One of the year's Top Ten Books on Religion and Spirituality (Booklist), Being Alive and Having to Die is the story of the remarkable public and private journey of Reverend Forrest Church, the scholar, activist, and preacher whose death became a way to celebrate life. Through his pulpit at the prestigious Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York, Reverend Forrest Church became a champion of liberal religion and a leading opponent of the religious right. An inspired preacher, a thoughtful theologian and an eloquent public intellectual, Church built a congregation committed to social service for people in need, while writing twenty five books, hosting a cable television program, and being featured in People, Esquire, New York Magazine, and on numerous national television and radio appearances. Being Alive and Having to Die works on two levels, as an examination of liberal religion during the past 30 years of conservative ascendancy, and as a fascinating personal story. Church grew up the son of Senator Frank Church of Idaho, famous for combating the Vietnam War in the 1960s and the CIA in the 1970s. Like many sons of powerful fathers, he rebelled and took a different path in life, which led him to his own prominence. Then, in 1991, at the height of his fame, he fell in love with a married parishioner and nearly lost his pulpit. Eventually, he regained his stature, overcame a long-secret alcoholism, wrote his best books–and found himself diagnosed with terminal cancer. His three year public journey toward death brought into focus the preciousness of life, not only for himself, but for his ministry. Based on extraordinary access to Church and over 200 interviews with family, friends, and colleagues, Dan Cryer bears witness to a full, fascinating, at time controversial life. Being Alive and Having to Die is an honest look at an imperfect man and his lasting influence on modern faith.

Nicole decides to end it all. On one cold winter night, she travels deep into the woods, in the midst of a horrific thunderstorm, hoping that she would perish and the awful pain would fade away from her miserable life. However, not everything works out as smoothly as she hoped. To start with, a mysterious, devastatingly handsome man saves her from certain death, introducing himself as Brix. He tells her that he is a werewolf, and Nicole is his mate. She is soon thrown into the realm of the supernatural, introduced to creatures she never knew existed. Everything she thought she knew turns out to be wrong, the whole world shifting before her eyes. Will Nicole be able to survive in this new, strange life she is forced to live?

Nathan Bedford Forrest did not invent mobilized guerilla warfare, but he did modernize and polish it to an extent that has left few theoretical areas for improvement. Tanks and jeeps, it could even be said, do not possess the mobility relative to the main force which they attach that Forrest’s dedicated band of horsemen enjoyed. Following in the footsteps of Francis Marion and Lighthorse Harry Lee, American practitioners of the devastating hit-and-run cavalry attach of the Revolutionary War, Forrest raised their effective but geographically limited campaigns to an art-form spread over the widest possible tactical theatre. He accomplished this with superior knowledge of terrain and of horses coupled and with an iron will, a complete disregard for physical exhaustion (his own and that of his men) and, this book will demonstrate, by the most admirable sort of sheer country orneriness. Forrest, a man of simple upbringing, is the perfect symbol for the odd mélange that was the Confederate Army; patrician West Pointers like Lee side by side by unregenerate racists like Forrest. These well-bred students of battles and from the classical era were not prevented by an almost unimaginable difference in class from being able to recognize the tactical genius of a farmer from the low country... That any scholar of this history of warfare would have to judge Forrest rather more harshly for his conduct after the war than this conduct during it is just another tragic aspect of the larger tragedy that generated The War Between the States. Heroes rose from unlikely places and returned, when the time for heroism had past, to their more unheroic pursuits. Whether than return negates the valor shown during the conflict is only for you to determine, after you have learned of Forrest’s life in all its aspects, heroic, and less so.

Predicting the future has long been a cornerstone of science fiction. Now seventeen farseeing authors have taken up the challenge of gazing into the future and seeing where America may be the day after tomorrow. From an America where history has become myth and misinformation amid the ruins of a once-vast land...to a place where the only existence for genetic misfits is as slaves to the "Gawders"...to a company intent on cloning the world's species, both extinct and endangered, back to a balanced ecosystem, here are original stories that will have readers thinking about the future, and about how their own actions now could make a difference tomorrow.