Christ Church Priory, Canterbury, 990 AD. Orphaned by vikings, Folcwin and his elder brother Aelfwynn have become excellent scribes. Their lives, enlivened by sibling rivalry, are upset by a competition to illuminate a commissioned psalter. After Folcwin is selected the victor, his brother is accused of murdering another competitor, and he escapes. While Aelfwynn begins a patriotic battle against Viking raiders, Folcwin's fame as a scribe increases. Even with their imbalanced fortunes, the paths of the two brothers are bound to cross with powerful kings and strong leaders, including King Aethelred, Thorkell the Tall and Edmund Ironside. But can they overcome the Viking menace?

Carleton Beals was among America’s most distinctive foreign correspondents. His colorful, combatively critical reporting of U.S. intervention in Latin America had a fearless energy and authority that won him millions of readers. He interviewed the Nicaraguan rebel leader Sandino in the camp from which he fought thousands of U.S marines in 1928, covered two revolutions in Cuba (1933 and 1959), and interpreted the Mexican Revolution for American readers. Beals’s dispatches and features appeared regularly in the Nation, New Republic, Current History and the Progressive, and often in the New York Times. Time magazine called him “the best informed and the most awkward living writer on Latin America.” Forty books, including chronicles, political analysis and novels, drawn mostly from his travels and wide-ranging contacts in what he called “America South” made that characterization apt. But Beals was also an eyewitness reporter on Mussolini’s rise in Italy. He wrote on U.S. topics too, such as Louisiana’s Huey Long, and the environmental damage and rural migration in the 1930s caused by emerging agri-business in America’s South and West. Many of his books were best-sellers, their evidence-based assessments earning at least grudging respect even among those who took issue with his indictments of U.S. economic and government elites. At once biography and analytical history, The Rebel Scribe tells the story of a fiercely independent non-conformist. It probes Beals’s interactions with political leaders, democrats, demagogues, populists and revolutionaries, and reveals how his ability to immerse himself in their societies gave his accounts a palpable authenticity and, time has shown, a prescience that is almost prophetic. Christopher Neal’s layered narrative traces how Beals identified patterns of political behavior and concepts that later became fully-fledged schools of thought, such as the idea of a Third World, dependency theory, U.S. neo-imperialism, and aspects of critical theory. His story sheds light on the evolution of U.S. foreign policy and intervention, from Mexico and Nicaragua in the 1920s, to Cuba and Vietnam in the 1960s. It reveals the fraught trail that faced—and still faces—contrarian journalists who challenge conventional assumptions, while also showing how probing journalism drives change.

"If earlier scholarship on apocalyptic literature was once described as "clueless about apocalypticism, " it was due in part to a focus on questions of definition, literary genre, and theological eccentricity. Richard A. Horsley takes a different approach, letting the language of the apocalypses themselves reveal their chief concern: the expanding domination by foreign empires and the form that popular defiance should take. Most telling are the traces where Judean scribes wrote themselves into their texts - and thus into God's purposes in history."--Jaquette du livre.

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls altered our understanding of the development of the biblical text, the history and literature of Second Temple Judaism, and the thought of the early Christian community. Questions continue to surround the relationship between the caves in which the scrolls were found and the nearby settlement at Khirbet Qumran. In Scribes and Scrolls at Qumran, Sidnie White Crawford combines the conclusions of the first generation of scrolls scholars that have withstood the test of time, new insights that have emerged since the complete publication of the scrolls corpus, and the much more complete archaeological picture that we now have of Khirbet Qumran. She creates a new synthesis of text and archaeology that yields a convincing history of and purpose for the Qumran settlement and its associated caves.

Judaism and Christianity both arose in times of empire, with roots in Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman periods. In order to understand these religious movements, we must first understand the history and society of these imperial cultures. In these formative years, wisdom and apocalyptic traditions flourished as two significant religious forms. In Scribes, Visionaries, and the Politics of Second Temple Judea, distinguished New Testament scholar Richard A. Horsley analyzes the function and meaning of these religious movements within their social context, providing essential background for the development of early Judaism and early Christianity. It is an ideal textbook for classes on the rise of Judaism or the Second Temple period, as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls and Apocrypha.

As a new Initiate with the Alchemists' Council, Jaden is trained to maintain the elemental balance of the world, while fending off interference by the malevolent Rebel Branch. Bees are disappearing from the pages of the ancient manuscripts in Council dimension and from the outside world, threatening its very existence. Jaden navigates alchemy's complexities, but the more she learns, the more she begins to question Council practices. Erasure, a procedure designed not only to remove individuals from Council dimension but also from the memories of other alchemists, troubles Jaden, and she uses her ingenuity to remember one of the erased people. In doing so, she realizes the Rebel Branch might not be the enemy she was taught to fight against. Jaden is caught between her responsibility to the Council and her growing allegiance to the rebels, as the Council finds itself at the brink of war. She is faced with an ethical dilemma involving the free will of all humanity, and must decide whether or not she can save the worlds.