His wife dead, Elisa Green Pennington gathered up his brood of twelve young children in 1857 and left Texas for California, the promised land. The Penningtons could not have imagined what the untamed frontier had in store for them. After a difficult trek across West Texas and New Mexico, they were forced by sicknesses and circumstances to settle in the newly claimed Gadsden Purchase - present-day southern Arizona - where members of the clan and their descendants would remain into Arizona's statehood years. At the heart of this saga is Larcena Pennington Page Scott, who is witness as her loved ones are killed and her family's livelihood and property stolen. Larcena lived well into the twentieth century to tell the story of her captivity by Apaches and her miraculous escape from the captors, of outlawry and murder along the Mexican border, of disease, hunger, and isolation, and of the unceasing depredations by hostile Apaches during the 1860s and '70s. Using family letters, papers, and primary documents from all over the Southwest, Virginia Culin Roberts traces the lives of Larcena and her family. Roberts presents a real-life story of the rigors of surviving in a hostile and unforgiving land, transcending family history to provide a framework for telling the tale of the western frontier in the bloody Civil War and antebellum years.

Mothering under normal circumstances takes all you have to give. But what happens when your child is disabled, and sacrificing all you've got and more is the only hope for a decent future? Full of rage and resilience, duty and love, Ashley Bristowe delivers a mother's voice like no other we've heard. When their second child, Alexander, is diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder, doctors tell Ashley Bristowe and her husband that the boy won't walk, or even talk--that he is profoundly disabled. Stunned and reeling, Ashley researches a disorder so new it's just been named--Kleefstra Syndrome--and she finds little hope and a maze of obstacles. Then she comes across the US-based "Institutes," which have been working to improve the lives of brain-injured children for decades. Recruiting volunteers, organizing therapy, juggling a million tests and appointments, even fundraising as the family falls deep into debt, Ashley devotes years of 24/7 effort to running an impossibly rigorous diet and therapy programme for their son with the hope of saving his life, and her own. The ending is happy: he will never be a "normal" boy, but Alexander talks, he walks, he swims, he plays the piano (badly) and he goes to school. This victory isn't clean and it's far from pretty; the personal toll on Ashley is devastating. "It takes a village," people say, but too much of their village is uncomfortable with her son's difference, the therapy regimen's demands and the family's bottomless need. The health and provincial services bureaucracy set them a maddening set of hoops to jump through, showing how disabled children and their families languish because of criminally low expectations about what can be done to help. My Own Blood is an uplifting story, but it never shies away from the devastating impact of a baby that science couldn't predict and medicine couldn't help. It's the story of a woman who lost everything she'd once been--a professional, an optimist, a joker, a capable adult--in sacrifice to her son. An honest account of a woman's life turned upside down.

John Montandon's father "Doc" Montandon contracted AIDs after he was subjected to an unnecessary exploratory surgery and was transfused with tainted HIV blood. To make matters worse, the incident was covered up and the gentle Texas farmer was not apprised of his condition. After he began suffering from the symptoms of AIDS, Doc was refused admittance and help from the same community hospital that performed the transfusion.

Newly updated, this definitive reference work on major cult systems is the gold standard text on cults with nearly a million copies sold.

Vampire Victoria is a hunter… …but now she’s the hunted. After a chance meeting with an eerily familiar stranger, she realizes she’s in grave danger. Though immortal, she learns of a loophole that would resign her to a horrible fate… For eternity. Using all of her cunning, and the help of her two closest friends, Victoria sets out on a journey to learn how to defeat this new enemy. Can she stay one step ahead of him? Doubting her every move, she must go forward, not only to save herself, but all creatures. The line between the living and the dead is cracking, and she is the only one who can mend it. Can Victoria discover the secrets that will allow her to save Life itself? Or will she get caught and suffer eternal damnation? Bored To Death is a vampire thriller for people who love blood-thirsty immortals, dangerous quests and the thrill of the chase. Get Bored To Death now.

With this new lectionary commentary series, Westminster John Knox offers the most extensive resource for preaching on the market today. When complete, the twelve volumes of the series will cover all the Sundays in the three-year lectionary cycle, along with movable occasions, such as Christmas Day, Epiphany, Holy Week, and All Saints' Day. For each lectionary text, preachers will find four brief essays--one each on the theological, pastoral, exegetical, and homiletical challenges of the text. This gives preachers sixteen different approaches to the proclaimation of the Word on any given occasion. The editors and contributors to this series are world-class scholars, pastors, and writers representing a variety of denominations and traditions. And while the twelve volumes of the series will follow the pattern of the Revised Common Lectionary, each volume will contain an index of biblical passages so that nonlectionary preachers, as well as teachers and students, may make use of its contents.

"A WINNER." --PUBLISHERS WEEKLY "FIENDISHLY CLEVER." --THE TIMES In this heart-stopping installment of Peter May's award-winning China Thrillers, the Beijing Olympics are the setting for fierce competition, national pride--and murder. THE SUFFERER A prodigious Chinese swimmer kills himself on the eve of the Beijing Olympics. Days later, a champion weightlifter suffers a fatal heart attack prior to competition. THE LISTENER Detective Li Yan senses a conspiracy surrounding the fatalities, and finds a female athlete willing to talk. But she will only trust one person: Li's fiancée, Margaret Campbell. THE RUNNER When Campbell's contact herself vanishes, the gun is fired on a race against time. And Li must now outrun--and outwit--an enemy bent on pushing him beyond endurance.

In this book, we will take the unique approach and read the Book of Revelation as it was meant to be read. That is we will read Revelation exactly as Apostle John wrote it, with his Hebraisms and his Jewish writing style. Taking into account John’s Jewish mindset we will embark on a very different approach to interpreting his Divinely given visions – the visions which later came to be compiled into what is now known as the Book of Revelation. First, we must look at the Book of Revelation in context and realize that it is a letter written in the first-century by a Jewish Christ follower who lived in a Roman dominated society where Roman/Greek gods were idolized and worshiped. With this in mind, we need to understand John’s mindset – being that he thought in Hebrew, but wrote in the language of the land, which was Greek. We also must realize that John’s letter was meant for a predominately Jewish audience, who may or may not have believed that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah, who lived under Roman rule, and therefore, dominated spiritual and cultural values.... values that went against those of the Jewish people who worshipped the God of Israel. Therefore, John’s letter to the people of the churches in Asia Minor was very anti-Roman. Characteristic of ancient Jewish literature was a very unique writing style. Thoroughly Jewish, John wrote with this 7 characteristic style and the Jewish people were accustomed to reading it. What are the implications of interpreting John’s letter exactly as he wrote it, with its characteristic Jewish style? Actually, several very different ideas emerge as to both the structure and the timeline of the Book of Revelation, creating interpretations that are quite unlike interpretations we may have been exposed to when studying the Bible through traditional methods. For instance, we will see that the timeline of the Book of Revelation is multidimensional and reiterative, which is very different than the typical linear and sequential interpretation we are accustomed to reading, and as modern theologians teach. We also see that using John’s style that the Book of Revelation has a very different structure than is presented in the New Testament as contained in the Bibles of today. What if the timeline of the Book of Revelation is not linear and sequential, as it has traditionally been read from beginning to end? What if the structural divisions of Revelation we are so accustomed to are artificial, and not as John originally intended them to be?