Even five months on the Big Island can change you forever. Being invited to visit the fiery home of Madame Pele, getting scared half-to-death by a UFO hovering over a lava field, and manifesting a blue feather out of thin air has that effect. Yet Andrew’s most powerful transformation was still ahead. A routine hitchhiking trip into town brings a new person into Andrew’s life that just might have the perfect opportunity for him. His new friend is a volunteer at a Vipassana meditation center. She invites him to join her on a 10-day silent meditation course and then live near the meditation center afterward, doing a very different kind of work-trade than he’s ever done. Andrew accepts and plunges into an intense experience, delving deeper into his mind and body than ever before, unearthing trauma that he thought he had healed long ago. In the process, a profound realization hits him and propels him into a new chapter of his life. Ten Thousand Hours in Paradise is a 3-volume true story about the consciousness shift that happens when you embrace Hawaii. In Volume 2: Tribulations, Andrew dives deep into a life-changing Vipassana meditation course, gains a new perspective on unrequited love, and is wished “Happy Birthday” from a man beyond the grave.

For the first time, own all 3 volumes in one convenient ebook! What happens when you hear the call to fly to the most remote population center on Earth, home base for ecovillages, black sand beaches, and a volcano goddess living in a molten lake of lava? You GO! Upon landing, Andrew feels instantly welcome. On his first night, a new friend asks him if he’d like to go on a volcano adventure with her. “Are you serious?” he says. “Yes, of course!” After picking up some gas masks the following day, they head to Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park, hiking down a secret road toward a massive red glow in the distance. By nightfall, Andrew and his new friends are standing on the edge of a huge lake of bubbling lava, radiating a warmth that feels like the sun on a cloudless day. Its beauty leaves him speechless, and they've brought food. His friends call it “extreme picnicking,” but his adventure has only just begun. Ten Thousand Hours in Paradise is a 3-volume true story about the consciousness shift that happens when you embrace Hawaii: Volume 1: Arrival soars with pure adventure, unrequited love, deadly lava, mysterious UFOs, ecotourism, and fascinating characters that you’ll never forget. In Volume 2: Tribulations, Andrew dives deep into a life-changing Vipassana meditation course, gains a new perspective on unrequited love, and is wished “Happy Birthday” from a man beyond the grave. Volume 3: Reckoning takes flight with earthshaking changes, powerful healing, a new lava flow, and a hurricane, resulting in a reckoning that changes Andrew forever.

In song, verse, narrative, and dramatic form, war literature has existed for nearly all of recorded history. Accounts of war continue to occupy American bestseller lists and the stacks of American libraries. This innovative work establishes the American novel of war as its own sub-genre within American war literature, creating standards by which such works can be classified and critically and popularly analyzed. Each chapter identifies a defining characteristic, analyzes existing criticism, and explores the characteristic in American war novels of record. Topics include violence, war rhetoric, the death of noncombatants, and terrain as an enemy.

A riveting literary debut about the cost of keeping quiet Amy Jo Burns grew up in Mercury, Pennsylvania, an industrial town humbled by the steel collapse of the 1980s. Instead of the construction booms and twelve-hour shifts her parents’ generation had known, the Mercury Amy Jo knew was marred by empty houses, old strip mines, and vacant lots. It wasn’t quite a ghost town—only because many people had no choice but to stay. The year Burns turned ten, this sleepy town suddenly woke up. Howard Lotte, its beloved piano teacher, was accused of sexually assaulting his female students. Among the countless girls questioned, only seven came forward. For telling the truth, the town ostracized these girls and accused them of trying to smear a good man’s reputation. As for the remaining girls—well, they were smarter. They lied. Burns was one of them. But such a lie has its own consequences. Against a backdrop of fire and steel, shame and redemption, Burns tells of the boys she ran from and toward, the friends she abandoned, and the endless performances she gave to please a town that never trusted girls in the first place. This is the story of growing up in a town that both worshipped and sacrificed its youth—a town that believed being a good girl meant being a quiet one—and the long road Burns took toward forgiving her ten-year-old self. Cinderland is an elegy to that young girl’s innocence, as well as a praise song to the curative powers of breaking a long silence.