When eighth-grader San Lee moves to a new town and a new school for the umpteenth time, he doesn't try to make new friends or be a loner or play cool. Instead he sits back and devises a plan to be totally different. When he accidentally answers too many questions in World History on Zen (only because he just had Ancient Religions two schools ago) all heads turn and San has his answer: he's a Zen Master. And just when he thinks everyone (including the cute girl he can't stop thinking about) is on to him, everyone believes him . . . in a major Zen way.
The fox knows many things, the Greeks said, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. In his most comprehensive work Ronald Dworkin argues that value in all its forms is one big thing: that what truth is, life means, morality requires, and justice demands are different aspects of the same large question. He develops original theories on a great variety of issues very rarely considered in the same book: moral skepticism, literary, artistic, and historical interpretation, free will, ancient moral theory, being good and living well, liberty, equality, and law among many other topics. What we think about any one of these must stand up, eventually, to any argument we find compelling about the rest.
Technology and Science in Ancient Civilizations by Richard G. Olson - is historical book about cross-cultural comparison of the ways in which the ancients learned about and preserved their knowledge of the natural world, and the ways in which they developed technologies that enabled them to adapt to and shape their surroundings.
Added by: Kahena | Karma: 11526.37 | Fiction literature | 19 September 2011
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Killing Rommel
Moving away from the ancient world and into the 20th century seems to have served Steven Pressfield quite well. Many readers may be unfamiliar with the Long Range Desert Group (popularized in the 1960s TV series The Rat Patrol), but this powerful, thoroughly researched novel should change that. Pressfield creates the same edge-of-your-seat drama, remarkable battle scenes, and strong characters that populate his acclaimed novels of ancient warfare.
Ancient Rome masterfully synthesizes the vast period from the second millennium BCE to the sixth century CE, carrying readers through the succession of fateful steps and agonizing crises that marked Roman evolution from an early village settlement to the capital of an extraordinary realm extending from northern Britain to the deserts of Arabia. A host of world-famous figures come to life in these pages, including Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Augustus, Livia, Cicero, Nero, Hadrian, Diocletian, Constantine, Justinian, and Theodora.