Stranger Music - second hand

As the work at the heart of Christianity, the Bible is the spiritual guide for one out of every three people in the world. It is also the world’s most widely distributed book, translated into over two thousand languages, and the world’s best selling book, year after year. But the Bible is a complex work with a complicated and obscure history. Made up of sixty-six “books” written by various authors and divided into two testaments, its contents have changed over the centuries. The Bible has been transformed by translation and, through interpretation, has developed manifold meanings to various religions, denominations, and sects. In this seminal account, acclaimed historian Karen Armstrong discusses the conception, gestation, and life of history’s most powerful book. Armstrong analyzes the social and political situation in which oral history turned into written scripture, how this all-pervasive scripture was collected into one work, and how it became accepted as Christianity’s sacred text. She explores how scripture came to be read for information, and how, in the nineteenth century, historical criticism of the Bible caused greater fear than Darwinism. This is a brilliant, captivating book, crucial in an age of declining faith and rising fundamentalism.

As a novelist and writer for Wired and other publications, Po Bronson has earned a reputation as the most exciting and authentic literary voice to emerge from Silicon Valley. In his national bestseller The Nudist on the Late Shift he tells the true story of the mostly under-thirty entrepreneurs and tech wizards, immigrants and investors, dreamers and visionaries, who see the Valley as their Mecca. Taking us inside the world of these newcomers, brainiacs, salespeople, headhunters, utopians, plutocrats, and innovators as they transform our culture, The Nudist on the Late Shift is a defining portrait of a new generation in the whirl of an information revolution and an international gold rush.

Po Bronson is the author of two novels and one book of nonfiction. Bombardiers , a dark satire of high finance, was an international bestseller that was translated into twelve languages. The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest , soon to be a feature film from 20th Century Fox, is a comedy of Silicon Valley.  His third bestseller, The Nudist on the Late Shift and Other True Tales of Silicon Valley , demonstrates that Bronson's wit and imagination apply as well to nonfiction as to fiction.