Lindsay and Kerrie Ann are sisters who have known hardship from an early age, when their mother was sent to prison and they were separated and sent into foster care. Thirty years later, Lindsay is still trying to reconnect with her little sister.When they are finally reunited, neither sister’s expectations are met. Kerrie Ann feels intimidated by the “classy,” more educated Lindsay, while Lindsay is dismayed by Kerrie Ann’s streetwise ways. They immediately clash as Lindsay becomes threatened by Kerrie Ann. Simultaneously, Kerrie Ann struggles with the prospect of losing both her home and her boyfriend and is thrown into even further turmoil when her daughter’s foster parents put in a petition to adopt her. As the two sisters engage in the fiercest battles of their lives, they are drawn together despite their differences.

In boomtown Western Canada, a quirky young woman grows up amid a family dynamic that leaves her feeling misunderstood and left out. She's a child of immigrants from war-torn Germany and Croatia, parents who cling to vestiges of a traumatic past th...

Early nineteenth century New Zealand ? the great chief Te Rauparaha has conquered tiny Kapiti Island, from where Ngati Toa launches brutal attacks on its southern enemies. Off the coast of Kapiti, English trader John Stewart seeks to trade with Te Rauparaha, setting off a train of events that forever change the course of New Zealand history. Nar...

Eminent domain entered the awareness of many Americans with the recent U.S. Supreme Court case Kelo v. New London. Across the political spectrum, people were outraged when the Court majority said that a local government may transfer property from one private party to another under the ''public use'' clause of the Constitution, for the sake of ''economic development. Carla T. Main - who in the past, as a lawyer, has represented the condemning authorities in eminent domain cases - examines how property rights in America have come to be so weak, tracing the history of eminent domain from the Revolutionary War to the Kelo case. But the heart of Bulldozed is a story of how eminent domain has affected an American family and the small-town community where they have lived and worked for decades. In the 1940s, Pappy and Isabel Gore established a shrimp processing plant in Freeport, Texas. Three generations of Gores built Western Seafood into a thriving business that stood up to fierce competition and market flux. But Freeport was struggling, and city officials decided that a private yacht marina on the Old Brazos River might save it. They would use eminent domain to take the Gores' waterfront property and hand it over to the developer, an heir of a legendary Texas oil family, in a risky sweetheart deal. For three years, the Gores resisted the taking with every ounce of strength they had. Around them, the fabric of the community unraveled as friends and neighbors took sides. Bulldozed vividly recounts the Gores' fight with city hall, and at the same time ponders larger questions of what property rights mean today and who among us is entitled to hold on to the American Dream.

Founded just six years ago, Bellevue Literary Review is already widely recognized as a rare forum for emerging and celebrated writers - Julia Alvarez, Raphael Campo, Rick Moody and Abraham Verghese among them - on issues of health and healing. Gat...

Writer, consultant and speaker Chris Rabb coined the term invisible capital to represent the unseen forces that dramatically impact entrepreneurial viability when a good attitude, a great idea, and hard work simply aren't enough. In his book, Invisible Capital: How Unseen Forces Shape Entrepreneurial Opportunity, Rabb puts forth concrete and...

The Reverend's Apprentice, the third novel by David N. Odhiambo, is a powerful, tragicomic novel about power, culture, and identity politics in contemporary America, as seen through the eyes of an African student. Jonah Ayot is a graduate student from a fictional central African nation, studying in a fictional American city some time after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003; the novel mirrors Jonah's own struggle as a newcomer to American life, trying to organize his perceptions around an identity that is global rather than parochial. But those perceptions become muddied in the reality of the new war zone - on American soil, where the foreign becomes familiar, and the familiar is no longer what it used to be. Dissonant, frantic, and full of the white noise of a culture at war with itself, The Reverend's Apprentice takes the familiar story of the stranger in a strange land to new, disturbing, breathtaking new levels. The American magazine Black Issues Book Review has said: ''David Odhiambo joins a third guard of African novelists made up of peers like Uganda's Moses Isegawa and Nigeria's Chris Abani. The books of this younger generation of African writers (heirs to the continent's greats from Chinua Achebe to Mark Mathabane) shed the starched language and steep romanticism of Africa's literary tradition to expose the rawer, hipper, more vulgar aspects of life as lived by most Africans today.''

In 1971, the state of Minnesota was rocked by the ''Butcher Boy'' incident, as coverage of a family brutally murdered by one of their own swept across newspapers and television screens nationwide. Now, in present-day New Orleans, Polly Deschamps finds herself at yet another lonely crossroads in her life. No stranger to tragedy, Polly was a runaway at the age of fifteen, escaping a nightmarish Mississippi childhood. Lonely, that is, until she encounters architect Marshall Marchand. Polly is immediately smitten. She finds him attractive, charming, and intelligent. Marshall, a lifelong bachelor, spends most of his time with his brother Danny. When Polly's two young daughters from her previous marriage are likewise taken with Marshall, she marries him. However, as Polly begins to settle into her new life, she becomes uneasy about her husband's increasing dark moods, fearing that Danny may be influencing Marshall in ways she cannot understand. But what of the ominous prediction by a New Orleans tarot card reader, who proclaims that Polly will murder her husband? What, if any, is the Marchands' connection to the infamous ''Butcher Boy'' multiple homicide? And could Marshall and his eccentric brother.

In the era of Kennedy and Khrushchev, power was expressed in terms of nuclear missiles, industrial capacity, numbers of men under arms, and tanks lined up ready to cross the plains of Eastern Europe. By 2010, none of these factors confer power in the same way: industrial capacity seems an almost Victorian virtue, and cyber threats are wielded by non-state actors. Politics changed, and the nature of power-defined as the ability to affect others to obtain the outcomes you want-had changed dramatically. Power is not static; its story is of shifts and innovations, technologies and relationships.Joseph Nye is a long-time analyst of power and a hands-on practitioner in government. Many of his ideas have been at the heart of recent debates over the role America should play in the world: his concept of "soft power" has been adopted by leaders from Britain to China; "smart power" has been adopted as the bumper-sticker for the Obama Administration's foreign policy. This book is the summation of his work, as relevant to general readers as to foreign policy specialists. It is a vivid narrative that delves behind the elusive faces of power to discover its enduring nature in the cyber age.