Showing results by author "James Johnson" in All Categories

What if the Bible was only half the story? In 1945, a sealed jar was unearthed in the Egyptian desert. Inside: a set of ancient texts that no one was supposed to read. Known now as the Nag Hammadi Library, these 1,600-year-old writings include lost gospels, secret revelations, and alternative takes on Jesus, God, creation, and reality itself. This book walks you straight into the fire. Not with dogma — but with myth, metaphor, and the actual words the early Church buried. You’ll meet the Demiurge, a false god who thinks he’s the real one. You’ll hear Jesus speak in riddles.

He nailed a piece of paper to a door and split the Christian world in half. Martin Luther wasn’t trying to become a legend. He was trying to survive damnation, out-argue indulgence sellers, and maybe, just maybe, figure out how to get into Heaven. But what began as one monk’s spiritual meltdown became the spark that torched a millennium of Catholic power. MARTIN LUTHER: The Monk Who Broke the Church tells the full, unfiltered story of the man who stood up to popes, flipped the Bible into German, married a runaway nun, and set Europe on fire.

The Most Wonderful Time is a warm, funny, and unexpectedly profound journey through the centuries of stories, symbols, and surprises that gave us the holiday we know today. From the winter solstice rituals of early humans to the chaos of Saturnalia in ancient Rome… from the real Saint Nicholas to Coca-Cola’s Santa… from pagan ghosts and Yule logs to Mariah Carey — this is the true, tangled history of Christmas as you’ve never seen it. Along the way, James Johnson explores the contradictions at the heart of the holiday: joy and grief, light and darkness, sacred and commercial.

Three great historians write compelling, relevent biographies of three of our most important and famous presidents in this collection of Eminent Lives Michael Korda brings his acclaimed storytelling talents to the life of Ulysses S. Grant—a man who managed to end the Civil War on a note of...

She wore black for forty years. And ruled a world in mourning. Queen Victoria didn’t just wear the crown — she became it. Through grief, silence, and sheer symbolic power, she turned herself into the emotional architecture of an empire that never stopped expanding. While others fought, conquered, and colonized, she sat — cloaked in black — and let the myth do the work. Victoria: The Widow Who Ruled the World is not a sentimental biography.

The Hidden Hand: A History of Secret Societies pulls back the curtain on the groups that shaped civilization—not with conspiracy, but with structure, symbolism, and silence. From ancient mystery rites and medieval brotherhoods to Ivy League crypts and Silicon Valley cults, JJ traces the real influence of secret societies across time—without the tinfoil, the paranoia, or the guesswork. This is not a book about who runs the world. It’s a book about how power cloaks itself—through ritual, myth, and the illusion of secrecy.

From sealing ships to spy planes, secret bases to collapsing glaciers, White Silence tells the story of humanity’s strangest relationship with a place we still barely understand. This isn’t just a nature book. It’s a geopolitical thriller, a Cold War ghost story, and a climate countdown clock — all layered beneath a sheet of ice a mile thick. Because Antarctica isn’t empty. It’s just quiet.

Terence McKenna didn’t just study psychedelics — he became their most articulate, hilarious, and fearless ambassador. From his early childhood obsession with fossils and sci-fi to his legendary journey into the Amazon in search of shamanic secrets, McKenna walked between worlds. What he brought back wasn’t just stories — it was a new way of seeing reality. In Mushroom Man: The Curious Journey of Terence McKenna, JJ delivers a biography that guides listeners through McKenna’s life while unwrapping his biggest ideas.

He wasn’t just the man who discovered gravity. He was the man who tried to measure God. Isaac Newton is often remembered as the cold genius who sat under an apple tree and changed the world with a single thought. But the truth is far stranger — and far more human. Heaven’s Codebreaker peels back the myth to reveal the obsessive, secretive, visionary mind behind modern science.

What Are the Odds? is your intro to understanding the hidden mathematics of everyday life. From coin flips to casinos, lightning strikes to love stories, this book walks the line between probability and poetry—bringing clarity to the chaos and calm to the randomness. Through twelve sharp chapters (plus a bonus finale), JJ cracks open real-life situations with statistical insight, humor, and heart. You'll learn why the coin isn't fair, why streaks are a lie, and how even your tiniest decisions might ripple through the universe in ways you’ll never see coming. No math degree required. No charts.

Lobbied: How They Bought the Government is a brutal exposé of the real power behind American politics. From Big Pharma to Big Oil, weapons manufacturers to food conglomerates, this book shows how corporations and special interests didn’t just bend the rules, they wrote them. With billions spent on lobbying every year, legislation isn’t made, it’s purchased. Behind closed doors. With checks, access, and influence you’ll never have. This isn’t just about backroom deals in Washington. It’s your insulin prices. Your student debt. Your rent. Your food. Your vote. And your future.

COLUMBUS: The Man Who Didn’t Discover America is a clear-eyed biography of one of history’s most mythologized figures. Drawing from primary sources, letters, and eyewitness accounts, this book traces the life and legacy of Christopher Columbus. From his early years in Genoa to his final voyage across the Atlantic. Rather than retelling the story through rose-colored legend, the book offers a grounded account of who Columbus actually was, what he believed, and what happened when he made landfall in the Caribbean.

What do you actually believe? Not what your family says. Not what your pastor says. Not what your podcast host says. What the label means. Fully. This is not a book about scripture. It’s not a defense of religion. And it’s not a takedown of belief. It’s a walkthrough. From Christians to Catholics, Evangelicals to Mormons, Muslims to Jews, Hindus to Buddhists, Atheists to Agnostics, and cults you didn’t even know were real. This book lays out the actual belief structure, system by system, line by line. No cherry-picking. No commentary. Just: “If you say you are this… here’s what that means.

Life didn’t begin with a roar. It began with goo. Before brains, bones, bugs, or breathing, Earth was just a soup of chemicals getting zapped by lightning until something clicked. This is the story of what happened next. From the first self-replicating molecule to the rise of humans with god complexes, From Goo to You is a ride through four billion years of biology. The true story of how atoms turned into cells, cells turned into creatures, and creatures started asking, "What even is life?"

This isn’t a memoir. It’s not a miracle cure. And it’s not another promise built on fear. This is the book that finally explains it, all of it. What it is. How it works. Why it’s so hard to treat. What the treatments actually do. What the diagnosis does to your mind. And how the system around it got so big, so expensive, and so confusing. It’s biology. It’s industry. It’s psychology. It’s the full picture, from rogue cells to medical machines to the moment your life gets split in half by one word.

From sacred ceremony to cigarette ads, from opioid pills to infinite scroll, Addiction: The Habit That Runs the World traces the full timeline of how craving became a system and how that system became modern life. This is not a recovery memoir. This is not a clinical manual. This is a walk through the architecture of addiction. How it was built, scaled, sold, and normalized. From the opium wars and plantation sugar to vaping teens and dopamine apps, this book shows how every empire found its fix, and how every generation got hooked.

Before gods had names, temples had altars, and books were called holy, we were staring into the storm and searching for meaning. From prehistoric burials and animistic spirits to sacred texts, televangelists, cults, algorithms, and Instagram astrology, Religion 101 traces the full arc of human faith in all its glory and violence. In this punchy history, JJ breaks down the world’s oldest force: not by preaching, but by exploring. You’ll meet prophets, kings, gods, heretics, influencers, and follow belief as it evolves into systems of power, identity, community, and content.

BUILT FROM BURGERS is a clear, sharp, and wildly listenable walkthrough of how life actually works. From DNA to digestion, from cell division to consciousness. No fluff. No filler. Just the full biological blueprint of you, explained molecule by molecule. This isn’t a textbook. It’s a systems manual. Inside, you’ll learn how your body builds itself from atoms, why proteins do everything, how cells specialize, how your brain talks to your gut, and what happens when it all breaks down.

Throughout fiction, there have always been heroes who have fallen from grace. Champions of honor, decency, and order who have become villains through some traumatic event or a deep personal flaw. Blackest Knights is a collection of 19 tales by some of independent fantasy's best authors that follow a collection of those heroes who fell to temptation. From tales of bloody-handed hypocrites to space pirates, you'll find some truly fascinating works within.

They called it justice. It was fear in disguise. For centuries, people across Europe and the New World believed witches walked among them — casting curses, flying at night, and serving dark forces. But behind the flames and confessions was something older, deeper, and far more human: fear. The Witch Trials explores how ordinary people — driven by faith, panic, and suspicion — turned on their neighbors in one of history’s most haunting chapters. From ancient magic and medieval superstition to the infamous Salem hysteria, this book reveals how belief became law… and how thousands paid the price.