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In the long run, we're all dead. But for some of the most influential figures in history, death marked the start of a new adventure. The famous deceased have been stolen, burned, sold, pickled, frozen, stuffed, impersonated and even filed away in a lawyer's office. Their fingers, teeth, toes, arms, legs, skulls, hearts, lungs and nether regions have embarked on voyages that criss-cross the globe and stretch the imagination. Counterfeiters tried to steal Lincoln's corpse. Einstein's brain went on a cross-country road trip. And after Lord Horatio Nelson perished at Trafalgar, his sailors submerged him in brandy - which they drank. From Mozart to Hitler, Rest in Pieces connects the lives of the famous dead to the hilarious and horrifying adventures of their corpses and traces the evolution of cultural attitudes towards death.
The Mormon faith may seem so different from aspirations to transcend the human through technological means that it is hard to imagine how these two concerns could even exist alongside one another, let alone serve together as the joint impetus for a social movement. Machines for Making Gods investigates the tensions between science and religion through which an imaginative group of young Mormons and ex-Mormons have found new ways of understanding the world. The Mormon Transhumanist Association (MTA) believes that God intended humanity to achieve Mormonism’s promise of theosis through imminent technological advances. Drawing on a nineteenth-century Mormon tradition of religious speculation t...
This thought-provoking book looks at humanity's quest for immortality and examines the latest research on extending one's life and possibly living forever, presenting an overview of technological innovations such as cryonics, cell rejuvenation, organ transplants, using an exoskeleton, and brain transplants. With the seemingly limitless potential of 21st-century technology, the chance of human immortality being an actual possibility rather than a science fiction concept is tantalizingly close. And with this increased possibility of achieving immortality, a growing community of people interested in immortality has formed worldwide. Organizations dedicated to great extension of human life now e...
When most of us think of Charles Lindbergh, we picture a dashing twenty-five-year-old aviator stepping out of the Spirit of St. Louis after completing his solo flight across the Atlantic. What we don't see is the awkward high school student, who preferred ogling new gadgets at the hardware store to watching girls walk by in their summer dresses. Sure, Lindbergh's unique mindset invented the pre-flight checklist, but his obsession with order also led him to demand that his wife and three German mistresses account for all their household expenditures in detailed ledgers. Lucky Lindy is just one of several American icons whom Joshua Kendall puts on the psychologist's couch in America's Obsessiv...
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"Lights, Camera, Soundtrack surveys over 50 years of rock 'n' roll movies, musicals and performance films. It identifies the top guns involved in each film, provides a storyline, rates the film and reviews its soundtrack." "From pop and rock musicals, like the classic Elvis Presley vehicle Jailhouse Rock and the recent Tenacious D showpiece The Pick of Destiny, to performance films like Woodstock and Dig!, and the bootylicious films of the Blaxpoitation genre, all manner of rock and popular music films are here." "It also includes the films whose soundtracks made a massive impact on their success, such as Trainspotting, Reservoir Dogs, and The Crow." "And a section is dedicated to the rock and pop luminaries who have written film scores, such as Peter Gabriel, Nick Cave, and Ry Cooder."--BOOK JACKET.
From the authors of Quackery, a visual and narrative history of popular ideas, phenomena, and widely held beliefs disproven by science. From the easily disproved to the wildly speculative, to straight-up hucksterism, Pseudoscience is a romp through much more than bad science—it’s a light-hearted look into why we insist on believing in things such as Big Foot, astrology, and the existence of aliens. Did you know, for example, that you can tell a person’s future by touching their butt? Rumpology. It’s a thing, but not really. Or that Stanley Kubrick made a fake moon landing film for the US government? Except he didn’t. Or that spontaneous human combustion is real? It ain’t, but it can be explained scientifically. Pseudoscience is a wild mix of history, pop culture, and good old fashioned science–that not just entertains, but sheds a little light on why we all love to believe in things we know aren't true.
The Bible, Homer, and the Search for Meaning in Ancient Myths explores and compares the most influential sets of divine myths in Western culture: the Homeric pantheon and Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament. Heath argues that not only does the God of the Old Testament bear a striking resemblance to the Olympians, but also that the Homeric system rejected by the Judeo-Christian tradition offers a better model for the human condition. The universe depicted by Homer and populated by his gods is one that creates a unique and powerful responsibility – almost directly counter to that evoked by the Bible—for humans to discover ethical norms, accept death as a necessary human limit, develop com...