Higher Worlds

Ever since the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, scientists have dreamed of preventing catastrophic outbreaks of infectious disease. Yet despite a century of medical progress, viral and bacterial disasters continue to take us by surprise, inciting panic and dominating news cycles. From the Spanish flu to the 1924 outbreak of pneumonic plague in Los Angeles to the 1930 "parrot fever" pandemic, through the more recent SARS, Ebola, and Zika epidemics, the last one hundred years have been marked by a succession of unanticipated pandemic alarms.

This Long Form Edition includes all 3 parts of The Brall Empire: +Fred series.Fred's life was on autopilot, but that abruptly changed. He finds himself in a new world, with strange people and fearsome monsters. The Brall take one look at Fred and expect him to die within hours. However, there is more to Fred than even he knows. He struggles to stay alive, as he uses his knowledge from Earth to strengthen the fragmented Brall Empire. Along the way, he gains powerful allies and inadvertently provokes and inspires a ruthless General. Can Fred save the Brall and bring stability to the Empire? ...

Set in Calcutta, London, the glacier-locked wilds of the Karakoram, and on Everest itself, The Last Englishmen is also the story of a generation. The cast of this exhilarating drama includes Indian and English writers and artists, explorers and Communist spies, Die Hards and Indian nationalists, political rogues and police informers. Key among them is a highborn Bengali poet named Sudhin Datta, a melancholy soul torn, like many of his generation, between hatred of the British Empire and a deep love of European literature, whose life would be upended by the arrival of war on his Calcutta doorstep.

In the wake of one of the most tumultuous conventions in Republican history, the party of Lincoln nominated in 1940 a prominent businessman and Wall Street attorney for president. Though Wendell Willkie would lose to FDR, David Levering Lewis reveals in this news-making reclamation that the story of this Hoosier-born corporate chairman's life is the story of an America that could have been. Popular for his down-home Midwestern charm and unaffected candor, Willkie possessed a supple intellect and a concealed disdain for political opportunism that, had he not died prematurely, would have revolutionized American politics with its advocacy of bipartisanship and social responsibility.

Not since Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan has a fiction writer explored with such powerful intensity the experience of being Asian American. The characters who inhabit this extraordinary fictional debut are caught between the burden of their past history and the fragility of their unchartered future. Hunger illuminates how first-generation immigrants from China, culturally and emotionally uprooted from their homeland, mistrust connection even as they hunger for attachment - and how the past affects and shapes their children.

The daughter of a Danish immigrant and a black G.I., Rachel survives a family tragedy only to face new challenges. Sent to live with her strict African-American grandmother in a racially divided Northwest city, she must suppress her grief and reinvent herself in a mostly black community. A beauty with light brown skin and blue eyes, she attracts much attention in her new home. The world wants to see her as either black or white, but that's not how she sees herself.

Everyone knows that the United States of America is made up of 50 states and, uh...some other stuff. The territories of American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the US Virgin Islands are often neglected, but they are filled with American flags and national parks and US post offices and some four million people, many of whom are as proudly red-white-and-blue as any Daughter of the American Revolution.

The Kettlebell-Lover’s Primer for Rapid Physical Transformation and Peak Athletic Performance… When Dragon Door originated the modern kettlebell movement in 2001, it was love-at-first-sight for millions of fitness enthusiasts worldwide. This almost magical “gym-in-the-palm-of-your-hand” can deliver spectacular results--be it in strength, conditioning, power or movement quality. The health-strength benefits of vigorous, dedicated, skilled exercise with kettlebells can indeed be off-the-charts. But note the all-important word “skill”. Because without the proper know-how, the ...

Gustav Perle grows up in a small town in Switzerland, where the horrors of the Second World War seem only a distant echo. An only child, he lives alone with Emilie, the mother he adores but who treats him with bitter severity. He begins an intense friendship with a Jewish boy his age, talented and mercurial Anton Zweibel, a budding concert pianist.

Are you interested in parallel realms, elves, and fairies? Do you long to uncover your soul’s origins and discover your afterlife homes? Would you like to learn about the earliest history of our planet before the current matrix? Or perhaps you are curious to uncover the secrets of the Inner Earth and our ancient ancestors? If so, then this book is just for you! Iva Kenaz seamlessly blends mythology, science, and her own personal experiences with parallel worlds to bring forth a unique, mystical exploration. In this book, you will learn about the various realms we may go to in the ...

History begets legends. Swords versus sorcery. Mortals cross paths with faeries. A high adventure of love, loss, treachery, and redemption. This noble tale continues as Rhys arrives at the family estate with a wound from a poisoned arrow. He stops to recover and to present heirloom gifts to his three sisters from his aunts, Morgana La Fae, Morgause, and Elaine. Rhys receives a birthright which signals patriarchal approval and impending adulthood. As he resumes the King’s business, he calls to his beloved, Naida, and asks for the location of Eon, the faery world. What she tells him only ...

The planet is gripped in a state of frenzied panic as Vesta, an asteroid of apocalyptic proportions, is on a direct collision course with Earth. There is no place to hide. There is no way to stop it. When the countdown to oblivion begins, the doomsday clock's persistence poisons people's minds. Humanity becomes feral. Rain, a 16-year-old from Maine, watches in horror as her peaceful, coastal town descends into cataclysmic chaos. Hysteria mounts, civility vanishes, and no one is safe. Just when Rain thinks things can't get any worse, a new nightmare reveals itself: she may be descended from ...

Are you brave enough to face a free fall from over 400 feet in the air? If the mere thought of a heart-pounding drop makes your palms sweat, you’ll love diving into 25 Extreme Drop Tower Rides — the ultimate guide to the tallest, fastest, and most terrifying vertical thrills on Earth! Besides your roller coasters, carousels, and Ferris wheels, a staple attraction of any major amusement park is the drop tower ride. While common today, these freefall attractions don’t have a long, hundred-year history like the roller coaster or amusement park. The first tower rides didn’t appear until...

In Still Waters, Curt Stager introduces us to the secret worlds hidden within lakes as he travels from the Adirondack wilderness to the wilds of Siberia, from Massachusetts to the Middle East. For him, lakes are both mirrors and windows into history, culture, and our primal connections to all life. Stager fills his narrative with strange and enchanting details about these submerged worlds - diving insects chirping underwater like crickets, African crater lakes that explode, the growing threats to Thoreau's cherished pond - while emphasizing how beautiful and precious our lakes are.

An Unstoppable Force Meets an Unyielding Will In a world teetering on the edge of chaos, where technology and ambition collide with deadly consequences, a new threat emerges from the shadows. A ruthless warlord has discovered a way to automate the production of a potent drug, setting the stage for a monopoly that could upend the global pharmaceutical industry. His plan could lead to mass murder on an unprecedented scale, and the clock is ticking. Enter Natalie, a determined CIA agent with a haunted past and a desperate need to salvage her career. Driven by revenge, she sets her sights on ...

From finding their footing in an art world dictated by social media followers to coming to terms with their queer identity, Bunny knows first-hand what it’s like to feel like an outsider. It was at a real low point that Bunny first got in touch with their Higher Self–and ever since has been helping their followers do the same through their art and inspiring Instagram presence.

Evolutions brings to life the latest scientific thinking on the birth of the universe and the solar system, the journey from a single cell all the way to our human minds. Reawakening our sense of wonder and terror at the world around us and within us, Oren Harman uses modern science to create new and original mythologies.

Long before their country officially joined the war, American aid workers were active in rescue efforts across Europe. Two such Americans were Martha and Waitstill Sharp, who were originally sent to Prague as part of a relief effort but turned immediately to helping Jews and dissidents after the 1939 invasion by Germany. They were not the only ones. Renowned historian Debórah Dwork follows the story of rescue workers in five major cities as the refugee crisis expanded to Vilna, Shanghai, Marseille, and Lisbon. Followed by Nazi agents, spiriting people across borders, they learned secrecy.

For better or worse - be it militarily, politically, economically, technologically, or culturally - Americans have had a profound role in shaping the wider world beyond them. The United States has been a savior to some, a curse to others, but either way such views are often based on a caricature of American actions and intentions. American foreign relations, then, is a subject of immense global importance that provokes strong emotions and much debate, but often based on deep misunderstanding.

A battle rages for the heart and soul of America. For one group, the idea of "American Exceptionalism" is dead. Some never tire of lecturing us about how out of step America is with the rest of the world and how the country needs to get with it. Worse, America, they say, is bad for the world. Its freedom and prosperity are merely historical accidents.