In the early ages, the world of Oniro was plagued by a frightening evil. Grotesque creatures roamed the land, wyverns filled the skies, and demonic, misshapen men plotted destruction and control. The strongest armies in existence stood no chance. In its current state, Oniro was lost. But the appearance of seven legendary heroes, along with the nearly defeated warriors of the Holy Order, saved mankind. From that day forward, the world remained relatively peaceful for five hundred years. However, on the continent of Dregnal, a new evil arises. The country of Entervia has been invaded by the North. While Entervia’s army marches to meet them, the barbarian clans of the South harass the citizenry, pillaging villages and killing innocents. With the North and the South bearing down, Entervia has only one option. Sigurd, a young man from Entervia’s capital, along with his lifelong friend Euwart, is tasked with forming a small resistance group to travel to the country of Ariglioth for reinforcements. Accompanied by Adrian, a guard captain, and Tristan, a long time friend of Euwart’s, the small force sets forward, walking a trail the common people hardly traverse. Little do they know, however, of the secrets they are about to uncover, of the mysteries long since buried beneath the soil, causing this seemingly simple task to be far more than they’d ever dreamed. . .

Born in 1938 in rural Kenya, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o came of age in the shadow of World War II, amidst the terrible bloodshed in the war between the Mau Mau and the British. The son of a man whose four wives bore him more than a score of children, young Ngũgĩ displayed what was then considered a bizarre thirst for learning, yet it was unimaginable that he would grow up to become a world-renowned novelist, playwright, and critic. In Dreams in a Time of War, Ngũgĩ deftly etches a bygone era, bearing witness to the social and political vicissitudes of life under colonialism and war. Speaking to the human right to dream even in the worst of times, this rich memoir of an African childhood abounds in delicate and powerful subtleties and complexities that are movingly told.

Academy Award winner William Joyce’s Guardians recruit Sanderson ManSnoozy, the sleepy legend also known as the Sandman, to their cause in this fourth chapter book adventure. When the Man in the Moon brought together the Guardians, he warned them that they would face some terrible evils as they strove to protect the children of earth. But nothing could have prepared them for this: Pitch has disappeared and taken Katherine with him. And now the Guardians are not only down one member, but a young girl is missing. Fortunately, MiM knows just the man to join the team. Sanderson ManSnoozy—known in most circles as the Sandman—may be sleepy, but he’s also stalwart and clever and has a precocious ability to utilize sand in myriad ways. If the other Guardians can just convince Sandy that good can triumph evil, that good dreams can banish nightmares, they’ll have themselves quite a squad. But if they can’t…they might never see Katherine again.

People around the world associate the "universal dream of home ownership" with an unprecedented improvement in quality of life. But there is a war on this dream, the result of policies that seek to control urban sprawl or suburbanization. The proponents and governments that implement such anti-suburban policies do so with little debate and virtually without any serious analysis of the consequences. Anti-suburban policies outlaw development on large swaths of land, creating scarcity and increasing housing prices. This means less home ownership in the future and less wealth creation. Anti-suburban policies hopelessly seek to force people to use mass transit instead of cars, while failing to build roadway capacity to accommodate rising demand. The result is more intense traffic congestion, air pollution, and less productive urban areas. Author Wendell Cox takes a closer look at this growing problem in War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life. With most of the world still living in relative poverty, it is clear that neither economic growth nor wealth creation can be taken for granted. Anti-suburban policies must be rejected and repealed. Only by such actions will national economies and their urban areas be positioned to ensure that future generations have a better quality of life.

In 2008, Waltz with Bashir shocked the world by presenting a bracing story of war in what seemed like the most unlikely of formats—an animated film. Yet as Donna Kornhaber shows in this pioneering new book, the relationship between animation and war is actually as old as film itself. The world’s very first animated movie was made to solicit donations for the Second Boer War, and even Walt Disney sent his earliest creations off to fight on gruesome animated battlefields drawn from his First World War experience. As Kornhaber strikingly demonstrates, the tradition of wartime animation, long ignored by scholars and film buffs alike, is one of the world’s richest archives of wartime memory and witness. Generation after generation, artists have turned to this most fantastical of mediums to capture real-life horrors they can express in no other way. From Chinese animators depicting the Japanese invasion of Shanghai to Bosnian animators portraying the siege of Sarajevo, from African animators documenting ethnic cleansing to South American animators reflecting on torture and civil war, from Vietnam-era protest films to the films of the French Resistance, from firsthand memories of Hiroshima to the haunting work of Holocaust survivors, the animated medium has for more than a century served as a visual repository for some of the darkest chapters in human history. It is a tradition that continues even to this day, in animated shorts made by Russian dissidents decrying the fighting in Ukraine, American soldiers returning from Iraq, or Middle Eastern artists commenting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Arab Spring, or the ongoing crisis in Yemen. Nightmares in the Dream Sanctuary: War and the Animated Film vividly tells the story of these works and many others, covering the full history of animated film and spanning the entire globe. A rich, serious, and deeply felt work of groundbreaking media history, it is also an emotional testament to the power of art to capture the endurance of the human spirit in the face of atrocity.

'When I close my eyes, I dream of peace.', said 14 year old Aleksandar, just after enduring a dressing change of the terrible burn wounds he suffered from a Molotov cocktail explosion. His words became the title of this book, which presents the thoughts & paintings of children in the former Yugoslavia, as they deal with war related psychological trauma. The material was gathered by UNICEF during its work in the former Yugoslavia.

This volume deals with the years of World War II and after. In the 1940s California changed from a regional centre into the dominant economic, social and cultural force it has been in America ever since.