Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness’s Under the Glacier is a one-of-a-kind masterpiece, a wryly provocative novel at once earthy and otherworldly. At its outset, the Bishop of Iceland dispatches a young emissary to investigate certain charges against the pastor at Snæfells Glacier, who, among other things, appears to have given up burying the dead. But once he arrives, the emissary finds that this dereliction counts only as a mild eccentricity in a community that regards itself as the center of the world and where Creation itself is a work in progress. What is the emissary to make, for example, of the boarded-up church? What about the mysterious building that has sprung up alongside it? Or the fact that Pastor Primus spends most of his time shoeing horses? Or that his wife, Ua (pronounced “ooh-a,” which is what men invariably sputter upon seeing her), is rumored never to have bathed, eaten, or slept? Piling improbability on top of improbability, Under the Glacier overflows with comedy both wild and deadpan as it conjures a phantasmagoria as beguiling as it is profound.

Being a pagan in a small town west of the Mississippi is not easy. Calvin Pfeiffer, a German immigrant working for the University of Iowa, has chosen the rural life in Walnut Grove as a place to settle down and start a family. Except for the local group of fundamentalist Christians-Lyle Anderson in particular-Calvin has decided that Walnut Grove really is not a bad place to live. When Megan rides her bike up his road and stops to chat, Calvin realizes she is the woman of his dreams. As Calvin and Megan fall in love, a group of local fundamentalists headed by Lyle-an influential conservative who has a reputation for ruining the lives of those who dare to cross him-gathers steam about the issue of the local school curriculum, most notably against the idea that glaciers formed the Iowa landscape. It is not long before the fundamentalists accuse Calvin of not living up to community standards, and they argue that the school curriculum promotes promiscuity and homosexuality. While Calvin forges alliances to defeat their antiquated ideas, business school graduates-who happen to be gay-move to town and assist the town in recovering from economic hardship. An all-out war begins and culminates in a virulent school board meeting that will determine the outcome for this quaint town embroiled in controversy.

On most days, the wilderness gave me peace. But not tonight. In a land sculpted by glaciers, the forest is on fire. Thick smoke chokes the mountain air and casts an apocalyptic glow over the imposing peaks and vistas of Montana’s Glacier National Park. When firefighters are called in to dig firebreaks near the small town bordering the park, a crew member is shocked to unearth a shallow grave containing human remains. Park Police Officer Monty Harris is summoned to the site to conduct an excavation. But with an incendiary monster threatening to consume the town, Monty seeks help from Gretchen Larson, the county’s lead crime scene investigator. While the two work frantically to determine the true identity of the victim, a teenager suddenly disappears from one of the campgrounds in Glacier. Could the cases somehow be connected? As chances for recovery of the missing boy grow slimmer and the FBI finds only dead ends, Gretchen and Monty desperately race to fit all the pieces together while battling time, the elements, and their own unresolved inner conflicts. The Weight of Night is the latest novel in an award-winning series which “paints a moving picture of complex, flawed people fighting to make their way in a wilderness where little is black or white” (Publishers Weekly). It is a gripping tribute to the power of redemption set against one of America’s most majestic and unforgiving landscapes.

Climate change is producing profound changes globally. Yet we still know little about how it affects real people in real places on a daily basis because most of our knowledge comes from scientific studies that try to estimate impacts and project future climate scenarios. This book is different, illustrating in vivid detail how people in the Andes have grappled with the effects of climate change and ensuing natural disasters for more than half a century. In Peru's Cordillera Blanca mountain range, global climate change has generated the world's most deadly glacial lake outburst floods and glacier avalanches, killing 25,000 people since 1941. As survivors grieved, they formed community organizations to learn about precarious glacial lakes while they sent priests to the mountains, hoping that God could calm the increasingly hostile landscape. Meanwhile, Peruvian engineers working with miniscule budgets invented innovative strategies to drain dozens of the most unstable lakes that continue forming in the twenty first century. But adaptation to global climate change was never simply about engineering the Andes to eliminate environmental hazards. Local urban and rural populations, engineers, hydroelectric developers, irrigators, mountaineers, and policymakers all perceived and responded to glacier melting differently-based on their own view of an ideal Andean world. Disaster prevention projects involved debates about economic development, state authority, race relations, class divisions, cultural values, the evolution of science and technology, and shifting views of nature. Over time, the influx of new groups to manage the Andes helped transform glaciated mountains into commodities to consume. Locals lost power in the process and today comprise just one among many stakeholders in the high Andes-and perhaps the least powerful. Climate change transformed a region, triggering catastrophes while simultaneously jumpstarting modernization processes. This book's historical perspective illuminates these trends that would be ignored in any scientific projections about future climate scenarios.

A haunting crime novel set in Glacier National Park about a man who finds himself at odds with the dark heart of the wild—and the even darker heart of human nature. It was a clear night in Glacier National Park. Fourteen-year-old Ted Systead and his father were camping beneath the rugged peaks and starlit skies when something unimaginable happened: a grizzly bear attacked Ted’s father and dragged him to his death. Now, twenty years later, as Special Agent for the Department of the Interior, Ted gets called back to investigate a crime that mirrors the horror of that night. Except this time, the victim was tied to a tree before the mauling. Ted teams up with one of the park officers—a man named Monty, whose pleasant exterior masks an all-too-vivid knowledge of the hazardous terrain surrounding them. Residents of the area turn out to be suspicious of outsiders and less than forthcoming. Their intimate connection to the wild forces them to confront nature, and their fellow man, with equal measures of reverence and ruthlessness. As the case progresses with no clear answers, more than human life is at stake—including that of the majestic creature responsible for the attack. Ted’s search for the truth ends up leading him deeper into the wilderness than he ever imagined, on the trail of a killer, until he reaches a shocking and unexpected personal conclusion. As intriguing and alluring as bestselling crime novels by C.J. Box, Louise Penny, and William Kent Krueger, as atmospheric and evocative as the nature writing of John Krakauer and Cheryl Strayed, The Wild Inside is a gripping debut novel about the perilous, unforgiving intersection between man and nature.

From its humble beginnings in the nineteenth century, Seventh-day Adventism has remarkably grown to become one of America's largest, home-grown faiths, numbering nearly nineteen million members worldwide. Yet Adventism harbors dark secrets within its history. This is the true story of how one Adventist pastor, and university and seminary professor discovered these dark secrets and learned through painful, personal experience that neither the denomination nor its doctrine could be trusted. As his odyssey takes him from pastoral assignments in rural and urban congregations and finally into teaching religion at an Adventist university, he suddenly finds himself caught up in the maelstrom of a church's greatest theological crisis. For him, the denomination's theology and practice agonizingly unravel, forcing him to choose between loyalty to his church, his vocation, and his personal integrity. Rich in anecdotes and personal experiences, Out of Adventism guides readers interested in religious history, cults, and sects through the ins and outs of a religious community in crisis. Along the way, the reader not only gets an insider's view of Adventism, but also discovers a careful critique of the peculiar teachings of Seventh-day Adventism.

The contemporary Christian church is in critical decline, both in membership and finances. All attempts at reversal are failing, primarily because of the consuming socioeconomic-secular dynamic in which society is immersed in its self-destructive course. Consequently, Christian imagery is losing its conceivability and credibility, and past motivations that once encouraged belief have lost their appeal. Without these as points of contact, the demise of the institutional church will be relentless, despite all efforts to halt it. Yet, as at other crisis points in history, the divine promise has been to raise a “faithful remnant” with sufficient promise to outlast whatever the societal demise. After carefully analyzing the ingredients of our societal crisis, the author develops the contours of a “Remnant Church” to be set in place now within the present institutional churches. This necessitates distilling a vital spirituality and discerning the heart of a preservable tradition, sufficient to claim both personal and communal commitment. Thereby prepared for the long haul, the Remnant Church can emerge as a prophetic alternative.

Since that fateful day she was snatched from her job and turned into a Vampire, Mandy's life has sucked-literally. Forced to become an assassin for the Vampire Council, she finds solace in taking out the scumbag rogues she's often assigned to kill. Things go south when she realizes her next mark is an old coworker from her human days...a seriously hot one, who she had deep feelings for. Worse, the council was wrong. He's not a villain, but a protector. One she refuses to kill, regardless of orders. Glacier's astonished to come face to face with Mandy in a dark alley. Even more so to learn the sweet one-time human is now an assassin-assigned to kill him, no less. His orders are clear. Eliminate her. But what's a GarLycan to do when duty conflicts with his desire to protect the woman he once had feelings for? He's about to find out.

First Published in 1995. This book focuses on the role and significance of texts and textualism for anthropology and ethnography and, more specifically, the understanding of particular aspects of Icelandic society and history. The discussion is centred on a range of issues; moving between general social theory and ethnographic details, the immediate present and the distant past, language and production, fieldwork and the act of writing, texts (sagas, novels, and ethnographies) and real life. In each case, however, it draws attention to what may be called a pragmatist approach, a concern with action and agency as they constitute, and are constituted by, social life. Such an approach, I hold, is an important and timely remedy to current textualism, the trendy theoretical tradition often described as the linguistic turn.