It's the long, hot summer of 1968. For ten-year-old Kathleen Slaven and her pals, the school holidays beckon. Into their run-down village in the west of Scotland arrives Tony, a real American kid, like the ones from the movies, ready to lead them into all kinds of adventure: gaining sweet revenge on their sadistic teacher Miss Grant on a trip to Ayr, discovering the unsettling secrets of 'Shaggy Island', and coming up with ways to outwit the people who screw up their lives - like the local parish priest Father Flynn. But the world they live in is a precarious one. And while they escape by playing at TV heroes and film stars, their mothers grow old before their time on broken promises, and fathers make a living in the coal mines or 'digging ditches, in the pissing rain', often boozing or gambling the wages away while their families go hungry. In an impoverished community, suffering and violence are never far from home. And even the optimism and escapism of their years cannot protect the children from the tragedies of life.

It's the long, hot summer of 1968. For ten-year-old Kathleen Slaven and her pals, the school holidays beckon. Into their run-down village in the west of Scotland arrives Tony, a real American kid, like the ones from the movies, ready to lead them into all kinds of adventure: gaining sweet revenge on their sadistic teacher Miss Grant on a trip to Ayr, discovering the unsettling secrets of 'Shaggy Island', and coming up with ways to outwit the people who screw up their lives - like the local parish priest Father Flynn. But the world they live in is a precarious one. And while they escape by playing at TV heroes and film stars, their mothers grow old before their time on broken promises, and fathers make a living in the coal mines or 'digging ditches, in the pissing rain', often boozing or gambling the wages away while their families go hungry. In an impoverished community, suffering and violence are never far from home. And even the optimism and escapism of their years cannot protect the children from the tragedies of life.

In this commentary on chapter one, "Why I am So Wise," of Nietzsche's Ecce Homo, the author dispels the long-standing impression that Ecce Homo is an irrational book in which the madness that claimed Nietzsche only months after he began writing it had already begun its work. Ecce Homo, it is alleged, is not egotistical, or narcissistic, or megalomaniacal. It is not a work of madness. In his linear exposition of this first chapter, the author presents Nietzsche's revelation of the tragic fact that his very aliveness was in a state of being overwhelmed, consumed, by powerful unconscious emotion, the condition he called decadence. Nietzsche's madness may have caused him to lose perspective on the meaning of having dwelt in "a world of exalted and delicate things," as he writes of himself in Ecce, but the original experience of elevation that comes of an abundance of life, of a surplus of life, certainly was not pathological.

Life in Tidewater, Virginia, at the outbreak of the Revolution.

Lieutenant-Colonel Grant Sievers oversees the mouth of Kettle Creek during the war of 1812. Hundreds of miles from civilization he fights not only the Americans. But disease, starvation, and hostile Indians. It isn’t until after the war when he is injured. The doctor tells him that he will never walk again. Lucas Sievers is a spy. Known to the Americans as Angus Truitt, he infiltrates enemy camps. He learns their secrets and reports to General Brooks. His only goal is to find his son. Sam had been kidnapped and sold into slavery. After the war, Lucas and his good friend Night Wind head south through hostile territory to find Sam and bring him home.

David Grossman's The Yellow Wind is essential reading for anyone who seeks a deeper understanding of Israel today. The Israeli novelist David Grossman's impassioned account of what he observed on the West Bank in early 1987—not only the misery of the Palestinian refugees and their deep-seated hatred of the Israelis but also the cost of occupation for both occupier and occupied—is an intimate and urgent moral report on one of the great tragedies of our time. This edition includes a new afterword by the author.