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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason
Charles Freeman · 470 pages
How the early Christian Church bent the intellectual climate of the Mediterranean world from one of active and questioning inquiry to an encouragement of the subordination of the mind to authority and acceptance of incomprehensibility as the will of God.
The Greek Way
Edith Hamilton · 327 pages
A study of the intellectual life of Greece at the peak of its achievements. The author interprets the literature, art, and philosophy of the Greeks and discusses what this heritage means to the world today.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Yuval Noah Harari · 456 pages
From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity’s creation and evolution—a #1 international bestseller—that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be “human.” One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one—homo sapiens. What hap
The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels
Thomas Cahill · 304 pages
Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
Reza Aslan · 336 pages
Two thousand years ago, an itinerant Jewish preacher walked across the Galilee gathering followers to establish the "Kingdom of God." He was tortured and executed as a state criminal. Within decades, his followers would call him God. Sifting through centuries of mythmaking, Reza Aslan sheds new light on one of history's most influential and enigmatic characters by examining Jesus through the lens
Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero
James Romm · 290 pages
Explores the moral struggles, political intrigues and violent vendettas that enmeshed Seneca, the ancient Roman writer and philosopher, in the brutal daily lives of the imperial family and the regime of his student, Nero.
The History of Sexuality, Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure
Michel Foucault · 304 pages
The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival
John Bagot Glubb · 52 pages
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
Julian Jaynes · 486 pages
At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, o
How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee
Bart D. Ehrman · 416 pages
New York Times bestselling author and Bible expert Bart Ehrman reveals how Jesus’s divinity became dogma in the first few centuries of the early church. The claim at the heart of the Christian faith is that Jesus of Nazareth was, and is, God. But this is not what the original disciples believed during Jesus’s lifetime—and it is not what Jesus claimed about himself. How Jesus Became God tells th
The Life of Greece
Will Durant, Ariel Durant · 754 pages
"A history of Greek government, industry, manners, morals, religion, philosophy, science, literature and art from the earliest times to the Roman conquest"--Jacket subtitle.
The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future
Riane Eisler · 261 pages
"In prehistorical times, Eisler argues, women and men lived together in egalitarian communities devoted to nurturance; with the imposition of male domination, female values gave way to creeds of hierarchy, aggression, power, obedience. Eisler, a futurist, posits a new society based on the recovery of more humane values."--Library journal (6/1/85).
Cyrus the Great: The Arts of Leadership and War
Xenophon · 320 pages
The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization
Arthur Herman · 704 pages
The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics
Elaine Pagels · 214 pages
Who is Satan in the New Testament, and what is the evil that he represents? In this groundbreaking book, Elaine Pagels, Princeton's distinguished historian of religion, traces the evolution of Satan from its origins in the Hebrew Bible, where Satan is at first merely obstructive, to the New Testament, where Satan becomes the Prince of Darkness, the bitter enemy of God and man, evil incarnate. In
The Evolution of God
Robert Wright · 567 pages
In this sweeping narrative that takes us from the Stone Age to the Information Age, Robert Wright unveils a hidden pattern that the great monotheistic faiths have followed as they have evolved. Through the prisms of archaeology, theology, and evolutionary psychology, Wright's findings overturn basic assumptions about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and are sure to cause controversy. He explains
The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450
David C. Lindberg · 455 pages
A Short History of Progress
Ronald Wright · 211 pages
Palaeolithic hunters who learnt how to kill two mammoths instead of one had made progress. Those who learnt how to kill 200 by driving a whole herd over a cliff had made too much. Many of the great ruins that grace the deserts and jungles of the earth are monuments to progress traps, the headstones of civilisations which fell victim to their own success. The twentieth-century´s runaway growth has
Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson
Jennifer Michael Hecht · 551 pages