reviews

Tropical atrocity... Author:  Laurence Hyde They had been living there for almost 4000 years.  Thriving in an environment of idyllic beauty and abundance, the islanders on the Bikini Atoll had everything they needed to sustain them.   One of the more remote Marshall Islands – which hosted a major campaign in World War II’s Pacific Theater – the atoll was as obscure as it was beautiful.  It wasn’t until after the war, when the whole group of islands was placed under the protection of the United States, that it rapidly became evident that Bikini would be the perfect location for a [...]

An Ageless Story of Faith and Doubt Author: William Peter Blatty Driving by the Exorcist stairs always chills me – the fancy yet eerily run-down M-street corridor –  unnatural steepness of the dark, misshaped stairs. This location with its moody lighting and H.P. Lovecraft-esque architectural dereliction would haunt me even if I hadn’t witnessed the famous stair scene in The Exorcist of the priest plunging into a brutally sprawled death. The iconic movie with its no-holds bared research into the profanely occult only exacerbates the sense that there is something else lurking around this glass strewn parking lot. When a [...]

Evolutionary cogitations... Author:  Daniel C. Dennett How did we get here?  Specifically, how did we end up with these remarkable (if not always entirely rational) mentation devices in our skulls?  Even more specifically, how did our minds evolve, providing us the mental space to contemplate the world in all its fascinating complexity?  For millennia, the wise ones simply assumed that God must have gifted humanity with this special skill that seems to set us apart from all his other creations.  But what if they were wrong?  In an adventure of amazing scope and fortitude, acclaimed philosopher Daniel C. Dennett explains [...]