World War II is raging, but in this dusty backwater of the Belgian Congo, the biggest problem is finding a cold beer. That's the case, at least, for Hooper Taliaferro, a U.S. government gofer sent to Africa on a vague errand related to the war effort. What he finds at the failing Congo-Ruizi plantation won't help the Allies much. Like colonialism itself, the owner is dying of a slow poison, and neither his staff nor his sluttish wife can muster the energy to care. But along with Hooper arrives Dr. Mary Finney, a formidable missionary with both moral outrage and sleuthing skills to spare. The Devil in the Bush introduces Dr. Finney as a sort of blunt-spoken Yankee Miss Marple, with likable, lightweight Hooper as her faithful scribe.

Scruffy soldiers with guns pointed in all directions were scattered around my yard when I returned from teaching. "What's up?" I asked in a shaky voice that was supposed to come out calm. Liberian soldiers were scary. "Your dog ate one of the Superintendent's guinea fowl," the sergeant growled. The Superintendent, the governor of Bong County, was apparently quite fond of his fowl birds. But Boy, the perpetrator of the crime, didn't belong to me, and he regarded my cat Rasputin as dinner. "Why don't you arrest him," I suggested helpfully, pointing at Boy. "Not him. You " the sergeant roared. "You are coming with us." The interview wasn't going as planned. "I am not going anywhere with you. He is not my dog," I responded as I disappeared quickly into my house. Yanking a Peace Corps Volunteer out of his home for a dead, want-to-be chicken would have serious repercussions. Or at least I hoped that's what the sergeant would think. He eventually left. At 4:00 a.m., he was back, pounding on my door with the butt of his rifle. "Your dog ate another one of the Superintendent's guinea fowl," Sarge announced with glee at the thought of dragging me off into the dark night. I was beginning to seriously question my decision to join the Peace Corps. Nonetheless, joining was one of the best decisions in my life. The way I was raised and educated, even my DNA, had pointed me in the direction of becoming a Peace Corps Volunteer. But there was more. I grew up in the 60s and was a student at UC Berkeley during the 1964 Free Speech Movement. Civil Rights, the Vietnam War, and the student revolution dramatically affected how I viewed the world. The Bush Devil Ate Sam is story of my experience as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Liberia, West Africa. When I arrived, descendants of freed slaves from America ruled the country with an iron grip while the tribal people were caught in a struggle between modern culture and ancient Africa. Out in the jungle, the Lightning Man was said to make lightning strike people, and the Sassywood Man determined guilt with a red-hot machete. I quickly discovered that being a Peace Corps Volunteer was anything but dull. Army ants invaded our house. Students strolled into class with cans of squirming termites for breakfast. The young man who worked for me calmly announced that the scars running down his chest were the teeth marks of the Poro Bush Devil. There were enough challenges in my teaching job to fill a lifetime, but there were also rewards. For example: my high school seniors took top national honors in social studies, but the Liberian government determined that a student government I created to teach democracy was a threat to Liberia's one party state. My students were to be arrested. I was told to pack my bags. These are just a few of the stories you will find in The Bush Devil Ate Sam. I conclude the book with a short epilogue that traces the history of Liberia from the 60s up to the present and a postscript on the recent Ebola crisis. Half of the profits from this book will be donated to Friends of Liberia, a nonprofit organization that has been in existence since 1980 and is made up of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, people who have served on missions in Liberia, experts on international development, and Liberians. The goal of the organization is "to positively affect Liberia by supporting education, social, economic and humanitarian programs." For more information visit my blog at: wandering-through-time-and-space.me.

Morgan Kingsley, an exorcist with an attitude, returns in this paranormal fantasy follow-up to "The Devil Inside"--but this time a demon is living inside her and Morgan must do everything she can to protect him for the sake of herself and humanity. Original.

In the definitive book on the Bush presidency, a gifted reporter and longtime Bush observer with unprecedented access to the White House offers a revealing and balanced look at this most secretive of administrations.

Legend has it that twenty miles of volcanic rock rising through the landscape of northern Bohemia was the work of the devil, who separated the warring Czechs and Germans by building a wall. The nineteenth-century invention of the Devil's Wall was evidence of rising ethnic tensions. In interwar Czechoslovakia, Sudeten German nationalists conceived a radical mission to try to restore German influence across the region. Mark Cornwall tells the story of Heinz Rutha, an internationally recognized figure in his day, who was the pioneer of a youth movement that emphasized male bonding in its quest to reassert German dominance over Czech space. Through a narrative that unravels the threads of Rutha's own repressed sexuality, Cornwall shows how Czech authorities misinterpreted Rutha's mission as sexual deviance and in 1937 charged him with corrupting adolescents. The resulting scandal led to Rutha's imprisonment, suicide, and excommunication from the nationalist cause he had devoted his life to furthering. Cornwall is the first historian to tackle the long-taboo subject of how youth, homosexuality, and nationalism intersected in a fascist environment. "The Devil's Wall" also challenges the notion that all Sudeten German nationalists were Nazis, and supplies a fresh explanation for Britain's appeasement of Hitler, showing why the British might justifiably have supported the 1930s Sudeten German cause. In this readable biography of an ardent German Bohemian who participated as perpetrator, witness, and victim, Cornwall radically reassesses the Czech-German struggle of early twentieth-century Europe.

Posession. Murder. Mayhem. Let the games begin... Exorcism isn’t a job, it’s a calling—and a curse. Just ask Morgan Kingsley, a woman who has a stronger aura than any Demon. Or so she thought. Now, in a pair of black leather pants and a kick-ass tattoo, Morgan is heading back to Philadelphia after a nasty little exorcism—and her life is about to be turned upside down…by the Demon that’s gotten inside her. Not just any Demon. Six foot five inches of dark, delicious temptation, this one is to die for—that is, if he doesn’t get Morgan killed first. Because while some humans vilify Demons and others idolize them, Morgan’s Demon is leading a war of succession no human has ever imagined. For a woman trying to live a life, and hold on to the almost-perfect man, being possessed by a gorgeous rebel Demon will mean a wild ride of uninhibited thrills, shocking surprises, and pure, unadulterated terror. . . .

“Saudi Arabia is more and more an irrational state—a place that spawns global terrorism even as it succumbs to an ancient and deeply seated isolationism, a kingdom led by a royal family that can’t get out of the way of its own greed. Is this the fulcrum we want the global economy to balance on?” In his explosive New York Times bestseller, See No Evil, former CIA operative Robert Baer exposed how Washington politics drastically compromised the CIA’s efforts to fight global terrorism. Now in his powerful new book, Sleeping with the Devil, Baer turns his attention to Saudi Arabia, revealing how our government’s cynical relationship with our Middle Eastern ally and America’ s dependence on Saudi oil make us increasingly vulnerable to economic disaster and put us at risk for further acts of terrorism. For decades, the United States and Saudi Arabia have been locked in a “harmony of interests.” America counted on the Saudis for cheap oil, political stability in the Middle East, and lucrative business relationships for the United States, while providing a voracious market for the kingdom’ s vast oil reserves. With money and oil flowing freely between Washington and Riyadh, the United States has felt secure in its relationship with the Saudis and the ruling Al Sa’ud family. But the rot at the core of our “friendship” with the Saudis was dramatically revealed when it became apparent that fifteen of the nineteen September 11 hijackers proved to be Saudi citizens. In Sleeping with the Devil, Baer documents with chilling clarity how our addiction to cheap oil and Saudi petrodollars caused us to turn a blind eye to the Al Sa’ud’s culture of bribery, its abysmal human rights record, and its financial support of fundamentalist Islamic groups that have been directly linked to international acts of terror, including those against the United States. Drawing on his experience as a field operative who was on the ground in the Middle East for much of his twenty years with the agency, as well as the large network of sources he has cultivated in the region and in the U.S. intelligence community, Baer vividly portrays our decades-old relationship with the increasingly dysfunctional and corrupt Al Sa’ud family, the fierce anti-Western sentiment that is sweeping the kingdom, and the desperate link between the two. In hopes of saving its own neck, the royal family has been shoveling money as fast as it can to mosque schools that preach hatred of America and to militant fundamentalist groups—an end game just waiting to play out. Baer not only reveals the outrageous excesses of a Saudi royal family completely out of touch with the people of its kingdom, he also takes readers on a highly personal search for the deeper roots of modern terrorism, a journey that returns time again and again to Saudi Arabia: to the Wahhabis, the powerful Islamic sect that rules the Saudi street; to the Taliban and al Qaeda, both of which Saudi Arabia helped to underwrite; and to the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the most active and effective terrorist groups in existence, which the Al Sa’ud have sheltered and funded. The money and arms that we send to Saudi Arabia are, in effect, being used to cut our own throat, Baer writes, but America might have only itself to blame. So long as we continue to encourage the highly volatile Saudi state to bank our oil under its sand—and so long as we continue to grab at the Al Sa’ud’s money—we are laying the groundwork for a potential global economic catastrophe.

The film's troublesome production schedule is brought vividly to life through Tony Earnshaw's enthusiastic style - including new research and original interviews. Earnshaw's book tracks the film's development from the original ghost story Casting the Runes by M R James through the various shooting scripts, alternative titles, and the challenging production work, to the final theatrical release. Along the way there are anecdotes, analysis and fascinating insights into British movie making in the 1950s, as well as previously unseen production designs by Sir Ken Adam, who went on to create the gadgets and secret bases that helped make the Bond series an international phenomenon. With a comprehensive location guide and biographies of all the onstage and backstage players, Beating The Devil - the Making of Night of the Demon is the definitive book on what has been described as "The Casablanca of Horror Films".

"Shocking in its disclosures, elegantly crafted, and faultlessly measured in its judgments."-Roger Morris, author of Richard Milhous Nixon and Partners in Power How did the deeply flawed George W. Bush ascend to the highest office in the nation, what forces abetted his rise, and-perhaps most important-were those forces really vanquished by Obama's election? Award-winning investigative journalist Russ Baker gives us the answers in Family of Secrets, a compelling and startling new take on the Bush dynasty and the shadowy elite that has quietly steered the American republic for the past half century and more. Baker shows how this network of figures in intelligence, the military, oil, and finance enabled-and in turn benefited handsomely from-the Bushes' perch at the highest levels of government. As Baker reveals, this deeply entrenched elite remains in power regardless of who sits in the Oval Office. Family of Secrets offers countless disclosures that challenge the conventional accounts of such central events as the JFK assassination and Watergate. It includes an inside account of George W.'s cynical religious conversion and the untold real background to the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina. Baker's narrative is gripping, sobering, and deeply sourced. It will change the way we understand not just the Bush years, but a half century of postwar history-and the present.

New York Times bestseller M. C. Beaton's cranky, crafty Agatha Raisin—now the star of a hit T.V. show—is back on the case again in Beating About the Bush. She won’t let any moss grow under her feet... When private detective Agatha Raisin comes across a severed leg in a roadside hedge, it looks like she is about to become involved in a particularly gruesome murder. Looks, however, can be deceiving, as Agatha discovers when she is employed to investigate a case of industrial espionage at a factory where nothing is quite what it seems. The factory mystery soon turns to murder and a bad-tempered donkey turns Agatha into a national celebrity, before bringing her ridicule and shame. To add to her woes, Agatha finds herself grappling with growing feelings for her friend and occasional lover, Sir Charles Fraith. Then, as a possible solution to the factory murder unfolds, her own life is thrown into deadly peril. Will Agatha get her man at last? Or will the killer get her first? “M. C. Beaton has a foolproof plot for the village mystery.” —The New York Times Book Review