Highland Sanctuary unravels the complex interactions among agriculture, herding, forestry, the colonial state, and the landscape itself. Conte's study illuminates the debate over conservation, arguing that contingency and chance, the stuff of human history, have shaped forests in ways that rival the power of nature.

Gavin MacKenzie, a chieftain heir who is hired to restore the ancient Castle of Braigh, discovers a hidden village of outcasts who have created their own private sanctuary from the world. Among them is Serena Boyd, a mysterious and comely lass, who captures Gavin's heart in spite of harboring a deadly past that could destroy her future. The villagers happen to be keeping an intriguing secret as well, and when a fierce enemy launches an attack against them, greed leads to bitter betrayal. Then, as Gavin prepares a defense, the villagers unite in a bold act of faith, showing how God's love is more powerful than any human force on earth.

This story describes, in considerable detail, the enhancements that were built into the DNA of the New People that were produced. A major enhancement is the ability to communicate by telepathy. Many people believe that we all have some telepathic ability built into us. There are countless examples of this in our everyday lives, and in this story, examples are given as well as a rationale for the emergence of this ability. Our problem is that the ability in most of us is undeveloped, largely because we dont, in our formative years, need it. Some of us, who grow up in an environment where there is a real need to negotiate for our success and survival, do develop this ability. This may be why many such people are so successful in later life, since they seem to know better than others what is going on in anothers mind, and act on that knowledge. The great business men, political leaders and others whose success depends upon their ability to sense the minds of their audience are good examples. In this story the need arose to separate what the characters were saying out loud from what was being transmitted by telepathy. To make it clear to the reader the convention has been introduced in which telepathic transmissions are written in italics. May 2012

Bryce MacPhearson, a highland warrior, kidnaps Akira MacKenzie on her wedding day to honor a promise he made to his dying father. While Akira begins to forgive, and Bryce learns to trust, a series of murders creates a legacy of hate that once again rises between their families.

When Quakers Flora Saferight and Bruce Millikan embark on the Underground Railroad, they agree to put their differences aside to save the lives of a pregnant slave couple. With only her mother’s quilt as a secret guide, the foursome follows the stitches through unknown treachery. As they embark on their perilous journey, they hope and pray that their path is one of promise where love sustains them, courage builds faith, and forgiveness leads to freedom.

For 30-year-old literature lover Joan Meeler, there is no heroine so admirable as Gone With the Wind’s Scarlett O’Hara. Joan, with her quiet nature and love of good food, falls shockingly short of Scarlett’s outspoken passion, strength, and 17-inch waist. Yet as the secret hostess of an advice blog called Scarlett Says, she discovers she’s quite adept at dispensing advice in Scarlett’s devil-may-care tone. Joan is happy to live vicariously . . . until she meets Charles, a Christian and faithful Scarlett Says reader, who suddenly has Joan dreaming of something more. Since Scarlett has never let her down, Joan digs deeper and deeper into her heroine’s mind, searching for something to calm her rising insecurities. But her search falls short, and Joan realizes that she must look within herself—and to God—to uncover the inner confidence she never knew she possessed.

This edited collection disrupts dominant narratives about space, states, and borders, bringing comparative ethnographic and geographic scholarship in conversation with one another to illuminate the varied ways in which space becomes socialized via political, economic, and cognitive appropriation. Societies must, first and foremost, do more than wrangle over ownership and land rights — they must dwell in space. Yet, historically the interactions between the state’s territorial imperative with previous forms of landscape management have unfolded in a variety of ways, including top-down imposition, resistance, and negotiation between local and external actors. These interactions have resulted in hybrid forms of territoriality, and are often fraught with fundamentally different perceptions of landscape. This book foregrounds these experiences and draws attention to situations in which different social constructions of space and territory coincide, collide, or overlap. Each ethnographic case in this volume presents forms of territoriality that are contingent upon contested histories, politics, landscape, the presence or absence of local heterogeneity and the involvement of multiple external actors with differing motivations — ultimately all resulting in the potential for conflict or collaboration and divergent implications for conceptions of community, autochthony and identity.