Satire History

Every civilization begins the same way: someone hears thunder, assumes it’s personal, and starts organizing committees. The History of Religion for the Non-Believer is the story of what happened next—how a species that barely survived the Ice Age went on to invent every imaginable version of meaning, from cave rituals to crypto cults. With surgical humor and relentless clarity, this book follows humanity’s long, glorious, and occasionally idiotic attempt to explain itself. Religion began as prehistoric panic management—howling at lightning to feel less small—and evolved into the ...

Known to historians as "the First American," Benjamin Franklin is without a doubt the most accessible of America's founding fathers. His writings have inspired millions of Americans, and even now, more than 200 years after his death, his wit and humor still brighten lives all across the world. But what was this great man's view on faith? Was he really a Deist as so many historians have proposed? Was he a humanist like so many of his French friends? Is there any possibility that he could have been a Christian? In this unique volume, Bill Fortenberry has collected everything that Franklin ...

Over 99 identical generations, Mia’s family has shaped human history to push them to the stars, making brutal, wrenching choices and sacrificing countless lives. Her turn comes at the dawn of the age of rocketry. Her mission: to lure Wernher Von Braun away from the Nazi party and into the American rocket program, and secure the future of the space race.

Inessential Pharmacology is a playful romp through the data behind psychiatric medications. The point of the book is to teach my readers how to understand what a medicine does. I give them the same tools I use, as a practicing psychiatrist, with a lot more humor than used to teach me. We go through a list of common medications, and using those as examples, we learn how to read research about those same medications. We learn about charts, graphs, tables, and the lawsuits and side effects that made these drugs famous. They also made pharmaceutical companies billions. This is a book written ...

Joe Walsh has always been more than just the eccentric guitarist of the Eagles. His life and music tell the story of American rock itself—brilliant, unhinged, humorous, and enduring. Joe Walsh: The Eagles’ Guitar Maverick is the first full-length, definitive biography that traces his journey from a Kansas military childhood to the global stages of Hotel California. Written with documentary precision and narrative drive, it weaves archival research, press accounts, and studio detail into a sweeping chronicle of both a singular guitarist and the cultural upheavals that shaped him. The ...

The Batshit Crazy Bible isn’t your grandma’s Sunday School companion—unless grandma was into alien gods, divine temper tantrums, and weaponized foreskins. Robert Ragnar, legal eagle turned armchair theologian, has done the unthinkable: read the Bible—every bloody verse of it—cover to cover. And now he’s here to report back, not with sermons or salvation, but with sharp wit, a raised eyebrow, and a healthy dose of historical side-eye. This isn’t about mocking belief—it’s about exposing the bizarre, brutal, and baffling moments buried in the so-called Good Book. From talking...

The very liberal Kirks are throwing a party. For Howard Kirk, liberal sociology lecturer whose deluded sense of heroism has him moving seductively around the university campus, the net must be perfectly cast: ‘if you want to have something that’s genuinely unstructured, you have to plan it carefully.’ Kirk embodies the contradictions of the era’s intellectual and political climate. As he navigates complex relationships with his wife, his students and his colleagues, he pursues personal and professional agendas under the guise of progressive thought.

Alexandra Petri's US History contains a lost (invented!) history of America. (A history for people disappointed that the only president whose weird sex letters we have is Warren G. Harding.) Petri's "historical fan fiction" draws on real events and completely absurd fabrications to create a laugh-out-loud, irreverent takedown of our nation's complicated past. A witty, absurdist satire of the last 500 years, Alexandra Petri's US History is the fake textbook you never knew you needed.

In this thought-provoking and playful short story collection, David Foster Wallace nudges at the boundaries of fiction with inimitable wit and seductive intelligence. Wallace's stories present a world where the bizarre and the banal are interwoven and where hideous men appear in many guises...

Forget what you think you know about the Good Book. The BC Bible is not a sermon—it’s a riotous, irreverent, and razor-sharp deep dive into the most bizarre, brutal, and brilliantly baffling stories in the Bible. Written with wit, bite, and a historian’s curiosity, Robert Ragnar takes you on a chronological journey through scripture with a scalpel in one hand and a shot of whiskey in the other. From talking snakes to cosmic floods, divine tantrums to circumcision revenge plots, Ragnar unpacks the ancient texts with equal parts skepticism, satire, and sincere wonder. Raised in the pews...

This particular fellow was born on July 11th, 27,000 BCE in the later Paleolithic Period. He was a Homo-Sapien and lived a quiet life in the Commune of Les Eyzies, France. Originally from Bordaux, he moved to Les Eyzies when he was 16, accompanied by his very unhappy wife, Tallerant. There, he lived to the ripe old age of 27, his life tragically cut short while doing his business on Saturday afternoon. Quite the scene I can assure you. This book will take you on a journey of discovery and enlightenment as we follow Cro-Magnon Man through one week of hunting, gathering, hijinks and food ...

They laughed at him for decades. This book argues that was his plan all along. Long before the rallies and the residency at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Donald Trump was a ghost in the machine of American culture. He was a punchline in sitcoms, a lyrical shorthand for wealth in hip-hop, and the ultimate boss in the boardroom of reality TV. We all saw the caricature, but what if we missed the strategy? What if the parody wasn't a weapon used against him, but the very source of his power? Tycoon Trump’s Parody-Powered Ascendancy is a groundbreaking cultural analysis that explores the theory of...

The irreverent author of the cult classic Syrup hits his target in this satire on the wages of big capital. In Max Barry's hilarious vision of the near future, the world is run by giant American corporations, and employees take the last names of the companies they work for; The Police and The NRA are publicly traded security firms, and the U.S. government may only investigate crimes if they can bill a citizen directly.

A classic guide to tricks and tactics for winning arguments, with commentary on the use of and defense against each tactic. The best summary of this audiobook is "being right doesn’t mean you’re gonna win, and this is why". It’s the ultimate guide to spotting the many different kinds of bull people pull in order to win over the crowd, rather than argue the point at hand. There’s very few of them that don’t immediately bring examples to mind, and having it laid out clearly like this is the perfect armour to stop people derailing you.

London, 1772: a young artist called Thomas Rowlandson is making his way through the grimy backstreets of the capital, on his way to begin his studies at the Royal Academy Schools. Within a few years, James Gillray and Isaac Cruikshank would join him in Piccadilly, turning satire into an artform, taking on the British establishment, and forever changing the way we view power. Set against a backdrop of royal madness, political intrigue, the birth of modern celebrity, French revolution, American independence and the Napoleonic Wars, UPROAR! follows the satirists as they lampoon those in power.

Counting bodies in Vietnam. In this earthy war/peace novel, comedy frames grim pictures of war. Morris weaves combat, a love affair, and military satire—acted out by grunts, hookers, Vietcong soldiers, spies, heroes, and inane officers—into a story that is by turns terrifying, gruesome, and comic.

Welcome, dear reader, to a journey through time's most ridiculous posturing, preening, and pretending. You hold in your hands a chronicle of humanity's greatest achievement: the art of being absolutely anybody but ourselves. From the moment our ancestors crawled out of caves and realized their neighbors had better caves, we've been locked in an eternal performance. We've powdered, postured, and posed our way through millennia, convinced that the secret to happiness lies in meticulously copying whatever everyone else is doing—preferably six months after it stopped being cool. This book is ...

Four satirical spoof shows from the multi-award-winning National Theatre of Brent The National Theatre of Brent is a two-man company founded in 1980 and led by Patrick Barlow as his comic alter ego, Artistic Director and Chief Executive Desmond Olivier Dingle. Helping him to realise his...

Six short works in the neighborhood of 1000 words. One has some adult content. Sahara The Lesson The Deflowerment of Amelia Bogusaki The Curious Disappearance of Spaceman Doug Yet Another Rendition

After narrowly averting the apocalypse (again), Mercury—the celestial realm’s most reluctant cherub—is stuck on Earth with nothing but attitude and immortality. When a teenage Satanist accidentally summons him from cosmic exile, Mercury lands in the middle of a tangled mess involving rogue angels, incompetent terrorists, and a shadowy government experiment in mass mind control. As Mercury's allies dig into the conspiracy, they realize it has roots in the American Revolution—and Mercury may have had something to do with it. With heavenly agents watching from above and earthly forces ...