The Other Side of the World: Vision and Reality embraces and celebrates the experiences of idealistic, young Peace Corps volunteers as they confronted the ancient and enigmatic civilization of India four decades ago. Prompted by memories and emotions tapped during a gathering on the 40-year reunion of their return to the States, members of India 44 A&B provide reflections that are honest, compelling, insightful, riotous, humbling, and yet redemptive. These reflections give expression to feelings long repressed and, at the same time, uncover the mysterious ways in which their service in remote India transformed and redirected the trajectory of their lives. Their stories provide a humorous and deeply moving description of village life, where imperfect language skills and limited technical capabilities interacted with good intentions and stubborn dedication to produce embarrassment on the one hand, and the occasional minor miracle on the other. This is not a feel-good testimony to the Peace Corps on its golden anniversary. Rather, it is a sobering depiction of the lives of volunteers living in one of the Peace Corps' most demanding site countries, where frustrations and challenges were found in abundance. Yet at the end of the day, these stories generally attest to the wisdom of the Peace Corps concept, which affirms the powers of volunteerism and the giving of self. For many, it was the first time these volunteers had articulated their feelings since leaving India. Mary Jo Clark, Thomas Corbett, Michael Simonds and Haywood Turrentine compiled the book. Respectively, the authors reside in San Diego, California, Madison, Wisconsin, the greater Hartford area, and Birmingham, Alabama. http: //sbpra.com/HaywoodTurrentine

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On the eve of her birthday, Ashley wakes to find her family murdered, a deadly hunger ravaging her body. A dark voice beseeches her to seek her new fate as an immortal being plunged into a world ruled by laws and myths long forgotten. Along the way, she meets Apollo,her soul mate, one born of two fathers. Together they travel, lost to their souls, confronting the unholy secrets the past. Violent passions erupt as Ashley fights her hunger for blood and lustful desires for her new companion. Meet the Firsts—Croven, the Witch. Orion, the Elfin King. Draagyn, the Vampire, destroyer of life. Danger unfolds as Ashley’s soul is entwined with Draagyn’s mate, Amber Rose, seeking once more to take her seat at his side. Follow into the web of deceit as Ashley struggles to find her true self. Is she Draagyn's Queen of Darkness reincarnate? The long lost beloved of her Apollo? Or, is she the prophecy yet to be fulfilled?

Freedom of speech and expression is considered in the West a high public good and an important social value, underpinned by legislative and ethical norms. Its importance is not shared to the same extent by conservative and devout Muslims, who read Islamic doctrines in ways seemingly incompatible with Western notions of freedom of speech. Since the Salman Rushdie affair in the 1980s there has been growing recognition in the West that its cherished value of free speech and associated freedoms relating to arts, the press and media, literature, academia, critical satire etc. episodically clash with conservative Islamic values that limit this freedom for the sake of holding religious issues sacrosanct. Recent controversies - such as the Danish cartoons, the Charlie Hebdo affair, Quran burnings, and the internet film ‘The Innocence of Muslims’ which have stirred violent reactions in the Muslim world - have made the West aware of the fact that Muslims’ religious sensitivities have to be taken into account in exercising traditional Western freedoms of speech. Featuring experts across a spectrum of fields within Islamic studies, Freedom of Speech and Islam considers Islamic concepts of blasphemy, apostasy and heresy and their applicability in the modern world.

Reveals the troubling intimacy between Black women and the making of US global power The year 1968 marked both the height of the worldwide Black liberation struggle and a turning point for the global reach of American power, which was built on the counterinsurgency honed on Black and other oppressed populations at home. The next five decades saw the consolidation of the culture of the American empire through what Erica R. Edwards calls the “imperial grammars of blackness.” This is a story of state power at its most devious and most absurd, and, at the same time, a literary history of Black feminist radicalism at its most trenchant. Edwards reveals how the long war on terror, beginning with the late–Cold War campaign against organizations like the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and the Black Liberation Army, has relied on the labor and the fantasies of Black women to justify the imperial spread of capitalism. Black feminist writers not only understood that this would demand a shift in racial gendered power, but crafted ways of surviving it. The Other Side of Terror offers an interdisciplinary Black feminist analysis of militarism, security, policing, diversity, representation, intersectionality, and resistance, while discussing a wide array of literary and cultural texts, from the unpublished work of Black radical feminist June Jordan to the memoirs of Condoleezza Rice to the television series Scandal. With clear, moving prose, Edwards chronicles Black feminist organizing and writing on “the other side of terror”, which tracked changes in racial power, transformed African American literature and Black studies, and predicted the crises of our current era with unsettling accuracy.