The Mysteries of History is an entertaining romp through the centuries, uncovering the great mysteries surrounding some of the most inaccurate and misleading parts of our past.
On This Day in History looks back at all 365 days of the year and provides short, riveting entries on the most significant events in history that occurred on that day.
Perfect for anyone with an interest in our scientific history, When the Earth Was Flat exposes the scientific theories that were once widely believed to be true but have since been disproved.
The Accidental Scientist explores the role of chance and error in scientific, medical and commercial innovation, outlining exactly how some of the most well-known products, gadgets and useful gizmos came to be.
This book is the perfect gift for anyone with an interest in our scientific history. It exposes the theories that were once widely regarded as facts but have since been proven to be complete science fiction. From such seemingly crazy ideas as the body being composed of only four things—black and yellow bile, blood, and phlegm—to the discovery of dinosaur bones being accepted as the bones of giants killed in the great flood from Biblical times. They Got It Wrong: Science tells the fascinating story behind 50 erroneous scientific theories and gives incredible perspective on how the way we view the workings of the world has evolved throughout history.
We've always measured the world around us, from how big things are, to how fast they go, how much they're worth and practically everything in between. But who decided how we do it, and why?
From cats, spats and catacombs to the Wall Street shuffle, Lies, Damned Lies and History is an entertaining look at how historical events didn't always unfold as we think they did. Graeme Donald takes the reader on a journey, century-by-century, showing how the truth we take for granted is a far cry from the facts. This is not a book for those who like their history sugar-coated, but for those who truly want to see the past as it was. It is a hilarious lesson that any history lover will delight in.
In this quirky and humorous volume, Graeme Donald explores the fascinating links and curious connections between words. While at first these word pairs may appear to have very little in common, owing to years of linguistic shift, their origins can be traced back to the same root.In exploring these etymological twins, Words of a Feather reveals the oddities of the English language and the fascinating stories that have made our vocabulary so rich.The perfect gift for language lovers and history buffs alike, this beautiful book contains over 200 word pairs with a common ancestry.Is there any PRESTIGE in a STRAITJACKET? When does a CLIQUE become a CLICHÉ? And what has MORRIS DANCING to do with MAURITANIA? In this witty volume, Graeme Donald explores the intriguing links between words with a common origin. Did you know, for example that your attic is named after the Greek capital, or that a flamingo doing flamenco would be the height of vulgarity?Through humorous story-telling, Words of a Feather explores the connections between many other pairings, including:Albatross and AlcatrazBatman and BastardExplode and ApplaudParrot and WigRhubarb and BarbarianSardine and SardonicVillage and VillainYoga and Conjugal
A revealing look at history’s most important also-rans, bit-players, and might-have-beens Most people know that Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald, but who shot John Wilkes Booth? The answer: Thomas Boston Corbett, who went mad instead of finding fame and fortune. We know about the great men whose actions changed the course of history, but what about the men whose actions affected those men? This is their book. Offbeat and engaging, The Man Who Shot the Man Who Shot Lincoln reveals the stories of forty-five of history’s most significant but little-known game-changers, including: - Pierre Basile, the crossbowman whose arrow hit Richard I - John Barry, the confederate who mistakenly shot Stonewall Jackson - Lee Duncan, the serviceman who rescued a puppy from the trenches of World War I and brought him home to America, where he became famous as Rin Tin Tin - Hanna Reitsch, Hitler’s personal pilot If you think you know your history, think again.
The Ephemeral Civilization is an astonishing intellectual feat in which Graeme Snooks develops an original and ground-breaking analysis of changing sociopolitical forms over the past 3,000 years. Snooks challenges the prevailing theories of social evolutionism with an innovative approach which also looks ahead to the twenty-first century. The Ephemeral Civilization builds on the model of dynamic strategy outlined in the author's highly acclaimed companion volume, The Dynamic Society. The Ephemeral Society is divided into three parts - theory, history and future.
Who tried to bomb Japan with bats? Who invented the air-gun in 250BC? Which stories should we believe? The so-called Dambusters raid was all but ineffective; the Hurricane not the Spitfire was the champion of the Battle of Britain; Singapore did not fall because all the guns were pointing the wrong way' and who would go to war over a game of football, a pig, or an old bucket? Oppenheimer fluffed his lines after the first atomic test; virtually every well-known quote attributed the Duke of Wellington is wrong; Churchill had a BBC voice impersonator record all his famous WW2 speeches as he was invariably too busy or too 'tired and emotional' to do it himself and no-one at the time called WW1 'The War to end all Wars'. Will you believe the truth?
This book discusses the nature and process of change in human society over the past two million years. The author draws on economic, historical and biological concepts to examine the driving forces of change and looks to likely developments in the future. This analysis produces some very thought-provoking and controversial conclusions.
A complete guide to everyday words with military origins. Did you know they started 'hearing through the grapevine' during the American Civil War, that 'ghettos' originated in Venice or that 'deadline' has a very sinister origin? Jam-packed with many amazing facts, Sticklers, Sideburns and Bikinis is a fascinating trip through the words and phrases that came to us from the military but nowadays are used by soldier and civilian alike. The sources of many are surprising and their original use is often far removed from that of today. From 'duds' to 'freelancers' and 'morris dancing' to 'bikini' this enthralling book describes the military origins of words and phrases that we use on a daily basis.
We have all heard about the great generals of military history, and those whose heroic deeds changed the course of war. This is not their book. Instead, this offbeat and engaging book reveals the stories of 75 bit-players of military history- Hitler's personal pilot, Hanna Reitsch; Pierre Basile, the crossbowman whose arrow hit Richard I; Major John D Barry, the Confederate who mistakenly gave the order to fire upon General Stonewall Jackson, and Lee Duncan, who rescued a puppy from the German trenches of World War I and took him back to America, where he became famous as Rin Tin Tin. If you think you know your history, prepare to think again.
ARK OF THE SUN provides an entirely new and holistic explanation for the origin and transformation of both life and human society. It does so by employing the revolutionary, demand-driven, general dynamic theory developed by Graeme Snooks over a life-time of cutting edge research. This book provides the capstone to Professor Snooks' extensive research, spanning five decades, on biological and social evolution. ARK OF THE SUN shows and explains how life on Earth is driven and shaped by a dynamic life system the author calls the "strategic logos." The "logos" is an entropy-defying, shock-deflecting system that has enabled biological forms and their societies to prosper in a hostile world. It is a system composed of materialist forces conceptually similar to the cosmos analysed by physicists, and to the human mind studied by psychologists. This book is essential to the understanding of life not only on Earth, but also wherever else in the Universe it might have emerged. And the theories it contains make possible what the intellectual tradition stretching from the ancient Greeks, through Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, Darwin and Freud, down to the present, could never achieve -- a holistic understanding of biological and social dynamics. ARK OF THE SUN will be of interest to readers curious about the role of biological, social, economic, political, intellectual, and psychological transformations in life; and about the all-encompassing dynamic life system. Here is what one eminent international expert -- Professor Peter Schuster (President of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, from the University of Vienna) -- has said: "The conventional view in science is often questioned by non-mainstream researchers, and once in a while, it pays to listen ... When I received Graeme Snooks' review presenting his view on evolution of the biosphere and human society ... I got the impression that demand-oriented evolutionary dynamics might be a useful view on problems of high complexity." (Editorial for 2008 in COMPLEXITY, Journal of the Santa Fe Institute).
Global Transition is an innovative study that analyses the problems and prospects of the Third World by building on the theoretical contribution - the dynamic-strategy model - made in the author's acclaimed Longrun Dynamics . It formulates a general economic and political theory he calls the global strategic transition (GST) model. The central feature of this model is the global strategic demand-response mechanism involving an interaction between the world's expanding strategic core and its fringe, which is facilitated through strategic inflation. This model also provides the basis for a new policy approach to economic development.
The author argues that we should not be diverted by the East Asian 'meltdown', which is a predictable outcome of global dynamics. Of real concern, however, is the 'hidden crisis', which has been inadvertently engineered by neoliberal economists who dominate the world's financial institutions. They are the global crisis makers, who have convinced governments to abandon strategic leadership and to impose crippling deflationary policies. By employing the innovative theoretical empirical work published in his recent series of remarkable books, Graeme Snooks shows how this threat to progress and liberty can be overcome.
THE COMING ECLIPSE deals with the most important issue of our era, and deals with it in a unique way. This book is concerned with a critical choice of futures: either the adoption of a comprehensive climate-mitigation program or the emergence of a new technological revolution. As this book succinctly explains, the adoption of one will eclipse the other. A climate mitigation program of the type proposed by the IPCC will require the establishment of an artificial system of prices, which could only be achieved by establishing a command-like economy. Such an economic system would lock us into the old polluting fossil-fuel technological paradigm and thereby delay, even derail, the newly emerging technological revolution - the Solar Revolution - which will be based on radically new methods of energy extraction. By using a realist general dynamic framework, Professor Snooks shows that, by the end of the twenty-first century, the real dynamic costs of the mitigation program proposed by the IPCC will amount to an astronomical 90% of world GDP rather than the 1-2% estimated by climate mitigationists. Owing to their inadequate methodology, orthodox economists have massively, and dangerously, underestimated the real costs of climate mitigation, which would inevitably arise from delaying the imminent technological revolution due to begin in the middle decades of this century. A revolution that will transform our world, just as the Industrial Revolution transformed the commercial world of the eighteenth century. A revolution that, ironically, if not derailed will solve the current problem of climate change. This book is designed to be read in a couple of sittings by busy powerbrokers and businesspeople, as well as the educated public.
This book explores truth in human society - its nature, role, and future. But it does so in an unorthodox way, by employing a fictional framework. Truth conveyed within a lie. It is an exploration that ranges from Greek rationalism (truth told to outsiders and lies to insiders) in the West and Zoroastrianism (Truth versus the Lie) in the East, to the pragmatism of today, and beyond. It is the year 2044 in a world reeling from the devastating effects of a radical experiment by governments to impose a draconian global climate-mitigation program. After decades of oppression, right-wing forces in Metropolis, the world's leading society, have thrown off these shackles, taken political control, invaded the devastated oil-rich countries, and are advancing on China after a limited nuclear exchange. In the turmoil, a determined scholar is editing the unpublished essays of an obscure thinker, active between the 1960s and 2010s, who had predicted these events using his revolutionary general dynamic theory of life. A voice from the underground that had been ignored in its own time. The edited essays focus on the role played by truth in the dealings of the state, the people, the intellectuals, the businesspeople, and the clergy of Metropolis in the early years of the twenty-first century. A role that led to the chaos of 2044. Arguing from the grave, our thinker shows there is no general "will to truth," even among philosophers; there is no societal demand for truth in the struggle to survive and prosper; and that truth-seeking is the most extreme of extreme sports - a form of self-vivisection - pursued by deviants who often end mentally disturbed or taking their own lives.
This book embodies a search for the ultimate reality in life; that unbearable truth from which we all shelter in the lowlands. Only those who delight in braving the alpine heights will want to read this book, which is about our true selves; about the real nature of good and evil, oppression and liberty, truth and lies; about the relentless reality of the life-system--the "strategic logos"--that enables us to survive and prosper; about the self-serving falseness of our ethical systems; and about the difficult but rewarding path to individual freedom. It is a book that tackles Goethe's sceptical question, "What is man?"; Shakespeare's query of disdain, "What is this quintessence of dust?"; Montaigne's rhetorical demand, "Is it possible to imagine anything as ridiculous as this miserable and wretched creature?"; Nietzsche's statement of veiled contempt, "What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal"; and Thomas Mann's expression of disillusionment, "Is this all there is?." This book constitutes an entirely new approach to the philosophy of life, based as it is on the author's unique general dynamic theory of human society. Graeme Donald Snooks is Executive Director of the institute of Global Dynamic Systems (IGDS) in Canberra. Formerly (1989-2010) he was the Coghlan Professor in the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Australian National University. Dr Snooks has been at the cutting edge of research on social and biological dynamics, and the new realist methodology, for 50 years. He has published 26 books and many articles.
Since the advent of autism as a diagnosed condition in the 1940s, the importance of music in the lives of autistic people has been widely observed and studied. Articles on musical savants, extraordinary feats of musical memory, unusually high rates of absolute or perfect pitch, and the effectiveness of music-based therapies abound in the autism literature. Meanwhile, music scholars and historians have posited autism-centered explanatory models to account for the unique musical artistry of everyone from Béla Bartók and Glenn Gould to Blind Tom Wiggins. Given the great deal of attention paid to music and autism, it is surprising to discover that autistic people have rarely been asked to account for how they themselves make and experience music or why it matters to them that they do. In Speaking for Ourselves, renowned ethnomusicologist Michael Bakan does just that, engaging in deep conversations--some spanning the course of years--with ten fascinating and very different individuals who share two basic things in common: an autism spectrum diagnosis and a life in which music plays a central part. These conversations offer profound insights into the intricacies and intersections of music, autism, neurodiversity, and life in general, not from an autistic point of view, but rather from many different autistic points of view. They invite readers to partake of a rich tapestry of words, ideas, images, and musical sounds that speak to both the diversity of autistic experience and the common humanity we all share.
In this provocative work, noted social and economic theorist Graeme D. Snooks exposes fatal flaws in the foundations of the Darwinian theory of evolution, which he deems an "artificial algorithm," as well as the neo-Darwinian synthesis adopted by many social scientists. Utilizing the historical method, Snooks develops a remarkable replacement theory of evolution, which he calls the "dynamic-strategy" theory. While the neo-Darwinian position places too great an emphasis on genetic change--giving rise to untenable but popular concepts such as the "selfish gene"--and fails to explain the fluctuating fortunes of life's most successful species (mankind), Snooks' framework starts by systematically observing the broad patterns of life and human society. The resultant realist theory of life posits life as a strategic pursuit (rather than a game of chance) in which organisms adopt dynamic strategies (only one of which is genetic change) to survive and prosper. Organisms' and species' progress is achieved through "strategic selection"--a concept that displaces the "divine selection" of creationists and the "natural selection" of Darwinists. This new theory reveals the organism as empowered, rather than as the plaything of gods, genes, or blind chance; and it provides a new basis for humanism.
Taking each theory in turn, Stuff They Don't Want You to Know considers more than 80 conspiracies, examining the evidence and key suspects in an explosive account of the world's secrets. Meticulously researched, it contains fresh revelations on historical conspiracies that won't go away, as well as information on the latest cover-ups. Brought to life with photographs of the places, people and evidence, this book is your in-depth guide to the grassy knolls and undercover bunkers of a world you were never meant to know existed.
Dead God Rising provides a completely original explanation for the many religions and myths that have arisen in human society. In particular, it exposes the mechanism by which human religion has been transformed over the millennia. To do this, the book focuses on a number of important and representative case studies in early human society (the Neanderthals and Aboriginal Australians), together with those at the core both of the Neolithic (or agricultural) Transformation in the Fertile Crescent from Egypt to Mesopotamia (Egyptian religion, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam) and of the Industrial Transformation in Western Europe and beyond (scientism). This is a study in economic sociology rather than religion more narrowly defined. The book's basic argument is that religion and scientism arose from humanity's attempt to understand and sustain the hidden life-system responsible for human survival and prosperity in a hostile physical and social environment. This hidden life-system, which Professor Snooks calls the "strategic logos," is the book's major discovery. In addition to explaining the central mystery of life, it shows that religion - or "strategic ideology" - is the outcome of a set of rituals by which the Shamans and, later, the priestly philosophers attempted to gain access to, and to influence, the "strategic guardians" - the guardians of the logos - who were misleadingly called "gods" and, eventually, "God." What makes this book distinctive is the unique underlying theory - the "dynamic-strategy" theory - that Professor Snooks has developed to explain the dynamics of human society and of life itself. This realist transdisciplinary theory, which is based on 40 years of systematic observation of the patterns in life in general and human society in particular, extends beyond the work of orthodox sociologists and exposes the flaws in the arguments of the new atheists (such as Richard Dawkins) and Sociobiologists (such as Edward Wilson).
It was in the early summer of 1906 that Violet Bonham Carter first met Winston Churchill: an encounter which left an "indelible im pression" upon her. "I found myself," she recalled, sitting next to this young man who seemed to me quite different from any other young man I had ever met. For a long time he remained sunk in abstraction. Then he appeared to become aware of my existence. He turned on me a lowering gaze and asked me abruptly how old I was. I replied that I was nineteen. "And I," he said almost despairingly, "am thirty-two already. Younger than anyone else who counts, though," he added, as if to comfort himself. Then savagely: "Curse ruthless time! Curse our own mortality! How cruelly short is the allotted span for all we must cram into it!" And he burst forth into an eloquent diatribe on the shortness of human life, the immensity of possible human accomplishment - a theme so well exploited by the poets, prophets and philosophers of all ages that it might seem difficult to invest it with a new life and startling significance. Yet for me he did so, in a torrent of magnificent language which appeared to be both effortless and inexhaustible and ended up with the words I shall always remember: "We are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glow worm.
Contains nearly 3000 difficult questions, designed to enliven pub quizzes and keep contestants alert, with background information on contentious points for settling any disputes. Sections include arts and entertainment, science, industry, technology, sports, people, places and events.
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