Anniston, Alabama, is a small industrial city between Birmingham and Atlanta. In 1961, the city’s potential for race-related violence was graphically revealed when the Ku Klux Klan firebombed a Freedom Riders bus. In response to that incident, a few black and white leaders in Anniston took a progressive view that desegregation was inevitable and that it was better to unite the community than to divide it. To that end, the city created a biracial Human Relations Council which set about to quietly dismantle Jim Crow segregation laws and customs. This was such a novel notion in George Wallace’s Alabama that President Kennedy phoned with congratulations. The Council did not prevent all disorder in Anniston—there was one death and the usual threats, crossburnings, and a widely publicized beating of two black ministers—yet Anniston was spared much of the civil rights bitterness that raged in other places in the turbulent mid-sixties. Author Phil Noble’s account is carefully researched but told from a personal viewpoint. It shows once again that the civil rights movement was not monolithic either for those who were in it or those who were opposed to it.

The Council did not prevent all disorder in Anniston - there was one death and the usual threats, crossburnings, and a widely publicized beating of two black ministers - yet Anniston was spared much of the civil rights bitterness that raged in other places in the turbulent mid-sixties."--Jacket.

Powerful and important, My City Was Gone is the cautionary tale of how a hardworking small town was destroyed by the very forces that created it. Anniston, Alabama, was once a thriving industrial hub, home to a Monsanto chemical plant as well as a federal depot for chemical weapons. Now its notoriety comes from its exceptionally high cancer rate—some 25 percent above the state norm—and the town's determined citizens who joined together and struck back at the corporation. As provocative and timely as Erin Brockovich or A Civil Action, My City Was Gone is a magnificently told true story of ordinary citizens in a small Southern town who led a legendary fight against corporate pollution and wrongdoing.

Labeled "dyslexic and profoundly learning disabled with attention and behavior problems," Jonathan Mooney was a short bus rider--a derogatory term used for kids in special education and a distinction that told the world he wasn't "normal." Along with other kids with special challenges, he grew up hearing himself denigrated daily. Ultimately, Mooney surprised skeptics by graduating with honors from Brown University. But he could never escape his past, so he hit the road. To free himself and to learn how others had moved beyond labels, he bought his own short bus and set out cross-country, looking for kids who had dreamed up magical, beautiful ways to overcome the obstacles that separated them from the so-called normal world.--From publisher description.

This novel is set against the background of the Malay Peninsula and Singapore during the Second World years of 1941 to 1945. As implied from the title, is is not merely a story about two generals, Yamashita and Percival, but also the effect of their decisions upon the lives of people who were caught in the war the British residents and the locals of diverse cultures. The novel focuses on the theme of love and war. It discusses the frailties of human emotion that led to both. It portrays the lives of the various societies there at the time before, during and after the outbreak of the war: first the British, the elite society during the colonial years with their comfortable life, quite ignorant of Japanese clandestine activities, which were to have such a profound effect on their lives soon after. Amidst all these the novel also portrays the love, illicit and otherwise that inevitably grew out the events related to the war. In addition, the novel also looks at other parts of the social environment, at the effects of the war on the local population: the Malays who saw the war as an opportunity to prepare themselves towards self-government and independence; the Chinese who looked upon the Japanese as their bitter enemies for invading their homeland, China, and who must opposed at all costs; the Indians who were indifferent to all events around them; their main concern being to earn just enough for themselves and for their families back home in India. This is a novel dominated by historical facts related to the war period interlaced with fictional events related to the life and the loves of the fictional characters during the war. It carries a message about the meaninglessness of war; that pride of the victor is just temporary and trivial but the human suffering caused by the war is unfathomable and simply unforgivable. Shaari Isa has equal love for academic and creative writings. He began his career as a teacher and subsequently became a professional accountant and a university lecturer. His writings reflects his deep concern for social order, clear thinking and human happiness. He lives in Kuala Lumpur.

Backpacking Beyond Boundaries is the story of a young man who puts his career on hold in search of adventure and the discovery of his inner being. He leaves South Africa in 1990 while Nelson Mandela is still in prison and South Africa ruled by a white minority government. His travels take him through 35 countries and cultures as far afield as South East Asia where he spends one year; exotic islands of Thailand, hitchhiking through Malaysia, charming beauty of Sri Lanka, overland through India into Nepal and finally back to Thailand. He also buses through Morocco and into the Sahara Desert. In Turkey he joins a group of 11 fellow backpackers and travels across the country. Behind the Iron Curtain he visits East Germany and the Berlin Wall, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary seeing communism at work. In 1996 he returns to a free South Africa, one now with equal rights and called the Rainbow Nation, before choosing a new life in Canada. In 2003 he travels to Namibia and reconnects with his army past. And in 2005 he makes a special journey to Mozambique with two army friends to see the prison where one of them was held captive.

The NIV is the world's best-selling modern translation, with over 150 million copies in print since its first full publication in 1978. This highly accurate and smooth-reading version of the Bible in modern English has the largest library of printed and electronic support material of any modern translation.