James Johnson

The Mirage: How Saudi Arabia Built a Gas Station Empire is a sharp, unsettling deep-dive into how one royal family turned a desert into a kingdom, an oil company into a superpower, and a religious movement into a global firewall. This is not ancient history — it all started in the 20th century.

Biology 101: A History of Life is the story of how humans discovered life from the outside in. Poking, slicing, sketching, sequencing, and arguing our way toward understanding what it means to be alive.

He never stopped drawing. Not even when the world told him to grow up. Tim Burton didn’t try to fit in — he turned his alienation into art. From the suburban shadows of Burbank to the soundstages of Hollywood, he built an empire of monsters, misfits, and melancholy hearts.

What is color? Not just pigment. Not just light. Not even just perception. Color is a system. A language written in wavelengths, built by biology, shaped by culture, and weaponized by power.

Andrew Jackson: The Republic’s Iron Fist traces the full arc of one of the most polarizing figures in U.S. history. From his muddy birth on the Carolina frontier to the battlefield at New Orleans, from the dueling grounds of Tennessee to the Oval Office, Jackson’s life was war—and he never stopped swinging.

What do apples, atoms, black holes, and time machines all have in common? They all follow the same rules — the laws of physics. Physics 101: A History of Laws is a fast-paced, story-driven walkthrough of how we figured out the rules that govern reality.

From fire to fallout, potions to polymers — this is the story of how we figured out what everything is made of. Chemistry 101 isn’t your high school textbook. It’s a walkthrough of how humans turned mystery into mastery.

Why does Africa look like it was divided by a toddler with a ruler? Why does Canada still technically report to a king? Why does Chile look like a linguine noodle, and why is there a whole country inside Italy? This is not an atlas. This is the story of how the map got made — badly.

The FBI: How a Filing Cabinet Took Over America is a surgical walk through the most powerful domestic surveillance machine in U.S. history — and the terrifying banality behind it.

Lobbied: How They Bought the Government is a brutal exposé of the real power behind American politics. From Big Pharma to Big Oil, weapons manufacturers to food conglomerates, this book shows how corporations and special interests didn’t just bend the rules, they wrote them.

COLUMBUS: The Man Who Didn’t Discover America is a clear-eyed biography of one of history’s most mythologized figures. Drawing from primary sources, letters, and eyewitness accounts, this book traces the life and legacy of Christopher Columbus.

What do you actually believe? Not what your family says. Not what your pastor says. Not what your podcast host says. What the label means. Fully. This is not a book about scripture. It’s not a defense of religion. And it’s not a takedown of belief. It’s a walkthrough.

From sacred ceremony to cigarette ads, from opioid pills to infinite scroll, Addiction: The Habit That Runs the World traces the full timeline of how craving became a system and how that system became modern life.

Life didn’t begin with a roar. It began with goo. Before brains, bones, bugs, or breathing, Earth was just a soup of chemicals getting zapped by lightning until something clicked. This is the story of what happened next.

This is the book that finally explains it, all of it. What it is. How it works. Why it’s so hard to treat. What the treatments actually do. What the diagnosis does to your mind. And how the system around it got so big, so expensive, and so confusing.

Before gods had names, temples had altars, and books were called holy, we were staring into the storm and searching for meaning.

BUILT FROM BURGERS is a clear, sharp, and wildly listenable walkthrough of how life actually works. From DNA to digestion, from cell division to consciousness. No fluff. No filler. Just the full biological blueprint of you, explained molecule by molecule.

What if reality doesn’t exist until you look at it? Quantum physics started as a fix for a math problem. Then it spiraled into the most accurate and most unsettling theory in science. This is the story of how we figured it out.

Oops, All Atoms is a walk through what materialism actually means. Not in theory, but in practice. From love to morality to death, this book shows what breaks when you treat human beings like meat computers.

You’ve seen the red string. You’ve heard the word. But you’ve never seen Kabbalah like this. KABBALAH: The Code Behind Creation isn’t a self-help book or a watered-down celebrity guide.