“During the Raj, one group stands out as having prospered and thrived because of British rule: the Parsis. Driven out of Persia into India a thousands years ago, the Zoroastrian people adopted the manners and aspirations of the British colonizers. Their Anglophilia ranged from cricket to Oxford to tea. The British fulsomely praised the Parsis and rewarded them with high-level financial, mercantile and bureaucratic posts. The Parsis dominated Bombay for more than a century, until Indian independence ushered in their decline… The Parsi story is filled with the pathos of their long-delayed recognition of the emptiness of the promise that Parsis might one day be Englishmen. Luhrmann sensitively examines the paradoxical nature of their self-criticism (the Parsis had identified themselves with the ‘strong,’ ‘virile’ colonizers but now speak of themselves as effeminate, emasculated, ‘weak,’ all epithets once used by the British of Indians) to create an image of a fragile and beleaguered identity, fraught with contradictions, that looks uneasily toward the future.”

Publisher: Harvard University
Paperback: 317 pages

“They strip off their clothes to dance pagan revelry, or don austere robes to garner ‘power’ and direct it to particular ends. Yet nearly all who profess to be magicians or witches are in every other respect normal, educated, middle-class people—scientists, teachers, computer analysts and many senior civil servants.”

Publisher: Harvard University
Paperback: 382 pages

Explores a segment of American popular thought that has rarely been the subject of scholarship: the belief that history and the end of the world were foretold in the Bible. The author puts forth two arguments, the first being that the prophesy has played a more central role in American thought than most cultural and intellectual historians have recognized; the second being that after World War II the popularizers of a dispensational premillennialism have played an important role in shaping public opinion on such topics as the Soviet Union, the Common Market, the Middle East, the role of technology in modern life, and environmental issues. SC

Publisher: Harvard University
Hardback: 468 pages
Illustrated

The Soviet neuropsychologist who was the inspiration to Oliver Sacks explores the implications of physical damage to the brain: “A soldier named Zasetsky, wounded in the head at the battle of Smolensk in 1943, suddenly found himself in a frightening world: he could recall his childhood but not his recent past; half his field of vision had been destroyed; he had great difficulty speaking, reading and writing.”

Publisher: Harvard University
Paperback: 168 pages

Soviet neuropsychological pioneer A.R. Luria's study of a man discovered to have a literally limitless memory. Experiments and interviews over the years showed that his memory was based on synaesthesia (turning sounds into vivid visual imagery), that he could forget anything only by an act of will, and that he was handicapped intellectually because he could not make discriminations.

Publisher: Harvard University
Paperback: 160 pages

Idiosyncratic autobiography of a 19th-century German judge who became schizophrenic. Freud’s views on schizophrenia were largely based on Schreber’s own observations about his states of mind. His writings discuss God, his “solar anus” and visual and auditory hallucinations and dispute such psychiatric authority figures as Kraepelin.

Publisher: Harvard University
Paperback: 416 pages

An astonishing journey into the production and history of one of war’s most devastating weapons. During the course of World War I and II, the German research laboratory known as Peenemünde designed some of the most marvelous weapons of the time. One was the V-2, the most accurate, long-distance and destructive missile up to that point, later to become copied and modified by other war-driven countries. TD

Publisher: Harvard University
Paperback: 369 pages
Illustrated

Vidal believes that Americans of his generation either went to church or the movies for spiritual guidance. As a third-generation atheist from a well-placed Washington family, he knows from whence he speaks. Using as his point of departure the dual meanings of the title (to show it on a screen or to see it through a filter) this cranky little memoir of his first 20 years, mixing the impact of the movies with the realities of Washington politics with flights of longing and fancy, is pure vintage Vidal, doing what he does best. Much of this material was delivered originally in lecture form and is by turns caustic, witty, insightful and meandering, and consistently uncategorizable. It is a discourse on a period of American history that by its very structure proves how subjective the concept of history is. SA

Publisher: Harvard University
Paperback: 97 pages
Illustrated