A Place of Brightness: Free eBook: Mirabile Dictu: Thoughts and Theories on Mysteries of History, Life, and Language

Saturday, April 16, 2016

Free eBook: Mirabile Dictu: Thoughts and Theories on Mysteries of History, Life, and Language

I've taken a large number of my most successful blog posts and compiled them into a eBook that I offer for free on my main website. It's also available on Kindle for the cheapest price I can assign there, 99 cents.

It includes essays in which I propose solutions to historical riddles such as the Shugborough Inscription, the Last Words of Julius Caesar, the fate of Spartacus, and even why we have chins. I include an abundant amount of essays on matters related to the Latin language, as well as two short stories I wrote years ago.

I explain in the introduction of this book that some of these items could probably have been turned into academic articles, if I were still interested in publishing my ideas in those formal channels. But I prefer nowadays to write my thoughts in a more popular voice and I believe they will find a larger readership on my blog than they ever would have buried in an academic journal.

So if you've ever enjoyed one of my posts, I hope you'll find other things to inform and entertain you in the book that you may not have previously read.

For the cover art I use as background an image from Unconscious Rivals (1893), by one of my favorite artists, Lawrence Alma-Tadema. The combination of classical imagery, the explosion of color, and the appearance of the pensive woman seemed perfect to accent the overall content of my book--my thoughts and theories on mysteries of history, life, and language.

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