Shelly Lantz is a wife, homemaker, and joyful friend. If you met her today, you'd never know her untold story, the harrowing true tale of a young American girl who found herself abandoned in a stench-ridden Turkish prison cell. It's a story like none other, and in this book, Shelly shares the most intimate, devastating, and ultimately miraculous series of events you've ever read. When news of Shelly's imprisonment in Turkey hit airwaves around the world, her cries for help went unheard. Alone and forgotten, she had countless hours to reminisce how she ended up in a cold, dank cell on the other side of the world. Her traumatic childhood and a series of bad decisions had long caged her in a world of violence, drugs, and prostitution. While languishing in prison, a Bible was miraculously smuggled to Shelly by an American soldier and his wife. The events and miracles that followed are extraordinary and will be an ever-present reminder of God's love and grace.

A remarkable team of expert authors provide firsthand accounts from survivors of disasters around the globe, helping readers to understand the impact of trauma as well as interventions to heal. Around the world, scores of those who survive disasters have demonstrated a remarkable resilience that enables them to live happy, productive lives. Mass Trauma and Emotional Healing around the World: Rituals and Practices for Resilience and Meaning-Making documents the unique yet universal reaction to traumatic events and sets the agenda for future development of therapeutic interventions research and theory. An integrative approach to rituals and healing methods is highlighted to address and help prevent human-made traumas and prepare generations to cope with natural disasters in a more effective way. Chapters focus on rituals and practices for resilience after mass trauma, showing, among other findings, that storytelling, music, humor, and a belief in fate help people survive disasters worldwide.

“[Akunin] writes gloriously pre-Soviet prose, sophisticated and suffused in Slavic melanchioly and thoroughly worthy of nineteenth-century forebearers like Gogol and Chekhov.” –Time It is 1877, and war has broken out between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. The Bulgarian front resounds with the thunder of cavalry charges, the roar of artillery, and the clash of steel on steel during the world’s last great horse-and-cannon conflict. Amid the treacherous atmosphere of a nineteenth-century Russian field army, former diplomat and detective extraordinaire Erast Fandorin finds his most confounding case. It’s difficulties are only compounded by the presence of Varya Suvorova, a deadly serious (and seriously beautiful) woman with revolutionary ideals who has disguised herself as a boy in order to find her respected comrade– and fiancé–Pyotr Yablokov, an army cryptographer. Even after Fandorin saves her life, Varya can hardly bear to thank such a “lackey of the throne” for his efforts. But when Yablokov is accused of espionage and faces imprisonment and execution, Varya must turn to Fandorin to find the real culprit . . . a mission that forces her to reconsider his courage, deductive mind, and piercing gaze. Filled with the same delicious detail, ingenious plotting, and subtle satire as The Winter Queen and Murder on the Leviathan, The Turkish Gambit confirms Boris Akunin’s status as a master of the historical thriller–and Erast Fandorin as a detective for the ages. From the Hardcover edition.