Trouble ahead and trouble behind
No matter how dire the situation might be, remember to walk tall. Keep on trucking. There may be trouble ahead and trouble behind. That notion just caught my mind when I heard an old favorite on my playlist, Casey Jones, by the Grateful Dead. I looked into the story of Casey Jones – “the brave […]
Selected works by Bertrand Russell
Selected works by Bertrand Russell is a number of the most important work by Bertrand Russell. I have also included some books about the author. Russell was a genius who worked in a range of academic fields. He was a social activist, wrote essays, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in […]
The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli PDF
The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli is often referred to as the foundation of political philosophy. Nicolo Machiavelli was born on 3 May 1469 in the Republic of Florence in what is today the middle of Italy. He worked as a senior official in the Florentine Republic. At that time Italy was divided into a large […]
Rattlesnake Recipes
Rattlesnake Recipes by “Dessert Holly” Ted and “On The Rocks” Mac is a small book on the art of cooking rattlesnakes. The book was published in 1950 and consists of recipes gathered from miners, cowboys, Calexicans, Imperialists, Nilanders, prospectors sheepherders, desert rats and Indians and of course form Ted’s and Mac’s own kitchen. Mac writes […]
The Frankfurt School writings – Selected works by Karl Mannheim
The Frankfurt School writings – Selected works by Karl Mannheim. Recently I have listened to the excellent podcast Philosophize This! by Stephen West over at philosophizethis.org. His impressive podcast has a seven episodes long introduction to the Frankfurt School, highly recommended. The Frankfurt School was a critical philosophical group of thinkers centered around the Institute […]
The Decameron or Ten Days’ Entertainment of Boccaccio
The Decameron or Ten Days’ Entertainment of Boccaccio – also sometimes subtitled Prince Gehaut and often named I’Umana Commedia is a collection of short stories by Giovanni Boccaccio. The stories are told within a frame story, much as One Thousand and One Nights. a group of young people has escaped the black death and are […]
The Teachings of a Sufi Master
The Teachings of a Sufi Master. Sufism preaches no particular dogma, except the great truths that are the basis of all religious beliefs: the belief in the existence of divinity, of an invisible world, and of the immortality of the soul. Unlike the mosque, the Sufi’s gathering is open to all people; everybody can go […]
The Sufism of the Rubaiyat or The Secret of the Great Paradox
The Sufism of the Rubaiyat or The Secret of the Great Paradox by Norton F. W. Hazeldine, second edition 1906. The Persian word Rubaiyat means “reading between the lines”, or “a meaning, within a meaning”, or simply a paradox. The books consist of translations of beautiful mystical verses written by the Sufi mystic, mathematician, astronomer, […]
Find the 5th pig in this 1940s puzzle
Zoek Het 5de Zwun? – Where is the 5th pig? Print this image and see if you can find it – or cheat and see it below. This fine little piece of political humor circulated in the Netherlands in the 1940s. Find the solution here:
A collection of books and writings by Søren Kierkegaard
A collection of books and writings by Søren Kierkegaard. Søren Kierkegaard was the first existentialist philosopher, sharp and clear, ironic and down to earth at the same time. His writings can be hard to comprehend. I have been reading some of his books as they were written, in Danish, and I can imagine that translators […]
Capital – A Critique of Political Economy by Karl Marx – The complete work in four PDF volumes
Capital – A Critique of Political Economy, also knows as ‘Das Kapital’ – the original German title, by Karl Marx, is probably the most well-known philosophical treatise on politics and economy. Marx was a brilliant economic thinker and I personally often recall his quote ‘If you need something you can’t produce, you must produce something […]
Newsletter sign-up works again
Dear friends, For months it has not been possible to sign-up for the holybooks.com newsletter. I am sorry for that, but it works again now. If you have tried to sign during the last half-year, please try again. I send the newsletter once pr. month and it is primarily a presentation of the latest books […]
The Lie Behind the Lie Detector – and how to beat a polygraph
The Lie Behind the Lie Detector is now out in its fifth edition. The free book outlines the history of the lie detector, the science behind polygraphs and why they are highly unreliable bordering to plain pseudoscience. The authors George W. Maschke and Gino J. Scalabrini, who runs the website AntiPolygraph.org, takes the reader through the […]
The Ramayana Condensed into English Verse
This translation is the sixt attempt to make the Hindu epic Ramayana available in English from the original Sanskrit material. Romesh Dutt’s approach was to approximate the original presentation by translate it into English verses, a huge task, which he published in 1899. Romesh Dutt was born in Bengal and he had complete mastery of English. His first […]
The Perfumed Garden
The Perfumed Garden also known as The Perfumed Garden of Sensual Delight is a classic Arabic sex manual and a piece of erotic literature. Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Nafzawi probably wrote The Perfumed Garden sometime during the twelfth century somewhere around today’s Tunisia. The book is interesting because of its no-tabu approach, amusing stories and somewhat naive assumptions about human […]
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