Remote, forbidding, and volatile, the Caspian Sea long tantalized the world with its vast oil reserves. But outsiders, blocked by the closed Soviet system, couldn’t get to it. Then the Soviet Union collapsed, and a wholesale rush into the region erupted. Along with oilmen, representatives of the world’s leading nations flocked to the Caspian for a share of the thirty billion barrels of proven oil reserves at stake, and a tense geopolitical struggle began. The main players were Moscow and Washington–the former seeking to retain control of its satellite states, and the latter intent on dislodging Russia to the benefit of the West. The Oil and the Glory is the gripping account of this latest phase in the epochal struggle for control of the earth’s “black gold.” Steve LeVine, who was based in the region for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Newsweek, weaves an astonishing tale of high-stakes political gamesmanship, greed, and scandal, set in one of the most opaque corners of the world. In LeVine’s telling, the world’s energy giants jockey for position in the rich Kazakh and Azeri oilfields, while superpowers seek to gain a strategic foothold in the region and to keep each other in check. At the heart of the story is the contest to build and operate energy pipelines out of the landlocked region, the key to controlling the Caspian and its oil. The oil pipeline that resulted, the longest in the world, is among Washington’s greatest foreign policy triumphs in at least a decade and a half. Along the way, LeVine introduces such players as James Giffen, an American moneyman who was also the political “fixer” for oil companies eager to do business on the Caspian and the broker for Kazakhstan’s president and ministers; John Deuss, the flamboyant Dutch oil trader who won big but lost even bigger; Heydar Aliyev, the oft-misunderstood Azeri president who transcended his past as a Soviet Politburo member and masterminded a scheme to loosen Russian control over its former colonies in the Caspian region; and all manner of rogues, adventurers, and others drawn by the irresistible pull of untold riches and the possible “final frontier” of the fossil-fuel era. The broader story is of the geopolitical questions of the Caspian oil bonanza, such as whether Russia can be a trusted ally and trading partner with the West, and what Washington’s entry into this important but chaotic region will mean for its long-term stability. In an intense and suspenseful narrative, The Oil and the Glory is the definitive chronicle of events that are understood by few, but whose political and economic impact will be both profound and lasting.

There is a well of untapped potential inside you, just waiting to be unleashed. Everyone has superpowers when they are a child. We tend to lose them as we grow up, but they're always there, right below the surface, ready for us to reactivate them and fully manifest our human potential. Learn to reclaim your own superhero birthright with The Five Lost Superpowers. As you grew up, you were taught to dampen the natural strength of your Curiosity, Resilience, Authenticity, Compassion, and Playfulness. Understand why you came to believe that powers don't fit in a "grown-up" world, and discover how to reignite them to unlock your best self. Chapter by chapter, you'll explore the innate leadership tool belt you forgot you had and reconnect with the leader you were born to be-the kind of leader and person who knows how to activate superpowers in themselves and everyone around them.

Film critic Abby Olcese invites us to reflect on the great themes of the church calendar for each liturgical season through the lens of film. From superhero movies to classics and arthouse films, this book is more than just a book about movies–it's a model for how we engage with art as Christians.

In this epic rendition of the true power of Christ, “ Super Christ” illustrates Jesus Christ as never before. A superhero. Stronger then Superman, faster then the Flash, bigger then The Hulk, Jesus Christ takes down the entire empire of Evil with superpowers that are only known in this book! Join our God Superhero into his kingdom and gain new superpowers yourself by believing in the most powerful God and hero that exists, Jesus Christ.

The year is 1968 and the Vietnam War is reaching its nadir. Thomas Bishop, like so many other young men of this generation, faces terrible decisions forced on him by foreign policy of the American government. Honor bound to defend America from communism, Thomas trains to become a Marine Corps pilot to avoid a walking tour in the jungles of Vietnam. Tran Thien Don is a simple peasant boy thrust into the American War following a violent and life changing encounter with soldiers from Saigon. The struggle to preserve and maintain Vietnamese culture through a history of invasion from China, Japan, France, and now the inexplicable devastation from America, has ignited a fire in Don to fight for his country's unification, while seeking the opportunity for revenge on his personal enemies. Oliver Lacey is a young man who is an accidental Marine inductee facing racism in the ranks in Vietnam, missing a civil rights movement at home, and experiencing his own awakening about his place in the world. On the streets of the United States and in universities around the world the war rages. Few escape its reality as the nightly news sends images from Vietnam into homes during dinner. This tragic and unrelenting suppertime carnage sparks a collective awakening and a revolution of social change is born. Glory's Child is a story of the death of American idealism. From multiple perspectives the horrifying truth of war settles in around its characters. It is a gripping tale of heartbreak, survival, death, and a thorough examination of the philosophy and politics surrounding the execution of the American War in Vietnam.

Daniel's story is one of extraordinary faith in God lived out at the pinnacle of executive power. It tells of four teenage friends, born in the tiny state of Judah about twenty-six centuries ago, but captured by Nebuchadnezzar, emperor of Babylon. Daniel describes how they eventually rose to the top echelons of administration. Daniel and his friends did not simply maintain their private devotion to God; they maintained a high-profile witness in a pluralistic society antagonistic to their faith. That is why their story has such a powerful message for us. Society tolerates the practice of Christianity in private and in church services, but it increasingly deprecates public witness. If Daniel and his compatriots were with us today they would be in the vanguard of the public debate. What was it that gave that ancient foursome, Daniel and his three friends, the strength and conviction to be prepared, often at great risk, to swim against the flow?

The Politics of Hope and The Bitter Heritage brings together two important books that bracket the tempestuous politics of 1960s America. In The Politics of Hope, which historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., published in 1963 while serving as a special assistant to President Kennedy, Schlesinger defines the liberalism that characterized the Kennedy administration and the optimistic early Sixties. In lively and incisive essays, most of them written between 1956 and 1960, on topics such as the basic differences underlying liberal and conservative politics, the writing of history, and the experience of Communist countries, Schlesinger emphasizes the liberal thinker's responsibility to abide by goals rather than dogma, to learn from history, and to look to the future. Four years later, following Kennedy's assassination and the escalation of America's involvement in Vietnam, Schlesinger's tone changes. In The Bitter Heritage, a brief but penetrating appraisal of the "war that nobody wanted," he recounts America's entry into Vietnam, the history of the war, and its policy implications. The Bitter Heritage concludes with an eloquent and sobering assessment of the war's threat to American democracy and a reflection on the lessons or legacies of the Vietman conflict. With a new foreword by Sean Wilentz, the James Madison Library edition of The Politics of Hope and The Bitter Heritage situates liberalism in the convulsive 1960s--and illuminates the challenges that still face liberalism today.

We are living in an unprecedented resurgence of prophetic gifts and graces. Healthy expressions of the gift of prophecy most often emerge from those who have discovered the key of living in a true and vital connection with community. These pages unearth biblical and historical foundations for the concept of a prophetic company while laying a path forward of definitions and structures valuable for building strong and robust prophetic communities.

Introduction -- Unipolarity and the system -- Unipolarity and nuclear weapons -- Unipolarity and perception -- Identifying the enemy image -- Unipolarity and strategy -- Unipolarity and grand strategy -- Unipolarity and its conclusion

Can transportation really have such a destructive impact on society that, as Jay Holtz Kay (1998) once forcefully wrote, with the automobile industry as an example, that “the modern consequences of heavy automotive use contribute to the use of non-renewable fuels, a dramatic increase in the rate of accidental death, social isolation, the disconnection of community, the rise in obesity, the generation of air and noise pollution, urban sprawl, and urban decay”? (WK 2012) This negative expectation from transportation, with the automobile industry as an example here, can be contrasted with an opposing (positive) expectation in the old “glory days” when, as Skip McGoun (2012) thus reminded us, “we have sung songs about the glory and wonder that surrounds the very concept of the car. Examples of this range from the 1909 tune, ‘In My Merry Oldsmobile,’ to what is considered to be the first rock and roll song, ‘Rocket 88,’ in 1949. . . . Motion pictures have portrayed . . . expensive sleek sports cars . . . associated with wealth and success. . . . One commercial described Hell as being a place where a teenager would have to drive a minivan!” Contrary to these opposing expectations (and other views as will be discussed in the book), transportation, in relation to both networks and operations, is neither possible or impossible, nor desirable or undesirable, to the extent that the respective ideologues on different sides would like us to believe. This challenge to the opposing expectations from transportation does not mean that transportation is useless, or that those interdisciplinary fields (related to transportation studies) like urban planning, environmental sustainability, migration, tourism, transport economics, traffic engineering, transportation technology, energy efficiency, the tragedy of the commons, and so on are unimportant. Needless to say, neither of these extreme views is reasonable. Rather, this book offers an alternative, better way to understand the future of transportation, especially in the dialectic context of networks and operations—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them or integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other. More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the panoramic theory of transportation) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way. If successful, this seminal project is to fundamentally change the way that we think about transportation in relation to networks and operations from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what the author originally called its “post-human” fate.