The poetry, imagery, speeches, and emotions readers encounter in texts like Job, Psalms, and Jeremiah are abundant resources for articulating the painful experiences of the human condition. These compositions are sacred scripts that normalize and articulate the anxiety, loneliness, and despair that mark life on earth. In Vast as the Sea, Samuel Hildebrandt presents an accessible, exegetical study of these scripts that demonstrates how the Bible's ancient poetry speaks today. In conversation with current psychological research, Hildebrandt's poetic analyses invite readers to discover the personal and expressive contours of the biblical text, as well as its liberating and healing potential. Vast as the Sea models an approach to the Old Testament that navigates a critical and creative balance between ancient contexts and contemporary life. Hildebrandt joins these two worlds together by maintaining a conscious focus on poetic language. By reflecting on individual words, engaging selected metaphors, and unpacking expressions and their underlying worldviews, Vast as the Sea gifts to its readers a reservoir of language for putting the pain of being human into words. The world, woe, and wonder of Old Testament poetry is a vast yet overlooked resource for readers who are left speechless by the tumults of life and who struggle to reconcile such experiences with their faith. Promoting emotional literacy and wrestling with the tensions between confession and experience, Vast as the Sea will become a long-held, treasured resource for scholars and everyday readers of the Bible, as well as for practitioners in psychology and pastoral counseling.

“An extremely detailed history of 160 hospital sites that formed to care for soldiers who were wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg.” —Civil War Cycling Nearly 26,000 men were wounded in the three-day battle of Gettysburg (July 1-3, 1863). It didn’t matter if the soldier wore blue or gray or was an officer or enlisted man, for bullets, shell fragments, bayonets, and swords made no class or sectional distinction. Almost 21,000 of the wounded were left behind by the two armies in and around the small town of 2,400 civilians. Most ended up being treated in makeshift medical facilities overwhelmed by the flood of injured. Many of these and their valiant efforts are covered in Greg Coco’s A Vast Sea of Misery. The battle to save the wounded was nearly as terrible as the battle that placed them in such a perilous position. Once the fighting ended, the maimed and suffering warriors could be found in churches, public buildings, private homes, farmhouses, barns, and outbuildings. Thousands more, unreachable or unable to be moved remained in the open, subject to the uncertain whims of the July elements. As one surgeon unhappily recalled, “No written nor expressed language could ever picture the field of Gettysburg! Blood! blood! And tattered flesh! Shattered bones and mangled forms almost without the semblance of human beings!” Based upon years of firsthand research, Coco’s A Vast Sea of Misery introduces readers to 160 of those frightful places called field hospitals. It is a sad journey you will never forget, and you won’t feel quite the same about Gettysburg once you finish reading.

Much of human experience can be distilled to saltwater: tears, sweat, and an enduring connection to the sea. In Vast Expanses, Helen M. Rozwadowski weaves a cultural, environmental, and geopolitical history of that relationship, a journey of tides and titanic forces reaching around the globe and across geological and evolutionary time. Our ancient connections with the sea have developed and multiplied through industrialization and globalization, a trajectory that runs counter to Western depictions of the ocean as a place remote from and immune to human influence. Rozwadowski argues that knowledge about the oceans—created through work and play, scientific investigation, and also through human ambitions for profiting from the sea—has played a central role in defining our relationship with this vast, trackless, and opaque place. It has helped us to exploit marine resources, control ocean space, extend imperial or national power, and attempt to refashion the sea into a more tractable arena for human activity. But while deepening knowledge of the ocean has animated and strengthened connections between people and the world’s seas, to understand this history we must address questions of how, by whom, and why knowledge of the ocean was created and used—and how we create and use this knowledge today. Only then can we can forge a healthier relationship with our future sea.

Packer Throme, determined to demonstrate that power comes only from above, leads his people in a war against the dreaded Drammune.