Showing results by author "James Johnson" in All Categories

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.

This second edition of Becoming an Emotionally Focused Therapist: The Workbook has been fully revised by expert therapists with advances in attachment science and emotionally focused therapy (EFT) practice, the integration of the EFT Tango—a guide to the EFT process—and new chapters on working with both individuals and families.

The End is Coming. An extinction-level asteroid is cannonballing toward Earth. In humanity’s final hours, a lucky few earn a one-way ticket to the brand-new, ultra-immersive, fantasy-based VRMMORPG, Viridian Gate Online. Making that leap of faith might mean survival, but it comes with a steep price tag: “Travelers” will forever be stranded as digital avatars inside a fantastical world filled with vicious monsters, all-powerful AIs, and cutthroat players. Let the games begin....

The lure of the American West is in the spirit of adventure, in the majestic expanse of unconquered wilderness and in rugged individuals on a quest for identity and sometimes for survival. Owen Wister's unsmiling Virginian... Dorothy M. Johnson's, "A Man Called Horse": These are a few of the colorful, even legendary characters who populate The American West in Fiction, a collection of stories edited by Jon Tuska.

He had no degree, no license, no product. Yet Jeffrey Epstein ended up with a $77 million mansion, a private island, and a guest list that reads like the boardroom of the world. The Financier isn’t a biography — it’s an autopsy. This is the story of a man who didn’t just game the system… He revealed it. From classrooms he shouldn’t have taught in to courtrooms that let him walk, this book follows the network that built him, protected him, and quietly erased the evidence when things got too loud. This isn’t about one predator.

You’ve heard the names. You’ve seen the paintings. Maybe you even thought they were just Ninja Turtles. But behind the marble and oil paint were four real men—Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Donatello—who didn’t just create art. They rewired civilization. This isn’t a sleepy art history book. It’s a front-row seat to the most creative, competitive, and gloriously petty era in human history. Rivals, patrons, popes, politics, and power—it’s all here.

George Orwell wasn’t just the author of 1984 and Animal Farm — He was the man who saw it all coming. From the jungles of British Burma to the slums of Paris, from the trenches of the Spanish Civil War to the propaganda halls of the BBC, Orwell lived through the machinery of power — and spent every ounce of his voice trying to tear it apart. Orwell: The Man Who Warned Us is a literary biography that doesn’t just tell you who Orwell was — it shows you how he became one of the most dangerous writers in history.

Since the first appearance of a vampire in Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer, we mortals have endured a morbid fascination with these peculiar creatures of the night. They come in many forms: charming and seductive; ghastly and terrible. Join us as we explore a number of classic yarns concerning the various guises of the vampire, from Aleksey Tolstoy’s horrifying description of a vampiric family to Robert E. Howard’s tale of a creature loosed from bondage after having been buried for over three centuries. Thank the gods these creatures are fictitious…aren’t they?

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.

Before mindfulness apps. Before lo-fi beats to study to. Before every self-help book told you to “let go”… There was Alan Watts. This book isn’t a lecture. It’s a vibe. Everything Is Fine, Actually is a chilled-out journey through the life and mind of a man who didn’t care about enlightenment points — just clarity, laughter, and presence. From his British roots to his West Coast evolution, Watts preached the art of not trying, the illusion of the ego, and the sacred joke of existence.

You didn’t create it. You didn’t agree to it. But it controls your life. This is the story of credit, not as a convenience, but as a control system. Behind every mortgage denial, sky-high car loan, or job rejection, there’s a silent judge pulling the strings: your credit score. And it doesn’t just follow you. It defines you. In this book, JJ breaks open the black box. You’ll see how private companies like Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion turned your financial behavior into a commodity.

What do North Korea, Iran, and Saudi Arabia have in common? They all made the list — and not the good kind. Control Freaks is a ruthless, unfiltered tour through the 10 most strict countries on Earth — where joy is illegal, jokes are treason, and your haircut can land you in prison. This isn’t just a list of bad regimes. It’s a blueprint of how control works — how governments weaponize culture, religion, fear, surveillance, and even silence to stamp out identity and obedience.

TAYLOR SWIFT: The Making of a Pop Machine is the real story of how a Pennsylvania girl with a dream became a billion-dollar brand, a streaming superpower, and the most influential artist of her generation. From country roots to stadium dominance. From Kanye interruptions to ten-minute revenge ballads. From Big Machine drama to legal warfare with Taylor’s Versions. From sad songs to supply chains. This isn’t just a pop star biography. It’s a business case study, a cultural timeline, and a reminder that no one weaponized heartbreak better than Taylor Swift.

OxyContin didn’t just spark a crisis. It lit the match on a slow-motion national collapse. PURDUE is a brutal, unflinching exposé of the company that built a business model on human pain, addiction, and silence. From the Sackler dynasty’s quiet grip on the pharmaceutical industry to the FDA’s deadly approval stamp, this book pulls no punches. Follow the rise of a white-collar cartel. Witness how addiction became an asset class.

Walt Disney didn’t just create a cartoon. He created a civilization. From a bankrupt animator with a dream to a company that reshaped global culture, this is the true story of how one man — and one mouse — built an empire of characters, parks, movies, songs, and stories that still dominate the world today. This isn’t a takedown. It’s not a puff piece. It’s a biography of an empire — calm, clear, and unblinking. Disney isn’t just a company. It’s a myth that owns myths. This is how it happened.

From intake to discharge, Life Inside the Asylum walks you through the modern psychiatric system: the rules, the rituals, the staff, the patients, the punishment protocols, and the quiet violence hidden behind clinical language. No fluff. No fiction. Just the raw structure of a world few understand until they’re already inside. Locked doors. Forced meds. Therapy by checklist. This is what happens when mental health care stops being care — and becomes compliance.

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.

Before grammar, stories, or history, there was pointing. Grunting. Guesswork. And somehow, from that, we built language. This isn’t a textbook. It’s the story of how humans learned to name the world, how we stitched together meaning from noise, and how the system we invented ended up running us. From cave mouths to cuneiform, slang to syntax, sacred scripts to AI chatbots, this book tells the full arc of the original human software: invented, forgotten, rediscovered, and now automated. This Is a Rock doesn’t teach you how to talk. It shows you how we figured out that we could.

What was communism really? And why won’t the dream die? In this book, JJ strips away the Cold War cartoons, authoritarian cosplay, and capitalist propaganda to ask a much simpler question: What if we didn’t have to live like this? COMMUNISM: The Dream That Got Buried isn’t a defense of tyrants or a call for revolution. It’s a story about the dream that said we could build a world without bosses, billionaires, or survival-for-sale economics. A dream that terrified the powerful, got twisted by dictators, and was buried under branding before it ever got a real chance.

A billionaire without borders. A philosopher without faith. A playbook without rules. Peter Thiel isn’t just another tech mogul. He’s the architect of a worldview—quiet, calculated, and deeply contrarian—that has reshaped Silicon Valley, national politics, and the very future of civilization. From his PayPal coup to his shadow war against the media, his bets on Trump, Palantir, and immortality itself, Thiel: The Power Broker of Silicon Valley walks through his life like a thriller—but reads like a manual for the new elite.