In the deepest, darkest jungles of Indochina, an ancient evil is waiting in a forgotten, primeval valley. It is patient, monstrous, and bloodthirsty. Perfectly adapted to its hot, steaming environment, it strikes its chosen prey: human. Now Michael Spiers, a Marine sniper, the only survivor of a previous encounter with the beast, is going after it again. Against his better judgement, he is made part of a Marine Force recon team that will hunt it down and destroy it.The hunters are ...

You never knew that theoretical physics could be so simple! In this exciting and significant book, Andrew Thomas reveals how all unifications in physics have been based on incredibly simple ideas.Using a logical approach, Thomas explains how the great twentieth-century theories of relativity and quantum mechanics share a common base and how they can be linked using an idea so simple that anyone can understand it.An idea which is so simple that it has been hidden in plain si...

What do Disney, Bollywood, and "the Batkid" teach us about how to create celebrity experiences for our audiences? How can a vending machine inspire world peace? Can being "imperfect" make your business more marketable? Can a selfie improve one's confidence? When can addiction be a good thing?The answers to these questions may not be all that obvious, and that's exactly the point. For the past four years, marketing expert and Georgetown University professor Rohit Bhargava has curate...

When kids turn to substance abuse, parents also become victims as they watch their children transform into irrational and antisocial individuals. This harrowing scenario finds parents buckling beneath the stress, often with catastrophic consequences: divorce, career upsets, breakdowns . . . and worse.Don't Let Your Kids Kill You is a landmark work that dares to focus on the plight of the confused, distressed parent and not the erring child. It sets aside any preconceived i...

Can a football game affect the outcome of an election? What about shark attacks? Or a drought? In a rational world the answer, of course, would be no. But as bestselling historian Rick Shenkman shows in Political Animals, our world is anything but rational. This isn't because we aren't smart. Instead, modern cues are setting off ancient, instinctive responses that worked to keep us safe in the Stone Age but lead us astray today.Pop culture tells us we can trust our instinc...

Jonathan Franzen's work raises major questions about the possibilities of contemporary fiction: How does one appeal to a broad mass of mainstream readers, on the one hand, while persuading connoisseurs, on the other, that one's fiction has is high art? Even more acutely, how did Franzen move from the rage that animates his first two novels to the more generous comic stance of the two later novels on which his reputation rests?Wrestling with these questions, Jonathan Franzen: Th...

For proslavery leaders like John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis, the nineteenth-century world was torn between two hostile forces: a rising movement against bondage, and an Atlantic plantation system that was larger and more productive than ever before. In this great struggle, southern statesmen saw the United States as slavery's most powerful champion. Overcoming traditional qualms about a strong central government, slaveholding leaders harnessed the power of the state to defend slavery a...

From 1754 to 1755, the slave ship Hare completed a journey from Newport, Rhode Island, to Sierra Leone and back to the United States—a journey that transformed more than seventy Africans into commodities, condemning some to death and the rest to a life of bondage in North America. In this engaging narrative, Sean Kelley painstakingly reconstructs this tumultuous voyage, detailing everything from the identities of the captain and crew to their wild encounters with inclement weather...

James and Elle Eversman are a young couple traveling through the Mojave desert on their way to a new life. When their car mysteriously breaks down, they are stranded in the middle of nowhere without much water and no cell phone reception.A mile away, a deadly sniper has them in his crosshairs. They are pinned down behind their broken-down car, surrounded by open ground in all directions. There's nowhere to run and no one to help them. How can they possibly survive?With rele...

A dramatic work of historical detection illuminating one of the most significant--and long-forgotten--Supreme Court cases in American history. In 1820, the slave ship Antelope was captured off the Florida coast. Though the slave trade was prohibited, slavery was still legal in half of the United States, and it was left to the Supreme Court to determine whether nearly 300 Africans on board were considered slaves and if so, to whom they belonged. Mining untapped archives, Jonathan M. Bryant ...

West Point's Class of 1915 is the academy's most important in history.The cadets of the United States Military Academy, West Point, are intimately twined with the country's history. The graduating class of 1915, the class the stars fell on, was particularly noteworthy. Of the 164 graduates that year, 59 (36%) attained the rank of general, the most of any class. Although Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley, both five-star generals, are the most recognizable, other class members contr...

Andrea Boyle moved to Seattle to give her seventeen-year-old nephew, Spencer, a fresh start after the death of his parents. Andrea has found her own new beginning with Luke, a successful playwright and father of a teenage son, Damon. The boys appear to have little in common, but in truth they share a private torment . . .When a tragedy befalls Damon, it's just the beginning of a nightmare that unfolds. But the worst is yet to come once a dark secret from Spencer's past is exposed. ...