Elijah longs to be a scientist, to follow in the footsteps of his heroes. But as a member of the Horebite church such dreams will never be possible. Instructed by his father & his church to listen for The Still, Small Voice that will inform his life, Elijah finds himself trapped between a modern world & an ancient belief system; until the discovery of his hidden scientific apparatus brings these two worlds together with unexpected results... ...

Elijah longs to be a scientist, to follow in the footsteps of his heroes. But as a member of the Horebite church such dreams will never be possible. Instructed by his father & his church to listen for The Still, Small Voice that will inform his life, Elijah finds himself trapped between a modern world & an ancient belief system; until the discovery of his hidden scientific apparatus brings these two worlds together with unexpected results... ...

In a rare blend of scientific insight & writing as elegant as the theories it explains, Brian Greene, one of the world's leading string theorists, peels away the layers of mystery surrounding string theory to reveal a universe that consists of eleven

Dimensions, where all matter is generated by the vibrations of microscopically tiny loops of energy. Greene uses everything from an amusement park ride to ants on a garden hose to explain the beautiful yet bizarre realities that modern physics is unveiling. Dazzling in its brilliance, unprecedented in its ability to both illuminate & entertain, The Elegant Universe is a tour de force of scientific writing
- a delightful, lucid voyage through modern physics that brings us closer to understanding how the universe works.


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' This latest offering is a joy to read. It is one of those rare things, a book by a management author that you want to devour at one sitting.' Ambassador' Its eclectic style makes it extremely enjoyable to read.' The Irish Times' He has that rare gift among business writers
- able to talk sense & leave out the jargon
- This title will appeal to a very wide audience, because it is everything a business book should be
- very readable & thought provoking.' Business & Computer Bookseller Charles Handy's best-selling new book looks at how individuals (the fleas in his analogy) relate to multi-national conglomerates (the elephants). In addition to addressing how & why we work today, he covers a wide range of preoccupations & issues including the increasing fear of big business: 'it is easy to see why many observers think that the big corporations are now both richer & more powerful than many nation states. They worry that these new corporate states are accountable to no-one
- that their financial clout makes governments beholden to them.. . The elephants, people feel, are out of control.'



...

' This latest offering is a joy to read. It is one of those rare things, a book by a management author that you want to devour at one sitting.' Ambassador' Its eclectic style makes it extremely enjoyable to read.' The Irish Times' He has that rare gift among business writers
- able to talk sense & leave out the jargon
- This title will appeal to a very wide audience, because it is everything a business book should be
- very readable & thought provoking.' Business & Computer Bookseller Charles Handy's best-selling new book looks at how individuals (the fleas in his analogy) relate to multi-national conglomerates (the elephants). In addition to addressing how & why we work today, he covers a wide range of preoccupations & issues including the increasing fear of big business: 'it is easy to see why many observers think that the big corporations are now both richer & more powerful than many nation states. They worry that these new corporate states are accountable to no-one
- that their financial clout makes governments beholden to them.. . The elephants, people feel, are out of control.'



...

When a man's favourite elephant vanishes, the balance of his whole life is subtly upset; a couple's midnight hunger pangs drive them to hold up a Mc Donald's; a woman finds she is irresistible to a small green monster that burrows through her front garden; an insomniac wife wakes up to a twilight world of semi-consciousness in which anything seems possible
- even death. In every one of the stories that make up The Elephant Vanishes, Murakami makes a determined assault on the normal. He has a deadpan genius for dislocating realities to uncover the surreal in the everyday, the extraordinary in the ordinary.
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Since the seventeenth century, science has been contending with philosophy, organised religion & the arts for domination over Western civilisation & society. By the middle of the twentieth century, the battle appeared to be won; scientific rationalism & scepticism were triumphant. Yet in the last few decades a strong & potent counter-current has emerged. One manifestation of this has been the so-called occult revival.

In the Elixir & the Stone, Baigent & Leigh argue that this occult revival
- & indeed the entire revolution in attitudes which has taken place recently
- owes a profound debt to Hermeticism, a body of esoteric teaching which flourished in Alexandria two thousand years ago & which then went underground. The authors trace the history of this intriguing & all-encompassing philosophy
- which has much in common with contemporary holistic thought
- charting its origin in the Egyptian mysteries, & demonstrating how it continued to exercise enormous influence through the magicians & magi of the Middle Ages & the Renaissance.

Many remarkable characters feature in the narrative, including the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon & the Elizabethan magus John Dee; prototype of Shakespeare's Prospero in The Tempest, but he central figure that emerges is that of Faust himself
- one of the defining myths of Western civilisation.
The Elixir & the Stone is a remarkably rich & ambitious book that adds up to a little short of an alternative history of the intellectual world. Perhaps for the first time it puts into their true context those shadowy alchemists & magicians who have haunted the imaginations of people for centuries. Moreover it offers a way of looking at the world that is in one sense 'alternative', but, in another, deeply historical.









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