Schreber--an educated, cultured, fin-de-siecle German--gives us a window into psychosis like we've never had before or since. Part medical document, part confessional narrative, and part apocalyptic religious text, Schreber's bizarre Memoirs reveal an astute, skeptical mind confronted with a terrifying delusional landscape built of everything from Wagnerian opera and Lutheran theology to nineteenth-century medicine and cosmology. Thought-provoking, and at times downright disturbing, this is a book that will stay with you for a long time.
No book is without an agenda. The King James Bible was created to reconcile the warring religious factions in Jacobean England, with enough baroque literary flourishes to make people want to read it. Then, when people didn’t want to read it, the crown simply banned competing bibles. With an appreciation of both the beauty of the book and the heated debates that produced it, Nicolson tells the story of the all-time bestseller that made our language what it is today.
