Modern Science

This is your gateway to self-mastery, resilience, and inner peace through the works of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus. For over two thousand years, their words have shaped leaders, thinkers, and everyday people searching for meaning. The Complete Stoicism Collection brings their most powerful ideas directly to you, translated and adapted for the contemporary listener. Whether you seek practical advice on how to face life’s challenges or wish to deepen your understanding of Stoic philosophy, this collection has everything you need.

"It takes an entire lifetime to learn how to die", wrote the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca (c. 4 BC-65 AD). He counseled readers to "study death always", and took his own advice, returning to the subject again and again in all his writings, yet he never treated it in a complete work. How to Die gathers in one volume, for the first time, Seneca's remarkable meditations on death and dying. Edited and translated by James S. Romm, How to Die reveals a provocative thinker who speaks with a startling frankness about the need to accept death or even, under certain conditions, to seek it out.

Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late 30s took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic by Lucretius—a beautiful poem containing the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles.

Nine months ago, Zeus' murder catapulted the Greek gods back into public life. Now, the whole pantheon revels in new temples, casinos, and media empires - except Apollo. An overachiever with a bursting portfolio of godly duties, the amount of email alone he receives from rapacious mortals turns each day into a living hell. Yet there may be hope, if only he can return Zeus to life! With the aid of Thalia, the muse of comedy and science fiction, Apollo will risk his very godhood to help TV producer Tracy Wallace and a gamer geek named Leif, who hold the key to Zeus' resurrection.

Epigenetics can potentially revolutionize our understanding of the structure and behavior of biological life on Earth. It explains why mapping an organism's genetic code is not enough to determine how it develops or acts and shows how nurture combines with nature to engineer biological diversity. Surveying the 20-year history of the field while also highlighting its latest findings and innovations, this volume provides a readily understandable introduction to the foundations of epigenetics.

For many of the 40 million Americans who undergo anesthesia each year, it is a source of great fear and fascination. In Counting Backwards, Dr. Henry Jay Przybylo - an anesthesiologist with more than 30 years of experience - has written an unforgettable account of the routine procedure's daily dramas and fundamental mysteries. Przybylo has administered anesthesia more than 30,000 times in his career - erasing consciousness, denying memory, and immobilizing the body before reversing all of these effects.

With unflinching gaze and uncompromising intensity Julius Evola analyzes the spiritual and cultural malaise at the heart of Western civilization and all that passes for progress in the modern world. As a gadfly, Evola spares no one and nothing in his survey of what we have lost and where we are headed. At turns prophetic and provocative, Revolt Against the Modern World outlines a profound metaphysics of history and demonstrates how and why we have lost contact with the transcendent dimension of being.

A paradigm-shifting work that revolutionizes our understanding of the origins and structure of science.

Vividly written, The Infidel and the Professor is a compelling account of a great friendship of two towering Enlightenment thinkers that had great consequences for modern thought. David Hume is widely regarded as the most important philosopher ever to write in English, but during his lifetime, he was attacked as "the Great Infidel" for his skeptical religious views and deemed unfit to teach the young. In contrast, Adam Smith was a revered professor of moral philosophy and is now often hailed as the founding father of capitalism.

The ancient biographer and essayist Plutarch thought deeply about the leadership qualities of the eminent Greeks and Romans he profiled in his famous - and massive - Lives, including politicians and generals such as Pericles, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Mark Antony. Luckily for us, Plutarch distilled what he learned about wise leadership in a handful of essays, which are filled with essential lessons for experienced and aspiring leaders in any field today.

From kelly green to millennial pink, our world is graced with a richness of colors. But our human-made colors haven’t always matched nature’s kaleidoscopic array. To reach those brightest heights required millennia of remarkable innovation and a fascinating exchange of ideas between science and craft that’s allowed for the most luminous manifestations of our built and adorned world. In Full Spectrum, Rogers takes us on that globe-trotting journey, tracing an arc from the earliest humans to our digitized, synthesized present and future.

Can jokes win a hostile room, a hopeless argument, or even an election? You bet they can, according to Cicero, and he knew what he was talking about. One of Rome's greatest politicians, speakers, and lawyers, Cicero was also reputedly one of antiquity's funniest people. After he was elected commander-in-chief and head of state, his enemies even started calling him "the stand-up Consul". How to Tell a Joke provides a lively new translation of Cicero's essential writing on humor alongside that of the later Roman orator and educator Quintilian.

Evil threatens human reason, for it challenges our hope that the world makes sense. For 18th-century Europeans, the Lisbon earthquake was manifest evil. Today we view evil as a matter of human cruelty, and Auschwitz as its extreme incarnation. Examining our understanding of evil from the Inquisition to contemporary terrorism, Susan Neiman explores who we have become in the three centuries that separate us from the early Enlightenment. In the process, she rewrites the history of modern thought and points philosophy back to the questions that originally animated it.

Code of the Samurai is a 400-year-old explication of the rules and expectations embodied in Bushido, the Japanese Way of the Warrior. With a bright, conversational narrative by Thomas Cleary, this book is indispensable to corporate executives, students of Asian culture, martial artists, or anyone sincerely interested in Japan and its people.

In a world where social media, online relationships, and relentless self-absorption threaten the very idea of deep and lasting friendships, the search for true friends is more important than ever. In this short book, famous Roman politician and philosopher Cicero offers a compelling guide to finding, keeping, and appreciating friends. With wit and wisdom, Cicero teaches not only how to build friendships but also why they must be a key part of our lives. For, as Cicero says, life without friends is not worth living.

Everyone says Luma has the world at her fingertips. Her trust fund can buy anything she wants, there's a modeling agency courting her, and most people would kill for her life - especially her stepmother, Tabitha. When Tabitha comes home mangled from a botched cosmetic procedure and finds out Luma's been offered a prestigious gig, jealousy rears its aging, puffy head. Tabitha wants Luma dead and she's got no choice but to flee. Alone and cut off from her resources, Luma's last refuge is a remote cottage where she prays Tabitha won't find her.

For nearly 2,500 years, students, politicians, political thinkers, and military leaders have read the eloquent and shrewd speeches in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War for profound insights into military conflict, diplomacy, and the behavior of people and countries in times of crisis. How to Think about War presents the most influential and compelling of these speeches in an elegant new translation by classicist Johanna Hanink, accompanied by an enlightening introduction.

When 17-year-old Laurel Harper decides to go live with her estranged father and step-family, she's unaware of the fact that her fate was already sealed the day she was born. She is now exactly where some higher power wants her to be. But it's not until she meets the proud and mysterious Sam Laurens that she feels something strange is going on. And when she learns the dark truth about her own future, a sinister secret that will change everything as soon as she turns 19, she wants to run and hide, but soon realizes that there is no hiding from fate.

Lucian: I am a Dragon Prince of the House of Smoke...and I am dying. Five hundred years is truly enough for a man like me. A monster. Yet a 10,000-year treaty will die with me, if I don't spawn a dragonling to take my place. My two brothers are no use in this task. It falls to me, the eldest by a hair's breadth, and yet, I cannot face the horror of another sealing. Another death. Another woman's blood on my hands.

Frances Glessner Lee, born a socialite to a wealthy and influential Chicago family in the 1870s, was never meant to have a career, let alone one steeped in death and depravity. Yet she developed a fascination with the investigation of violent crimes and made it her life's work. Best known for creating the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, a series of dollhouses that appear charming - until you notice the macabre little details: an overturned chair, or a blood-spattered comforter.