Through faith in Jesus Christ anyone can accept the free gift of salvation (a ticket for “the train to glory”). The narrator accepted his ticket without fully knowing what it meant. He sought out a mentor, Stan, to guide him in how to mature in his faith while waiting for the train to eternity. Through casual conversations with Stan, the storyteller’s faith grows in practical, everyday situations. As you join him on his journey, you will feel like you’re listening in on a conversation about God, the Bible, and how to experience personal growth while waiting for the train. The readings are based on the author’s years of journaling, which helped him cultivate a deep relationship with the Lord. Each reading is followed by Scripture references that connect to the theme of the day. A prayer and “Think on this” questions tie it all together. Join the author as he is discipled in moving from conversion towards transformation, and what it means for living your life before catching the train. “There is a place in today’s world for stories that present what Jesus says in a different way, a way that resonates in truth without preaching and without overreaching. That is what Waiting for the Train presents.” —From the Foreword by Josh McDowell

During the tumultuous year of 2008--when gas prices reached $4 a gallon, Amtrak set ridership records, and a commuter train collided with a freight train in California--journalist James McCommons spent a year on America's trains, talking to the people who ride and work the rails throughout much of the Amtrak system. Organized around these rail journeys, Waiting on a Train is equal parts travel narrative, personal memoir, and investigative journalism. Readers meet the historians, railroad executives, transportation officials, politicians, government regulators, railroad lobbyists, and passenger-rail advocates who are rallying around a simple question: Why has the greatest railroad nation in the world turned its back on the very form of transportation that made modern life and mobility possible? Distrust of railroads in the nineteenth century, overregulation in the twentieth, and heavy government subsidies for airports and roads have left the country with a skeletal intercity passenger-rail system. Amtrak has endured for decades, and yet failed to prosper owing to a lack of political and financial support and an uneasy relationship with the big, remaining railroads. While riding the rails, McCommons explores how the country may move passenger rail forward in America--and what role government should play in creating and funding mass-transportation systems. Against the backdrop of the nation's stimulus program, he explores what it will take to build high-speed trains and transportation networks, and when the promise of rail will be realized in America.

‘Feeble Creature’ is arrested and charged with committing a crime under several penal codes for causing disruption and chaos by inflicting unfounded fear among the masses. His crime is writing and circulating four articles taking an extreme contrarian view that humankind is suffering from ‘progeria’, the rarest of rare diseases known to medical science. In his defense before the court of justice, he says- “I sincerely desired to infuse the real meaning of ‘living’ in the psyche of mankind so that they may battle out the death inflicted by this metaphysical ailment I conveniently call ‘Progeria’. I haven’t committed any crime in doing so by expressing my conviction, cautioning and alerting the commoners to take notice. It is up to them to take notice, realize and act or ignore the warning” This novel depicts the very cause that has led mankind to this lethal metaphysical ailment, the author termed as ‘metaphysical progeria’. The author has also ventured to present a possible remedy, who only the rarest of the rare may chance to put into application. He does this by taking readers on a short journey aboard a train, a perfect analogy for the journey of life as passengers seems ever waiting for the next, an assumed time, projecting data internalized from dead past. The author dares to write an obituary of the metaphysical demise of mankind, unravelling how he arrives at this conclusion. The author believes, however, that those who choose themselves still have a chance to rise from their metaphysical graves.

We all wait – in traffic jams, passport offices, school meal queues, for better weather, an end to fighting, peace. Time spent waiting produces hope, boredom, anxiety, doubt, or uncertainty. Ethnographies of Waiting explores the social phenomenon of waiting and its centrality in human society. Using waiting as a central analytical category, the book investigates how waiting is negotiated in myriad ways. Examining the politics and poetics of waiting, Ethnographies of Waiting offers fresh perspectives on waiting as the uncertain interplay between doubting and hoping, and asks "When is time worth the wait?" Waiting thus conceived is intrinsic to the ethnographic method at the heart of the anthropological enterprise. Featuring detailed ethnographies from Japan, Georgia, England, Ghana, Norway, Russia and the United States, a Foreword by Craig Jeffrey and an Afterword by Ghassan Hage, this is a vital contribution to the field of anthropology of time and essential reading for students and scholars in anthropology, sociology and philosophy.

Basrayatha is a literary tribute by author Muhammad Khudayyir to the city of his birth, Basra, on the Shatt al-Arab waterway in southern Iraq. Just as a city's inhabitants differ from outsiders through their knowledge of its streets and stories, so Khudayyir distinguishes between the real city of Basra and the imagined city he created through stories, experiences, and folklore. By turns a memoir, a travelog, a love letter, and a meditation, Basrayatha summons up a city long gone, yet which lives on in the memories and imaginations of its people. In the tradition of Calvino and Borges, Khudayyir's mesmerizing work itself illuminates and enriches the story of this magnificent city.

More than just charts, star bios, and boring listings, "The Country Music Book of Lists" is the perfect gift or pop reference guide for trivia fans, filled with humor, insight, and "down home fun".