Outside of ancient Syracuse on the island of Sicily, there lived a cruel ruler named Dionysius. He trusted no one. Nearby lived two best friends, Damon and Pythias. One day Pythias spoke out against Dionysius, who quickly ordered his execution, to take place in one month. Pythias wanted to return to his elderly parents to say goodbye and arrange for their care. Dionysius laughed, not trusting that Pythias would return. Damon stood up and offered to take Pythias' place until he returned. The ruler agreed only after stipulating that if Pythias did not come back, Damon would die instead. When the execution day arrived, Pythias had not returned, but Damon still believed that his friend would be there if he could. Just in time, Pythias ran in, offering up his own life for his friend's.

Raven is having the worst week ever. Her best friend Belle has just moved away, and tomorrow is Voices of History Day. Raven and Belle were working on their project together, and now Raven has to present alone—in front of the whole class. But when Raven stumbles upon the Wish Library and asks for school to be canceled, she faces a whole new challenge—and finds that just maybe she had the bravery she needed all along.

Practical Friendship brings insights together from ancient and contemporary philosophy, theology, psychology and sociology to identify what good friendship means and how we can live it. Based on the analysis it proposes we adopt a role based view of friendship, that also can be used to analyse loneliness. Based on research and anecdotal evidence the book compiles a range of recommendations on how to maintain our friendships in good repair and how to foster friendship in old age. The book addresses an audience of professionals working to fight loneliness in our society as well as lay people wanting to reflect on how to improve the friendships in their lives. Additional sections are addressed at researchers in sociology and psychology who want to expand their understanding of friendship in order to tune their research to generate insight for loneliness-support.

A seminal work and examination of the psychopathology of journalism. Using a strange and unprecedented lawsuit by a convicted murder againt the journalist who wrote a book about his crime, Malcolm delves into the always uneasy, sometimes tragic relationship that exists between journalist and subject. Featuring the real-life lawsuit of Jeffrey MacDonald, a convicted murderer, against Joe McGinniss, the author of Fatal Vision. In Malcolm's view, neither journalist nor subject can avoid the moral impasse that is built into the journalistic situation. When the text first appeared, as a two-part article in The New Yorker, its thesis seemed so radical and its irony so pitiless that journalists across the country reacted as if stung. Her book is a work of journalism as well as an essay on journalism: it at once exemplifies and dissects its subject. In her interviews with the leading and subsidiary characters in the MacDonald-McGinniss case -- the principals, their lawyers, the members of the jury, and the various persons who testified as expert witnesses at the trial -- Malcolm is always aware of herself as a player in a game that, as she points out, she cannot lose. The journalist-subject encounter has always troubled journalists, but never before has it been looked at so unflinchingly and so ruefully. Hovering over the narrative -- and always on the edge of the reader's consciousness -- is the MacDonald murder case itself, which imparts to the book an atmosphere of anxiety and uncanniness. The Journalist and the Murderer derives from and reflects many of the dominant intellectual concerns of our time, and it will have a particular appeal for those who cherish the odd, the off-center, and the unsolved.

Damon and Pythias, both of whom are arrested by the tyrannical Dionysius. Condemned to death, Pythias asks only that he be allowed to head to his home country and say goodbye to his loved ones. Dionysius agrees, but only on condition that Damon remain behind as hostage, to be executed in Pythias' place should the latter not return. Circumstances of an incredible nature prevent Pythias from returning at the appointed time, and tension mounts as the loyal Damon mounts the scaffold in anticipation of death. Just in the nick of time, however, Pythias returns, whereupon Dionysius, profoundly moved by the friends' devotion to one another, releases them both.