Gold! Rock City, a small isolated town located near timberline, has a gold mine. Crystolians from the planet Argos need gold. Recent college graduate, Derek Lang, is fired by his gold-lusting boss, Captain De Prive, who then schemes how he can take over Rock City's mine. Derek, angry with De Prive and also bitter because God did not save his wife's life, returns to Rock City. When he learns his town has decided to loan gold to aliens, he shows hostility toward Laird, the Crystolian leader, and his son, Raynor, who commands the spaceships that brought their miners. Raynor earns his trust and friendship while they prospect to locate a site for an Argos mine. A trip to Argos restores Derek's faith in God. During his three years there, De Prive, along with his corrupt friends, amass enough money to pull off De Prive's scheme. Their loan paid, Crystolians, who touch down to visit, find strangers mining, and the townspeople gone, including Derek, his wife, Angelina, and their son, Robin. Where are they? From the author of Lives Intertwined.

War photographer Lynsey Addario's memoir It's What I Do is the story of how the relentless pursuit of truth, in virtually every major theatre of war in the twenty-first century, has shaped her life. Lynsey Addario was just finding her way as a photographer when September 11th changed the world. One of the few photojournalists with experience in Afghanistan, when she is asked to return and cover the American invasion, she makes a decision - not to stay home, not to lead a quiet or predictable life, but to set out across the world, face the chaos of crisis, and make a name for herself. Addario travels with purpose and bravery, photographing the Afghan people before and after the Taliban reign, the civilian casualties and misunderstood insurgents of the Iraq War, as well as the burned villages and countless dead in Darfur. She exposes a culture of violence against women in the Congo and tells the riveting story of her headline-making kidnapping by pro-Qaddafi forces in the Libyan civil war. As a woman photojournalist Addario is determined to be taken as seriously as her male peers. She fights her way into a boys' club of a profession; and once there, rather than choose between her personal life and her career, Addario learns to strike a necessary balance. Watching uprisings unfold and people fight to the death for their freedom, Addario understands she is documenting not only news but also the fate of society. It's What I Do is more than just a snapshot of life on the front lines; it bears witness to the human cost of war.

Written by a former hostage negotiator, Taken Hostage provides specific daily behavioral, situational, and long-term psychological strategies used successfully by hostages who survived months and years of mental and physical torture by terrorists, religious extremists, and criminal gangs. The book describes in detail the five stages of a hostage taking. Whether taken hostage for ransom, political leverage, or as a human shield, the book suggests what treatment the hostage can expect during each stage and how to best counter them. Taken Hostage describes how a hostage can moderate the physical and mental effects caused by physical tortures such as binding, suspension, beatings, starvation, and sexual assault and against mental tortures such as social deprivation, false executions, and brainwashing. The book identifies the mental hazards of depression, suicide, and barbed-wire psychosis and how to combat them. Particular strategies such as passive compliance and humanizing will instruct the hostage on how to apply recognized psychological strategies to the hostages advantage, and as such, play a more active role in their day-to-day physical treatment and sustain positive mental health. The book stresses safer travel planning as the most important strategy against being kidnapped in the first place. It details hotel security, insider accomplices, finding the right hotel and the right taxi, and how to use countersurveillance techniques to identify and thwart a potential kidnapping. The book coaches the hostages family and employers back home how to effectively manage the media and one another, thereby reducing the incidence of hostage and family PTSD and reintegrating a changed person back into their changed family. The detailed survival strategies will inspire a hostages will to live and sustain a familys hope. It is written for domestic and international travelers, UN and NGO volunteers, military personnel, and anyone in harms way.

This thrilling volume tells the stories of young people who have faced some of the most extreme situations in modern times, making abstract stories of violence real for readers. From Bring Back Our Girls to less publicized instances, this book provides political context and gives a human face to victims of terrorism. The book helps readers connect with victims of violence on a personal level.

Tales about organ transplants appear in mythology and folk stories, and surface in documents from medieval times, but only during the past twenty years has medical knowledge and technology been sufficiently advanced for surgeons to perform thousands of transplants each year. In the majority of cases individuals diagnosed as "brain dead" are the source of the organs without which transplants could not take place. In this compelling and provocative examination, Margaret Lock traces the discourse over the past thirty years that contributed to the locating of a new criterion of death in the brain, and its routinization in clinical practice in North America. She compares this situation with that in Japan where, despite the availability of the necessary technology and expertise, brain death was legally recognized only in 1997, and then under limited and contested circumstances. Twice Dead explores the cultural, historical, political, and clinical reasons for the ready acceptance of the new criterion of death in North America and its rejection, until recently, in Japan, with the result that organ transplantation has been severely restricted in that country. This incisive and timely discussion demonstrates that death is not self-evident, that the space between life and death is historically and culturally constructed, fluid, multiple, and open to dispute. In addition to an analysis of that professional literature on and popular representations of the subject, Lock draws on extensive interviews conducted over ten years with physicians working in intensive care units, transplant surgeons, organ recipients, donor families, members of the general public in both Japan and North America, and political activists in Japan opposed to the recognition of brain death. By showing that death can never be understood merely as a biological event, and that cultural, medical, legal, and political dimensions are inevitably implicated in the invention of brain death, Twice Dead confronts one of the most troubling questions of our era.

"You cursed child! I always knew that you were a baggage from hell! How dare you kill my husband?! You sent him back into the fire and now he's dead!" Koko Magnus, an ugly and useless she-wolf, who was known as the girl who killed her father, got a chance of redemption. There is an opportunity came to give her heart to save her twin sister who was supposed to be the next Luna of the red moon pack. Alpha Niyol, the king of alphas, lost his beloved mate, and for two years he became a shadow of himself which affected his pack and the packs under him. The moon goddess in her good will gave him a second chance mate in the most unexpected way ever... Will he accept another mate?