Bøger udgivet af Important Books

Kuhn contended that the Bible derived its origins from other Pagan religions and that much of Christian history was pre-extant as Egyptian mythology. He also proposed that the Bible was symbolic and did not depict real events, and argued that the leaders of the church started to misinterpret the bible at the end of the third century. These controversial ideas outside of mainstream history and theology are rejected by most pre-eminent scholars, but many including Tom Harpur and John G. Jackson were influenced by the works of Kuhn. Harpur even dedicated his best-selling 2004 book, "The Pagan Christ" to Kuhn, calling him "a man of immense learning and even greater courage" and "one of the single greatest geniuses of the twentieth century" [who] "towers above all others of recent memory in intellect and his understanding of the world's religions."

In this book, first published in 1944, the distinguished historian C. V. Wedgwood takes as her subject here the figure of William, Count of Nassau and Prince of Orange, who led the revolt of the Netherlands against the Spain of Philip II. The book is not only a masterpiece of biographical writing but a rich portrait of an age-a period of political, religious, and economic ferment that dramatically shaped the history of early modern Europe.'A reliable and well-balanced history of great events. Miss Wedgwood tells simply and accurately a series of moving, romantic and most important events, the first effective stand made in Europe against Spain and the Inquisition, the foundation of the Dutch Republic on the basis of freedom; and she tells these great historical events in the form of a biography centered round the figure of one man.'-G. M. Trevelyan, [London] Sunday Times'A very fine book. There is all the human interest of William's life with all the historic importance for us of his achievement.'-A. L. Rowse, Observer'Miss Wedgwood, an authority on the period, has told William's life story persuasively, with singular economy and charm....Superior scholarship, penetrating insight, lucid prose.'-Geoffrey Brunn

LOVE AND WARCabot Murray first came to Williamsburg, Virginia, in the tense autumn of 1860. He was looked upon with suspicion because he was a Yankee. Then Cabot met redheaded Eden Day.Theirs was a wild, blind young love at first sight. Whispering in her hair, what did it matter that he was a Northerner and she from the South...But then came the Civil War. With the tide of battle Cabot returned as an enemy spy. In Eden he found the hatred of a woman who has learned desire.Could the bitterness of war be softened in the arms of lovers?

First published in 1956, the novel Etruscan by Finnish author Mika Waltari begins around 480 B.C., and the story takes us on the spiritual journey of a young man named Lars Turms as he adventures through Ancient Greece to Sicily, Rome and, finally, Tuscany, searching for the meaning of life. He gradually becomes aware of his immortality and his duties to the future. Although set in ancient civilization, the book poses many of life's existential questions asked to this day, and the reader will find timeless answers to these timeless questions through the main character. Lars Turm's troubles begin after having abducted Arsinoe, the wanton priestess of Eryx, as he followed her to whatever lands promised her wealth and luxury. But when she falls in love with another, he is forced to flee... and find a destiny beyond his wildest expectations and powers.

CROSS OF IRON is the thrilling story of a German platoon cut off far behind Russian lines in the second half of World War II. A resourceful and cynical commander somehow manages to coax his men through the bitter hand-to-hand fighting in forests, trenches and city streets until eventually they regain the German lines. But safety is only temporary. After the tension of waiting for the last overwhelming Russian advance the platoon is forced into futile counter-attacks and murderous house-to-house fighting until its final decimation becomes inevitable. A modern classic of war fiction both as a book and a film, this is a strikingly realistic story of action on the Eastern Front, where the grimness of combat seems to have neither pity nor end.

Lamb was a writer for Adventure magazines and an excellent historical novelist, being considered an expert on the periods he wrote about. Tamerlane is a Westernization of the Persian tale of Tamer Lenk. When the baby was first born, his parents took him to a holy sheik to be blessed. As they arrived, the sheik was reading a section of the Koran with that word, and instantly upon seeing him declared that his name would be Tamuru. During his lifetime, he conquered more territory than anyone except Alexander. His rule extended from his home base in Samarkand, southern Russia down through Iran and Syria in the west and into Northern Indian the south, and eastward into the westernmost parts of China. Although at times a brutal conqueror, he was also a man of compassion and great intelligence.

Safe Conduct is Boris Pasternak's first and best autobiography, penned after the great success of Dr. Zhivago.Here translated by Alec Brown and Lydia Pasternak-Slater, and written when he was forty, Safe Conduct puzzled many readers in Russia and when it appeared in English, because its isolated sharp impressions and juxtapositions seem to deny chronology, but at least one critic recognized it as "the most original of autobiographies, employing a new technique of great important."

This book describes the internal structure of metals and its relation to mechanical and physical properties and weldability. The first edition of this book sold 30,000 copies, and the reason for this acceptance is this practical manual discusses the various metals used by industry and tells what processes and procedures can be used to weld them. This dual purpose textbook and reference manual is written in non-technical language so high school seniors, welders, supervisors, engineers and educators will easily assimilate all data. Photos, diagrams and tables, 195 in all, back-up the text. Each of the 21 chapters concludes with a glossary of new terms used in each chapter, plus review questions on points worthy of extra note.

This is the story of a 30 year, one-man war. The author confesses his bias - in favor of labor, in friendship with Lewis, but he manages to present Lewis convincingly, with his complicated personality, his inconsistencies, his dynamic power, his ruthless use of any means to his end. He traces the steps by which he reached the peak from the pits of Illinois mines. He tells how he created C.I.O. in protest over the limitations of A.F. of L.; of how he secured his own U.M.W. even at the cost of dictatorship. He goes behind the scenes for his breaks with Green, with Murray, with Roosevelt. But the end-all is gains for his miners - in pay, in safety, in security. Brilliant analysis, an unflaggingly interesting chapter in American labor, it provides an interesting insight into a fascinating part of American history. It's a reminder of what unions did achieve and it is a contrast to the comparative powerless of unions these days.

Martin Luther is often thought of as a world-shaking figure who defied papacy and empire to introduce a reformation in the teaching, worship, organization, and life of the church. Sometimes it is forgotten that he was also a pastor and shepherd of souls. Collected in this volume are Luther's letters of spiritual counsel, which he offered to his contemporaries in the midst of sickness, death, persecution, imprisonment, famine, and political instability. For Luther, spiritual counsel was about establishing, nurturing, and strengthening faith. Freshly translated from the original German and Latin, these letters shed light on the fascinating relationship between his pastoral counsel and his theology.

Complete in itself, this volume originated as a commentary and expansion of Manly P. Hall's masterpiece of symbolic philosophy, The Secret Teachings of All Ages. In Lectures on Ancient Philosophy, Manly P. Hall expands on the philosophical, metaphysical, and cosmological themes introduced in his classic work, The Secret Teachings of All Ages. Hall wrote this volume as a reader's companion to his earlier work, intending it for those wishing to delve more deeply into the esoteric philosophies and ideas that animated the Secret Teachings. In this edition particular attention is paid to Neoplatonism, ancient Christianity, Rosicrucian and Freemasonic traditions, ancient mysteries, pagan rites and symbols, and Pythagorean mathematics.

With Sartre, Merleau-Ponty was the foremost French philosopher of the post-war period. What makes this work so important is that it returned the body to the forefront of philosophy for the first time since Plato.

First published in 1924, this is a masterpiece on literary criticism. I. A. Richards argues that science and literature use two different forms of language: scientific and emotive language.I A Richards advocates for the new criticism of psychology that makes a literary work complete to the senses and intellect of ordinary readers. He proposed that literary criticism could be precise in communicating clear and valuable meanings, by way of denotation and connotation. Richards defines value from a work as anything that satiates a deep response or desire within an individual.

Based on the original edition first published in 1934, Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life is a work on Judaism and American Jewish life by Rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism.The book is Kaplan's most notable work and has influenced a number of American Jewish thinkers. Kaplan's work centers around the concept that Judaism ought not to be defined as the religion of the Jews, but the sum of Jewish religion, culture, language, literature and social organization.

Based on the original edition. First published in 1963 in the US.In the tradition of Jungian analysis, a psychiatrist and an anthropologist explore the meanings and manifestations of death through ritual, religion and myth.The knowledge that he must die is the force that drives man to create. The tribal initiation of the shaman, the archetype of the serpent, exists universally in man's experience, exemplifying the death of the Self and a rebirth into a transcendent, "unknowable" life.In The Wisdom of the Serpent: The Myths of Death, Rebirth and Resurrection, first published in 1963, the authors trace the images and patterns of psychic liberation through personal encounter, the cycles of nature, spiritual teaching religious texts, myths of resurrection, poems and epics. They translate these elements of common human experience into a them for modern man: the reinterpretation of the individual freed from the mortal boundaries of the Self.

The definitive biography of William Butler YeatsThe most influential poet of his age, Yeats eluded the grasp of many who sought to explain him. In this classic critical examination of the poet, Richard Ellmann strips away the masks of his subject: occultist, senator of the Irish Free State, libidinous old man, and Nobel Prize winner.

A hard-boiled detective classic, Charles Willeford's Wild Wives is amoral, sexy and brutal. Written in a sleazy San Francisco hotel in the early 1950's while on leave from the army, Willeford creates a tale of deception featuring the crooked detective Jacob C. Blake and his nemesis-a beautiful, insane young woman who is the wife of a socially prominent San Francisco architect. Blake becomes entangled in a web of deceit, intrigue and multiple murders in this exciting period tale. First published 1956 in the US.

Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter, The Magic Mountain is Thomas Mann's story of an unassuming, undistinguished young engineer named Hans Castorp who sits on the balcony of a sanatorium, wrapped in his blanket, thermometer in his mouth, naively but earnestly pondering the meaning of life, time, and his love for the beautiful Frau Chauchat. Among the other characters on this Germanic ship of fools are Hofrat Behrens, the head doctor, and his hearty but sick-looking sidekick, Dr. Krokowski and an entourage of interesting patients. Mann began working on The Magic Mountain following a few weeks' visit to a sanatorium in Switzerland. It is a massive meditation on "the inner significance of an epoch, the pre-war period of European history." It was an immense international success from the time of its publication.

When elderly ladies begin disappearing in an English village dominated by Lydia Crewe, a matriarch who delights in ruling over her unfortunate nieces, Miss Maud Silver investigates.

What is the Ultimate? At first glance the title to this book, The Ultimate, may seem to present a challenge, or it could appear presumptuous. However, the answer to the above question will disclose that neither of these attitudes is implied.The Ultimate is that glorious point in revelation where the long struggle for Spiritual understanding is ended, where ever-present perfection is realized to be the entirety of the Life, Soul, Being, and Body of the seeker. Of course this does not mean that all revelation has come to an end. Rather it is from this point that the Truth reveals Itself from within in ever-increasing Light and clarity. Here you stand in the Light as the Light; and the Light is Consciousness, YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS.In the Ultimate there is no dualism. Here there is conscious awareness that God is in the Universe as the Universe. God is recognized to be the Life, Mind, Soul, Substance, and Body of all that has existence. This infinite Self-containment includes YOU, your entire Life, Mind, Soul, Substance, Being, Body, and Experience.

Against a background of the strife-torn land of Judea two thousand years ago, Mika Waltari has written what is certainly his most important novel.Seeking the meaning to his life in the study of philosophy, the young Roman. Marcus Manilianus, discovers in an Alexandrian library a vast number of predictions, all tending to confirm his own feeling that the world is about to enter upon a new era. Two chance encounters with Jews who proclaim the coming of a world leader whom they call the Messiah or King, cause Marcus to resolve to make a visit to the Holy City of the Jews. He arrives outside Jerusalem in time to see crowds-some curious, some shocked-staring up at three crosses on a nearby mound. Above the center cross, an inscription had been fixed: JESUS OF NAZARETH, KING OF THE JEWS.The quest that ensues leads Marcus through all parts of Jerusalem and into contact with men and women of all stations of life who had known this remarkable man. And by degrees, wonderful if strange things are revealed to him of Jesus' teaching, and he experiences the odd sensation of almost believing in the destiny of this crucified Roman among the alien Jews, Stands alone on the borderline of two worlds, feelings he belongs to neither, and it becomes vital to him to find "the way, "the Kingdom," to again knowledge and certainty, not merely belief.What follows, as Marcus pursues his search for the promised secret of the Kingdom, bring to a climax as exciting and deeply moving a novel as Mika Waltari, certainly one of the world's outstanding historical novelists, has ever written. It is a story of a time long past, yet it deals with a theme as modern as today: the dilemma of modern man and his culture in gaining and retaining a faith. And always present throughout the novel is the splendor, the irony and humor which have so delighted millions of readers of other Waltari novels from The Egyptian to The Etruscan.

Perry G. E. Miller was an American intellectual historian and Harvard University professor. He was an authority on American Puritanism, and a founder of this specialized area of American Studies. Alfred Kazin referred to him as "the master of American intellectual history". In his most famous book, "The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century," Miller adopted a cultural approach to illuminate the worldview of the Puritans. This distinguished him from most previous historians, who employed psychological and economic explanations of their beliefs and behavior.

Bouleau's classic illustrated work examines the essential reliance of European painting tradition on the golden mean and other geometrical patterns. From antiquity to the present, expert painters-including abstract modern masters such as Paul Klee and Jackson Pollock-have conveyed harmony through the mathematics of spatial division, ultimately giving geometry a crucial role as the foundation upon which these classics were built. For over half a century, The Painter's Secret Geometry has been a seminal work for students of art history and composition. Now this popular, rich analysis is back in print for today's artists and historians.

The Man Without Qualities as a novel is a "story of ideas", which takes place in the time of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy's last days, and the plot often veers into allegorical digressions on a wide range of existential themes concerning humanity and feelings. It has a particular concern with the values of truth and opinion and how society organizes ideas about life and society. A 32-year-old mathematician named Ulrich who is in search of a sense of life and reality but fails to find it. His ambivalence towards morals and indifference to life has brought him to the state of being "a man without qualities", depending on the outer world to form his character. A kind of keenly analytical passivity is his most typical attitude.Musil once said that it is not particularly difficult to describe Ulrich in his main features. Ulrich himself only knows he is strangely indifferent to all his qualities. Lack of any profound essence and ambiguity as a general attitude to life are his principal characteristics.Meanwhile, we meet a murderer and rapist, Moosbrugger, who is condemned for his murder of a prostitute. Other protagonists are Ulrich's mistress, Bonadea, and Clarisse, his friend Walter's neurotic wife, whose refusal to go along with commonplace existence leads to Walter's insanity.Robert McCrum ranked it one of the top 10 books of the 20th century: "This is a meditation on the plight of the little man lost in a great machine. One of Europe's unquestioned 20th-century masterpieces."

This volume pulls together and republishes, with some editing, updating, and additions, articles written during 1978-86 for internal use within the CIA Directorate of Intelligence. The information is relatively timeless and still relevant to the never-ending quest for better analysis. The articles are based on reviewing cognitive psychology literature concerning how people process information to make judgments on incomplete and ambiguous information. The essays selected are the most relevant to intelligence analysis and most in need of communication to intelligence analysts. The articles are intended to help the intelligence analysts understand and interpreted the issues that most intelligence analysts face.