Bøger af Nickell John Romjue

Finding himself returned to earth in 2009 on the 150th anniversary of The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin keeps a journal of his fascinating experience. Granted special powers of invisibility and instant travel, he visits the fossil sites, laboratories, and libraries of the world -- eager to explore the progress and impact of his world-changing evolutionary legacy. Startling discoveries in science and beyond science await him.Darwin discovers conclusive, worldwide fossil evidence that animal phyla appeared already fully formed at the very dawn of geological time. He is astonished by the molecular biological revolution and its revolutionary message. He is profoundly shocked by the twentieth century's great killing regimes -- rationalized by brutal new ideologies in a world where scientific naturalism eroded belief in the Creator God of History and a moral code transcending nature.I, Charles Darwin is a scientific epiphany and a moral parable. Mr. Darwin's journal is brought to light by an American historian whose many published twentieth-century-history stories dramatize the fierce contradictions assailing the tragic illusion of modern men and women that human existence is an accident of blind nature in a meaningless universe.About the AuthorNickell John Romjue studied European history and German literature at the universities of Missouri, California, and Heidelberg. He is the author of official published studies of the historic doctrinal and institutional reforms and modernization carried through by the United States Army following the Vietnam War, including From Active Defense to AirLand Battle, The Army of Excellence, and American Army Doctrine for the Post-Cold War. His books are widely used in military education and in many current national stragegic and military studies. His history-themed short stories, collected in Out of the Riven Century and The Black Box: Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, dramatize the great why of the unprecedentedly violent, democidal twentieth century. He is the author of a novel of post-World War II life in a small Midwestern town, Merry Town, Missouri, and a collection of strange and humorous tales, Witches of Devon. He lives with his wife in York County, Virginia.

The world today is witnessing the terminal breakup of the great materialist belief systems of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that so powerfully shaped the secular modern mind. No metaphor better encapsulates that breakup of the visionary theories and credos of nature, man, and society advanced by Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud than The Black Box. Each of the materialist faiths generated by modernity's famous quartet of founders contained an unknown chamber of surprises, a black box that its author could not, or did not see into. Today the black boxes stand open. First, the intricate cell of life, which the crude optics of Darwin's time could not penetrate, is indisputably a structure designed by intelligence. Second, the hidden component of mass killing that proved organic to Marxist revolutionary regimes. Third, the propensity of Nietzsche's bold vision of trans-moral overmen to produce, not the aesthetic ideal, but cold totalitarian monsters. Fourth, the widespread subversion of individual moral behavior legitimized by the deluded Freudian assertion of the primacy of subconscious drives over the rational mind. In the early twenty-first century, our civilization looks back upon the tragic legacy of materialism: a worldview that declared God to be a human invention, the galaxies and life on Earth cosmic accidents, and morality a factor of need and situation in an aimless universe. God substitutes emerged to fill the void. Religion-hostile National Socialist and Communist party regimes assumed in the twentieth century higher moral authority to kill their unwanted subjects and alien victims on a scale unprecedented in modern history. The stories of this book dramatize the life-crises of five acolytes of the famous four gospels of materialism that so powerfully shaped the violent twentieth century world, along with a sixth who returned on the eve of the millennium for a second look. In these stories, irony and humor could not be avoided.