A Spartan, a samurai and a Global police officer are summoned to a strange world where they will undertake a dangerous quest to rescue a kidnapped prince. Strangely, so is an eleven year old runaway from the south side of Chicago. Elizabeth, and everyone else in this land known as Austere, believes her calling to be a mistake. But more importantly, something is not quite right about this mystical realm full of monsters and strange people, as they will soon discover. Great battles, treachery and mystery fill this fast-paced tale of bravery and wit. History comes alive when these warriors from different times must learn to work together. The Underground Realm is the first book in the Summoned Series by author T.L. Kramer.

Dr. Michael Stein a Genetic Research scientist is contacted by the Department of Defense to come to Washington D.C. to work with a group of scientist to help build the most advanced aerial reconnaissance vehicle ever devised by man. Dragonfly will be part computerized mechanical and part living biological matter. Dr. Stein discovers that the government is secretly using his unique abilities of abstraction of DNA stands to build something so horrifying that if unleashed it will terrorize planet earth, and billions of people will be stung. Caught up in a web of lies and deceit, will Dr. Stein find out the truth and stop the government from completing their plans and opening one of the doors to Armageddon.

A radical reinterpretation of America’s greatest president. Where previous Lincoln biographers describe his temperament as “moderate,” “passive,” or even “conservative,”historian Richard Striner offers a stunningly original perspectivethat will shed significant new light on one of the most studied figures in American history. Striner shows Lincoln’s audacity as no other book has ever done. By emphasizing the workings of Lincoln’s mind—stressing his cunning, his overall honesty, strategic thinking—even his ability to change his mind—Striner looks anew at many topics and themes important to Lincoln’s story that either revise or add new meaning to the work of previous biographers. His insights into Lincoln’s life, but also into antebellum America, and the military and political history of the Civil War, make this book indispensable for well-read armchair historians, seasoned students of Lincoln, the Civil War, or the American presidency and newcomers alike.

'February 1943: a crowded railway station in Haifa, Palestine. Crowds of people wait for a train to pull in. Through a winter of anguish the Jews of Palestine have longed for this train. It arrives and from the open windows hundreds of little hands wave blue-and-white flags. The train is packed with Jewish children who have been traveling war-ravaged Europe since the fall of Poland in 1939. Palestine is their journey's end. In front of the crowd is an official delegation, headed by an old woman not quite five feet tall. She is Henrietta Szold, and these children, the final contingent of ten thousand children, were saved from the Nazis and brought to Palestine because of her.' One could not have predicted from the beginnings of her comfortable, dependent life as the oldest daughter of a Baltimore rabbi the extraordinary accomplishments of Henreitta Szold. Even as she reached middle age, she was the dutiful studious partner of her father's scholarly researches, although she had behind her impressive accomplishments, such as the establishment of a pioneering night school for Russian Jewish immigrants. But each time she ventured, she retreated. It took two grave emotional crises to bring her into her own -- the death of her father, and the more astonishing public emotional collapse that ensued after her intense love for a scholar thirteen years her junior ended when he took a young German bride. Out of the ashes of this second bereavement emerged the Henrietta Szold who was to imprint her formidable accomplishments on American Jewry and the land of Palestine. That barren land, the needs of its population, and the courage of its pioneers shaped the course of her future, while back home in New York the small study group she had established, and which was called Hadassah, grew into the women's arm of the American Zionist movement. Zionism was full of factionalism, and the history of Palestine was bloody and divisive. It was Henrietta Szold's initiative and drive that established its health care system, shaped education, and began the social services that prevail today. In the 1930s a new mission emerged: the rescue from the Nazis of thousands of Jewish children who would otherwise have been lost. This Youth Aliyah was her last triumph. She was eighty-three when her indomitable body wearied at last, and she lies buried on the Mount of Olives, in the land she played so large a part in shaping.

It's lucky number thirteen . . . this is the epic finale for our favourite Grim Reaper and her sinfully sexy son-of-the-devil husband, Reyes. Charley Davidson, Grim Reaper extraordinaire, is pissed. She's been kicked off the earthly plane for eternity - which is exactly the amount of time it takes to make a person stark, raving mad. But someone's looking out for her, and she's allowed to return after a mere hundred years in exile. Is it too much to hope for that not much has changed? Apparently it is. Bummer. She's missed her daughter. She's missed Reyes. She's missed Cookie and Garrett and Uncle Bob. But now that she's back on earth, it's time to put to rest burning questions that need answers. What happened to her mother? How did she really die? Who killed her? And are cupcakes or coffee the best medicine for a broken heart? It all comes to a head in an epic showdown between good and evil in this final smart and hilarious novel. It's Charley's last adventure, and the one thing we know for sure is that it's going to be one wild ride . . . 'An absolute must read' J.R. Ward, No.1 New York Times bestselling author of the Black Dagger Brotherhood series. 'The grim reaper gets a shiny cook makeover in Jones's blazing hot debut... will appeal to fans of MaryJanice Davidson and Janet Evanovich.' Publisher's Weekly 'What's better than a bad-ass girl grim reaper who keeps us safe from hell hounds and demons? (The answer is obviously nothing.)' RT Book Reviews

Uncovers the hidden world of the military legal system and the intimate history of racism that pervaded the armed forces long after integration. Richard A. Serrano reveals how racial discrimination in the US military criminal justice system determined whose lives mattered and deserved a second chance and whose did not. Between 1955 and 1961, a group of white and black condemned soldiers lived together on death row at Fort Leavenworth military prison. Although convicted of equally heinous crimes, all the white soldiers were eventually paroled and returned to their families, spared by high-ranking army officers, the military courts, sympathetic doctors, highly trained attorneys, the White House staff, or President Eisenhower himself. During the same 6-year period, only black soldiers were hanged. Some were cognitively challenged, others addicted to substances or mentally unbalanced—the same mitigating circumstances that had won white soldiers their death row reprieves. These men lacked the benefits of political connections, expert lawyers, or public support; only their mothers begged fruitlessly for their lives to be spared. By 1960, John Bennett was the youngest black inmate at Fort Leavenworth. His lost battle for clemency was fought between 2 vastly different presidential administrations—Eisenhower’s and Kennedy’s—as the civil rights movement was gaining steam. Drawing on interviews, trial transcripts, and rarely published archival material, Serrano brings to life the characters in this lost history: from desperate mothers and disheartened appeals lawyers, to the prison doctors, psychiatrists, and chaplains. He shines a light on the scandalous legal maneuvering that reached the doors of the White House and the disparity in capital punishment that was cut so strictly along racial lines.

Leadership Re-VisionedCast a vision, set a strategy, rally the troops, and take the hill—you don’t need another book to rehash the well-worn principles of modern leadership. But if you’re looking for something different, something that . . .approaches leadership as an art as well as a scienceinspires hope and expectation in those of us who aren’t born leaderschallenges those with leadership roles to explore new possibilities. . . then Leonard Sweet wants to help you discover a very different kind of leadership vision. It’s one you hear if your ears are open, and it could summon you at any time. When you respond, the puzzle pieces of who you are will fit together into a leader others follow because you’ve answered a call, not trained for a position. “The church has it all wrong. It is trying to train leaders. Instead, it ought to train everyone to listen and to develop their own soundtrack.”Leaders don’t see a vision, says Sweet, they hear one. “Sound becomes sight. Leaders hear life.”For a sonogram of “acoustic leadership,” Sweet takes us inside the incredible account of Sir Ernest Shackleton, the celebrated polar explorer who led his entire crew of twenty-seven from disaster in the Antarctic to safety. Called “the greatest leader that ever came on God’s earth, bar none,” Shackleton objectifies the goals of Sweet’s own exploration in search of wisdom for today and tomorrow’s truly compelling, voice-activated leaders.Right now, you may be leading many people or just yourself. But who knows what tomorrow—or a minute from now—will call forth in you. Are your ears open?

This is the story of a woman overcoming the odds to minister to a suffering community outside the church. The model of Spiritual Accompaniment, which she developed for her ministry, changed her own life, along with the lives of those with whom she ministered. For those experiencing a call to ministry and wondering where to go beyond "the age of belief," here is a story that will inspire and point the way toward sharing a journey into belovedness.

MAKING THE BEST OF A BAD SITUATION! In an academy for summoners, students combine impressive stores of magical energy with artful incantations to usher legends, great and small, onto the battlefield. Feil Fonaf, an eighteen-year-old son to a poor farmer, may have had a rougher upbringing than his more affluent peers, but he’s here to prove he deserves his spot at the academy! As luck would have it, his counterpart summon winds up being the legendary god-slaying beast, Pandora! There’s just one problem...

On a typical weekday, men of the Beverly-La Brea Orthodox community wake up early, beginning their day with Talmud reading and prayer at 5:45am, before joining Los Angeles’ traffic. Those who work “Jewish jobs”—teachers, kosher supervisors, or rabbis—will stay enmeshed in the Orthodox world throughout the workday. But even for the majority of men who spend their days in the world of gentiles, religious life constantly reasserts itself. Neighborhood fixtures like Jewish schools and synagogues are always after more involvement; evening classes and prayers pull them in; the streets themselves seem to remind them of who they are. And so the week goes, culminating as the sabbatical observances on Friday afternoon stretch into Saturday evening. Life in this community, as Iddo Tavory describes it, is palpably thick with the twin pulls of observance and sociality. In Summoned, Tavory takes readers to the heart of the exhilarating—at times exhausting—life of the Beverly-La Brea Orthodox community. Just blocks from West Hollywood’s nightlife, the Orthodox community thrives next to the impure sights, sounds, and smells they encounter every day. But to sustain this life, as Tavory shows, is not simply a moral decision they make. To be Orthodox is to be constantly called into being. People are reminded of who they are as they are called upon by organizations, prayer quorums, the nods of strangers, whiffs of unkosher food floating through the street, or the rarer Anti-Semitic remarks. Again and again, they find themselves summoned both into social life and into their identity as Orthodox Jews. At the close of Tavory’s fascinating ethnography, we come away with a better understanding of the dynamics of social worlds, identity, interaction and self—not only in Beverly-La Brea, but in society at large.