Asserts the human species is at a low level in the evolutionary chain and that the human brain grew larger than its physical skull could accomodate, causing damage which resulted in the species' alienation from the immaterial world.

The shocking and significant story of how the White House and Pentagon scuttled an epic Hollywood production. Soon after atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, MGM set out to make a movie studio chief Louis B. Mayer called “the most important story” he would ever film: a big budget dramatization of the Manhattan Project and the invention and use of the revolutionary new weapon. Over at Paramount, Hal B. Wallis was ramping up his own film version. His screenwriter: the novelist Ayn Rand, who saw in physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer the model for a character she was sketching for Atlas Shrugged. Greg Mitchell’s The Beginning or the End chronicles the first efforts of American media and culture to process the Atomic Age. A movie that began as a cautionary tale inspired by atomic scientists aiming to warn the world against a nuclear arms race would be drained of all impact due to revisions and retakes ordered by President Truman and the military—for reasons of propaganda, politics, and petty human vanity (this was Hollywood). Mitchell has found his way into the lofty rooms, from Washington to California, where it happened, unearthing hundreds of letters and dozens of scripts that show how wise intentions were compromised in favor of defending the use of the bomb and the imperatives of postwar politics. As in his acclaimed Cold War true-life thriller The Tunnels, he exposes how our implacable American myth-making mechanisms distort our history.

In this fascinating journey to the edge of science, Vidal takes on big philosophical questions: Does our universe have a beginning and an end or is it cyclic? Are we alone in the universe? What is the role of intelligent life, if any, in cosmic evolution? Grounded in science and committed to philosophical rigor, this book presents an evolutionary worldview where the rise of intelligent life is not an accident, but may well be the key to unlocking the universe's deepest mysteries. Vidal shows how the fine-tuning controversy can be advanced with computer simulations. He also explores whether natural or artificial selection could hold on a cosmic scale. In perhaps his boldest hypothesis, he argues that signs of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations are already present in our astrophysical data. His conclusions invite us to see the meaning of life, evolution and intelligence from a novel cosmological framework that should stir debate for years to come.

I had to accept that I wasn’t just Arthur Leywin anymore, and that I could no longer be limited by the circumstances of my birth. If I was going to escape, if I was going to go toe-to-toe with the most powerful beings in this world, I needed to push myself to my utmost limit...and then I needed to push even further. After nearly dying as a victim of his own strength, Arthur Leywin wakes to find himself far from the continent where he was born for the second time. Alone, broken, and with no way to tell his family he’s alive, Arthur must rebuild his strength to survive. As he ascends through an ancient dungeon filled with hostile beasts and devious trials, he discovers an ancient, absolute power - a power that will either ruin him or take him to new heights. But the dungeon won’t give up its knowledge easily. Before he can plunder its depths, Arthur must learn to untangle the threads of fate. He must band together with the unlikeliest of allies if he hopes to escape with his life.