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"Judaism is one of the oldest religions in the world, and it has preserved its distinctive identity despite the extraordinarily diverse forms and beliefs it has embodied over the course of more than three millennia. A History of Judaism provides the first truly comprehensive look in one volume at how this great religion came to be, how it has evolved from one age to the next, and how its various strains, sects, and traditions have related to each other. In this magisterial and elegantly written book, Martin Goodman takes readers from Judaism's origins in the polytheistic world of the second and first millennia BCE to the temple cult at the time of Jesus. He tells the stories of the rabbis, mystics, and messiahs of the medieval and early modern periods and guides us through the many varieties of Judaism today. Goodman's compelling narrative spans the globe, from the Middle East, Europe, and America to North Africa, China, and India. He explains the institutions and ideas on which all forms of Judaism are based, and masterfully weaves together the different threads of doctrinal and philosophical debate that run throughout its history."--
Environmentally, our planet lacks the laws to keep it safe and those laws we do have are feebly enforced. Every new year is the hottest in human history, while forest, reef, ice, tundra, and species are disappearing forever. It is easy to lose all hope. Who will stop the planet from committing ecological suicide? The UN? Governments? Activists? Corporations? Engineers? Scientists? Whoever, environmental laws need to be enforceable and enforced. Step forward a fresh breed of passionately purposeful environmental lawyers. They provide new rules to legislatures, see that they are enforced, and keep us informed. They tackle big business to ensure money flows into cultural change, because money i...
A dystopian novel set around London's disused Heathrow Airport. For sixteen years the Earth has baked and no girls have been born. Karen's the last girl. Steven's her gay twin. Dad turns their home into a fortress as women take their chance to rule the world. Their eyes are on Steven. Perhaps, with a little medical interference, he could be the saviour of the world. The boys of teensquad run the streets, insects clog the skies, and scientists are cooking up a brand new Eden. Interzone says: 'Ectopia is a terrific novel with excellent characterisation, world-building, narration and dialogue. A story of great depth, raising questions about who we are and how we define ourselves. Steven is a br...
Goodman presents a lucid and balanced picture of the Roman world examining the Roman empire from a variety of perspectives; cultural, political, civic, social and religious.
This book tackles a central problem of comparative religious history: proselytizing by Jews and pagans in the ancient world, and the origins of missions in the early Church. Why did some individuals in the first four centuries of the Christian era believe it desirable to persuade outsiders to join their religious group, while others did not? In this book, the author offers a new hypothesis about the origins of Christian proselytizing, arguing that mission is not an inherent religious instinct, that in antiquity it was found only sporadically among Jews and pagans, and that even Christians rarely stressed its importance in the early centuries. Much of the book focusses on the history of Judai...
These collected studies, previously published in diverse places between 1990 and 2006, discuss important and controversial issues in the study of the development of Judaism in the Roman world from the first century C.E. to the fifth.
An essential introduction to Josephus’s momentous war narrative The Jewish War is Josephus's superbly evocative account of the Jewish revolt against Rome, which was crushed in 70 CE with the siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple. Martin Goodman describes the life of this book, from its composition in Greek for a Roman readership to the myriad ways it touched the lives of Jews and Christians over the span of two millennia. The scion of a priestly Jewish family, Josephus became a rebel general at the start of the war. Captured by the enemy general Vespasian, Josephus predicted correctly that Vespasian would be the future emperor of Rome and thus witnessed the final stages of t...
The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies reflects the current state of scholarship in the field as analyzed by an international team of experts in the different and varied areas represented within contemporary Jewish Studies. Unlike recent attempts to encapsulate the current state of Jewish Studies, the Oxford Handbook is more than a mere compendium of agreed facts; rather, it is an exhaustive survey of current interests and directions in the field.
John Scott Haldane (1860-1936) was one of the greatest and most colourful of British scientists, acknowledged as the leading physiologist of the Victorian era. The most successful serial self-experimenter in the history of science, Haldane crawled through the carnage of underground explosions, locked himself in sealed chambers, breathed in lethal cocktails of gases, sampled his own blood, burned and healed his own flesh, and experimented on his own children in an obsessive push to understand the nature of human respiration. What is expired air? How can you make coal mines safer? What does carbon monoxide do to people? These are just some of the vital questions to which Haldane provided the answers, saving thousands of lives in the process. He also designed the first space-suit and invented the gas-mask, among many other innovations and contributions we still benefit from today. Entertaining and enlightening in equal measure, Martin Goodman's lively and revealing biography casts new light on one of the greatest eccentrics of British scientific and intellectual life.
The Secret History of Marvel Comics digs back to the 1930s when Marvel Comics wasn't just a comic-book producing company. Marvel Comics owner Martin Goodman had tentacles into a publishing world that might have made that era’s conservative American parents lynch him on his front porch. Marvel was but a small part of Goodman’s publishing empire, which had begun years before he published his first comic book. Goodman mostly published lurid and sensationalistic story books (known as “pulps”) and magazines, featuring sexually-charged detective and romance short fiction, and celebrity gossip scandal sheets. And artists like Jack Kirby, who was producing Captain America for eight-year-olds...