement of the past century has been intentional in the eventual erasure of the Christian faith. Only urbanities, and academics and techies will be attracted to psychedelics and the religious claims made by people such as this author. They will draw some depressed people to experiment with this under the promise of gaining insight and having a refresh to their mental and emotional states.
This video on YT, hosted by the organization below, ironically exhibits my statement here.
PAUA is a gathering of entrepreneurs, explorers of consciousness, and conscious business leaders.
PAUA’s mission is to explore uncharted territories, rediscovering ancient and unveiling new technologies that offer a broader and richer perception of reality.
I will observe that Brian “studied” under the Jesuits, who have been playing a key role in the revival of the archaic mystery schools and the psychedelic reppaterning of the Western psyche around a new Gaia-centric “consciousness.” Lots of Earth Mother stuff. Psychedelics, aliens and secret “gnosis” are some among the other common themes being pushed by today’s Luciferian tribe.
Notice Tucker Carlson’s insistence on aliens being supernatural beings that have been here for a very long time, supposedly duking it out and using humans as their puppets, with the government supposedly covering up the secret knowledge involved in all this. Psychedelics cults are simply another variation on the same thing, promoting the sacred wisdom hidden from us by everyday reality, which you can now get a fast track to thanks to a mushroom…
It’s pure gnosticism and it’s very pervasive.
If one buys into these things, I’m sorry but they’ve definitely not gone very far enough down the rabbit hole. Revisit MK-Ultra and then read the Immortality Key, or just listen to Brian speak.
I’ve listened to Brian’s interviews. He tends to use ambiguity in a very methodical way, leaving things open, making “suggestions” without definitely saying something.
That’s not by chance or just some kind of scholarly posture of humility.
In hypnosis, the power of suggestion is well known. Images are conjured in the imagination, suggestions are made, and then things are left “open” without ever telling anyone to believe anything. The art lies in being vague, but systemically so, such that through a series of vague statements one arrives at a definite idea, which he believes he came to on his own.
Once someone gets to that point, it becomes very hard to change their mind because they’re convinced they came to the idea on their own and it’s now part of their identity.
The bad guys are crafty, but not wise… which is why they have to rely on these kinds of clever tricks.
The WEF/UN/WHO and the satellite megalomaniacal cabal of NGOs, think tanks and elite socio/psychopathic self-ordained gods have there own euphemistic name for it. “ The Great Reset”, or as Huxley eloquently coined, the Brave New World. A tyrannical technocracy ruled by said monsters over a genetically modified , medicated, androgynous Petri dish of tranhuman serfs. A greatly decreased population serving as disposable experiments to fulfill their goal of immortality.
Likely fearing the horrible eternity awaiting them otherwise.
We need to address the fact that artificial placental technology has enabled Ectogenesis. Ie life without a biological woman. Outside the womb. Think of a monopoly where the widget is all men. All terminator seeds. Who is the competition to that monopoly. Who is it necessary to replace to own such a system.
The socio-psychopathics orchestrating “ The Great Reset - Agenda 2030” are using Huxley’s “ Brave New World” as their playbook. Exactly what Huxley so desperately feared and frantically attempted to warn of. And was mocked, scorned and unpersoned for doing so.
Christmas and Santa Claus never made any sense until that book came out... Amazing research in there. I will still hang my Amanita Muscara shrooms in stockings to dry by the woodstove...
The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road Drugs Empire
By Nick Bilton
The unbelievable true story of the man who built a billion-dollar online drug empire from his bedroom—and almost got away with it.
In 2011, a twenty-six-year-old libertarian programmer named Ross Ulbricht launched the ultimate free market: the Silk Road, a clandestine Web site hosted on the Dark Web where anyone could trade anything—drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, poisons—free of the government’s watchful eye.
It wasn’t long before the media got wind of the new Web site where anyone—not just teenagers and weed dealers but terrorists and black hat hackers—could buy and sell contraband detection-free. Spurred by a public outcry, the federal government launched an epic two-year manhunt for the site’s elusive proprietor, with no leads, no witnesses, and no clear jurisdiction. All the investigators knew was that whoever was running the site called himself the Dread Pirate Roberts.
The Silk Road quickly ballooned into $1.2 billion enterprise, and Ross embraced his new role as kingpin. He enlisted a loyal crew of allies in high and low places, all as addicted to the danger and thrill of running an illegal marketplace as their customers were to the heroin they sold. Through his network he got wind of the target on his back and took drastic steps to protect himself—including ordering a hit on a former employee. As Ross made plans to disappear forever, the Feds raced against the clock to catch a man they weren’t sure even existed, searching for a needle in the haystack of the global Internet.
Drawing on exclusive access to key players and two billion digital words and images Ross left behind, Vanity Fair correspondent and New York Times bestselling author Nick Bilton offers a tale filled with twists and turns, lucky breaks and unbelievable close calls. It’s a story of the boy next door’s ambition gone criminal, spurred on by the clash between the new world of libertarian-leaning, anonymous, decentralized Web advocates and the old world of government control, order, and the rule of law. Filled with unforgettable characters and capped by an astonishing climax, American Kingpin might be dismissed as too outrageous for fiction. But it’s all too real.
The Shooting Party
By Anton Chekhov
The Shooting Party centers on Olga, the pretty young daughter of a drunken forester on a country estate, and her fateful relationships with the men in her life. Adored by Urbenin, the estate manager, whom she marries to escape the poverty of her home. She is also desired by the dissolute Count Karneyev and by Zinovyev, a magistrate, who knows the secret misery of her marriage. When an attempt is made on Olga's life in the woods, it seems impossible to discover the perpetrator in an impenetrable web of lust, deceit, loathing and double-dealing. One of Chekhov's earliest experiments in fiction combines the classic elements of a gripping mystery with a short story of corruption, concealed love and fatal jealousy.
Written by Chekhov in his early 20s, The Shooting Party is his only full-length novel.
The House of Mirth
By Edith Wharton
Introduction Written By Nina Bawden
First published in 1905, The House of Mirth shocked the New York society it so deftly chronicles, portraying the moral, social and economic restraints on a woman who dared to claim the privileges of marriage without assuming the responsibilities.
Lily Bart, beautiful, witty and sophisticated, is accepted by 'old money' and courted by the growing tribe of nouveaux riches. But as she nears thirty, her foothold becomes precarious; a poor girl with expensive tastes, she needs a husband to preserve her social standing, and to maintain her in the luxury she has come to expect. Whilst many have sought her, something—fastidiousness or integrity—prevents her from making a 'suitable' match.
A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East's Long War
By Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
An award-winning journalist’s powerful portrait of his native Baghdad, the people of Iraq, and twenty years of war.
“An essential insider account of the unravelling of Iraq…Driven by his intimate knowledge and deep personal stakes, Abdul-Ahad…offers an overdue reckoning with a broken history.”—Declan Walsh, author of The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State
“A vital archive of a time and place in history…Impossible to put down.”—Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise
The history of reportage has often depended on outsiders — Ryszard Kapuściński witnessing the fall of the shah in Iran, Frances FitzGerald observing the aftermath of the American war in Vietnam. What would happen if a native son was so estranged from his city by war that he could, in essence, view it as an outsider? What kind of portrait of a war-wracked place and people might he present?
A Stranger in Your Own City is award-winning writer Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s vivid, shattering response. This is not a book about Iraq’s history or an inventory of the many Middle Eastern wars that have consumed the nation over the past several decades. This is the tale of a people who once lived under the rule of a megalomaniacal leader who shaped the state in his own image; a people who watched a foreign army invade, topple that leader, demolish the state, and then invent a new country; who experienced the horror of having their home fragmented into a hundred different cities.
When the “Shock and Awe” campaign began in March 2003, Abdul-Ahad was an architect. Within months he would become a translator, then a fixer, then a reporter for The Guardian and elsewhere, chronicling the unbuilding of his centuries-old cosmopolitan city. Beginning at that moment and spanning twenty years, Abdul-Ahad’s book decenters the West and in its place focuses on everyday people, soldiers, mercenaries, citizens blown sideways through life by the war, and the proliferation of sectarian battles that continue to this day. Here is their Iraq, seen from the inside: the human cost of violence, the shifting allegiances, the generational change.
A Stranger in Your Own City is a rare work of beauty and tragedy whose power and relevance lie in its attempt to return the land to the people to whom it belongs.
The Great Railway Bazaar
By Paul Theroux
The Great Railway Bazaar is Paul Theroux's account of his epic journey by rail through Asia. Filled with evocative names of legendary train routes - the Direct-Orient Express, the Khyber Pass Local, the Delhi Mail from Jaipur, the Golden Arrow to Kuala Lumpur, the Hikari Super Express to Kyoto, and the Trans-Siberian Express - it describes the many places, cultures, sights, and sounds he experienced and the fascinating people he met.
Here he overhears snippets of chat and occasional monologues, and is drawn into conversation with fellow passengers, from Molesworth, a British theatrical agent, and Sadik, a shabby Turkish tycoon, while avoiding the forceful approaches of pimps and drug dealers. This wonderfully entertaining travelogue pays loving tribute to the romantic joys of railways and train travel.
Nightmare Alley is American author William Lindsay Gresham’s first and best-known work. The novel - most admired by noir fiction fans - was published in 1946, adapted into a film in 1947 starring Tyrone Power and subsequently printed as a graphic novel by Spain Rodriquez. During the 1940s Gresham worked as an editor for a genuine crime pulp magazine in New York, during which period he wrote this book; characters range from hustlers to Machiavellian femme fatales in a dark world of show business. Stan Carlisle is an ambitious ‘carny’ who eventually becomes a spiritualist for the rich and gullible. It appears that the world is at his feet, but not everything is as it seems….
The Road Home
By Rose Tremain
Winner of the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2008, The Road Home is the best-selling story of Lev, a middle-aged migrant from Eastern Europe, who moves to London in search of work after losing his wife and job. Lev's London is awash with money, celebrity and complacency. The world Tremain creates is both convincing and poignant.
Heat
An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany
By Bill Buford
From one of our most interesting literary figures - former editor of Granta, former fiction editor at The New Yorker, acclaimed author of Among the Thugs - a sharp, funny, exuberant, close-up account of his headlong plunge into the life of a professional cook.Expanding on his James Beard Award-winning New Yorker article, Bill Buford gives us a richly evocative chronicle of his experience as “slave” to Mario Batali in the kitchen of Batali’s three-star New York restaurant, Babbo.
In a fast-paced, candid narrative, Buford describes three frenetic years of trials and errors, disappointments and triumphs, as he worked his way up the Babbo ladder from “kitchen bitch” to line cook...his relationship with the larger-than-life Batali, whose story he learns as their friendship grows through (and sometimes despite) kitchen encounters and after-work all-nighters...and his immersion in the arts of butchery in Northern Italy, of preparing game in London, and making handmade pasta at an Italian hillside trattoria.
Heat is a marvelous hybrid: a memoir of Buford’s kitchen adventure, the story of Batali’s amazing rise to culinary (and extra-culinary) fame, a dazzling behind-the-scenes look at a famous restaurant, and an illuminating exploration of why food matters. It is a book to delight in, and to savor.
This was a very interesting book and I read it a few years ago. I like that Pollen has an addition there because his book, How to Change Your Mind, is great as well. We have ignored so much on psychadelics that it isn't even funny while pretending religions aren't influences by it.
The Last Supper was a passover seder. There was nothing psychedelic about it. Jesus took the passover wine and matzoh and compared them to His blood and body, knowing he was going to the cross the next day. He was the literal fulfillment of the Passover lamb.
There is no biblical evidence for weekly communion. When Jesus said to "do this in rememberance of me", he was talking about the passover seder, which happens once a year.
From the best-selling author of Why We Get Fat, a groundbreaking, eye-opening exposé that makes the convincing case that sugar is the tobacco of the new millennium: backed by powerful lobbies, entrenched in our lives, and making us very sick.
Among Americans, diabetes is more prevalent today than ever; obesity is at epidemic proportions; nearly 10 percent of children are thought to have nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. And sugar is at the root of these, and other, critical society-wide, health-related problems. With his signature command of both science and straight talk, Gary Taubes delves into Americans' history with sugar: its uses as a preservative, as an additive in cigarettes, the contemporary overuse of high-fructose corn syrup. He explains what research has shown about our addiction to sweets. He clarifies the arguments against sugar, corrects misconceptions about the relationship between sugar and weight loss, and provides the perspective necessary to make informed decisions about sugar as individuals and as a society.
The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party
By Daniel James Brown
“An ideal pairing of talent and material.… Engrossing.… A deft and ambitious storyteller.” — Mary Roach, New York Times Book Review
In April of 1846, twenty-one-year-old Sarah Graves, intent on a better future, set out west from Illinois with her new husband, her parents, and eight siblings. Seven months later, after joining a party of pioneers led by George Donner, they reached the Sierra Nevada Mountains as the first heavy snows of the season closed the pass ahead of them. In early December, starving and desperate, Sarah and fourteen others set out for California on snowshoes, and, over the next thirty-two days, endured almost unfathomable hardships and horrors.
In this gripping narrative, New York Times bestselling author Daniel James Brown sheds new light on one of the most legendary events in American history. Following every painful footstep of Sarah’s journey with the Donner Party, Brown produces a tale both spellbinding and richly informative.
Of Human Bondage
By W. Somerset Maugham
One of the most widely read novels of the 20th century, W. Somerset Maugham's masterpiece, Of Human Bondage, gives a harrowing depiction of unrequited love. Philip Carey, a sensitive orphan born with a clubfoot, finds himself in desperate need of passion and inspiration. He abandons his studies to travel, first to Heidelberg and then to Paris, where he nurses ambitions of becoming a great artist.
Philip's youthful idealism erodes, however, as he comes face-to-face with his own mediocrity and lack of impact on the world. After returning to London to study medicine, he becomes wildly infatuated with Mildred, a vulgar, tawdry waitress, and begins a doomed love affair that will change the course of his life.
First published in 1915, the semi-autobiographical Of Human Bondage combines the values left over from the Victorian era with the prevailing irony and despair of the early 20th century. Unsentimental yet bursting with deep feeling, Of Human Bondage remains Maugham's most complete statement of the importance of physical and spiritual liberty, a theme that resounds more loudly than ever today.
The Wood Age: How One Material Shaped the Whole of Human History
By Roland Ennos
When our ancestors came down from the trees, they brought the trees with them and remade the world.
‘A stunning book on the incalculable debt humanity owes wood…’ John Carey, The Sunday Times
How did the descendants of small arboreal primates manage to stand on our own two feet, become top predators and take over the world?
In The Wood Age, Roland Ennos shows that the key to humanity’s success has been our relationship with wood. He takes us on a sweeping ten-million-year journey from great apes who built their nests among the trees to early humans who depended on wood for fire, shelter, tools and weapons; from the structural design of wheels and woodwinds, to the invention of paper and the printing press.
Drawing together recent research and reinterpreting existing evidence from fields as far-ranging as primatology, anthropology, archaeology, history, architecture, engineering and carpentry, Ennos charts for the first time how our ability to exploit wood’s unique properties has shaped our bodies and minds, societies and lives. He also charts the dislocating effects of industrialism and explains how rediscovering traditional ways of growing, using and understanding trees can help combat climate change and bring our lives into better balance with nature.
In the bestselling tradition of Harari’s Sapiens, this unique history of humanity tells the story of our evolution, our civilisations and our future through the lens of the material that made us. We are products of the Wood Age.
Disgrace
By J. M. Coetzee
After years teaching Romantic poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, David Lurie, middle-aged and twice divorced, has an impulsive affair with a student. The affair sours, he is denounced and summoned before a committee of inquiry. Willing to admit his guilt, but refusing to yield to pressure to repent publicly, he resigns and retreats to his daughter Lucy's isolated smallholding.
For a time, his daughter's influence and the natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life. But the balance of power in the country is shifting. He and Lucy become victims of a savage and disturbing attack which brings into relief all the faultlines in their relationship.
By the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and twice winner of the Booker Prize.
The Yellow Birds
By Kevin Powers
With profound emotional insight, especially into the effects of a hidden war on mothers and families at home, The Yellow Birds is a groundbreaking novel about the costs of war that is destined to become a classic.
"The war tried to kill us in the spring," begins this breathtaking account of friendship and loss. In Al Tafar, Iraq, twenty-one-year old Private Bartle and eighteen-year-old Private Murphy cling to life as their platoon launches a bloody battle for the city. In the endless days that follow, the two young soldiers do everything to protect each other from the forces that press in on every side: the insurgents, physical fatigue, and the mental stress that comes from constant danger.
Bound together since basic training when their tough-as-nails Sergeant ordered Bartle to watch over Murphy, the two have been dropped into a war neither is prepared for. As reality begins to blur into a hazy nightmare, Murphy becomes increasingly unmoored from the world around him and Bartle takes impossible actions.
A sweeping and captivatingly told history of clothing and the stuff it's made of--an unparalleled deep dive into how we've made what we wear, and how our garments have transformed our societies, our planet, and our lives.
In this ambitious, panoramic social history, Sofi Thanhauser brilliantly tells five stories--Linen, Cotton, Silk, Synthetics, Wool--about the clothes we wear and where they come from, illuminating our world in unexpected ways. She takes us from the opulent court of Louis Quatorze to the labor camps in modern-day Chinese-occupied Xinjiang. We see how textiles were once dyed from lichen, shells, bark, saffron, and beetles, displaying distinctive regional weaves and knits, and how the modern Western garment industry has refashioned our attire into the homogenous and disposable uniforms popularized by fast fashion brands. Thanhauser makes clear how the clothing industry has become one of the planet's worst polluters, relying on chronically underpaid and exploited laborers. But she also shows us how micro-communities and companies of textile and clothing makers in every corner of the world are rediscovering ancestral and ethical methods for making what we wear.
The Story of Russia
By Orlando Figes
No other country has been so divided over its own past as Russia. None has changed its story so often. How the Russians came to tell their story, and to reinvent it as they went along, is a vital aspect of their history, their culture and beliefs. To understand what Russia’s future holds—to grasp what Putin’s regime means for Russia and the world—we need to unravel the ideas and meanings of that history.
In The Story of Russia, Orlando Figes brings into sharp relief the vibrant characters that comprise Russia’s rich history, and whose stories remain so important in making sense of the world’s largest nation today—from the crowning of sixteen-year-old Ivan the Terrible in a candlelit cathedral, to Catherine the Great, riding out in a green uniform to arrest her husband at his palace, to the bitter last days of the Romanovs.
Beautifully written and based on a lifetime of scholarship, The Story of Russia is a major and definitive work from the great storyteller of Russian history: sweeping, suspenseful, masterful.
The Korean War
By Max Hastings
It was the first war we could not win. At no other time since World War II have two superpowers met in battle. Now Max Hastings, preeminent military historian, takes us back to the bloody, bitter, struggle to restore South Korean independence after the Communist invasion of June 1950. Using personal accounts from interviews with more than 200 vets - including the Chinese - Hasting follows real officers and soldiers through the battles. He brilliantly captures the Cold War crisis at home - the strategies and politics of Truman, Acheson, Marshall, MacArthur, Ridgeway, and Bradley - and shows what we should have learned in the war that was the prelude to Vietnam.
Doctor Zhivago
By: Boris Pasternak
Banned in the Soviet Union until 1988, Doctor Zhivago is the epic story of the life and loves of a poet-physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Yuri Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds and in love with the tender and beautiful Nurse Lara.
Trust
By Hernan Diaz
A Wall Street tycoon takes a young woman as his wife. Together they rise to the top in an age of excess and speculation. But now a novelist is threatening to reveal the secrets behind their marriage, and this wealthy man’s story—of greed, love and betrayal—is about to slip from his grasp. Composed of four competing versions of this deliciously deceptive tale, Trust brings us on a quest for truth while confronting the lies that often live buried in the human heart.
Salt: A World History
by Mark Kurlansky
In his fifth work of nonfiction, Mark Kurlansky turns his attention to a common household item with a long and intriguing history: salt. The only rock we eat, salt has shaped civilization from the very beginning, and its story is a glittering, often surprising part of the history of humankind. A substance so valuable it served as currency, salt has influenced the establishment of trade routes and cities, provoked and financed wars, secured empires, and inspired revolutions.
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor
By David S. Landes
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations is David S. Landes's acclaimed, best-selling exploration of one of the most contentious and hotly debated questions of our time: Why do some nations achieve economic success while others remain mired in poverty? The answer, as Landes definitively illustrates, is a complex interplay of cultural mores and historical circumstance.
Rich with anecdotal evidence, piercing analysis, and a truly astonishing range of erudition, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations is a "picture of enormous sweep and brilliant insight" (Kenneth Arrow) as well as one of the most audaciously ambitious works of history in decades.
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
By Daron Acemoğlu, James A. Robinson
Brilliant and engagingly written, Why Nations Fail answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine?
Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps ignorance of what the right policies are?
Simply, no. None of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Otherwise, how to explain why Botswana has become one of the fastest growing countries in the world, while other African nations, such as Zimbabwe, the Congo, and Sierra Leone, are mired in poverty and violence?
Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or lack of it). Korea, to take just one of their fascinating examples, is a remarkably homogeneous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest. The south forged a society that created incentives, rewarded innovation, and allowed everyone to participate in economic opportunities. The economic success thus spurred was sustained because the government became accountable and responsive to citizens and the great mass of people. Sadly, the people of the north have endured decades of famine, political repression, and very different economic institutions—with no end in sight. The differences between the Koreas is due to the politics that created these completely different institutional trajectories.
Based on fifteen years of original research Acemoglu and Robinson marshall extraordinary historical evidence from the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, medieval Venice, the Soviet Union, Latin America, England, Europe, the United States, and Africa to build a new theory of political economy with great relevance for the big questions of today, including:
- China has built an authoritarian growth machine. Will it continue to grow at such high speed and overwhelm the West?
- Are America’s best days behind it? Are we moving from a virtuous circle in which efforts by elites to aggrandize power are resisted to a vicious one that enriches and empowers a small minority?
- What is the most effective way to help move billions of people from the rut of poverty to prosperity? More philanthropy from the wealthy nations of the West? Or learning the hard-won lessons of Acemoglu and Robinson’s breakthrough ideas on the interplay between inclusive political and economic institutions?
Why Nations Fail will change the way you look at—and understand—the world.
The Clot Thickens: The enduring mystery of heart disease
By Malcolm Kendrick
“Malcolm Kendrick's masterly survey of the enduring mystery of heart disease reads like a detective story. With great verve he marshals the evidence for the two main contending theories, exonerates the presumed suspect and makes a formidable case for thrombogenesis (blood clotting) as the perpetrator. Witty, provocative and entertaining, 'The Clot Thickens' packs a powerful scientific punch. Highly recommended.” Dr James Le Fanu Doctor, journalist, author of ‘ The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine .’
“Malcolm Kendrick's new book brings to mind the quote from Thomas Huxley when he first learned of Darwin's theory of evolution: ‘how extremely stupid (of me) not to have thought of that’. What Kendrick presents is nothing less than a unifying theory of heart disease, that explains why everything from sickle cell disease to diabetes to a stressful lifestyle increases cardiovascular risk (and he does it with a large dollop of humour). After decades stuck in the blind alley that is the LDL hypothesis, this book is a revelation. It should be read by anyone with even a slight interest in understanding heart disease and what they can do to protect themselves from it.”
Influential people and academia, not to mention new world religionists, have been very publicly, with the aid of msm, promoting psychedelics fervently for the last couple of years. They place worms on the hooks to grab different people's attention and give a gloss of legitimacy to what they're promoting, such as linking the drug to religious worship, or women being treated unfairly; it is so woke and such a giveaway. This is part of the agenda to weaken people and cultures.
Actually, this author is a Catholic, and the evidence is very scientific. I think we have a weird Puritan heritage, especially in the states, which is utterly abetted by corporate forces that desire to keep prescribing lucrative products, which makes a false categorical difference between experiences induced by drugs and mystical or paranormal experiences, the drug experiences making one a slacker, the mystic and paranormal making one a liar or a borderline personality or, if a scientist, a fringe wacko that must leave the polite paradigm for the pale. You may be right and there is a promotion of psychedelics to weaken culture, but this book isn't in the least woke, nor does it promote anything. It is an academic detective story.
I have a theory that the great Dante may have actually participated in a vestigial cult on the Italian coast. Plato and Pindar went to the Mysteries, and there's a sign on Mt Athos in Greek that says "if you die before you die, you will not die when you die" I just read Sebastian Junger's book on his NDE, and though he tried to make sense of what happened to him through science and the materialist paradigm, he couldn't find anyone that could explain why the dead always come for you, why that experience is so universal. And, though this has been wokeified, with that young global horror woman in Scotland apologizing, you gotta admit the centuries of witch hunts and the inquisitions, sucked pretty badly. Naked Emperor should start a book club!
These people should NOT be trusted. They are seeking immortality through technology and wish to convince others to leave old religious understandings behind and embrace their new theological philosophies. Theology in Universities around western countries has been corrupted and conquered by new world order idealists. Globalist wealth has been happy to assist in this effort since the time Rockefeller founded the University of Chicago over 100 years ago.
This takeover/transformation of Christianity has been taking place since the reformation and its dilution has reached its peak by completely losing the original religious meaning as traditionally understood. The ecumenism movement of the past century has been intentional in the eventual erasure of the Christian faith. Only urbanities, and academics and techies will be attracted to psychedelics and the religious claims made by people such as this author. They will draw some depressed people to experiment with this under the promise of gaining insight and having a refresh to their mental and emotional states.
This video on YT, hosted by the organization below, ironically exhibits my statement here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZWXjwVAl48
https://www.paua.life/
PAUA is a gathering of entrepreneurs, explorers of consciousness, and conscious business leaders.
PAUA’s mission is to explore uncharted territories, rediscovering ancient and unveiling new technologies that offer a broader and richer perception of reality.
This was a great book. The context for the Church of Rome's distrust of women and their invention of witches was really well explained.
I will observe that Brian “studied” under the Jesuits, who have been playing a key role in the revival of the archaic mystery schools and the psychedelic reppaterning of the Western psyche around a new Gaia-centric “consciousness.” Lots of Earth Mother stuff. Psychedelics, aliens and secret “gnosis” are some among the other common themes being pushed by today’s Luciferian tribe.
Notice Tucker Carlson’s insistence on aliens being supernatural beings that have been here for a very long time, supposedly duking it out and using humans as their puppets, with the government supposedly covering up the secret knowledge involved in all this. Psychedelics cults are simply another variation on the same thing, promoting the sacred wisdom hidden from us by everyday reality, which you can now get a fast track to thanks to a mushroom…
It’s pure gnosticism and it’s very pervasive.
If one buys into these things, I’m sorry but they’ve definitely not gone very far enough down the rabbit hole. Revisit MK-Ultra and then read the Immortality Key, or just listen to Brian speak.
I’ve listened to Brian’s interviews. He tends to use ambiguity in a very methodical way, leaving things open, making “suggestions” without definitely saying something.
That’s not by chance or just some kind of scholarly posture of humility.
In hypnosis, the power of suggestion is well known. Images are conjured in the imagination, suggestions are made, and then things are left “open” without ever telling anyone to believe anything. The art lies in being vague, but systemically so, such that through a series of vague statements one arrives at a definite idea, which he believes he came to on his own.
Once someone gets to that point, it becomes very hard to change their mind because they’re convinced they came to the idea on their own and it’s now part of their identity.
The bad guys are crafty, but not wise… which is why they have to rely on these kinds of clever tricks.
The WEF/UN/WHO and the satellite megalomaniacal cabal of NGOs, think tanks and elite socio/psychopathic self-ordained gods have there own euphemistic name for it. “ The Great Reset”, or as Huxley eloquently coined, the Brave New World. A tyrannical technocracy ruled by said monsters over a genetically modified , medicated, androgynous Petri dish of tranhuman serfs. A greatly decreased population serving as disposable experiments to fulfill their goal of immortality.
Likely fearing the horrible eternity awaiting them otherwise.
We need to address the fact that artificial placental technology has enabled Ectogenesis. Ie life without a biological woman. Outside the womb. Think of a monopoly where the widget is all men. All terminator seeds. Who is the competition to that monopoly. Who is it necessary to replace to own such a system.
The socio-psychopathics orchestrating “ The Great Reset - Agenda 2030” are using Huxley’s “ Brave New World” as their playbook. Exactly what Huxley so desperately feared and frantically attempted to warn of. And was mocked, scorned and unpersoned for doing so.
Christmas and Santa Claus never made any sense until that book came out... Amazing research in there. I will still hang my Amanita Muscara shrooms in stockings to dry by the woodstove...
Yep, and it's all utter, utter bollocks in the end. A bit of a tale, but hey. T'was ever thus.
Yikes. It was only a seder but the early Church fathers had to turn it into an Eleusinian Mystery to sell it to the Greeks.
Fer shure mind alterants ye shall always have with you. Birds and monkeys get drunk too.
By the way--I used to do a Huston Smith parody that drove the now-unhusband nuts...
Interesting book with new insights
Thanks for the recommendation - I have just purchased the audio version.
I've posted my list of all time favourite books... many of them are on Audible...
American Kingpin
The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road Drugs Empire
By Nick Bilton
The unbelievable true story of the man who built a billion-dollar online drug empire from his bedroom—and almost got away with it.
In 2011, a twenty-six-year-old libertarian programmer named Ross Ulbricht launched the ultimate free market: the Silk Road, a clandestine Web site hosted on the Dark Web where anyone could trade anything—drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, poisons—free of the government’s watchful eye.
It wasn’t long before the media got wind of the new Web site where anyone—not just teenagers and weed dealers but terrorists and black hat hackers—could buy and sell contraband detection-free. Spurred by a public outcry, the federal government launched an epic two-year manhunt for the site’s elusive proprietor, with no leads, no witnesses, and no clear jurisdiction. All the investigators knew was that whoever was running the site called himself the Dread Pirate Roberts.
The Silk Road quickly ballooned into $1.2 billion enterprise, and Ross embraced his new role as kingpin. He enlisted a loyal crew of allies in high and low places, all as addicted to the danger and thrill of running an illegal marketplace as their customers were to the heroin they sold. Through his network he got wind of the target on his back and took drastic steps to protect himself—including ordering a hit on a former employee. As Ross made plans to disappear forever, the Feds raced against the clock to catch a man they weren’t sure even existed, searching for a needle in the haystack of the global Internet.
Drawing on exclusive access to key players and two billion digital words and images Ross left behind, Vanity Fair correspondent and New York Times bestselling author Nick Bilton offers a tale filled with twists and turns, lucky breaks and unbelievable close calls. It’s a story of the boy next door’s ambition gone criminal, spurred on by the clash between the new world of libertarian-leaning, anonymous, decentralized Web advocates and the old world of government control, order, and the rule of law. Filled with unforgettable characters and capped by an astonishing climax, American Kingpin might be dismissed as too outrageous for fiction. But it’s all too real.
The Shooting Party
By Anton Chekhov
The Shooting Party centers on Olga, the pretty young daughter of a drunken forester on a country estate, and her fateful relationships with the men in her life. Adored by Urbenin, the estate manager, whom she marries to escape the poverty of her home. She is also desired by the dissolute Count Karneyev and by Zinovyev, a magistrate, who knows the secret misery of her marriage. When an attempt is made on Olga's life in the woods, it seems impossible to discover the perpetrator in an impenetrable web of lust, deceit, loathing and double-dealing. One of Chekhov's earliest experiments in fiction combines the classic elements of a gripping mystery with a short story of corruption, concealed love and fatal jealousy.
Written by Chekhov in his early 20s, The Shooting Party is his only full-length novel.
The House of Mirth
By Edith Wharton
Introduction Written By Nina Bawden
First published in 1905, The House of Mirth shocked the New York society it so deftly chronicles, portraying the moral, social and economic restraints on a woman who dared to claim the privileges of marriage without assuming the responsibilities.
Lily Bart, beautiful, witty and sophisticated, is accepted by 'old money' and courted by the growing tribe of nouveaux riches. But as she nears thirty, her foothold becomes precarious; a poor girl with expensive tastes, she needs a husband to preserve her social standing, and to maintain her in the luxury she has come to expect. Whilst many have sought her, something—fastidiousness or integrity—prevents her from making a 'suitable' match.
A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East's Long War
By Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
An award-winning journalist’s powerful portrait of his native Baghdad, the people of Iraq, and twenty years of war.
“An essential insider account of the unravelling of Iraq…Driven by his intimate knowledge and deep personal stakes, Abdul-Ahad…offers an overdue reckoning with a broken history.”—Declan Walsh, author of The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State
“A vital archive of a time and place in history…Impossible to put down.”—Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise
The history of reportage has often depended on outsiders — Ryszard Kapuściński witnessing the fall of the shah in Iran, Frances FitzGerald observing the aftermath of the American war in Vietnam. What would happen if a native son was so estranged from his city by war that he could, in essence, view it as an outsider? What kind of portrait of a war-wracked place and people might he present?
A Stranger in Your Own City is award-winning writer Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s vivid, shattering response. This is not a book about Iraq’s history or an inventory of the many Middle Eastern wars that have consumed the nation over the past several decades. This is the tale of a people who once lived under the rule of a megalomaniacal leader who shaped the state in his own image; a people who watched a foreign army invade, topple that leader, demolish the state, and then invent a new country; who experienced the horror of having their home fragmented into a hundred different cities.
When the “Shock and Awe” campaign began in March 2003, Abdul-Ahad was an architect. Within months he would become a translator, then a fixer, then a reporter for The Guardian and elsewhere, chronicling the unbuilding of his centuries-old cosmopolitan city. Beginning at that moment and spanning twenty years, Abdul-Ahad’s book decenters the West and in its place focuses on everyday people, soldiers, mercenaries, citizens blown sideways through life by the war, and the proliferation of sectarian battles that continue to this day. Here is their Iraq, seen from the inside: the human cost of violence, the shifting allegiances, the generational change.
A Stranger in Your Own City is a rare work of beauty and tragedy whose power and relevance lie in its attempt to return the land to the people to whom it belongs.
The Great Railway Bazaar
By Paul Theroux
The Great Railway Bazaar is Paul Theroux's account of his epic journey by rail through Asia. Filled with evocative names of legendary train routes - the Direct-Orient Express, the Khyber Pass Local, the Delhi Mail from Jaipur, the Golden Arrow to Kuala Lumpur, the Hikari Super Express to Kyoto, and the Trans-Siberian Express - it describes the many places, cultures, sights, and sounds he experienced and the fascinating people he met.
Here he overhears snippets of chat and occasional monologues, and is drawn into conversation with fellow passengers, from Molesworth, a British theatrical agent, and Sadik, a shabby Turkish tycoon, while avoiding the forceful approaches of pimps and drug dealers. This wonderfully entertaining travelogue pays loving tribute to the romantic joys of railways and train travel.
Nightmare Alley
By William Lindsay Gresham
Nightmare Alley is American author William Lindsay Gresham’s first and best-known work. The novel - most admired by noir fiction fans - was published in 1946, adapted into a film in 1947 starring Tyrone Power and subsequently printed as a graphic novel by Spain Rodriquez. During the 1940s Gresham worked as an editor for a genuine crime pulp magazine in New York, during which period he wrote this book; characters range from hustlers to Machiavellian femme fatales in a dark world of show business. Stan Carlisle is an ambitious ‘carny’ who eventually becomes a spiritualist for the rich and gullible. It appears that the world is at his feet, but not everything is as it seems….
The Road Home
By Rose Tremain
Winner of the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2008, The Road Home is the best-selling story of Lev, a middle-aged migrant from Eastern Europe, who moves to London in search of work after losing his wife and job. Lev's London is awash with money, celebrity and complacency. The world Tremain creates is both convincing and poignant.
Heat
An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany
By Bill Buford
From one of our most interesting literary figures - former editor of Granta, former fiction editor at The New Yorker, acclaimed author of Among the Thugs - a sharp, funny, exuberant, close-up account of his headlong plunge into the life of a professional cook.Expanding on his James Beard Award-winning New Yorker article, Bill Buford gives us a richly evocative chronicle of his experience as “slave” to Mario Batali in the kitchen of Batali’s three-star New York restaurant, Babbo.
In a fast-paced, candid narrative, Buford describes three frenetic years of trials and errors, disappointments and triumphs, as he worked his way up the Babbo ladder from “kitchen bitch” to line cook...his relationship with the larger-than-life Batali, whose story he learns as their friendship grows through (and sometimes despite) kitchen encounters and after-work all-nighters...and his immersion in the arts of butchery in Northern Italy, of preparing game in London, and making handmade pasta at an Italian hillside trattoria.
Heat is a marvelous hybrid: a memoir of Buford’s kitchen adventure, the story of Batali’s amazing rise to culinary (and extra-culinary) fame, a dazzling behind-the-scenes look at a famous restaurant, and an illuminating exploration of why food matters. It is a book to delight in, and to savor.
This was a very interesting book and I read it a few years ago. I like that Pollen has an addition there because his book, How to Change Your Mind, is great as well. We have ignored so much on psychadelics that it isn't even funny while pretending religions aren't influences by it.
Pollen's book: https://amzn.to/3zohIaO
The Last Supper was a passover seder. There was nothing psychedelic about it. Jesus took the passover wine and matzoh and compared them to His blood and body, knowing he was going to the cross the next day. He was the literal fulfillment of the Passover lamb.
There is no biblical evidence for weekly communion. When Jesus said to "do this in rememberance of me", he was talking about the passover seder, which happens once a year.
The Case Against Sugar
By Gary Taubes
From the best-selling author of Why We Get Fat, a groundbreaking, eye-opening exposé that makes the convincing case that sugar is the tobacco of the new millennium: backed by powerful lobbies, entrenched in our lives, and making us very sick.
Among Americans, diabetes is more prevalent today than ever; obesity is at epidemic proportions; nearly 10 percent of children are thought to have nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. And sugar is at the root of these, and other, critical society-wide, health-related problems. With his signature command of both science and straight talk, Gary Taubes delves into Americans' history with sugar: its uses as a preservative, as an additive in cigarettes, the contemporary overuse of high-fructose corn syrup. He explains what research has shown about our addiction to sweets. He clarifies the arguments against sugar, corrects misconceptions about the relationship between sugar and weight loss, and provides the perspective necessary to make informed decisions about sugar as individuals and as a society.
The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party
By Daniel James Brown
“An ideal pairing of talent and material.… Engrossing.… A deft and ambitious storyteller.” — Mary Roach, New York Times Book Review
In April of 1846, twenty-one-year-old Sarah Graves, intent on a better future, set out west from Illinois with her new husband, her parents, and eight siblings. Seven months later, after joining a party of pioneers led by George Donner, they reached the Sierra Nevada Mountains as the first heavy snows of the season closed the pass ahead of them. In early December, starving and desperate, Sarah and fourteen others set out for California on snowshoes, and, over the next thirty-two days, endured almost unfathomable hardships and horrors.
In this gripping narrative, New York Times bestselling author Daniel James Brown sheds new light on one of the most legendary events in American history. Following every painful footstep of Sarah’s journey with the Donner Party, Brown produces a tale both spellbinding and richly informative.
Of Human Bondage
By W. Somerset Maugham
One of the most widely read novels of the 20th century, W. Somerset Maugham's masterpiece, Of Human Bondage, gives a harrowing depiction of unrequited love. Philip Carey, a sensitive orphan born with a clubfoot, finds himself in desperate need of passion and inspiration. He abandons his studies to travel, first to Heidelberg and then to Paris, where he nurses ambitions of becoming a great artist.
Philip's youthful idealism erodes, however, as he comes face-to-face with his own mediocrity and lack of impact on the world. After returning to London to study medicine, he becomes wildly infatuated with Mildred, a vulgar, tawdry waitress, and begins a doomed love affair that will change the course of his life.
First published in 1915, the semi-autobiographical Of Human Bondage combines the values left over from the Victorian era with the prevailing irony and despair of the early 20th century. Unsentimental yet bursting with deep feeling, Of Human Bondage remains Maugham's most complete statement of the importance of physical and spiritual liberty, a theme that resounds more loudly than ever today.
The Wood Age: How One Material Shaped the Whole of Human History
By Roland Ennos
When our ancestors came down from the trees, they brought the trees with them and remade the world.
‘A stunning book on the incalculable debt humanity owes wood…’ John Carey, The Sunday Times
How did the descendants of small arboreal primates manage to stand on our own two feet, become top predators and take over the world?
In The Wood Age, Roland Ennos shows that the key to humanity’s success has been our relationship with wood. He takes us on a sweeping ten-million-year journey from great apes who built their nests among the trees to early humans who depended on wood for fire, shelter, tools and weapons; from the structural design of wheels and woodwinds, to the invention of paper and the printing press.
Drawing together recent research and reinterpreting existing evidence from fields as far-ranging as primatology, anthropology, archaeology, history, architecture, engineering and carpentry, Ennos charts for the first time how our ability to exploit wood’s unique properties has shaped our bodies and minds, societies and lives. He also charts the dislocating effects of industrialism and explains how rediscovering traditional ways of growing, using and understanding trees can help combat climate change and bring our lives into better balance with nature.
In the bestselling tradition of Harari’s Sapiens, this unique history of humanity tells the story of our evolution, our civilisations and our future through the lens of the material that made us. We are products of the Wood Age.
Disgrace
By J. M. Coetzee
After years teaching Romantic poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, David Lurie, middle-aged and twice divorced, has an impulsive affair with a student. The affair sours, he is denounced and summoned before a committee of inquiry. Willing to admit his guilt, but refusing to yield to pressure to repent publicly, he resigns and retreats to his daughter Lucy's isolated smallholding.
For a time, his daughter's influence and the natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life. But the balance of power in the country is shifting. He and Lucy become victims of a savage and disturbing attack which brings into relief all the faultlines in their relationship.
By the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and twice winner of the Booker Prize.
The Yellow Birds
By Kevin Powers
With profound emotional insight, especially into the effects of a hidden war on mothers and families at home, The Yellow Birds is a groundbreaking novel about the costs of war that is destined to become a classic.
"The war tried to kill us in the spring," begins this breathtaking account of friendship and loss. In Al Tafar, Iraq, twenty-one-year old Private Bartle and eighteen-year-old Private Murphy cling to life as their platoon launches a bloody battle for the city. In the endless days that follow, the two young soldiers do everything to protect each other from the forces that press in on every side: the insurgents, physical fatigue, and the mental stress that comes from constant danger.
Bound together since basic training when their tough-as-nails Sergeant ordered Bartle to watch over Murphy, the two have been dropped into a war neither is prepared for. As reality begins to blur into a hazy nightmare, Murphy becomes increasingly unmoored from the world around him and Bartle takes impossible actions.
Worn
A People's History of Clothing
By Sofi Thanhauser
A sweeping and captivatingly told history of clothing and the stuff it's made of--an unparalleled deep dive into how we've made what we wear, and how our garments have transformed our societies, our planet, and our lives.
In this ambitious, panoramic social history, Sofi Thanhauser brilliantly tells five stories--Linen, Cotton, Silk, Synthetics, Wool--about the clothes we wear and where they come from, illuminating our world in unexpected ways. She takes us from the opulent court of Louis Quatorze to the labor camps in modern-day Chinese-occupied Xinjiang. We see how textiles were once dyed from lichen, shells, bark, saffron, and beetles, displaying distinctive regional weaves and knits, and how the modern Western garment industry has refashioned our attire into the homogenous and disposable uniforms popularized by fast fashion brands. Thanhauser makes clear how the clothing industry has become one of the planet's worst polluters, relying on chronically underpaid and exploited laborers. But she also shows us how micro-communities and companies of textile and clothing makers in every corner of the world are rediscovering ancestral and ethical methods for making what we wear.
The Story of Russia
By Orlando Figes
No other country has been so divided over its own past as Russia. None has changed its story so often. How the Russians came to tell their story, and to reinvent it as they went along, is a vital aspect of their history, their culture and beliefs. To understand what Russia’s future holds—to grasp what Putin’s regime means for Russia and the world—we need to unravel the ideas and meanings of that history.
In The Story of Russia, Orlando Figes brings into sharp relief the vibrant characters that comprise Russia’s rich history, and whose stories remain so important in making sense of the world’s largest nation today—from the crowning of sixteen-year-old Ivan the Terrible in a candlelit cathedral, to Catherine the Great, riding out in a green uniform to arrest her husband at his palace, to the bitter last days of the Romanovs.
Beautifully written and based on a lifetime of scholarship, The Story of Russia is a major and definitive work from the great storyteller of Russian history: sweeping, suspenseful, masterful.
The Korean War
By Max Hastings
It was the first war we could not win. At no other time since World War II have two superpowers met in battle. Now Max Hastings, preeminent military historian, takes us back to the bloody, bitter, struggle to restore South Korean independence after the Communist invasion of June 1950. Using personal accounts from interviews with more than 200 vets - including the Chinese - Hasting follows real officers and soldiers through the battles. He brilliantly captures the Cold War crisis at home - the strategies and politics of Truman, Acheson, Marshall, MacArthur, Ridgeway, and Bradley - and shows what we should have learned in the war that was the prelude to Vietnam.
Doctor Zhivago
By: Boris Pasternak
Banned in the Soviet Union until 1988, Doctor Zhivago is the epic story of the life and loves of a poet-physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Yuri Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds and in love with the tender and beautiful Nurse Lara.
Trust
By Hernan Diaz
A Wall Street tycoon takes a young woman as his wife. Together they rise to the top in an age of excess and speculation. But now a novelist is threatening to reveal the secrets behind their marriage, and this wealthy man’s story—of greed, love and betrayal—is about to slip from his grasp. Composed of four competing versions of this deliciously deceptive tale, Trust brings us on a quest for truth while confronting the lies that often live buried in the human heart.
Salt: A World History
by Mark Kurlansky
In his fifth work of nonfiction, Mark Kurlansky turns his attention to a common household item with a long and intriguing history: salt. The only rock we eat, salt has shaped civilization from the very beginning, and its story is a glittering, often surprising part of the history of humankind. A substance so valuable it served as currency, salt has influenced the establishment of trade routes and cities, provoked and financed wars, secured empires, and inspired revolutions.
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor
By David S. Landes
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations is David S. Landes's acclaimed, best-selling exploration of one of the most contentious and hotly debated questions of our time: Why do some nations achieve economic success while others remain mired in poverty? The answer, as Landes definitively illustrates, is a complex interplay of cultural mores and historical circumstance.
Rich with anecdotal evidence, piercing analysis, and a truly astonishing range of erudition, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations is a "picture of enormous sweep and brilliant insight" (Kenneth Arrow) as well as one of the most audaciously ambitious works of history in decades.
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
By Daron Acemoğlu, James A. Robinson
Brilliant and engagingly written, Why Nations Fail answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine?
Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps ignorance of what the right policies are?
Simply, no. None of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Otherwise, how to explain why Botswana has become one of the fastest growing countries in the world, while other African nations, such as Zimbabwe, the Congo, and Sierra Leone, are mired in poverty and violence?
Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or lack of it). Korea, to take just one of their fascinating examples, is a remarkably homogeneous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest. The south forged a society that created incentives, rewarded innovation, and allowed everyone to participate in economic opportunities. The economic success thus spurred was sustained because the government became accountable and responsive to citizens and the great mass of people. Sadly, the people of the north have endured decades of famine, political repression, and very different economic institutions—with no end in sight. The differences between the Koreas is due to the politics that created these completely different institutional trajectories.
Based on fifteen years of original research Acemoglu and Robinson marshall extraordinary historical evidence from the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, medieval Venice, the Soviet Union, Latin America, England, Europe, the United States, and Africa to build a new theory of political economy with great relevance for the big questions of today, including:
- China has built an authoritarian growth machine. Will it continue to grow at such high speed and overwhelm the West?
- Are America’s best days behind it? Are we moving from a virtuous circle in which efforts by elites to aggrandize power are resisted to a vicious one that enriches and empowers a small minority?
- What is the most effective way to help move billions of people from the rut of poverty to prosperity? More philanthropy from the wealthy nations of the West? Or learning the hard-won lessons of Acemoglu and Robinson’s breakthrough ideas on the interplay between inclusive political and economic institutions?
Why Nations Fail will change the way you look at—and understand—the world.
The Clot Thickens: The enduring mystery of heart disease
By Malcolm Kendrick
“Malcolm Kendrick's masterly survey of the enduring mystery of heart disease reads like a detective story. With great verve he marshals the evidence for the two main contending theories, exonerates the presumed suspect and makes a formidable case for thrombogenesis (blood clotting) as the perpetrator. Witty, provocative and entertaining, 'The Clot Thickens' packs a powerful scientific punch. Highly recommended.” Dr James Le Fanu Doctor, journalist, author of ‘ The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine .’
“Malcolm Kendrick's new book brings to mind the quote from Thomas Huxley when he first learned of Darwin's theory of evolution: ‘how extremely stupid (of me) not to have thought of that’. What Kendrick presents is nothing less than a unifying theory of heart disease, that explains why everything from sickle cell disease to diabetes to a stressful lifestyle increases cardiovascular risk (and he does it with a large dollop of humour). After decades stuck in the blind alley that is the LDL hypothesis, this book is a revelation. It should be read by anyone with even a slight interest in understanding heart disease and what they can do to protect themselves from it.”