On a June night in 2002, Salt Lake City teenager Elizabeth Smart was abducted at knifepoint from her own bedroom. for months afterward her distraught family prayed for her safe return while a massive manhunt was undertaken. Then, in March of the following year, Elizabeth Smart was discovered alive just a few miles from home, the prisoner of a man who believed himself the messiah and his loyal, complacent wife. What happened to Elizabeth during her nine months of captivity is shocking; how she finally gained her freedom is remarkable. And now the story can be told -- including startling information about the controversial investigation. -- book jacket.

Among the early white settlers, accounts of Indian captivities and massacres became America's first literature of catharsis - a means by which a population that disapproved of fiction and play-acting could satisfy its appetite for stories about other people's misfortunes. This collection of unaltered captivity narratives, first published in 1973, remains an invaluable source of information for historians and ethnologists, providing a fascinating glimpse of a vanished era. For this edition, VanDerBeets has written a new preface discussing the proliferation of recent scholarship about captivity narratives, especially those written by women.

Face it. Life is tough. Daily we face life's PITS, PRISONS, STORMS, AND TRIALS. Days are long and harsh. Those promotions never come. The criticism cuts deeper and deeper. The bills arrive before the paycheck. The spouse is more bitter than the night before. The kids are on your last nerve. Your future doesn't seem so bright. Let's be honest. Life throws us a curve-ball at times. It throws us into depressing pits and lonely, impenetrable prisons. Sometimes life just gets just plain unbearable. However, there is hope! Scripture details the lives of brave heroes who faced their pit head on. Gleaning from their struggles, we learn of God's love for His people. Like the heroes of the Bible, we too can spiritually grow, learn, strive, and overcome any troublesome time we may face. Don't stay put in your pit. Let your faith not be held captive by the world. Grab hold of God's rope of hope, and be set free.

In August of 1520, Martin Luther published the first of three incendiary works, Address to the German Nobility, in which he urged secular authorities to take a strong hand in "reforming" the Roman church. In October, he published The Church Held Captive, and by December the deepest theological rationale appeared in The Freedom of a Christian. With these three books, the relatively unknown Friar Martin exploded onto the Western European literary and religious scene. These three works have been universally acknowledged as classics of the Reformation, and of the Western religious tradition in general. Though Reformation scholars have been reluctant to single out one as the most important of the three, Denis Janz proposes a bold case for The Church Held Captive. In the first entirely new translation in more than a century, Janz presents Luther's text as it hasn't been read in English before. Previous translations stifle the original text by dulling the sharpest edges of its argumentation and tame Luther by substituting euphemisms for his vulgarities. In Janz's dual language edition we see the provocative, offensive, and extreme restored. In his wide-ranging introduction, Janz offers much-needed context to clarify the role of The Church Held Captive in Luther's life and the life of the Reformation. This edition is the most reader-friendly scholarly version of Luther's classic in the English language.

After the War Between the States, a Confederate officer longs to heal the heart of a beautiful woman—but first he’ll have to right the wrongs that were done to her. Major Ethan Kelly has never been able to absolve himself of the guilt he feels for raiding a woman’s home shortly before he was taken prisoner during the Civil War. He is struggling to get through each day until he once again crosses paths with Lizbeth Barclay—the very woman he is trying to forget. Life after the war is not much different for former Captain Devin Monroe until he meets Julianne VanFleet. He knows she is the woman he’s been waiting for, but he struggles to come to terms with the sacrifices she made to survive the war. When Ethan and Devin discover that their former colonel, Adam Bushnell, is responsible for both Lizbeth’s and Julianne’s pain, they call on their former fellow soldiers to hunt him down. As the men band together to earn the trust of the women they love, Lizbeth and Julianne seek the justice they deserve in a country longing to heal.

A captive insurance company is, in a nutshell, an insurance company formed by a business owner to insure the risks of the operating business. The operating business pays premiums to the captive, and the captive insures the risks of the operating business. A captive is much more than an exotic form of self-insurance: It is the creation of a new insurance company that has the potential to grow from being a mere captive into a full-blown insurance company seeking to profit from underwriting the risks of others. Adkisson's Captive Insurance Companies provides a basic introduction to captives and their benefits, including: utilize your own experience ratings; recapture underwriting profits; underwrite exposed risks and deductibles; access the reinsurance markets; and transfer wealth between generations. This book also provides a unique look at the wealth transfer, accumulation and preservation advantages of captives, as well as an overview of the types of captives, taxation of captives, and captive domiciles.