College freshman Victoria Parker is moving on with her life after surviving her father’s sexual abuse and six months of foster care. But when her long-lost aunt shows up, asking Victoria to lie about her father’s assault so he’ll get a lighter sentence, Victoria must decide whether and how to share her truth as a survivor.

When seventeen-year-old Victoria Parker is suddenly placed into foster care, she struggles to find words for the abuse that upended her life. Determined to keep her head down, stay out of trouble, and graduate on time, Victoria soon realizes that no matter how hard she tries to move forward, the trauma in her past won’t leave her alone.

Spontaneous and creative protest movements have burst onto the political stage in Canada and around the world. Joel D. Harden, an activist, writer, and educator, offers a ground-level account of the most important of these recent expressions of large-scale political engagement, mostly by young people. Based on first-hand accounts from many of the participants and organizers, Harden describes key events and turning-points -- in Canada and beyond -- from the viewpoint of a committed insider. Harden believes that these new bottom-up movements are the most challenging and effective agent of political change on the scene today, galvanizing people to express their views actively in the streets and parks or in their workplaces. The political and corporate power structure has been shaken by these challenges, sometimes enough to generate real political change. Political analysts, journalists and academics have not yet come to terms with this new activism. Harden briefly reviews theories that fail to capture its essence and those that come close to getting it. In a concluding chapter addressed to students and participants in these social movements he offers his own take on a "movement-relevant" theory informed by his own considerable experience as a widely respected Canadian activist. This book offers new thinking about how ordinary citizens -- particularly young people -- have started to take back power in our democracy and change the world.

It is time to reevaluate the merits of the inconspicuous life, to search out some antidote to continuous exposure, and to reconsider the value of going unseen, undetected, or overlooked in this new world. Might invisibility be regarded not simply as refuge, but as a condition with its own meaning and power? The impulse to escape notice is not about complacent isolation or senseless conformity, but about maintaining identity, autonomy, and voice. In our networked and image-saturated lives, the notion of disappearing has never been more alluring. Today, we are relentlessly encouraged, even conditioned, to reveal, share, and promote ourselves. The pressure to be public comes not just from our peers, but from vast and pervasive technology companies that want to profit from patterns in our behavior. A lifelong student and observer of the natural world, Busch sets out to explore her own uneasiness with this arrangement, and what she senses is a widespread desire for a less scrutinized way of life—for invisibility. Writing in rich painterly detail about her own life, her family, and some of the world’s most exotic and remote places, she savors the pleasures of being unseen. Discovering and dramatizing a wonderful range of ways of disappearing, from virtual reality goggles that trick the wearer into believing her body has disappeared to the way Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway finds a sense of affiliation with the world around her as she ages, Busch deliberates on subjects new and old with equal sensitivity and incisiveness. How to Disappear is a unique and exhilarating accomplishment, overturning the dangerous modern assumption that somehow fame and visibility equate to success and happiness. Busch presents a field guide to invisibility, reacquainting us with the merits of remaining inconspicuous, and finding genuine alternatives to a life of perpetual exposure. Accessing timeless truths in order to speak to our most urgent contemporary problems, she inspires us to develop a deeper appreciation for personal privacy in a vast and intrusive world.

The holidays are filled with joyful noise. But Christmas is sometimes wrapped in quiet: “Searching for presents quiet,” “Getting caught quiet,” and “Hoping for a snow day quiet.” Irresistibly cute, soft colored pencil illustrations of bunnies, bears, and more paint a magical holiday picture indeed.

There will be pain ahead, and trouble and problems that I won't be able to fix on my own. But in them all, I know God will be there, calling me to look to him. Inviting me to take the next step toward his open arms. And I will say yes. And yes. And yes. Annahita Parsan was born into a Muslim family in Iran and grew up with the simple hope of one day finding a good husband, having children, and doing some good in the world. Married and a mother before she turned eighteen, Annahita found herself unexpectedly widowed and trapped for years in an abusive second marriage that she later fled-discovering instead a God who might love her. Stranger No More is the remarkable true story of Annahita's path from oppression to the life-changing hope of Jesus. Fleeing Iran across the mountains into Turkey, she spent months in the terrifying Agri prison before a miraculous release and flight to Europe, where she and her two children knelt in a church and prayed, "God, from this day on we are Christians." Filled with unthinkable circumstances, miraculous rescues, and the quietly constant voice of Jesus, Stranger No More leads readers deep into the heart of God and draws them toward the same call that Annahita heeds today: using her past to save others from theirs. As the leader of two congregations in Sweden, Annahita has baptized hundreds of former Muslims since her own conversion, has seen firsthand the powerful ways God is at work among those who have left Islam behind, and is reminded every day that saying yes to God is always worth the risk.