Winner of the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award For the Chinese, the Great Wall of China has defined much more than a physical barrier. Over the centuries it has represented a psychological frontier - within it lies the Celestial Kingdom, the compass of all civilization. Beyond lies a barbaric world of chaos and exile. In Frontiers of Heaven, author Stanley Stewart recounts his wanderings halfway across Asia. The journey takes him from Shanghai to the banks of the Indus, and along the way he encounters the modern Chinese for whom these regions beyond the Wall still hold the same morbid fascination. Today, the great western province of Xinjiang is still a land of exile, the destination of soldiers, reluctant settlers, political prisoners, and disgraced officials. Whether describing the lost cities of Central Asia, a Buddhist monastery in the shadow of Tibet, or a love affair in Xi'an, Stewart tells his story with charm and affection.

Stanley Stewart's award-winning account of journeys along the Great Wall of China.

New York Times bestselling author Howard Blum expertly weaves together three narratives to tell the true story of the 1897 Klondike Gold Rush. It is the last decade of the 19th century. The Wild West has been tamed and its fierce, independent and often violent larger-than-life figures--gun-toting wanderers, trappers, prospectors, Indian fighters, cowboys, and lawmen--are now victims of their own success. But then gold is discovered in Alaska and the adjacent Canadian Klondike and a new frontier suddenly looms: an immense unexplored territory filled with frozen waterways, dark spruce forests, and towering mountains capped by glistening layers of snow and ice. In a true-life tale that rivets from the first page, we meet Charlie Siringo, a top-hand sharp-shooting cowboy who becomes one of the Pinkerton Detective Agency’s shrewdest; George Carmack, a California-born American Marine who’s adopted by an Indian tribe, raises a family with a Taglish squaw, and makes the discovery that starts off the Yukon Gold Rush; and Jefferson "Soapy" Smith, a sly and inventive conman who rules a vast criminal empire. As we follow this trio’s lives, we’re led inexorably into a perplexing mystery: a fortune in gold bars has somehow been stolen from the fortress-like Treadwell Mine in Juneau, Alaska. Charlie Siringo discovers that to run the thieves to ground, he must embark on a rugged cross-territory odyssey that will lead him across frigid waters and through a frozen wilderness to face down "Soapy" Smith and his gang of 300 cutthroats. Hanging in the balance: George Carmack’s fortune in gold. At once a compelling true-life mystery and an unforgettable portrait of a time in America’s history, The Floor of Heaven is also an exhilarating tribute to the courage and undaunted spirit of the men and women who helped shape America.

“The work of a young writer with tremendous ambition, a bildungsroman of religion and revolution set during an obscure chapter of American history.” —The Washington Post A powerful and impressive debut novel from the winner of the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Prize for fiction—first in the Woolsack family saga that continues with Secessia and The New Inheritors. The Blood of Heaven is the story of Angel Woolsack, a preacher’s son, who flees the hardscrabble life of his itinerant father, falls in with a charismatic highwayman, then settles with his adopted brothers on the rough frontier of West Florida, where American settlers are carving their place out of lands held by the Spaniards and the French. The novel moves from the bordellos of Natchez, where Angel meets his love Red Kate to the Mississippi River plantations, where the brutal system of slave labor is creating fantastic wealth along with terrible suffering, and finally to the back rooms of New Orleans among schemers, dreamers, and would-be revolutionaries plotting to break away from the young United States and create a new country under the leadership of the renegade founding father Aaron Burr. The Blood of Heaven is a remarkable portrait of a young man seizing his place in a violent new world, a moving love story, and a vivid tale of ambition and political machinations that brilliantly captures the energy and wildness of a young America where anything was possible. It is a startling debut. “Wascom is a craftsman, and each of his lengthy, winding sentences shimmers with the tang of blood and bone and sweat, and the archaic splendor of his language.” —The Boston Globe

Learn the Answers to All Your Questions about God What role do angels play in our lives? Where and how will we live? What will we be doing in heaven? Will I know my family and friends? What happens to departed children? What will our new bodies be like? Explore the Bible’s heavenly promises where all your hopes and dreams will be fulfilled. If you have lost a loved one, you need this book to help you understand the truth about Heaven–the greatest promise ever made. Many who have read through these pages have forever lost their fear of death.

A young man in the 18th century leaves home to hide his homosexuality and heads for the frontier. He meets a frontierman who is also gay and they become lovers, until he discovers the man is a rapist and murderer.

Many Worlds Under One Heaven analyzes a wide range of newly excavated materials to offer a new perspective on political and cultural change under the Western Zhou. Examining tombs, bronze inscriptions, and other artifacts, Yan Sun challenges the Zhou-centered view with a frontier-focused perspective that highlights the roles of multiple actors.

Between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, Qing rulers, officials, and scholars fused diverse, fragmented perceptions of foreign territory into one integrated worldview. In the same period, a single "foreign" policy emerged as an alternative to the many localized "frontier" policies hitherto pursued on the coast, in Xinjiang, and in Tibet. By unraveling Chinese, Manchu, and British sources to reveal the information networks used by the Qing empire to gather intelligence about its emerging rival, British India, this book explores China's altered understanding of its place in a global context. Far from being hobbled by a Sinocentric worldview, Qing China's officials and scholars paid close attention to foreign affairs. To meet the growing British threat, they adapted institutional practices and geopolitical assumptions to coordinate a response across their maritime and inland borderlands. In time, the new and more active response to Western imperialism built on this foundation reshaped not only China's diplomacy but also the internal relationship between Beijing and its frontiers.