We follow Johnny and Margo, Johnny's lifelong, albeit socially taboo, friendship with his friend, “Bullet Joe” Rogan, a pitcher in the Negro Leagues.Johnny introduces his granddaughter, Debby, to the tree in 1957, an era of bobby socks, roller-skating carhops and Elvis music, and Debby meets Mason in 1967's Summer of Love, just before Mason is drafted to fight in Vietnam.For 30 years, Debby wonders whatever became of the boy who changed her life. Then she finds out.

    Esther, a beautiful young Jewish woman, becomes the wife of the Persian king, Ahasuerus, but when the king is tricked into persecuting the Jews by his minister she feels she must reveal the truth about her identity and save her people.

    Uprooted by war, Miriam enters a world where the old constraints slip away with thrilling and disastrous results. Miriam’s rebellious daughter, Nadia, is thrilled with the opportunity for a modern life that her elite education provides. But when she falls in love with an outsider, the clan reins her back with a shocking finality. Nijmeh, Nadia's daughter, is an only child and the path her father, the sheik, sets for her is fraught with difficulties, yet it prepares her for her ultimate journey to America, where she finds her future.Each woman, in her own time and in her own way, experiences a world in transition through war and social change...and each must stretch the bounds of her loyalty, her courage, and her heart.

    For Joe, a 12-year-old boy suddenly alone and 600 miles from home, it's a nightmare come true. This adventure story is a tale of a special friendship that only comes along once in a lifetime. Joe, who is white, and Peter, sixteen and a free Black, become unlikely friends and learn to depend on each other as they try to escape the desperate Confederate South. Follow these two as they trek through a war-torn countryside and witness war at its worst, up close and personal. They travel through a landscape that has been decimated by brutal battles, and they encounter people that have suffered the extreme hardships and depredation of three years of war. All the while they learn to depend on each other and grow a binding love as special as any two brothers. They will need each other more than they know-unknown to them, they are being pursued by a deranged killer. Also read John Gschwend's historical novel, Spirit In The Red Amber and his science fiction novel, Portal To The Forgotten. Scroll up, click the buy button, and enter this moving Civil War novel. johngschwend.com

    As the King’s favorite, she enjoys his protection, but after seeing the downfall of three of his wives, she’s determined to avoid the same fate. Alice must walk a fine line between mistress and wife.She finds a powerful protector in Thomas Cromwell, and Alice has every reason to believe that she will continue to enjoy a life of wealth and comfort at Court…until she puts everything at risk by falling in love with a Frenchman, Nicholas Bourbon.When Cromwell is executed, Alice loses her only ally and flees to France. There she hopes to live in peace with Nicholas. But Alice is lured into a perilous game of treason, and peace doesn’t last long. Will Alice get back the life and love she’s fought for? Or will she lose herself to the whims of a capricious monarch?

    Only a generation ago, female adolescence as we know it in the West did not exist in the Middle East. There were only children and married women. Today, young Arab women outnumber men in universities, and a few are beginning to face down religious and social tradition in order to live independently, to delay marriage, and to pursue professional goals. Hundreds of thousands of devout girls and women are attending Qur’anic schools—and using the training to argue for greater rights and freedoms from an Islamic perspective. And, in 2011, young women helped to lead antigovernment protests in the Arab Spring. But their voices have not been heard. Their stories have not been told.In Syria, before its civil war, she documents a complex society in the midst of soul searching about its place in the world and about the role of women. In Lebanon, she documents a country that on the surface is freer than other Arab nations but whose women must balance extreme standards of self-presentation with Islamic codes of virtue. In Abu Dhabi, Zoepf reports on a generation of Arab women who’ve found freedom in work outside the home. In Saudi Arabia she chronicles driving protests and women entering the retail industry for the first time. In the aftermath of Tahrir Square, she examines the crucial role of women in Egypt's popular uprising. Deeply informed, heartfelt, and urgent, Excellent Daughters brings us a new understanding of the changing Arab societies—from 9/11 to Tahrir Square to the rise of ISIS—and gives voice to the remarkable women at the forefront of this change.

    Until he faces a devastating reality: Bertha is unable to bear children. If Henry doesn’t produce an heir, the American branch of his family name will die out. So Henry, desperate to preserve his aristocratic family lineage, does the unthinkable.When Salome, a former slave and Henry’s mistress, gives birth to a white-skinned, blue-eyed daughter, Henry orders a reluctant Lady Bertha to claim the child as their own…allowing young Margaret to pass into the white world of privilege.As Margaret grows older, unaware of her true parentage, devastating circumstances threaten to shroud her in pain and shame…but then, ultimately, in revelation. Despite rumors about Margaret’s true identity, Salome is determined to transform her daughter’s bitter past into her secure future while Henry goes to extraordinary lengths to protect his legacy. Spanning decades and generations, marked by tragedy and redemption, this unforgettable saga illuminates a family’s fight for their name, for survival, and for true freedom.

    Her real-life journal recounts two years of homesteading, history hints at the next six decades, and the novel explores the truth. We meet Rosette in 1888 as she revises the wedding-day page of her journal. In lush detail, in the voices of Rosette and others, the novel traces how we both choose and suffer our destiny, how hopes come to naught and sometimes rise from the wreckage. In a style reminiscent of Willa Cather, in a family saga that recalls the work of Marilynne Robinson, this novel brings us enduring themes of human life as Rosette and her friends and family make the most of the American pioneer life first detailed for most of us by Laura Ingalls Wilder. One reviewer says this story "makes an anonymous woman equal to the most celebrated hero of legend." Note that the Kindle version includes only the text of the novel. The paperback version includes 24 charcoal illustrations and highlights in a font created from Rosette's own handwriting. Now available: a companion short story - "Blizzard: A Story of Dakota Territory."

    history: the Vietnam War and the AIDS epidemic. Each, Marita Sturken argues, disrupts our conventional understanding of nationhood, identity, and American culture. She brilliantly compares the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the AIDS Quilt as key sites where cultural memory is produced and debated. While debunking the characterization of the United States as a culture of amnesia, Sturken shows that remembering is itself a form of forgetting, and memory an inventive social practice.Sturken's immensely readable and multilayered work considers films, memorials, and bodies as commemorative media. She shows how television images of events like the Challenger explosion and the Gulf War and Hollywood films about the Vietnam War feed into "official histories" and operate in concert with cultural objects like yellow and red ribbons, AIDS activist posters, photographs of the immune system, and alternative art works to mediate concepts of identity and nationalism. Tangled Memories illuminates not only how cultural memories are produced and embodied but also what desires, needs, and fantasies they satisfy.

    It has only very recently been published. Although it has been written as a novel, it details events, which were all too tragically true.Edith Hofmann is a survivor of the Holocaust, born in Prague in 1927 as Edith Birkin. In 1941, along with her parents, she was deported to the Lodz Ghetto, where within a year both her parents had died. At 15 she was left to fend forherself.The Lodz Ghetto was the second-largest ghetto to Warsaw, and was established for Jews and Gypsies in German-occupied Poland. Situated in the town of Lodz in Poland and originally intended as a temporary gathering point for Jews, the ghetto was transformed into a major industrial centre, providing much needed supplies for Nazi Germany and especially for the German Army.Because of its remarkable productivity, the ghetto managed to survive until August 1944, when the remaining population, including Edith, was transported to Auschwitz and Chelmno extermination camp in cattle trucks. It was the last ghetto in Poland to be liquidated due to the advancing Russian army. Edith was only 17, and one of the lucky ones.For the majority, it was their final journey. A small group of them were selected for work. With her hair shaved off and deprived of all her possessions, she travelled to Kristianstadt, a labour camp in Silesia, to work in an underground munitions factory.

    She was the beautiful and proud daughter of King Saul and the prize David would risk his kingdom to win. Behind the palace doors, beneath the burning sun of the desert, or fleeing from Absalom's warriors, Michal was at the center of court intrigues.

    Is it a forced landing, or the beginning of an invasion - a technological treasure trove, or an extraterrestrial pandora’s box that spells disaster for life on Earth?Infiltrating the vast tropical wilderness of northern Australia, Beckman’s team encounter strange machines, alien structures and a handful of human survivors struggling to evade capture. When Beckman’s team penetrates to the heart of the Mothership, they discover an answer they never expected and a universe far larger than they had ever imagined.

    The Warming is coming. The ocean ice they have lived and hunted on for generations is melting, and they must flee to the safety of an unknown land before they all drown. In this powerful tale of survival at the end of an Ice Age, the young hunter, Attu, must choose between saving his clan or saving Rika, the golden-eyed healer he is forbidden to love.Show more Show less --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    But Mariamne has a further gift: an illness has left her with visions; she has the power of prophecy. It is her prophesying that drives the two girls to flee to Egypt, where they study philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy in the Great Library of Alexandria.After seven years they return to a Judaea where many now believe John the Baptizer is the messiah. Salome too begins to believe, but Mariamne, now called Magdalene, is drawn to his cousin, Yeshu'a, a man touched by the divine in the same way she was during her days of illness. Together they speak of sharing their direct experience of God; but Yeshu'a unexpectedly gains a reputation as a healer, and as the ill and the troubled flock to him, he and Magdalene are forced to make a terrible decision.This radical retelling of the greatest story ever told brings Mary Magdalene to life—not as a prostitute or demon-possessed—but as an educated woman who was truly the "apostle to the apostles."From the Hardcover edition.

    The breast of the mail bore a ragged hole and the heavy links were sticky. It took a moment for Hedyn to realize it was soaked in drying blood.“A bascinet and hauberk?” he asked.“Aye, you shall need these before the night is done.” . . . Treachery, disease, hunger, and death plague their steps as King Henry’s men near their fateful battle with the French army at Agincourt. Eager to see the world that lies beyond his small Cornish village, 12 year ol Hedyn, son of an archer and serf, is thrilled to be chosen to join King Henry’s army as it advances on Normandy. His excitement quickly gives way to exhaustion in body and spirit, as well as worry for the safety of his newfound friends and comrades. Can a mysterious stranger with a secretive past offer Hedyn hope amidst the horrors of battle?