Austin's Picks

A man from southwest Turkey travels the eastern Mediterranean, Egypt and Ethiopia interviewing the locals. There are thousands of passion-flaring stories in here. I yelled, I stopped to think, and I actually threw the book once!

Edward Gibbon wrote 'The Decline and Fall' having only read the primary texts of Roman historians, shunning modern commentaries as grist for his giant mill. To get a real sense of the Roman Empire, our mother-system, a million data points must pass before our eyes. A small handful of writers fulfill this need (Livy, Suetonius, Tacitus, Dio, Plutarch, Polybius, Pliny the younger, etc.) with Tacitus being one of the most commonly cited, as he had speciall access through his senatorial position to the Senate's recotds. The Annals provides coverage of 14-68 A.D., a perfet prelude to 69 A.D., a truly awful year! This is stellar, exciting writing! Who excluded this from public school curriculum?

"He was writing about me." -Eric Hoffer
"It seems to me as if I myself had written the book." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Give this to your mother or professor, they'll love it.

Patent-laden mycologist Paul Stamets has written an authoratative intro to the psilocybin genera (white pages), and a technical field guide (yellow pages). In full color, Stamets details key principles of identification, including look-alikes. We all harbor opinions on magic mushrooms; form yours based on facts!