Life never seemed so good. Well, at least that’s how you’ll feel after completing Confessions of a Bipolar Firefighter. Strap in. From the mountainous highs to the bottomless lows, this adventurous autobiography travels through the mind and experiences of a tremendously controversial, besieged, introspective and tormented man named James L. Nutt. It begins through the eyes of a child who endures extreme physical, sexual and emotional abuse and then transitions into his impoverished and naturally destructive teenager years accented by his proclivity for violence. After a tumultuous young adulthood, he grows into a working class firefighter who daringly climbs the ranks to chief. Normalcy appears to be attained as James and his newfound family gain a strong relationship with God. But the ebbs quickly return as James discovers his church pastor has embezzled thousands of dollars from offerings, and his wife passes from skin cancer leaving him to raise four children on his own. All the while, he continues to wage battles against his own bipolar disorder along with the vices of alcohol, drug abuse, sex and violence. Everything culminates to a fight with his own demons as a God-fearing man with an agenda to avenge those who have betrayed him. His mental illness exacerbates and his relationship with the Lord wavers as he struggles with completing his own vengeance versus allowing God to take the lead. Whether you believe him to be crazy or sane, right or wrong, you will certainly remain on the edge of your seat as you take a ride with this truly original character who provides insight into his real-life tale for the ages.

Set in the future when "firemen" burn books forbidden by the totalitarian "brave new world" regime.

Picturing Pity is the first full length monograph on missionary photography. Empirically, it is based on an in-depth analysis of the published photographs taken by Norwegian evangelical missionaries in Northern Cameroon from the early nineteen twenties, at the beginning of their activities in this region, and until today. Being part of a large international movement, Norway sent out more missionaries per capita than any other country in Europe. Marianne Gullestad's main contention is that the need to continuously justify their activities to donors in Europe has led to the creation and maintenance of specific ways of portraying Africans. The missionary visual rhetoric is both based on earlier visualizations and has over time established its own conventions which can now also be traced within secular fields of activity such as international development agencies, foreign policy, human relief organizations and the mass media. Picturing Pity takes part in the present "pictorial turn" in academic teaching and research, constituting visual images as an exciting site of conversation across disciplinary lines.

Kiera Van Gelder's first suicide attempt at the age of twelve marked the onset of her struggles with drug addiction, depression, post-traumatic stress, self-harm, and chaotic romantic relationships-all of which eventually led to doctors' belated diagnosis of borderline personality disorder twenty years later. The Buddha and the Borderline is a window into this mysterious and debilitating condition, an unblinking portrayal of one woman's fight against the emotional devastation of borderline personality disorder. This haunting, intimate memoir chronicles both the devastating period that led to Kiera's eventual diagnosis and her inspirational recovery through therapy, Buddhist spirituality, and a few online dates gone wrong. Kiera's story sheds light on the private struggle to transform suffering into compassion for herself and others, and is essential reading for all seeking to understand what it truly means to recover and reclaim the desire to live.

Like sharks, epidemic diseases always lurk just beneath the surface. This fast-paced history of their effect on mankind prompts questions about the limits of scientific knowledge, the dangers of medical hubris, and how we should prepare as epidemics become ever more frequent. Ever since the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, scientists have dreamed of preventing catastrophic outbreaks of infectious disease. Yet, despite a century of medical progress, viral and bacterial disasters continue to take us by surprise, inciting panic and dominating news cycles. From the Spanish flu and the 1924 outbreak of pneumonic plague in Los Angeles to the 1930 'parrot fever' pandemic and the more recent SARS, Ebola, and Zika epidemics, the last 100 years have been marked by a succession of unanticipated pandemic alarms. Like man-eating sharks, predatory pathogens are always present in nature, waiting to strike; when one is seemingly vanquished, others appear in its place. These pandemics remind us of the limits of scientific knowledge, as well as the role that human behaviour and technologies play in the emergence and spread of microbial diseases.

This book is a meditation on and an attempt to understand suicidal violence in the immediate context of its most recent political surge: the decade between 2001 and 2011, from the suicidal mission of Muhammad Atta and his band in the United States to the suicide of Mohamed Bouazizi in 2010 in Tunisia. After the former a devastating military strike and occupation of two Muslim countries commenced, and after the latter a massive transnational democratic uprising ensued. Suicidal violence is neither specific to Islam nor peculiar to our time. It has been manifested in practically all cultures and religions and throughout human history. But the suicidal violence we witness today is of an entirely different disposition because the bodies (both of the assailant and of the assailed) on which it is perpetrated are no longer the human body of our Enlightenment assumption. What we are witnessing is in fact the contour of a posthuman body. The posthuman body, as Dabashi here proposes, is the body of a contingent and contextual being, and as such an object of disposable knowledge; while the human body that it has superseded was corporeally integral, autonomous, rational, indispensable, and above all the site of a knowing subject.