On A Crash Course With LoveShe was the woman of pararescue jumper Manny Pena's dreams. But he'd stuck his foot in his mouth the last time he met Celia Munoz. Now, grounded after a parachuting accident, he was desperate to make amends with the beautiful widow. But Celia wasn't having it. The last thing she needed was another man with a dangerous job––even if he had given his life to God. Yet Manny's growing commitment to her and her troubled son began to convince her that perhaps she should take her own leap of faith.

From the author of What This Cruel War Was Over, a vivid portrait of the Union army’s escaped-slave refugee camps and how they shaped the course of emancipation and citizenship in the United States. Chandra Manning casts in a wholly original light what it was like to escape slavery, how emancipation happened, and how citizenship in the United States was transformed. This reshaping of hard structures of power would matter not only for slaves turned citizens, but for all Americans. Integrating a wealth of new findings, this vivid portrait of the Union army’s escaped-slave refugee camps shows how they shaped the course of emancipation and citizenship in the United States. Drawing on records of the Union and Confederate armies, the letters and diaries of soldiers, transcribed testimonies of former slaves, and more, Manning allows us to accompany the black men, women, and children who sought out the Union army in hopes of achieving autonomy for themselves and their communities. It also raised, for the first time, humanitarian questions about refugees in wartime and legal questions about civil and military authority with which we still wrestle, as well as redefined American citizenship, to the benefit, but also to the lasting cost of, African Americans.

This timely gift book offers a moving new perspective on the nativity story-evoking the struggle of Mary, Joseph and Baby Jesus as refugees traveling in a strange land, seeking the protection and kindness of strangers. Everyone may already know the story of how Jesus was humbly born in a manger, but Refuge is a lyrical depiction of what came next: the new family's travels through the desert, fleeing Herod's soldiers in order to find a safe place to welcome their son into the world. A poetic and refreshing look at the classic Christmas story that's never been more relevant, Refuge asks readers to consider the modern day implications of being forced to flee your home country.

At the center of this book are the World War II letters (Feldpostbriefe) of a German artist and art teacher to his wife. While these letters address many of the topics usually found in war letters, they are unusual in two respects. Each letter is lovingly decorated with a drawing and the letters make few references to the war itself.

American Airmen and Switzerland During World War II

An uplifting story of unlikely friendship and hope during the Iraq War. After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, First Sergeant Daniel Hendrex was dispatched along with his unit, Dragon Company, to Husaybah, a small town bordering Syria in the Sunni-dominated Al Anbar Province in Iraq. Their mission was to plug the bottleneck at the border checkpoint, where foreign fighters and weapons smugglers were filtering through daily to join the increasingly menacing insurgency growing rapidly in the region. It was at this checkpoint, amid relentless attacks, that Daniel and his men found the most effective ally of the war effort in the most unlikely of sources. In December 2003 a skinny Iraqi kid about fourteen years old approached one of the soldiers at the border and said simply, “Arrest me.” Jamil, as he was called, claimed to have valuable information about the insurgency, but First Sergeant Hendrex was skeptical—especially when the boy announced that the man he wanted to turn in was his own father. The story that unfolds is one of heartbreaking tragedy, remarkable courage, and unprecedented resiliency, as this child of the insurgency takes it upon himself to fight back with the help of the US Army...and loses everything in the process—his country, his home, and his family. But through the power of his own conviction and his finely honed survival skills, Jamil (who was quickly nicknamed Steve-O by the soldiers of Dragon Company) sought refuge with the US military in exchange for information. He risked everything he knew for a chance at freedom—a choice few men, let alone children, have to make in their lifetimes. And after Steve-O helped save countless lives, First Sergeant Hendrex made it his personal mission to repay his debt and get the boy to safety. A Soldier’s Promise is an incredible story of sacrifice and courage by an Iraqi boy and the US soldiers who protected him from certain death by bringing him to the United States. It’s an astonishing tale of two countries and two very different kinds of people joining together against terror and tyranny, and of the young man who, against all odds, gave Dragon Company what they desperately needed—hope.

An epic tale of freedom and slavery, love and war, and the potential futures of humankind tells of a twenty-first century California clan caught between two clashing worlds, one based on tolerance, the other on repression. Declaration of the Four Sacred Things The earth is a living, conscious being. In company with cultures of many different times and places, we name these things as sacred: air, fire, water, and earth. Whether we see them as the breath, energy, blood, and body of the Mother, or as the blessed gifts of a Creator, or as symbols of the interconnected systems that sustain life, we know that nothing can live without them. To call these things sacred is to say that they have a value beyond their usefulness for human ends, that they themselves became the standards by which our acts, our economics, our laws, and our purposes must be judged. no one has the right to appropriate them or profit from them at the expense of others. Any government that fails to protect them forfeits its legitimacy. All people, all living things, are part of the earth life, and so are sacred. No one of us stands higher or lower than any other. Only justice can assure balance: only ecological balance can sustain freedom. Only in freedom can that fifth sacred thing we call spirit flourish in its full diversity. To honor the sacred is to create conditions in which nourishment, sustenance, habitat, knowledge, freedom, and beauty can thrive. To honor the sacred is to make love possible. To this we dedicate our curiosity, our will, our courage, our silences, and our voices. To this we dedicate our lives. Praise for The Fifth Sacred Thing “This is wisdom wrapped in drama.”—Tom Hayden, California state senator “Starhawk makes the jump to fiction quite smoothly with this memorable first novel.”—Locus “Totally captivating . . . a vision of the paradigm shift that is essential for our very survival as a species on this planet.”—Elinor Gadon, author of The Once and Future Goddess “This strong debut fits well against feminist futuristic, utopic, and dystopic works by the likes of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ursula LeGuin, and Margaret Atwood.”—Library Journal

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel of the Spanish Civil War, a modern classic, and a searing exploration of the unknowability of history, by the acclaimed author of Outlaws In the waning days of the Spanish Civil War, an unknown militiaman discovered a Nationalist prisoner who had fled a firing squad and taken refuge in the forest. But instead of killing him, the soldier simply turned and walked away. The prisoner, Rafael Sánchez Mazas—writer, fascist, and founder of the Spanish Falange—went on to become a national hero and ultimately a minister in Franco's first government. The soldier disappeared into history. Sixty years later, Javier Cercas—or at least, a character who shares his name—sifts through the evidence to establish what really happened that day. Who was the soldier? Why didn't he shoot? And who was the true hero in the story? Every answer yields another question in this powerful and elegantly constructed novel about truth, memory, and war.

Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) examines how the Vietnam War has continued to serve as a stage for the shoring up of American imperialist adventure and for the (re)production of American and Vietnamese American identities. Focusing on the politics of war memory and commemoration, this book retheorizes the connections among history, memory, and power and refashions the fields of American studies, Asian American studies, and refugee studies not around the narratives of American exceptionalism, immigration, and transnationalism but around the crucial issues of war, race, and violence—and the history and memories that are forged in the aftermath of war. At the same time, the book moves decisively away from the “damage-centered” approach that pathologizes loss and trauma by detailing how first- and second-generation Vietnamese have created alternative memories and epistemologies that challenge the established public narratives of the Vietnam War and Vietnamese people. Explicitly interdisciplinary, Body Counts moves between the humanities and social sciences, drawing on historical, ethnographic, cultural, and virtual evidence in order to illuminate the places where Vietnamese refugees have managed to conjure up social, public, and collective remembering.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN LOVE AND DUTY COLLIDE? DAN RILEY IS A MAJOR IN THE BRITISH ARMY. After a six-month tour of duty in Afghanistan, he is coming home to the wife and young daughters he adores. He’s up for promotion and his ex-Army grandfather and father couldn’t be prouder. The Rileys are united in support of Dan’s passion for his career. But are they really? His wife, Alexa, has been offered a good teaching job she can’t take because the Army may move the family at any time. Her daughter Isabel hates her boarding school—the only good educational option for Army families—and starts running away. And Dan spends all his time on the base, unable to break the strong bonds forged with his friends in battle. Soon everyone who knows the Rileys is trying to help them save their marriage, but it’s up to Alexa to decide if she can sacrifice her needs and those of her family to support Dan’s commitment to his work. With her trademark intelligence and grace, Joanna Trollope illuminates the complexities of modern life in this story of a family striving to balance duty and ambition.