Pitcairn Island -- remote and wild in the South Pacific, a place of towering cliffs and lashing surf -- is home to descendants of Fletcher Christian and the Mutiny on the Bounty crew, who fled there with a group of Tahitian maidens after deposing their captain, William Bligh, and seizing his ship in 1789. Shrouded in myth, the island was idealized by outsiders, who considered it a tropical Shangri-La. But as the world was to discover two centuries after the mutiny, it was also a place of sinister secrets. In this riveting account, Kathy Marks tells the disturbing saga and asks profound questions about human behavior. In 2000, police descended on the British territory -- a lump of volcanic rock hundreds of miles from the nearest inhabited land -- to investigate an allegation of rape of a fifteen-year-old girl. They found themselves speaking to dozens of women and uncovering a trail of child abuse dating back at least three generations. Scarcely a Pitcairn man was untainted by the allegations, it seemed, and barely a girl growing up on the island, home to just forty-seven people, had escaped. Yet most islanders, including the victims' mothers, feigned ignorance or claimed it was South Pacific "culture" -- the Pitcairn "way of life." The ensuing trials would tear the close-knit, interrelated community apart, for every family contained an offender or a victim -- often both. The very future of the island, dependent on its men and their prowess in the longboats, appeared at risk. The islanders were resentful toward British authorities, whom they regarded as colonialists, and the newly arrived newspeople, who asked nettlesome questions and whose daily dispatches were closely scrutinized on the Internet. The court case commanded worldwide attention. And as a succession of men passed through Pitcairn's makeshift courtroom, disturbing questions surfaced. How had the abuse remained hidden so long? Was it inevitable in such a place? Was Pitcairn a real-life Lord of the Flies? One of only six journalists to cover the trials, Marks lived on Pitcairn for six weeks, with the accused men as her neighbors. She depicts, vividly, the attractions and everyday difficulties of living on a remote tropical island. Moreover, outside court, she had daily encounters with the islanders, not all of them civil, and observed firsthand how the tiny, claustrophobic community ticked: the gossip, the feuding, the claustrophobic intimacy -- and the power dynamics that had allowed the abuse to flourish. Marks followed the legal and human saga through to its recent conclusion. She uncovers a society gone badly astray, leaving lives shattered and codes broken: a paradise truly lost.

For more than a century, urban North Africans have sought to protect and revive Andalusi music, a prestigious Arabic-language performance tradition said to originate in the “lost paradise” of medieval Islamic Spain. Yet despite the Andalusi repertoire’s enshrinement as the national classical music of postcolonial North Africa, its devotees continue to describe it as being in danger of disappearance. In The Lost Paradise, Jonathan Glasser explores the close connection between the paradox of patrimony and the questions of embodiment, genealogy, secrecy, and social class that have long been central to Andalusi musical practice. Through a historical and ethnographic account of the Andalusi music of Algiers, Tlemcen, and their Algerian and Moroccan borderlands since the end of the nineteenth century, Glasser shows how anxiety about Andalusi music’s disappearance has emerged from within the practice itself and come to be central to its ethos. The result is a sophisticated examination of musical survival and transformation that is also a meditation on temporality, labor, colonialism and nationalism, and the relationship of the living to the dead.

Crime novel. Vero Beach, Florida: (85k words) Rick Edwards comes roaring to life as a troubled young man trying to find his way in the world when he receives a ?calling? to become a police officer in a scenic seaside resort town. Rick learns what it means to strap on a gun belt and protect a great community from those who seek to do the unimaginable. There?s a fuzzy line separating right from wrong - and Rick comes out swinging. Rick reveals himself to be a clever street-smart cop while dealing with missing kids, battered spouses, crazed derelicts, and a bank robber, too. He handles them all with a positive mindset and a twisted sense of humor. Rick learns to hunt crime. He enjoys it. And he has a unique ability to find clarity in the confusion of chaos. He?s open minded to the helpless, yet spring-loaded for violence. You'll feel the passion in his triumphs and the desperate ache of his failures. The day comes when Rick lands his first major case - the murder of Caylee Davison, a prominent local businesswoman ? being a girl he once knew as a reckless teenager. After a careful review of evidence in an apparent open & shut case, Rick discovers an ulterior motive; and he starts to dig deeper. Rick teams up with a trusted friend from the state police and the two chase down leads in the flip-side of paradise. A web of lies begins to unravel exposing a notorious powerbroker. When Rick gets too close to the truth, a mobster targets his own family and all hell breaks loose in this true-to-life crime story. Rick believes most bad guys simply need some direction, while others... just need killing. While reading LOST, you can almost feel the warm surf lapping at your feet. The swanky beach lifestyle and local history are spellbinding.

A steamy tale of sexual obsession and an all-or-nothing love, this sensuous novel contrasts defiantly freewheeling passions against the rigidity of society and the constraints on fulfillment in life and love.

Sheluna is strong and wise beyond her twenty years, and she is ready to assume her role as the next high priestess of Holy Ground. She has all the qualities of a great leader-she is open-minded, spirited, and courageous. She is loved and respected by all the people and creatures surrounding her. Now her destiny rests on the other side of one crucial and dangerous test. Set in Holy Ground, a real city that existed over nine thousand years ago and lasted for over fifteen centuries in central Turkey, Sheluna's story is imaginative historical fiction based on fascinating fact gleaned from extensive research into the excavations of Çatalhöyük, the real city that inspired the story of Holy Ground. Home to an advanced egalitarian society, Çatalhöyük's legacy is rich with thought-provoking themes of equality, Earth worship, and the importance of ritual and symbology. Modern humans can learn much from our ancestors of prehistory (a big part of which is "her story"). The people of Holy Ground called it Paradise-the paradise before the fall.

The fortunes of the late nineteenth century’s imperial and industrial powers depended on a single raw material—rubber—with only one source: the Amazon basin. And so began the scramble for the Amazon—a decades-long conflict that found Britain, France, Belgium, and the United States fighting with and against the new nations of Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil for the forest’s riches. In the midst of this struggle, Euclides da Cunha, engineer, journalist, geographer, political theorist, and one of Brazil’s most celebrated writers, led a survey expedition to the farthest reaches of the river, among the world’s most valuable, dangerous, and little-known landscapes. The Scramble for the Amazon tells the story of da Cunha’s terrifying journey, the unfinished novel born from it, and the global strife that formed the backdrop for both. Haunted by his broken marriage, da Cunha trekked through a beautiful region thrown into chaos by guerrilla warfare, starving migrants, and native slavery. All the while, he worked on his masterpiece, a nationalist synthesis of geography, philosophy, biology, and journalism he named the Lost Paradise. Da Cunha intended his epic to unveil the Amazon’s explorers, spies, natives, and brutal geopolitics, but, as Susanna B. Hecht recounts, he never completed it—his wife’s lover shot him dead upon his return. At once the biography of an extraordinary writer, a masterly chronicle of the social, political, and environmental history of the Amazon, and a superb translation of the remaining pieces of da Cunha’s project, The Scramble for the Amazon is a work of thrilling intellectual ambition.