A labor of love taking much of Burton's life to write and revise, "The Anatomy of Melancholy" is an expansive, informative, and eccentric work of genius first published in 1621. Burton was an English churchman and a scholar, and his depth and breadth of knowledge is readily apparent in this inexhaustible book. Through the frame of a medical treatise, Burton begins with melancholy and slowly deals with various mental states, frequently digressing with...

The following text has been drawn from Sir Richard Burton's exhaustive translation of "The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night," more commonly known as "The Arabian Nights." The story of "The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor" tells the tale of Sinbad who ventures out to sea, at first to acquire wealth, but afterwards in search of adventure. During these voyages he encounters many obstacles including giant animals, monsters, and savage cannibals,...

Journey through the subject of melancholia in an easily accessible volume touching on topics from love and sex to religion and geographyBurton's The Anatomy of Melancholy is one of the great but unclassifiable prose works in English literature: diverting, delightfully rambling, and filled with recondite learning and peculiar facts and speculations. Burton, frustrated at the stagnant, disorderly society in which he found himself, became convinced...

What if our soundest, most reasonable judgments are beyond our control? Despite 2500 years of contemplation by the world's greatest minds and the more recent phenomenal advances in basic neuroscience, neither neuroscientists nor philosophers have a decent understanding of what the mind is or how it works. The gap between what the brain does and the mind experiences remains uncharted territory. Nevertheless, with powerful new tools such as the fMRI...

Aliens release a furry critter in the wilds of Lapland where it takes a woman captive and threatens a group of scientists.