Stalked by a hitman for a heinous crime of which he was acquitted, a church pastor suffers waking nightmares about a dysfunctional divine family, a grim reaper which bears a striking resemblance to Johnny Cash, four riderless horses and a looming apocalypse. Meanwhile, society is in turmoil. Federal laws have disarmed honest citizens while freeing convicted murderers. Runaway taxation has driven the everyday economy underground. Congressional assent to a United Nations treaty facilitates the deadliest terrorist attack since 9/11/01. As the Presidential election nears, an irresistible urge to be truthful seizes the incumbent and her Republican opponent. The incumbent’s revelation about systemic voter fraud triggers reforms which result in a landslide victory for the third-party underdog. Ironically, not a single voter remembers selecting the spoiler at the ballot box. Predator and prey finally meet at a funeral, but the ceremony is hijacked by General George Patton. After performing a slapstick resurrection and setting humanity straight on a few things, Patton solves the political mystery by explaining the evolutionary leap which has begun to expand human consciousness. The newly aware congregants proceed to reinvent the United States of America envisioned by its founders.

How San Francisco became America's capital of sexual libertinism and a potent symbol in its culture wars

By the early 1940s, when Ukrainian-born Irène Némirovsky began working on what would become Suite Française—the first two parts of a planned five-part novel—she was already a highly successful writer living in Paris. But she was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz: a month later she was dead at the age of thirty-nine. Two years earlier, living in a small village in central France—where she, her husband, and their two small daughters had fled in a vain attempt to elude the Nazis—she’d begun her novel, a luminous portrayal of a human drama in which she herself would become a victim. When she was arrested, she had completed two parts of the epic, the handwritten manuscripts of which were hidden in a suitcase that her daughters would take with them into hiding and eventually into freedom. Sixty-four years later, at long last, we can read Némirovsky’s literary masterpiece The first part, “A Storm in June,” opens in the chaos of the massive 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion during which several families and individuals are thrown together under circumstances beyond their control. They share nothing but the harsh demands of survival—some trying to maintain lives of privilege, others struggling simply to preserve their lives—but soon, all together, they will be forced to face the awful exigencies of physical and emotional displacement, and the annihilation of the world they know. In the second part, “Dolce,” we enter the increasingly complex life of a German-occupied provincial village. Coexisting uneasily with the soldiers billeted among them, the villagers—from aristocrats to shopkeepers to peasants—cope as best they can. Some choose resistance, others collaboration, and as their community is transformed by these acts, the lives of these these men and women reveal nothing less than the very essence of humanity. Suite Française is a singularly piercing evocation—at once subtle and severe, deeply compassionate and fiercely ironic—of life and death in occupied France, and a brilliant, profoundly moving work of art.

Traces the unlikely friendship of a wealthy Afghan youth and a servant's son in a tale that spans the final days of Afghanistan's monarchy through the atrocities of the present day.

A “brilliant and fascinating” (Eben Alexander, MD, author of Proof of Heaven) exploration—rich with powerful personal stories and convincing research—of the many ways the living can and do accompany the dying on their journey into the afterlife. In 2000, end-of-life therapist William Peters was volunteering at the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco when he had an extraordinary experience as he was reading aloud to a patient: he suddenly felt himself floating midair, completely out of his body. The patient, who was also aloft, looked at him and smiled. The next moment, Peters felt himself return to his body…but his patient never regained consciousness and died. Perplexed and stunned by what had happened, Peters began searching for other people who’d shared similar experiences. He would spend the next twenty years gathering and meticulously categorizing their stories to identify key patterns and features of what is now known as the “shared crossing” experience. The similarities, which cut across continents and cultures and include awe-inspiring visual and sensory effects, and powerful emotional aftershocks. The book is filled with “moving and tender” (Jack Kornfield, PhD, author of A Path with Heart) tales of spouses seeing their loved ones reach the other side after decades together and bereaved parents who share their children’s entry into the afterlife. Applying rigorous research, Peters digs into the effects of these shared crossing experiences impart—liberation at the sight of a loved one finding joy, a sense of reconciliation if the relationship was fraught—and explores questions like: What can explain these shared death experiences? How can we increase our likelihood of having one? What do these experiences tell us about what lies beyond? And, most importantly, how can they help take away the string of death and better prepare us for our own final moments? How can we have both a better life and a better death?

Monumental epic poem tells the heroic story of Aeneas, a Trojan who escaped the burning ruins of Troy to found Lavinium, the parent city of Rome, in the west.