From the author of Apparently, I’m A Bitch comes a new Double Shot rom-com in which a teacher is forced to work on a fundraiser with her ex-co-worker-turned-closest-friend-turned-hated-rival – with risky results. Lilly Fares is not a people-pleasing pushover. At least, not anymore. Right? Cue Trevor Atkins: the head teacher of her nightmares. Thanks to his threats to fire Lilly, she can’t help but fold into old, torturous, habits. To save her dream-job teaching literature, Trevor forces her to take his place in the upcoming Educational Arts Fundraiser, where she runs into long-time frenemy Shawn Jackson. The Great Shawn Jackson, educational thought leader extraordinaire. Cue melodramatic groan. Years ago, Shawn made his feelings about Lilly crystal clear, and judging by the icy cold front he’s been emanating, nothing will change despite their close quarters. But as Lilly struggles to fix her career, and Shawn begins to lend a helping hand, things feel... different. Lilly and Shawn start *gasp* talking. Suddenly, things don’t seem as bad as they once did. Suddenly, Lilly starts enjoying herself. Suddenly, Lilly can’t take her eyes off of Shawn’s sexy, dimpled smile and muscular forearms. But when it comes time to prove she’s the teacher she was meant to be, will Shawn be able to handle her particular brand of torture? Apparently, I’m Torture is a smart, swoony, feel-good romantic comedy based on the awfully vague question: Is everything always what it seems? This spicy friends to enemies to lovers romantic comedy is set in contemporary New York City, and is the second book within the Double Shot Duet, but can be read as a standalone. This full length romance features: · A Happily Ever After · A Swoon-worthy 'I'll sacrifice it all for her' hero · A Nostalgic heroine with anxiety representation · No third act breakup · Teacher x Teacher high stakes workplace conflict · Opposites attract · Found Family · He falls first · Open door, slow burn EARNED spice · Dual first person POV (point of view) · Then vs now timeline · Angst and humor! If you enjoyed Love Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood, Yours Truly by Abby Jimenez, or The True Love Experiment by Christina Lauren, you'll love this book!

An award-winning journalist’s extraordinary account of being kidnapped and tortured in Syria by al Qaeda for two years—a revelatory memoir about war, human nature, and endurance that’s “the best of the genre, profound, poetic, and sorrowful” (The Atlantic). In 2012, American journalist Theo Padnos, fluent in Arabic, Russian, German, and French, traveled to a Turkish border town to write and report on the Syrian civil war. One afternoon in October, while walking through an olive grove, he met three young Syrians—who turned out to be al Qaeda operatives—and they captured him and kept him prisoner for nearly two years. On his first day, in the first of many prisons, Padnos was given a blindfold—a grime-stained scrap of fabric—that was his only possession throughout his horrific ordeal. Now, Padnos recounts his time in captivity in Syria, where he was frequently tortured at the hands of the al Qaeda affiliate, Jebhat al Nusra. We learn not only about Padnos’s harrowing experience, but we also get a firsthand account of life in a Syrian village, the nature of Islamic prisons, how captors interrogate someone suspected of being CIA, the ways that Islamic fighters shift identities and drift back and forth through the veil of Western civilization, and much more. No other journalist has lived among terrorists for as long as Theo has—and survived. As a resident of thirteen separate prisons in every part of rebel-occupied Syria, Theo witnessed a society adrift amid a steady stream of bombings, executions, torture, prayer, fasting, and exhibitions, all staged by the terrorists. Living within this tide of violence changed not only his personal identity but also profoundly altered his understanding of how to live. Offering fascinating, unprecedented insight into the state of Syria today, Blindfold is “a triumph of the human spirit” (The New York Times Book Review)—combining the emotional power of a captive’s memoir with a journalist’s account of a culture and a nation in conflict that is as urgent and important as ever.

In this engrossing analysis, Cavanaugh contends that the Eucharist is the Church's response to the use of torture as a social discipline.

An explosive memoir about the creation and implementation of the controversial Enhanced Interrogation Techniques by the former Chief Operations Officer for the CIA's Counterterrorism Center.

Thoroughly sharp and honest treatment of a brutal conflict.The Algerian War (1954-1962) was a savage colonial war, killing an estimated one million Muslim Algerians and expelling the same number of European settlers from their homes. It was to cause the fall of six French prime minsters and the collapse of the Fourth Repbulic. It came close to bringing down de Gaulle and - twice - to plunging France into civil war.The story told here contains heroism and tragedy, and poses issues of enduring relevance beyond the confines of either geography or time. Horne writes with the extreme intelligence and perspicacity that are his trademarks.

Torture is banned because it is cruel and inhumane. But as Shane O’Mara writes in this account of the human brain under stress, another reason torture should never be condoned is because it does not work the way torturers assume it does. In countless films and TV shows such as Homeland and 24, torture is portrayed as a harsh necessity. If cruelty can extract secrets that will save lives, so be it. CIA officers and others conducted torture using precisely this justification. But does torture accomplish what its defenders say it does? For ethical reasons, there are no scientific studies of torture. But neuroscientists know a lot about how the brain reacts to fear, extreme temperatures, starvation, thirst, sleep deprivation, and immersion in freezing water, all tools of the torturer’s trade. These stressors create problems for memory, mood, and thinking, and sufferers predictably produce information that is deeply unreliable—and, for intelligence purposes, even counterproductive. As O’Mara guides us through the neuroscience of suffering, he reveals the brain to be much more complex than the brute calculations of torturers have allowed, and he points the way to a humane approach to interrogation, founded in the science of brain and behavior. Torture may be effective in forcing confessions, as in Stalin’s Russia. But if we want information that we can depend on to save lives, O’Mara writes, our model should be Napoleon: “It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile.”

For the first time, Stephen Grey tells the inside story of international prisons sanctioned by the U.S. Government and used by the CIA to hold and torture people suspected of terrorism. Using contacts deep inside the U.S. Government, Grey reveals how deeply the Bush administration is involved in the program and questions the truth of statements made by Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. He also shines a spotlight on the heads of European nations who turned a blind eye to the program when it showed up in their back yards. Grey takes an unflinching look at a horrendous practice that scorns Geneva Convention rules and is powered by corruption at the highest levels of governments worldwide. Through his unprecedented access to CIA flight records and dozens of sources at the senior levels of the current administration, Grey has produced a story of flight plans, extreme torture, and the clash of religions and governmental posturing that goes on today. Ghost Plane tells the stories of individuals abducted at airports around the world and transported for interrogation and torture on a fleet of leased planes manned by CIA operatives. Grey paints a disburing ethical picture of the war on terror and lays the responsibility for abduction and torutre at the doorstep of Washington, D.C.