An examination of the myths of the Moon goddess and how she appeared to the original creators of those myths in ancient Greece.Waxing and waning and reborn with each new month, the Moon has always been the supreme symbol of cyclical change in the western world.Metaphorical representations of the Moon’s goddess also seem to undergo similar changes, each new century reinventing her in its own image. For Hesiod, she was a distant figure in the celestial panthe...

This book comprehensively surveys the colorful history of mass hysteria and kindred phenomena in schools, documenting outbreaks of demonic possession during witchcraft scares, to modern incidents of collapsing bands, itching frenzies, ghost panics and mystery illnesses.Strange behaviors and illnesses in students are examined through the centuries. Possessed children went into trance states and began to bark like dogs in 16th and 17th century Holland; an epidemic of twitching, tremb...

The New York Times BestsellerWhat if everything you think you know about addiction is wrong? Johann Hari's journey into the heart of the war on drugs led him to ask this question--and to write the book that gave rise to his viral TED talk, viewed more than 62 million times, and inspired the feature film The United States vs. Billie Holiday and the documentary series The Fix.One of Johann Hari's earliest memories i...

From the award-winning, groundbreaking author of A Brief History of Anxiety...Yours and Mine comes a touching, exhilarating, challenging exploration of the inexplicable gleamings of another world many of us experience, in life, in grief, and near death.Sparked by extraordinary experiences that occurred in her family when her father and her sister both died in 2008, Patricia Pearson was launched on a journey of investigation into what she calls "a curious sort of modern und...

Read the devastating story of the Spanish flu - the twentieth century's greatest killer – and discover what it can teach us about the current Covid-19 pandemic.'Both a saga of tragedies and a detective story... Pale Rider is not just an excavation but a reimagining of the past' GuardianWith a death toll of between 50 and 100 million people and a global reach, the Spanish flu of 1918–1920 was the greatest human disaster, no...

A witty, irreverent tour of history's worst plagues—from the Antonine Plague, to leprosy, to polio—and a celebration of the heroes who fought themIn 1518, in a small town in Alsace, Frau Troffea began dancing and didn’t stop. She danced until she was carried away six days later, and soon thirty-four more villagers joined her. Then more. In a month more than 400 people had been stricken by the mysterious dancing plague. In late-seventeenth-century England an eccentr...

"A tour de force . . . [Storr's] dogged approach to nailing many of the most celebrated skeptics in lies and misrepresentations is welcome." — SalonWhy, that is, did the obviously intelligent man beside him sincerely believe in Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden and a six-thousand-year-old Earth, in spite of the evidence against them? It was the start of a journey that would lead Storr all over the world—from Texas to Warsaw to the Outer Hebrides—meeting an e...

A look at the 1918 influenza pandemic from its outbreak to its effects on the global population and its legacy.On the second Monday of March, 1918, the world changed forever. What seemed like a harmless cold morphed into a global pandemic that would wipe out as many as a hundred-million people—ten times as many as the Great War. German troops faltered, lending the allies the winning advantage, and India turned its sights to independence while South Africa turned to ...

Having a good death is our final human right, argues Sandra Martin in this updated and expanded version of her bestselling and award-winning social history of the right to die movement in Canada and around the world.Winner of the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, finalist for both the Donner Prize in Public Policy and the Dafoe Prize for History, A Good Death has a new chapter on Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying Law. The law allows mentally competent adults, who are s...

With a scientist's mind and an animal lover's compassion, world-renowned biologist Rupert Sheldrake presents a groundbreaking exploration of animal behavior that will profoundly change the way we think about animals--and ourselves.How do cats know when it's time to go to the vet, even before the cat carrier comes out? How do dogs know when their owners are returning home at unexpected times? How can horses find their way back to the stable over completely unfamilia...

Almost a third of your whole life is spent asleep. Every night you close your eyes, become oblivious to your surroundings and waste hours flying, being chased or watching all your teeth fall out – and then you wake up. What on earth is going on?Based on exciting new peer-reviewed research, mass-participation experiments and the world’s largest archive of dream reports, Night School uncovers the truth about the sleeping brain – and gives powerful tips on how you can use tho...

The problem of Aids has been kept largely under control in Europe, but in the Third World it is a different story. There is a devestating lack of resources for medicine and for education. When parents die at a young age, children are left behind with no-one to teach them how to avoid the same fate, and so the cycle continues.Memory Books could prove to be the most important documents in our time in answer to this crisis. When the official reports have been filed away, these slim vo...