Banished is an eye-opening, deeply personal account of life inside the cult known as the Westboro Baptist Church, as well as a fascinating story of adaptation and perseverance. You've likely heard of the Westboro Baptist Church. Perhaps you've seen their pickets on the news, the members holding signs with messages that are too offensive to copy here, protesting at events such as the funerals of soldiers, the 9-year old victim of the recent Tucson shooting, and Elizabeth Edwards, all in front of their grieving families. The WBC is fervently anti-gay, anti-Semitic, and anti- practically everything and everyone. And they aren't going anywhere: in March, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the WBC's right to picket funerals. Since no organized religion will claim affiliation with the WBC, it's perhaps more accurate to think of them as a cult. Lauren Drain was thrust into that cult at the age of 15, and then spat back out again seven years later. Lauren spent her early years enjoying a normal life with her family in Florida. But when her formerly liberal and secular father set out to produce a documentary about the WBC, his detached interest gradually evolved into fascination, and he moved the entire family to Kansas to join the church and live on their compound. Over the next seven years, Lauren fully assimilated their extreme beliefs, and became a member of the church and an active and vocal picketer. But as she matured and began to challenge some of the church's tenets, she was unceremoniously cast out from the church and permanently cut off from her family and from everyone else she knew and loved. Banished is the story of Lauren's fight to find herself amidst dramatic changes in a world of extremists and a life in exile.

After escaping from a flood that buried the aboveground in seawater, a fractured group of boys from Atlantis squabble over the way ahead and their trust of an underground race of men who give them shelter. For sixteen-year-old Dam, whose world was toppling before the tragedy, it’s a strange, new second chance. There are wonders in the underworld and a foreign warrior Hanhau who is eager for friendship despite Dam’s dishonorable past. But a rift among his countrymen threatens to send their settlement into chaos. Peace between the evacuees and Hanhau’s tribe depends on the sharing of a precious relic that glows with arcane energy. When danger emerges from the shadowed backcountry, Dam must undertake a desperate mission. It’s the only hope for the Atlanteans to make it home to the surface. It’s the only way to save Hanhau and his people.

For author Nancy Lee Klune, the nightmare began with a phone call from a stranger. The man, who identified himself as a family therapist, informed her that her son and daughter-in-law had decided that she was to have no further contact with them or their four children. This call set in motion a ten year journey of deep pain, emotional turmoil, and personal growth as she found ways to cope with this indescribable loss. Each inspirational chapter in Banished explores the dilemmas and challenges facing alienated parents and grandparents. Woven throughout are intensely personal accounts of the author’s own healing along with practical advice for those who suffer from family estrangement. She shares her process of healing, discussing everything from acceptance, forgiveness, gratitude, self-love, and the importance of letting go and honoring your own life. She reveals how she found joy and happiness again, despite the vacuum created by the absence of her adult child and grandchildren. Providing both straightforward assistance and much-needed empathy for those facing family alienation and estrangement, this book helps you move forward, while offering tools for healing and creating more love and peace in your life.

When one of their friends is captured and sold into slavery in the land of the Rus, the children of the old chieftain and their comrades decide to risk everything to rescue him. Little do they know what awaits them when they embark on the Viking ship, the 'Eagle'. In addition to the dangers of the sea voyage, they must face the villainy of a traitor, marauding pirates and robbers, before they end up in a seemingly hopeless situation as slaves in a quarry. To add to their problems, they learn that they have provoked the anger of the new chieftain of their island home and have been banished.

The Civil War has just entered its third bloody year, and the North is about to impose its first military draft, a decision that will spark the most devastating and destructive urban riot in American history. Banished Children of Eve traces that event as its tentacles grip New York City. The cast is drawn from every stratum: a likeable and laconic Irish-American hustler, an ambitious and larcenous Yankee stockbroker, an immigrant serving girl, a beautiful and mysterious mulatto actress and her white minstrel lover as well as a cluster of real-life characters, including scheming, ever-pompous General George McClellan; fiery, fierce Archbishop “Dagger John” Hughes; and fast-declining musical genius Stephen Foster. The fates of these characters coalesce in the cataclysm of the Draft Riots, as a pivotal period in the history of New York and the nation is painfully, vividly, magically bought to life.