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Prepare to feel queasy. Are you suffering from a life-threatening
illness? Do you possess chronic fatigue, sexual dysfunction, severe
mental impairment, or have to endure constant, debilitating pain?
If not, then you might do so after reading this book! Snake-oil
salesmen, preying like vultures upon the hopes and fears of the
sick and the dying, are nothing new. Up until relatively recently
in history, before the miraculous medical advances made during the
20th and 21st centuries, doctors killed many more patients than
they ever cured - and it was no wonder when you consider some of
the appalling quacks who have felt themselves qualified (often
fraudulently) to call themselves doctors. Was it really possible to
diagnose a person's illness by sniffing their soul through their
hair, as one medical man thought? Did Jesus give His followers
enemas? Can a man fart his own hair out? Is letting a tapeworm live
inside your body a wise way to lose weight? Is it possible to exist
off an ultra-low-calorie diet of thin air alone? Is McDonalds'
secret menu of interdimensional foodstuffs a sure-fire path to good
health? Could an alien potato from the moon hold the secret to
defeating cancer? Is deafness caused by having constipated ears?
Should you really wear underpants laced with nuclear radiation? The
answer to all these questions is undoubtedly 'NO!!', but that
hasn't stopped certain desperate people down the centuries from
believing that it might have been 'YES!!', such has been their
eagerness to find a way out of the medical dead-ends they have
found themselves stuck in. This book tells the story of some of the
strangest and most insane doctors, surgeons, quacks and
food-faddists from throughout history, as well as the often cruel
(and always absurd) diet crazes, treatment regimes and beliefs they
unleashed out onto an unsuspecting world - proving once and for all
that the one thing there really isn't a cure for is human
gullibility. Now open wide and say 'Aaargh!'
Nazi UFOs tells the strange tale of how, following the first
alleged flying saucer sightings made in the USA in 1947, a series
of fantasists and neo-fascists came forward to create a media myth
that the Nazis may have invented these incredible craft as a means
for winning the Second World War, a plan which was tantalisingly
close to completion before the Allies conquered Berlin in 1945.
Today, the fantasy of Nazi UFOs has grown into an entire mythology
in books, on TV and online. Did Germany back-engineer anti-gravity
craft, and even a full-blown time-machine, by stripping technology
from a crashed alien saucer? Did the SS secretly invent Green'
technology for use in their star ship engines, and was this
planet-saving discovery later suppressed at the behest of a
sinister Big Oil conspiracy? Did Himmler try to develop lightning
weapons' for use in aerial combat? By contrasting the fake
military-industrial pseudo-histories of Nazi UFO theorists with
details of real-life Nazi aerospace achievements, the author
demonstrates both how this modern-day mythology came about and how
it cannot possibly be more than fractionally true. For the first
time, this fake alternative military history' is laid out in full.
This book features an appealing cast of con-men and spies, complete
madmen, real-life Nazis and completely made-up ones, operating
right across the globe from South America to wartime Europe and
Japan. A good example may be the mad professor', Viktor
Schauberger, who actually genuinely did manage to gain a personal
audience with Adolf Hitler in order to try and convince him that he
had discovered and then exploited some amazing new source of
natural free energy' which could make objects (such as saucers, in
the opinion of some) float. Hitler dismissed his plan, but it does
nonetheless show how close some bizarre schemes came to being
implemented in Nazi Germany.
If only the war had lasted another six months, then Hitler would
have won ... because his scientists stood upon the very brink of
inventing flying saucers. That, at least, is the myth as it is
currently being peddled today, in books, pamphlets and online; and,
if it were true, squadrons of Luftwaffe spacecraft would certainly
have made mincemeat out of British Spitfires and American B-52s.
But, of course, it is a complete fiction. And yet the sinister myth
of Nazi UFOs is surprisingly well developed. If you listen to its
champions, escaped Nazis and their indoctrinated offspring are
simply hiding in secret Antarctic bases, inside the Hollow Earth,
somewhere upon another planet, or even within another dimension,
just waiting for the right time to strike again - and this time,
armed with saucers and in close alliance with Aryans from other
star systems, they stand poised to finish what they started. Some
even claim that Hitler and his chief henchmen did not really die in
1945, but were borne away in spirit on flying saucers. Such
theories seem insane - but do they have a hidden purpose? White
supremacists around the globe have adopted Nazi ufology to draw the
gullible into the wider orbit of Far-Right ideology; after all, if
the standard version of history is so wrong as to fail to
acknowledge that Hitler helped invent UFOs, then what else might
historians have got wrong about the Third Reich? Might the Nazis
actually have been right all along? Could the Holocaust have been a
total hoax? Once they have swallowed the first lie, a person might
easily swallow several others. The stories in this book are
bizarre: Nazi saucer-pilots fighting alongside Saddam Hussein in
the first Gulf War; alien boot-prints whose soles bear swastikas
being found in the wake of UFO-landings; the leader of America's
Nazi Silvershirts claiming to be in psychic contact with men from
other galaxies; and Allied pilots being buzzed by fiery glowing
'foo fighters' during the Second World War. They may seem harmless
at first, but they are not. Is it really the white race's destiny
to conquer the icy reaches of space under the banner of the 'Aryan
world spirit'? Perhaps not, but the conquest of their victims'
inner space, not outer space, in the name of Hitlerism is what
these latter-day Goebbels truly desire.
The Trickster-god is a strange and rather wonderful mythological
figure who is found in folklore and legend right across the world,
from the Norse Loki to the Greek Hermes to the Raven and Coyote of
the Native American peoples. The ultimate 'cunning fool', he and
the many subversive tales told about him have been studied down the
years by anthropologists, historians, literary theorists and
psychologists from Ted Hughes to C. G. Jung. But in the
twenty-first century, should the Trickster also be studied by
parapsychologists and ghost hunters? Nobody believes in gods like
Hermes or Loki anymore, but that does not mean that people do not
still tell one another tales about such Tricksters and their
mischievous ways. They do, but in disguised form - the disguised
form of the poltergeist. Belief in Trickster-gods, this book
argues, has today been transformed into popular belief in
Trickster-ghosts, with those noisy, disruptive, roguish spirits
known as poltergeists fulfilling largely the same imaginative
function as more traditional Trickster-figures like Robin
Goodfellow once did. By playing childish tricks upon us,
poltergeists appear to reveal our current world-view to be in some
way incomplete, breaking the accepted circles of 'official'
materialistic, scientific logic and provoking laughter at their
irreverent audacity in doing so. Rather than being intended to
frighten, perhaps the true purpose of certain ghost stories is in
fact to amuse, perplex and provoke? Whether true or not, such ghost
stories still function as genuine Trickster-myths, providing those
who read them with access to a hidden realm lurking somewhere just
beyond the rational, in which the usual rules of science, logic and
reality simply do not apply. Perhaps in doing so they act as a kind
of 'emotional safety-valve', intended to allow mankind temporary
respite from the sometimes oppressive social forces surrounding us.
Covering a wide global selection of reported poltergeist phenomena
from ancient times right up to the present day, and then subjecting
them to a process of literary, historical and sociological
analysis, Blithe Spirits is one of the most unusual, original and
wide-ranging books about the subject ever to be written.
Who, these days, still believes in goblins? Well surprisingly,
millions of people do, right the way across the countries of
southern Africa, where such creatures are known as tokoloshes.
Little known in the West, these entities - hairy little men with
gigantic magical penises and the ability to turn themselves
invisible through the aid of an enchanted pebble - are a matter of
everyday belief in nations such as South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia
and Lesotho. In this, the first ever full-length book to be
published upon the topic in the West, the consequences of this
bizarre belief are explored in immense detail. It is not just that
poltergeist-hauntings and UFO-sightings are blamed upon the
activities of this nefarious little imp; so are everyday
misfortunes such as a person's lack of success in love or business.
Rather more outlandishly, tokoloshes are also held responsible for
supposedly raping innocent women in their beds at night and then
impregnating them with goblin-children; court cases have arisen in
which people have been accused of murdering such unfortunate
infants whilst under the genuine impression that they were evil
tokoloshe-babies. But this is not all - tokoloshes have also been
linked with witchcraft, zombies, paranormal stone-showers, murder,
ancient Trickster-gods, sightings of unknown animals and outbreaks
of mass hysteria. In no other book can you read about topics as
diverse and strange as haunted toilets, killer one-eyed Cyclops-men
made from porridge, severed penises being used as magical batteries
and a deformed baby goat born with the head of Homer Simpson. All
this, and the full uncensored tale of the man who claimed to have
been molested in the night by a big gay hippo-monster ... Lavishly
illustrated and all fully-referenced, this book is not only filled
with dozens of unusual, amusing and hitherto-unexamined real-life
stories, it also tries to place prevailing contemporary southern
African belief in the tokoloshe into some kind of plausible social
context. The tokoloshe may not be a genuinely real creature, but it
certainly occupies a position of social reality in the minds of
those who believe in it - with truly wide-ranging and often
unexpected consequences.
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