Words alone can no longer convey the horrors of the war that now grips the Imperium. In what should have been an age of enlightenment and glorious triumph, instead warriors on both sides reel from the twin agonies of betrayal and bloodshed. The hatred of a sworn foe, the ire of a primarch, or the unholy wrath of a daemon-lord - none but the mighty Space Marines can hope to weather such torments unscathed...

Sitting in the pew at her husband's funeral, author Anna Madsen heard the last verse of the great Reformation hymn: "Were they to take our house, goods, honor, child, or spouse, though life be wrenched away, they cannot win the day. The kingdom's ours forever!" Reflecting on this experience, Madsen realized that death takes victories when its power appears to be greater than life. And she defiantly refused to cede death any more wins: "Not my spirit, not my strength, not my joy, and certainly not those of my children." The challenge is to acknowledge death in its manifold forms and own one's indignation and grief, and yet transcend it so that even if we are angry, we do not become anger. This book names the tension between grief and hope, acknowledges the reality of both, and defines a path forward to a life of joyful defiance. That path runs through Holy Saturday, a day that has one foot in the fear, grief, and death of Good Friday while the other is in Easter, a day of hope, freedom, life, and joy. Christians are not immune from experiencing anxiety, anger, exhaustion, and grief--emotions and effects arising from personal and communal trauma, including the trauma of death. Yet, the accompanying angst and pain, while real, are not the last word for people of faith. This book is written particularly for advocates, caregivers, and those who suffer in any number of ways, among them chronic illness, chronic injustice, and chronic exhaustion. Despite facing grief, anger, fear, and fatigue, readers will be encouraged not just to cope but to embrace hope and joy again, and then to plow them back into the ground of the wider world for the sake of their neighbors.

KILL OR BE KILLED

The prevailing image of European Jews during the Holocaust is one of helpless victims, but in fact many Jews struggled against the terrors of the Third Reich. In Defiance, Nechama Tec offers a riveting history of one such group, a forest community in western Belorussia that would number more than 1,200 Jews by 1944--the largest armed rescue operation of Jews by Jews in World War II. Tec reveals that this extraordinary community included both men and women, some with weapons, but mostly unarmed, ranging from infants to the elderly. She reconstructs for the first time the amazing details of how these partisans and their families--hungry, exposed to the harsh winter weather--managed not only to survive, but to offer protection to all Jewish fugitives who could find their way to them. Arguing that this success would have been unthinkable without the vision of one man, Tec offers penetrating insight into the group's commander, Tuvia Bielski. Tec brings to light the untold story of Bielski's struggle as a partisan who lost his parents, wife, and two brothers to the Nazis, yet never wavered in his conviction that it was more important to save one Jew than to kill twenty Germans. She shows how, under Bielski's guidance, the partisans smuggled Jews out of heavily guarded ghettos, scouted the roads for fugitives, and led retaliatory raids against Belorussian peasants who collaborated with the Nazis. Herself a Holocaust survivor, Nechama Tec here draws on wide-ranging research and never before published interviews with surviving partisans--including Tuvia Bielski himself--to reconstruct here the poignant and unforgettable story of those who chose to fight.

Investigates a variety of texts in which the self-image of poor, urban black men in the U.S. is formed within, by, and against a culture of racial terror and state violence. In If We Must Die: From Bigger Thomas to Biggie Smalls, author Aimé J. Ellis argues that throughout slavery, the Jim Crow era, and more recently in the proliferation of the prison industrial complex, the violent threat of death has functioned as a coercive disciplinary practice of social control over black men. In this provocative volume, Ellis delves into a variety of literary and cultural texts to consider unlawful and extralegal violence like lynching, mob violence, and "white riots," in addition to state violence such as state-sanctioned execution, the unregulated use of force by police and prison guards, state neglect or inaction, and denial of human and civil rights. Focusing primarily on young black men who are depicted or see themselves as "bad niggers," gangbangers, thugs, social outcasts, high school drop-outs, or prison inmates, Ellis looks at the self-affirming embrace of deathly violence and death—defiance-both imagined and lived-in a diverse body of cultural works. From Richard Wright's literary classic Native Son, Eldridge Cleaver's prison memoir Soul on Ice, and Nathan McCall's autobiography Makes Me Wanna Holler to the hip hop music of Eazy-E, Tupac Shakur, Notorious B.I.G., and D'Angelo, Ellis investigates black men's representational identifications with and attachments to death, violence, and death—defiance as a way of coping with and negotiating late-twentieth and early twenty-first century culture. Distinct from a sociological study of the material conditions that impact urban black life, If We Must Die investigates the many ways that those material conditions and lived experiences profoundly shape black male identity and self-image. African Amerian studies scholars and those interested in race in contemporary American culture will appreciate this thought-provoking volume.

Both a riveting courtroom drama and a real-life thriller, A Just Defiance tells the story of four young black South Africans who were arrested for a string of political murders in 1987. In gripping prose, Peter Harris—the white lawyer who defended the men—describes how he came to understand, while constructing the case to save the defendants from the death penalty, the chain of events that led them to undergo training at ANC camps in Angola and return to their homeland to execute some of the apartheid regime's most notorious collaborators. The shocking twists and turns of the high-profile trial kept the public in suspense during the dying days of apartheid. Harris’s account of the trial is intercut with flashbacks to instances of the cold-blooded brilliance and deadly efficiency of the squad's operations. We see Nelson Mandela recently released from Robben Island as he begins negotiations that will eventually lead to the assumption of power by the ANC. We read about bomb-making and assassination attempts by both the ANC and the South African police. A critical and popular success in South Africa, this book is a tale of people driven to extremes by injustice and repression, and of ordinary citizens caught up in extraordinary events. Finally, it is the story of a country’s search for reconciliation, one that captures the moral vertigo of South Africa's violent apartheid years.