Challenging the widely held belief that Nicaragua has been ethnically homogeneous since the 19th century, TO DIE IN THIS WAY reveals the continued existence of a "forgotten" indigenous culture. By recovering a significant part of Nicaraguan history that has been excised from national memory, Jeffrey Gould critiques the enterprise of third world nation-building and marks an important step in the study of Latin American culture and history. 11 photos.

In Taipei, Taiwan, the kidnapping of a Mainlander billionaire throws national media into a tizzy—not least because of the famous victim’s vitriolic anti-immigration politics. Jing-nan has known Peggy Lee, a bullying frenemy who runs her family’s huge corporation, since high school. Peggy’s father has been kidnapped, and the ransom the kidnappers are demanding is not money but IP: a high-tech memory chip that they want to sell in China. Jing-nan feels sorry for Peggy until she starts blackmailing him into helping out. Peggy is worried the kidnappers’ deadline will pass before the police are able to track down the chip. But when the reluctant Jingnan tries to help, he finds himself deeper and deeper in trouble with some very unsavory characters—the most unsavory of whom might be the victim himself.

We all have to die someday—some people just find more bizarrely hilarious ways to go The woman who drank herself to death with water trying to win a games console by holding in her pee. . . the mechanic who blew himself up while trying to open a rocket-propelled grenade with a sledgehammer. . . a lottery winner killed by the gates of his new luxury home. . . a woman felled forever by a fatal falling lettuce. . . an octogenarian who met his maker while riding a shopping cart. . . a German artist crushed by one of his own sculptures, called "Woman with Four Breasts". . . the convicted murderer who electrocuted himself on the toilet as he repaired a TV—all true reports from across the globe which reveal the silliest ways you can meet your maker. Death may seem like a serious business, but this is a seriously funny book.

Cartoonist Elan Fleisher has a problem--he can't stop thinking about death. He's obsessed with death. He is consumed with death. His one problem is that he is perfectly healthy, so he draws deathly things instead. Illustrated.

We have lost the ability to deal with death. Most of our friends and beloved relations will die in a busy hospital in the care of strangers, doctors and nurses they have known at best for a couple of weeks. They may not even know they are dying, victims of the kindly lie that there is still hope. They are unlikely to see even their family doctor in their final hours, robbed of their dignity and fed through a tube after a long series of excessive and hopeless medical interventions. This is the starting point of Seamus O'Mahoney's thoughtful, moving and unforgettable book on the western way of death. Dying has never been more public, with celebrities writing detailed memoirs of their illness, but in private we have done our best to banish all thought of dying and made a good death increasingly difficult to achieve.

We talk a lot about resurrection. What about the death that must come first? Through story and biblical insight, Rick James reminds us that when Jesus tells us to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow him, he is describing a path of death, not a path to death. Giving up our own plans in order to meet someone else’s needs. Allowing God to shape our dreams, even as we lose a relationship, a job, a hoped-for future. Being alert to these daily opportunities to die to ourselves is how we discover that every act of dying, done in faith, leads to spiritual growth. As we learn to embrace the little deaths of everyday existence, we lose our taste for lifeless religiosity. Our appetite for a thriving, vibrant life in Christ grows—and our own experience motivates others to live out their extraordinary mission on earth. In truth, death is not an ending. It is the only way to experience abundant life.

What happens when a young man of talent and visions of greatness falls victim to a cruel set of circumstances over which he has no control? No Way to Die is such a story. Dennis Nunqam Ndendemajem gives up! Even when he is given a second chance to start again, he refuses to gather the broken pieces of his life together. He refuses to rebuild, and refuses to live. But he also finds no way to die.