This fascinating account of one of the state's largest resorts is richly embellished with old photographs and illustrations. Donna Fisher Braig covers the prosperity of the area, the community, the people, historical houses and farms, the Islands, and the many changes. In the 1960's, the park's decline started and the area took on a new look and atmosphere. The progress and development of Buckeye Lake in the '80s and '90s rounds out a long and important history. The author's accounting of this place she calls home is truly original and moving, and written from the heart.

On July 4, 1825, construction of the Ohio-Erie Canal began with the turning of the first shovel of earth in the Buckeye Lake area. Completed in 1830, it formed the Licking Summit Reservoir, which became known as Buckeye Lake. To increase weekend business on its streetcars, the Columbus, Buckeye Lake and Newark Traction Company bought land at Buckeye Lake and built an amusement park, advertising it as “the Playground of Ohio.” The Buckeye Lake Amusement Park and the Buckeye Lake Yacht Club on Watkins Island were very popular, and during the big band era, many visitors came to dance at the Crystal Pavilion and the Lake Breeze Pier Ballroom, which featured the sounds of Harry James, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Stan Kenton, Lawrence Welk, and Louis Armstrong.

An original collaboration among five of the genre’s brightest authors, A Glimpse of Darkness is urban fantasy as it’s never been done before. Originally featured on Suvudu.com, this is Random House’s first multicontributor chain story in which the readers voted on the outcome—now published here in its entirety as a thrilling eBook. Munira bint Azhar, the half-human daughter of a djinn, is a skilled Retriever in the city of Port Nightfall. Now the powerful sorcerer Temesis has given Munira a dire ultimatum: steal a magical lantern—the Light of Ta’lab—from the horrific undead kingdom below the city, or watch her father die at Temesis’s hand. Will she be able to retrieve the lantern and save her father’s life, or will they both perish in the process? With an Afterword featuring the choices readers were given at the end of each chapter.

Eight stories from Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. Jack Eddy, a man driven to succeed, is an assistant manager of the Akron branch of Wellington's National Detective Agency, circa 1938. This collection was granted a Thrillie Award from Thrilling Detective as best of 2006.

Where did big bands and swing music go? They didn't leave. . . but many Americans actually believe they disappeared along with ballrooms, jukeboxes, bobby sox and zoot suits decades ago. Band leader Brooks Tegler, who has recreated the great music of World War II with his Army Air Corps Review Big Band, offers a good response. "In order for something to come back, it needs to have gone away. Big bands have wrongly been put in that category. They never went away." And that's the essence of the chapters of my book about America's big bands, ballrooms and dancing's past and present. And there's a good look at the future through the eyes of a number of young bandleaders from the east to west coast who carry on in the tradition of Guy Lombardo, Glenn Miller, Harry James, Woody Herman, Duke Ellington and a host of other music legends in their own distinctive way. The struggle to survive in the music business hasn't been without losses and a need for life support. It did when Miller, Benny Goodman, James and Ellington were in their heyday. It's a financially precarious business regardless of your talent. Inevitably, music and dancing evolved and matured. The reasons are numerous and linked to our heritage. But like marching bands on the 4th of July, imagine a country club new year's eve without live dance music and a big band. Think about the many community social events and high school and college proms let alone wedding receptions that still insist on having live bands to play the foxtrots and swing numbers people enjoy. My research shows that while there were approximately 800 big bands on the road during the swing era of the 1940s, today there are nearly 1,300 big bands, according to a Google search and a review of hundreds of territory bands. Consequently, neither the bands nor the music vanished. . . they scattered throughout the American countryside.

At six years of age, the orphaned Windwalker, a.k.a., "Walker," is given to LDS Placement Services by the Navajo Indian tribe to be placed with an adoptive LDS family. In the loving and Christ-centered environment his foster home provides, Walker matures physically, mentally, and spiritually. As the years pass and Walker turns fifteen, he and his foster family anxiously await the necessary tribal consent for his adoption to take place. During this time Walker has a vision in which he sees himself entrusted with the responsibility of getting an urgent message to his people. He is to tell them that they will not become a great nation until they lay down the false traditions of their fathers and take up the true traditions of the ancient ones. As Walker prepares mentally and spiritually for his mission and for the long-awaited adoption, he is unaware of the forces working against him and his family to prevent the adoption. When Walker finds out who is responsible, he puts together a diabolical plan to get revenge. With a hate-filled heart and his vision all but forgotten, he executes his plan and his life spirals out of control. When Walker discovers he is dying, he knows he has reached the point of no return. He is grief-stricken as he realizes that he has failed not only God, but his beloved family and his people. He is afraid there is no hope for him either in this life or in the next so he goes to live alone on a mesa to pray for forgiveness and to await his impending death. Can Walker ever be forgiven for what he has done? Will Walker's urgent message to his people ever be delivered?

My Journey down the Reincarnation Highway is the first book of the author’s four book spiritual memoir series. In this personal account, Frank Mares details how he discovered the fact of reincarnation and explores what he did in some of his prior lives. More people than you would believe have prior life memories. This book tells how the author acquired psychic ability in his middle age. With this new gift, he recovered facts about nine of his prior lives, most of which involved violent, bloody deaths. The most recent life was that of a young German Wehrmacht sergeant who was ambushed and killed by Russians during the night of May 1, 1944, in a dark Estonian farmhouse. Not being satisfied with just discovering his past lives, Mares goes on a spiritual mission to find out why he kept dying violently. The answers do not come easily, but by using a team of three world class psychics he eventually tracks down the shocking reason for all his brutal deaths. The psychic team finds that within the soul of this normal small businessman resides a brutal, stone-cold killer from the 1600s who surprisingly was the revered founder of a gentile noble family. As part of his souls continuing quest for redemption, Mares hopes to salvage the dark time in his soul’s past into something that could help others today. His experiences show that death is only a transition phase, and that it should not be feared. His book also reveals that reincarnation is actually a well-designed, organized system that allows souls to learn personalized life lessons over a surprising number of lives. If you read this book, you will never look at life (and death) in the same way again.

In Lancaster, Ohio, 1800-2000, David R. Contosta tells the story of one American town as it has evolved over a two hundred-year period. Contosta has found that Lancaster was never the sort of idyllic community that writers once imagined for small towns; nor was it the social and cultural wasteland that social critics portrayed during most of the twentieth century. In explaining why Lancaster has remained a small but relatively successful community for some twenty decades, Contosta looks at various factors, including location, natural resources, technology, transportation systems, local leaders, historic preservation, awareness of local history, and national as well as international events. As the twenty-first century begins, the widespread use of the automobile, advances in technology, and Lancaster's proximity to the state capital, Columbus, are transforming the community into something new -- part town, part city, and part suburb - -a phenomenon that is emerging in hundreds of older communities throughout the United States. Contosta's history of the development of one small town, and the over one hundred illustrations enhancing the text, offer a microcosm of the profound changes in American life over two centuries.