A collection of Eddie's poems inspired by strife and life and love and loss.

Note: This book is an updated version of the author’s novel Royal Bride. One of the last acts performed by the post–Waterloo Congress of Vienna is the granting to Jura the status of a free and independent state. To safeguard against domination by its giant neighbor, Austria, Prince Augustus allies himself to Britain by taking an English wife. That wife was supposed to be the eldest granddaughter of Princess Mariana, but when she runs away with someone else, the youngest daughter, Charity, is pressed into service as a substitute. Charity has always hero-worshipped Gus, who has spent the last ten years leading guerilla fighters against Napoleon’s troops, but she is not prepared for the responsibility of her new position. The novel is about the growing love between Charity and Gus, as together they encounter political intrigues and dangerous plots against Jura and the rule of Prince Augustus.

Americans today harbor no strong or consistent collective memory of the First World War. Ask why the country fought or what they accomplished, and "democracy" is the most likely if vague response. The circulation of confusing or lofty rationales for intervention began as soon as President Woodrow Wilson secured a war declaration in April 1917. Yet amid those shifting justifications, Love and Death in the Great War argues, was a more durable and resonant one: Americans would fight for home and family. Officials in the military and government, grasping this crucial reality, invested the war with personal meaning, as did popular culture. "Make your mother proud of you/And the Old Red White and Blue" went George Cohan's famous tune "Over There." Federal officials and their allies in public culture, in short, told the war story as a love story. Intervention came at a moment when arbiters of traditional home and family were regarded as under pressure from all sides: industrial work, women's employment, immigration, urban vice, woman suffrage, and the imagined threat of black sexual aggression. Alleged German crimes in France and Belgium seemed to further imperil women and children. War promised to restore convention, stabilize gender roles, and sharpen male character. Love and Death in the Great War tracks such ideas of redemptive war across public and private spaces, policy and implementation, home and front, popular culture and personal correspondence. In beautifully rendered prose, Andrew J. Huebner merges untold stories of ordinary men and women with a history of wartime culture. Studying the radiating impact of war alongside the management of public opinion, he recovers the conflict's emotional dimensions--its everyday rhythms, heartbreaking losses, soaring possibilities, and broken promises.

Tolle Lege, take up and read! These words from St. Augustine perfectly describe the human condition. Reading is the universal pilgrimage of the soul. In reading we journey to find ourselves and to save ourselves. The ultimate journey is reading the Great Books. In the Great Books we find the struggle of the human soul, its aspirations, desires, and failures. Through reading, we find faces and souls familiar to us even if they lived a thousand years ago. The unread life is not worth living, and in reading we may well discover what life is truly about and prepare ourselves for the pilgrimage of life.

One in an ongoing series of esteemed and popular Bible commentary volumes based on the New International Version text.