Twenty years old and in love, Phyllis Chesler, a Jewish-American girl from Brooklyn, embarked on an adventure that has lasted for more than a half-century. In 1961, when she arrived in Kabul with her Afghan bridegroom, authorities took away her American passport. Chesler was now the property of her husband's family and had no rights of citizenship. Back in Afghanistan, her husband, a wealthy, westernized foreign college student with dreams of reforming his country, reverted to traditional and tribal customs. Chesler found herself unexpectedly trapped in a posh polygamous family, with no chance of escape. She fought against her seclusion and lack of freedom, her Afghan family's attempts to convert her from Judaism to Islam, and her husband's wish to permanently tie her to the country through childbirth. Drawing upon her personal diaries, Chesler recounts her ordeal, the nature of gender apartheid--and her longing to explore this beautiful, ancient, and exotic country and culture. Chesler nearly died there but she managed to get out, returned to her studies in America, and became an author and an ardent activist for women's rights throughout the world. An American Bride in Kabul is the story of how a naive American girl learned to see the world through eastern as well as western eyes and came to appreciate Enlightenment values. This dramatic tale re-creates a time gone by, a place that is no more, and shares the way in which Chesler turned adversity into a passion for world-wide social, educational, and political reform.

    . . . This treasure trove of linguistics, sociology, history and folklore offers a fascinating look at how, through the centuries, a unique and enduring language has reflected an equally unique and enduring culture.”—Publishers Weekly, starred reviewThe main spoken language of the Jews for more than 1,000 years, Yiddish offers a comprehensive picture of the mind-set that enabled them to survive a millennium of unrelenting persecution across Europe. Through the idioms, phrases, metaphors, and fascinating history of this wonderful tongue, Michael Wex gives us a moving and inspiring portrait of a people, and a language, in exile. From tukhes to goy, meshugener to bobe mayse (cok-and-bull story), Born to Kvetch offers a wealth of material, some that has never appeared in English before, on all elements of Yiddish life, including food, nature, divinity, humanity, and even sex.

    Modern critical biblical scholarship often points out how the church's teachings about Jesus have become encrusted with tradition so that it is hard to see what the core documents--the New Testament--really say about him. Now, with the insight of 200 years of modern critical scholarship and assuming an audience that includes both the well-churched and the non-churched, how should the church present the story and identity of the central personality of their faith, Jesus of Nazareth? Many people will be surprised at the story they hear.

    The Harbinger Companion With Study Guide includes a full study guide, special bonus features, articles, maps, illustrations, photographs of the actual harbingers, and more! The Harbinger Companion With Study Guideincludes such special features as:Teachings, insights, and revelations into each of mysteries in The HarbingerPhotographs of each of the Nine Harbingers and illustrations of each mysteryThe supernatural story behind The Harbinger (and the mysterious man in the airport)A thirteen-week study guide for group, class, church, or individual study with:Detailed teaching – with the biblical and historical context and background Exploration – in-depth study questions for individuals, groups, or churches Application – that can change your life and your worldThe mystery of the seals (and the actual real “Seal Behind the Seals”) A guided walking tour of the actual harbingers (with maps and locations)The most often asked questions surrounding The Harbinger, including:Who is the prophet? (the identity of the book’s most mysterious figure) Who is Nouriel? Who is Jonathan Cahn? Where is America in end-time prophecy? What does the future hold?In The Harbinger Jonathan Cahn sounded the alarm with a prophetic wake-up call for America, the world, and the future. With this powerful companion guide you won’t miss any of the mysteries it reveals!

    Through observation, anecdote, extensive interviews, and analysis Karen Elliot House navigates the maze in which Saudi citizens find themselves trapped and reveals the mysterious nation that is the world’s largest exporter of oil, critical to global stability, and a source of Islamic terrorists. In her probing and sharp-eyed portrait, we see Saudi Arabia, one of the last absolute monarchies in the world, considered to be the final bulwark against revolution in the region, as threatened by multiple fissures and forces, its levers of power controlled by a handful of elderly Al Saud princes with an average age of 77 years and an extended family of some 7,000 princes. Yet at least 60 percent of the increasingly restive population they rule is under the age of 20. The author writes that oil-rich Saudi Arabia has become a rundown welfare state. The public pays no taxes; gets free education and health care; and receives subsidized water, electricity, and energy (a gallon of gasoline is cheaper in the Kingdom than a bottle of water), with its petrodollars buying less and less loyalty. House makes clear that the royal family also uses Islam’s requirement of obedience to Allah—and by extension to earthly rulers—to perpetuate Al Saud rule. Behind the Saudi facade of order and obedience, today’s Saudi youth, frustrated by social conformity, are reaching out to one another and to a wider world beyond their cloistered country. Some 50 percent of Saudi youth is on the Internet; 5.1 million Saudis are on Facebook. To write this book, the author interviewed most of the key members of the very private royal family. She writes about King Abdullah’s modest efforts to relax some of the kingdom’s most oppressive social restrictions; women are now allowed to acquire photo ID cards, finally giving them an identity independent from their male guardians, and are newly able to register their own businesses but are still forbidden to drive and are barred from most jobs. With extraordinary access to Saudis—from key religious leaders and dissident imams to women at university and impoverished widows, from government officials and political dissidents to young successful Saudis and those who chose the path of terrorism—House argues that most Saudis do not want democracy but seek change nevertheless; they want a government that provides basic services without subjecting citizens to the indignity of begging princes for handouts; a government less corrupt and more transparent in how it spends hundreds of billions of annual oil revenue; a kingdom ruled by law, not royal whim. In House’s assessment of Saudi Arabia’s future, she compares the country today to the Soviet Union before Mikhail Gorbachev arrived with reform policies that proved too little too late after decades of stagnation under one aged and infirm Soviet leader after another. She discusses what the next generation of royal princes might bring and the choices the kingdom faces: continued economic and social stultification with growing risk of instability, or an opening of society to individual initiative and enterprise with the risk that this, too, undermines the Al Saud hold on power. A riveting book—informed, authoritative, illuminating—about a country that could well be on the brink, and an in-depth examination of what all this portends for Saudi Arabia’s future, and for our own.

    The story of an adolescent whose life has been changed forever by his mother's suicide when he was twelve years old. The story of a man who leaves the constraints of his family and its community of dreamers, scholars, and failed businessmen to join a kibbutz, change his name, marry, have children. The story of a writer who becomes an active participant in the political life of his nation.(back cover)

    In this novel charged with blood and fire, with white hot passions, and with the clash of army against army, brother against brother, Frank Yerby shows again why he is one of Americas's most popular novelists.

    Jesse walked out of prison a free man and disappeared, never to be heard from again. Never, that is, until 1949 when he came out of hiding after almost 60 years to claim his inheritance. In the course of proving his identity to a court Jesse told some amazing stories of his time when he was an outlaw but his biggest revelation of all was that his good friend Billy the Kid was still alive. Jesse led a young lawyer to an old man named not William H. Bonney but William H. Roberts who after some consideration finally agreed to come forward and reveal himself as Billy the Kid only if he would help him obtain a pardon from the Governor before his death so he could die a free man. You see, Billy the Kid was still wanted for murder and was condemned to hang. To come forward and reveal himself was to risk being arrested and put to death. This was a risk that William H. Roberts was willing to take. He sat down with the young lawyer and told his story. That story is the one true autobiography of Billy the Kid and told only one time, to one man. This is his story.

    Life in the Third Reich draws extensively on interviews, letters and diaries from the earliest days of the Nazi Party to the final hours of the thousand-year Reich to reveal how the Hitler cult influenced and corrupted every aspect of life, from education, health, business, the press, the judicial system and the Church to sport, culture, work and the family.It reveals the stark contrast between the myth of 'One People, One Fuhrer' perpetuated by Nazi propaganda and the harsh realities of life in a dictatorship.Life in the Third Reich challenges the popular view of Nazi Germany as a nation united behind their despotic leader and asks 'What would you have done? Would you have behaved any differently if you had lived in Hitler's Germany?'

    Growing up, Max is surrounded by Jews, each with an entirely different and outspoken view on what it means to be Jewish. His mother, incessantly preoccupied with a card game called Kalooki, only begrudgingly puts the deck away on the High Holy Days. Max's father, a failed boxer prone to spontaneous nosebleeds, is a self-proclaimed atheist and communist, unable to accept the God who has betrayed him so unequivocally in recent years.But it is through his friend and neighbor Manny Washinsky that Max begins to understand the indelible effects of the Holocaust and to explore the intrinsic and paradoxical questions of a postwar Jewish identity. Manny, obsessed with the Holocaust and haunted by the allure of its legacy, commits a crime of nightmare proportion against his family and his faith. Years later, after his friend's release from prison, Max is inexorably drawn to uncover the motive behind the catastrophic act -- the discovery of which leads to a startling revelation and a profound truth about religion and faith that exists where the sacred meets the profane.Spanning the decades between World War II and the present day, acclaimed author Howard Jacobson seamlessly weaves together a breath-takingly complex narrative of love, tragedy, redemption, and above all, remarkable humor. Deeply empathetic and audaciously funny, "Kalooki Nights" is a luminous story torn violently between the hope of restoring and rebuilding Jewish life, and the painful burden of memory and loss.

    In 1960, as a suicidal teenager, Sawyer was institutionalized, misdiagnosed, and suffered through 89 electroshock treatments before being transfered, labeled as “unimproved.” The damage done has haunted her life. Discharged in 1966, after finally receiving proper psychiatric care, Sawyer kept her past secret and moved on to graduate from Yale University, raise two children, and become a respected psychotherapist. That is, until 2001, when she reviewed her hospital records and began to remember a broken childhood and the even more broken mental health system of the 1950s and 1960s, Revisiting scenes from her childhood and assembling the pieces of a lost puzzle, her autobiography is a cautionary tale of careless psychiatric diagnosis and treatment, both 50 years ago and today. It is an informative story about understanding PTSD and making emotional sense of events that can lead a soul to darkness. Most of all, it’s a story of perseverance: pain, acceptance, healing, hope, and success. Hers is a unique voice for this generation, shedding light on an often misunderstood illness.

     ""It’s an astonishing performance. Wise goes through every piece of evidence, every report, every word and comes to the conclusion that investigators were deliberately and brilliantly misled by whoever took over the plane to look in the wrong place. Read this stunning piece of investigative journalism and see if he convinces you." -- John Podhoretz, Commentary magazine. Five years after a state-of-the-art Boeing 777 vanished into the night over the South China Sea, renowned science and aviation author Jeff Wise offers a compelling and detailed account of what happened that night and in the months and years that followed. In his follow-up to "The Plane That Wasn't There," named the Best Kindle Single of 2015, Wise walks readers through the many developments that have taken place in the meantime and explains why despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars and searching an area of seabed the size of Great Britain, authorities were unable to locate the plane's wreckage. Officials and independent experts were stunned by their failure, but Wise predicted it four years ago. Here he distills the fruits of exhaustive research and arrives at a conclusion that upends our understanding of what humans are capable of, both technologically and morally. Jeff Wise is a science journalist specializing in aviation and psychology. A licensed pilot of gliders and light airplanes, he has also written for New York, the New York Times, Time, Businessweek, Esquire, Popular Mechanics, and many others. He is also the author of Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger. A native of Massachusetts, he lives outside New York City with his wife and two sons.

    It is a genuine, firsthand account of a one-year tour that shows how a soldier grew and matured from an awkward, bewildered, inexperienced, eighteen year-old country “bumpkin” from Kentucky, to a tough, battle hardened, fighting soldier. You will laugh, cry and stand in awe at the true life experiences shared in this memoir. The awfulness of battle, fear beyond description, the sorrow and anguish of losing friends, extreme weariness, the dealing with the scalding sun, torrential rain, cold, heat, humidity, insects and the daily effort just to maintain sanity were struggles faced virtually every day. And yet, there were the good times. There was the coming together to laugh, joke, and share stories from home. There was the warmth and compassion shown by men to each other in such an unreal environment. You will see where color, race or where you were from had no bearing on the tight-knit group of young men that was formed from the necessity to survive. What a “bunch” they were! ... then the return to home and all the adjustments and struggles to once again fit into a world that was now strange and uncomfortable. "Call Sign Dracula" is an excellent and genuine memoir of an infantry soldier in the Vietnam War.

    Some promise the full story of the political manoeuvring that got us to this point, others promise to make sense of the vote, with a couple focusing on the supposed evils of immigration and Islam.In Rule Britannia, Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson tell a different story. They argue that the EU referendum was part of a last gasp of empire working its way out of the British psyche. It is a view of empire largely based on myth and nostalgia.Dorling and Tomlinson are not arguing for any particular position, but suggest that whatever the next year brings Britain will be much diminished by the process of trying to leave the EU, and that there is no welcoming Empire, Commonwealth, or other set of countries, ready to quickly embrace new trading relationships with us. They do, however, recognise the potential to reshape a post-Brexit Britain, assuming that the UK can accept a world order not based on the past.

    Seductive. Stimulating. We're talking about the Talmud? That's right. Take fifty actual Talmudic discussions, mix in pithy sayings (appropriate and inappropriate) by luminaries from Mae West and Amy Schumer to George Washington and Gandhi, add a few cartoons, and voila delighted and enlightened readers will come away with a new perspective on what the ancient Jewish sages say about our most intimate relationships. In this lighthearted, in-depth tour of sexuality within the Talmud, come eavesdrop at the first rabbis' locker-room door as they discuss every aspect of sexual relationshow, when, where, with whomoften in startlingly explicit fashion. Author Maggie Anton reveals how Jewish tradition is more progressive in many respects, and more bawdy, than one might think. The award-winning historical novelist's first foray into nonfiction is likely to leave her fans going OMG, WTF, and even LOL.