It’s hurricane season, and for one Keys community, the weather isn’t the only thing in turmoil. “It’s starting already. There’s something fierce out there stirring everybody up. This wind is going to blow the earth into the sea.” At 86 years old, Opal, Bahamian matriarch and purported seer, tries to guide her family through the coming storms: JoBe, the nephew to whose drug activities she casts a blind eye; T.C., her teenage granddaughter who’s experiencing her sexual awakening, and Pearl, her niece whose marriage is its own tempest. The Thompson family isn’t fairing much better. For Jessica, strung out and determined to make peace with her past, returning to Key West is, perhaps, the worst decision she’d ever make, but it is the only thing she can do. Her husband, Mark, mailman, dreamer, now single father, struggles to maintain a sense of family for his teenage daughter Mia. Coming to grips with the loneliness and responsibility of a single parenthood, he finds his life turned upside by Jessica’s return. And for octogenarians Bud and Caroline Johnson, they’re just trying to weather one more summer of life’s storms.

An award-winning classicist turns to Greek tragedies for the wisdom to understand the damage caused by suicide and help those who are contemplating suicide themselves In Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus the Tyrant, a messenger arrives to report that Jocasta, queen of Thebes, has killed herself. To prepare listeners for this terrible news, he announces, “The tragedies that hurt the most are those that sufferers have chosen for themselves.” Edith Hall, whose own life and psyche have been shaped by such loss—her mother’s grandfather, mother, and first cousin all took their own lives—traces the philosophical arguments on suicide, from Plato and Aristotle to David Hume and Albert Camus. In this deeply personal story, Hall explores the psychological damage that suicide inflicts across generations, relating it to the ancient Greek idea of a family curse. She draws parallels between characters from Greek tragedy and her own relatives, including her great-grandfather, whose life and death bore similar motivations to Sophocles’ Ajax: both men were overwhelmed by shame and humiliation. Hall, haunted by her own periodic suicidal urges, shows how plays by Sophocles and other Greek dramatists helped her work through the loss of her grandmother and namesake Edith and understand her relationship with her own mother. The wisdom and solace found in the ancient tragedies, she argues, can help one choose survival over painful adversity and offer comfort to those who are tragically bereaved.

The great romance and fear of bloody revolution--strange blend of idealism and terror--have been superseded by blind faith in the bloodless expansion of human rights and global capitalism. Flying in the face of history, violence is dismissed as rare, immoral, and counterproductive. Arguing against this pervasive wishful thinking, the distinguished historian Arno J. Mayer revisits the two most tumultuous and influential revolutions of modern times: the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917. Although these two upheavals arose in different environments, they followed similar courses. The thought and language of Enlightenment France were the glories of western civilization; those of tsarist Russia's intelligentsia were on its margins. Both revolutions began as revolts vowed to fight unreason, injustice, and inequality; both swept away old regimes and defied established religions in societies that were 85% peasant and illiterate; both entailed the terrifying return of repressed vengeance. Contrary to prevalent belief, Mayer argues, ideologies and personalities did not control events. Rather, the tide of violence overwhelmed the political actors who assumed power and were rudderless. Even the best plans could not stem the chaos that at once benefited and swallowed them. Mayer argues that we have ignored an essential part of all revolutions: the resistances to revolution, both domestic and foreign, which help fuel the spiral of terror. In his sweeping yet close comparison of the world's two transnational revolutions, Mayer follows their unfolding--from the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Bolshevik Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited Masses; the escalation of the initial violence into the reign of terror of 1793-95 and of 1918-21; the dismemberment of the hegemonic churches and religion of both societies; the "externalization" of the terror through the Napoleonic wars; and its "internalization" in Soviet Russia in the form of Stalin's "Terror in One Country." Making critical use of theory, old and new, Mayer breaks through unexamined assumptions and prevailing debates about the attributes of these particular revolutions to raise broader and more disturbing questions about the nature of revolutionary violence attending new foundations.

A thundering saga of the American west of the late 19th century filled with complex and twisted characters and vibrant scenes of the rugged New Mexico landscape. It was also turned into a film of the same name starring Barbara Stanwyck.

By training his eye on the ways that people outside the halls of power reacted to the rapid onset and escalation of the fighting in 1914, Neiberg dispels the notion that Europeans were rabid nationalists intent on mass slaughter. He reveals instead a complex set of allegiances that cut across national boundaries.

An unidentified object crashes from the sky into an Arizona canyon, releasing anthrax spores and leaving innocent victims in its wake. Investigators are shocked by what they find in the rubble: a swastika. They call upon former spy and World War II–era weapons expert Lewis Sharp for help. Could this be a biochemical weapon designed by the Nazis half a century ago—or is it an elaborate hoax? Sharp is convinced that it's the real McCoy and he warns that two more killing machines are still out there, primed and ready to strike... The attacker has left a cryptic note hinting at an another attack. Now, it's up to Sharp to piece together a sixty-year-old mystery—one that spans from a convent in Hitler's Germany to Hollywood, the Executive Branch to shadowy third-world governments. Sharp and his colleagues have just five days left to stop the weapon from unleashing mass destruction—and leading the world to the brink of a whole new kind of war...

A bog may be Earth’s undoing, but it will be a gift to Mars. Digging up bog bodies and analyzing corpses are the last things archaeology graduate student Felicity Cratchett wants to do. And when unusual mummies are discovered in the subpolar region of Polar Bear Provincial Park, it’s the last place she wants to go. But since her faculty advisor insists that she log more hours in fieldwork, she has little choice. In a remote bog with a small team of scientists, Felicity unearths the greatest secret of our time—a secret with ties to ancient Rome, roots in Botswana, and a link to the first people to exercise abstract thought. This revelation will challenge the conventional theory of human origins and human evolution. Meanwhile, astronaut Lucas Wilson, a man tormented with a deep-seated anger, is terraforming Mars. He reluctantly descends to the Red Planet’s surface with his fellow astronauts, preparing to direct their exploration. Mars, in its birth pangs, will challenge every step he takes, with gas explosions and raging rivers, with damaged fuel processors and limited oxygen supplies. In the midst of these disasters, Lucas must keep his companions from discovering a feat of genetic engineering that will transform Mars like nothing has in over a billion years. The double helix of this masterwork twists all the way back to Earth and Felicity’s mummies. But if he fails, Lucas must decide whether to take up Mars’s sword, or to cast the weapon into a bog. Five Stars “In The Furies' Bog ... Deborah Jackson’s writing style is crisp and lively with humor, emotion and the human condition written in each character and event that occurs. -Long and Short Reviews Furies’ Bog is a fast-paced Science Fiction Thriller combined with a Historical Mystery. A combination of Michael Crichton, Steve Berry, and Dan Brown, three authors I enjoy very much.” -Kim Heniadis, Book Influencer, McMillan Library