Showing results by author "James Johnson" in All Categories

The FBI: How a Filing Cabinet Took Over America is a surgical walk through the most powerful domestic surveillance machine in U.S. history — and the terrifying banality behind it. From its paranoid birth to its modern algorithmic glow-up, this book traces how the FBI evolved from a desk job into an empire. This isn’t a thriller. This isn’t a rant. It’s the story of how America’s most trusted agency spent a hundred years collecting secrets, destroying lives, and filing it all away. J. Edgar Hoover. COINTELPRO. MLK. Waco. 9/11. Metadata. Informants. Blackmail. Bureaucracy as weapon.

He didn’t govern. He performed. Ronald Reagan wasn’t just America’s 40th president — he was its most dangerous leading man. In REAGAN: The Actor Who Played President, JJ peels back the smile, the flag, and the fog to reveal the system beneath the script. From Hollywood nobody to union snitch, from Cold War cowboy to corporate prophet, Reagan didn’t just lead the country — he taught it how to forget what it used to be. This is not a hit piece. It’s not a love letter. It’s the untold biography of the man who gave the machine a face — and taught it how to lie with style.

Why are there 40,000 versions of one faith? Branches is a plainspoken, occasionally funny, and honest walk through the tangled family tree of Christianity. From Catholicism to Pentecostalism, Methodists to Mormons, this book doesn’t preach — it maps.

Jeff Bezos didn’t just change shopping. He changed everything. From garage startup to global empire, Bezos: The Man Who Delivered the World walks you through the quiet construction of a system that now runs beneath your life — one click at a time. This isn’t a love letter. It’s not a hit piece either. It’s the blueprint. This is the story of how Jeff Bezos didn’t just sell you stuff… He taught you how to live inside the system that sells it.

He didn’t just think. He built the tools for thinking. Born in Macedon. Trained by Plato. Tutor to Alexander the Great. But more than anything, Aristotle was a blueprint engineer. A mind that broke reality into categories, causes, and systems that still shape the world today. This is the full map of Aristotle’s legacy. Across logic, biology, politics, metaphysics, ethics, storytelling, and more. He didn’t give us the answers. He gave us the frameworks to figure them out.

The Tao Te Ching is one of the most translated books in human history — and one of the most misunderstood. It’s just 81 verses long. But inside those verses is a quiet manual for living, leading, letting go, and lasting. This book strips away the confusion. No commentary. No spiritual fluff. No academic fog. Just the Tao, in plain language — one verse at a time. Whether you're new to the Tao or circling back for the tenth time, this version meets you where you are — and takes you a little deeper.

For over six hundred years, the Catholic Church operated one of the most feared systems of control the world has ever seen — not through armies or kings, but through questions. Were you a heretic? A witch? A secret Jew? A woman with knowledge? A man with doubts? You wouldn’t know until they knocked. In this darkly gripping and deeply researched history, James Johnson walks you through the smoke-filled chambers and torchlit streets of the Inquisition — from its earliest whispers in medieval France to its bloody climax in Spain, Portugal, Goa, and the New World.

Gold plates. Lost tribes. Prophets in the Americas. You’ve heard of it. You’ve seen the commercials. But what does the Book of Mormon actually say? This book walks you through it — with no spin, no theology, and no sales pitch. From a family fleeing Jerusalem to wars in the wilderness. From ancient American empires to Jesus Christ descending in glory, it’s all here. Prophets, plates, and Jesus in America. Whether you believe it or not — this is what it says.

What happens when faith picks up a sword? From the blood-soaked streets of Jerusalem to the burning of Constantinople, Deus Vult tells the full, unflinching story of the Crusades — the wars that defined medieval Christendom, reshaped the world, and left behind a legacy of violence, myth, and madness. This isn’t your average textbook history. It’s raw, irreverent, and razor-sharp. JJ delivers a fast-paced, brutally clear narrative of how the Crusades actually happened — without the gloss, without the Sunday school edits, and without pretending anyone knew what they were doing.

What do shamans, Freud, rats, TikTok, and your mother all have in common? They’ve all shaped how we try to make sense of the human mind. Psychology 101 is the crash course you never got. A sharp, irreverent walk through the strange saga of how humans have studied humans. From ancient soul-healing rituals to modern therapy apps, this book traces the rise of psychology across twelve iconic chapters. You’ll meet the gods of the field (Freud, Jung, Skinner, Maslow), the ghosts they chased (trauma, shadow, madness), and the machines that took over (algorithms, feeds, and digital brains).

What if reality doesn’t exist until you look at it? Quantum physics started as a fix for a math problem. Then it spiraled into the most accurate and most unsettling theory in science. This is the story of how we figured it out. From Planck’s desperate fudge to Feynman’s diagrams, from Schrödinger’s cat to the many-worlds interpretation, Quantum 101 walks you through every milestone of the quantum revolution. No mysticism. No equations without meaning. Just the actual story, told in a way that makes sense. Discover why particles tunnel through walls. Why entanglement breaks space.

Oops, All Atoms is a walk through what materialism actually means. Not in theory, but in practice. From love to morality to death, this book shows what breaks when you treat human beings like meat computers. James Johnson runs the model to its logical conclusion, and then dares to ask what’s on the other side of it. If you’ve ever felt like something about this world is off, you’re not alone. You’re just not made of atoms alone.

Race isn’t real. But it changed the world. This book is the full history of how, and why, we made it up. From ancient tribal instincts to Enlightenment pseudoscience, from slavery and empire to redlining and algorithmic bias, Black and White walks through the invention of race as a system: where it started, how it spread, and why it still shapes everything. Biology didn’t create race. Power did. And the only way to dismantle the system is to understand how it was built. Brutal, clear, and global in scope, Black and White is a bullet through the myth and a blueprint for seeing through the lie.

From fire to fallout, potions to polymers — this is the story of how we figured out what everything is made of. Chemistry 101 isn’t your high school textbook. It’s a walkthrough of how humans turned mystery into mastery. You’ll meet alchemists chasing gold, scientists splitting atoms, and modern chemists designing synthetic realities out of carbon and code. Packed with stories, structure, and the messy human drive to mix, burn, and bottle the universe, this book walks you through the wild history of reactions — from ancient smelting pits to lab-grown meat and CRISPR edits.

What does it mean to wake up? Not spiritually. Not metaphorically. Literally — to become so clear, so present, so aware that the illusion of separation burns away and reality is seen for what it is. This book is about the ones who did. From Siddhartha under the Bodhi tree to Eckhart on the park bench, from Rumi’s spinning silence to Jung’s shadowed inner world — The Ones Who Woke Up is a soul-piercing walk through a few of the most conscious human beings to ever live. They didn’t seek followers. They didn’t chase fame.

One man sat under a tree. The world has never been the same. BUDDHISM: The Path That Rewrote Reality is not just the story of Siddhartha Gautama. It’s the story of what happened next. How a method for ending suffering became a global revolution in consciousness. From forest monks and ink-drawing Zen masters to tantric rituals and Silicon Valley mindfulness, this is the full arc of Buddhism as a living, shifting, silence-centered system. Empires rose around it. Wars tried to erase it. Tech tried to rebrand it. But the core never changed. Sit. Breathe. Look at your mind.

Leviathans stride the poetic stage, known to us all and revered by many. Their verse is at once familiar and yet constantly reveals new layers and depths, new ways of thinking and assembling words to reveal new truths, new feelings and above all new poetry.

Before there were banks, coins, or crash warnings — there was trust, trade, and the primal instinct of value. Economics 101 doesn’t teach you how to ace a test. It shows you how the entire game got built. From mammoth meat to crypto scams, feudal tithes to stock buybacks, this book walks you through the messy, mythological, totally human story of how money came to rule everything around us. It’s not about charts or jargon. It’s about why the world works the way it does — and what happens when the story of value starts to fall apart.

This is the story of the NSA — the agency you weren’t supposed to know existed, quietly building the largest surveillance machine in human history, run by math nerds, funded by fear, and powered by your private life. From Cold War cables to smart phone wiretaps, secret courts to predictive policing, The NSA: The World’s Most Powerful Perverts is a sharp, sarcastic, and disturbingly true deep dive into how one agency went from “born bugged” to watching everyone, all the time, forever.

He ruled for sixty-seven years. Built temples that dwarfed time. Fought the greatest chariot battle in history. Buried sons. Married goddesses. Made peace with empires. Rewrote the past. Refused to die. And three thousand years later, we’re still saying his name. RAMSES: The Pharaoh Who Wouldn’t Die is the story of Egypt’s loudest legend. The builder-king who turned himself into a monument, refused to step down, and became a god before his heart even stopped beating.