Meditation is a proven method of finding calm and coping with our crazy world. Amy Leigh Mercree explores the history of this ancient practice as well as its practical applications – including decreased anxiety and a more contented life. In addition...

Wicca is growing in popularity, and Cassandra Eason – much admired for her writing on spiritual subjects – takes a look at its origins, its uses in everyday life, and its gods and goddesses. She explains how magick functions; how to create an altar a...

According to Jeffrey Rosen, Louis D. Brandeis was "the Jewish Jefferson", the greatest critic of what he called "the curse of bigness", in business and government, since the author of the Declaration of Independence. Published to commemorate the hund...

Of all the figures in the Bible, David arguably stands out as the most perplexing and enigmatic. He was many things: a warrior who subdued Goliath and the Philistines; a king who united a nation; a poet who created beautiful, sensitive verse; a loyal...

Barbra Streisand has been called the "most successful... talented performer of her generation" by Vanity Fair, and her voice, said pianist Glenn Gould, is "one of the natural wonders of the age". Streisand scaled the heights of entertainment-from a p...

Jasper Johns (b. 1930) is arguably the most important living American artist, and his work is central to any history of postwar art. With extensive new scholarship based on original research and interviews with the artist, "Jasper Johns: Catalogue Ra...

When the Gospel writings were first produced, Christian thinking was already cognizant of its relationship to ancient memorial cultures and history-writing traditions. Yet, little has been written about exactly what shaped the development of early Ch...

Two men talk in Tokyo. One, a Belgian, is a diplomat. The other, Dutch, is a photographer. What, they wonder, is the real face of Japan? How can they get beyond the European idea of the nation and its people – with its exoticism – and see Japan as it...

London between the wars was a place of anxiety and uncertainty. After the postwar boom of the 1920s, the aftereffects of the stock market crash hit London and, even as the fortunes of the aristocracy went into decline, there was hunger and a rising t...

Designers have shaped our modern age, whether it's the chair we're sitting in, the computer we're reading on, or the house we're living in. Design is everywhere, and this volume profiles fifty of the most influential figures over the past one hundred...