Growing up in the well-heeled Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, Carey Neesley always thought she and her younger brother, Peter, would never be separated. The children of divorced parents and outcasts in their neighborhood, Carey and Peter supported, loved, and encouraged each other when it seemed no one else cared. It was a bond that grew through the years, and one that made Peter’s eventual decision to enlist in the Army all the more difficult for Carey. With Peter having stepped up to help her raise her young son, Carey was closer than ever to her brother, and the thought of him serving far from home was painful. While stationed in Iraq, Peter befriended a stray dog and her four puppies, only to watch three of the young pups die in the warzone. With only two surviving dogs—Mama and Boris—Peter became determined to save the strays. Carey helped her brother with his mission, but everything changed on Christmas Day in 2007 when word arrived at the Neesley household that Peter had been killed. Amidst the grief of coming to terms with her brother’s death and the turmoil of trying to plan his funeral, Carey devoted herself to bringing Peter’s dogs home to the U.S. It was the final honor she could pay to her brother and a way of keeping a piece of him with her. With the help of an unlikely network of heroes, including an animal rescue organization in Utah, a civilian airline, an Iraqi family, and a private security contractor with military connections, Mama and Boris mad the journey form the streets of Baghdad to Carey’s suburban house. Carey’s mission garnered widespread attention and requests from other soldiers for help in bringing home dogs they had become attached to on deployment, and she continues to work with organizations dedicated to bringing home wartime strays.

In/Visible War addresses a paradox of twenty-first century American warfare. The contemporary visual American experience of war is ubiquitous, and yet war is simultaneously invisible or absent; we lack a lived sense that “America” is at war. This paradox of in/visibility concerns the gap between the experiences of war zones and the visual, mediated experience of war in public, popular culture, which absents and renders invisible the former. Large portions of the domestic public experience war only at a distance. For these citizens, war seems abstract, or may even seem to have disappeared altogether due to a relative absence of visual images of casualties. Perhaps even more significantly, wars can be fought without sacrifice by the vast majority of Americans. Yet, the normalization of twenty-first century war also renders it highly visible. War is made visible through popular, commercial, mediated culture. The spectacle of war occupies the contemporary public sphere in the forms of celebrations at athletic events and in films, video games, and other media, coming together as MIME, the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network.

Intervention Narratives examines contradictory cultural representations of the US intervention in Afghanistan that justify an imperial foreign policy. Bose demonstrates that contemporary imperialism operates on an ideologically diverse terrain by marshaling familiar tropes of entrepreneurship, pet love, and Orientalist stereotypes to enlist support for the war across the political spectrum.

Examine the pros and cons of nontraditional adoption! Welcome Home! An International and Nontraditional Adoption Reader is an essential guide to the process, pros, and cons of adopting children from outside the United States, with special needs, and/or from a different racial/cultural background. The book documents every aspect of the adoption procedure—from working with “facilitators,” adoption agencies, and attorneys to mixed reactions over a child’s possible loss of heritage as the result of a transracial or multicultural adoption. Parents and adoptees offer unique, firsthand perspectives on the cautions and benefits of nontraditional adoption. Americans adopted more than 20,000 children from other countries in 2001, a number that reflects humanitarian motives, the desire to adopt a child from a specific country, and/or frustration with the domestic adoption system. Including a foreword by United States Representative Ted Strickland, Welcome Home! is a practical resource for anyone thinking of establishing a family or adding to their own. The book provides insight into the adoption process, open adoption, biracial adoption, adopting a special needs child, cultural attitudes, and how to handle an adopted child’s questions in later years. It also addresses specific adoption issues, including: how to verify an agency’s credentials; how an agency negotiates with the birth mother; state and country laws and practices; tax benefits; and expenses, including legal and medical costs; and includes research findings on the Northeast-Northwest Collaborative Adoption Projects (N2CAP) Welcome Home! tells the stories of: Naomi and Fred, an intermarried couple (she’s Jewish, he’s not) who adopted a Greek baby in 1962 “Tina” and “Lee,” a lesbian couple, who adopted a baby from China Marianne, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Lund in Sweden, who adopted babies from Iran and Thailand—several years after her divorce Pamela, a divorced mother of four biological children who has adopted babies from Viet Nam and China All of her biological children Mildred—Pamela’s mother and the children’s grandmother Karen, adoptive mother and national chairperson for Families for Russian and Ukrainian adoption (FRUA) William, adoptive father of miracle sisters from Romania and many more! Welcome Home! is an invaluable source of unusual insight for psychologists, psychiatrists, marriage and family therapists, adoption agencies, counselors, social workers, attorneys, physicians, academics, and, of course, anyone considering adoption.

This selection of Boris Pasternak's correspondence with his parents and sisters from 1921 to 1960—including more than illustrations and photos—is an authoritative, indispensable introduction and guide to the great writer's life and work. His letters are accomplished literary works in their own right, on a par with his poetry in their intensity, frankness, and dazzling stylistic play. In addition, they offer a rare glimpse into his innermost self, significantly complementing the insights gained from his work. They are especially poignant in that after 1923 Pasternak was never to see his parents again.

Across Eastern Europe and Russia in the first half of the twentieth century, conflict and violence arising out of foreign and civil wars, occupation, revolutions, social and ethnic restructuring and racial persecution caused countless millions of children to be torn from their homes. Displaced Children in Russia and Eastern Europe, 1915-1953 addresses the powerful and tragic history of child displacement in this region and the efforts of states, international organizations and others to ‘re-place’ uprooted, and often orphaned, children. By analysing the causes, character and course of child displacement, and examining through first-person testimonies the children’s experiences and later memories, the chapters in this volume shed new light on twentieth-century nation-building, social engineering and the emergence of modern concepts and practices of statehood, children’s rights and humanitarianism. Contributors are: Tomas Balkelis, Rachel Faircloth Green, Gabriel Finder, Michael Kaznelson, Aldis Purs, Karl D. Qualls, Elizabeth White, Tara Zahra

Boris Kastel was born in Zagreb, Croatia in 1914. A few months later the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated some 300 kilometers away in Sarajevo, an act which touched off The Great War. That catastrophic event presages Boris tumultuous life, during which he traveled to five continents and mastered at least ten languages. Throughout the violent war years following the Nazi invasion of his country, he never lost sight of his great dreama quest for peace. That quest had to wait through the long years of World War II, when duty called him first to the mountains of Northern Italy with the Italian Underground, and then to Titos Partisans and life in nascent Yugoslavia. That quest was realized in a most unexpectedly beautiful way. His story takes us from war-torn Zagreb to post-revolution China, to Ghandis India, through the birth of kibbutzim in Palestine, summer and winter Olympics in 1936, the resistance movements in Italy and Yugoslavia, Nazi hunting in Argentina and Uruguay, and ultimately to New York, where he met Eva, and the peace for which he yearned.

Heads You Win is international #1 bestseller Jeffrey Archer’s most ambitious and creative work since Kane and Abel, with a final twist that will shock even his most ardent of fans. Leningrad, Russia, 1968: From an early age it is clear that Alexander Karpenko is destined to lead his countrymen. But when his father is assassinated by the KGB for defying the state, Alexander and his mother will have to escape Russia if they hope to survive. At the docks, they have an irreversible choice: board a container ship bound for America or one bound for Great Britain. Alexander leaves the choice to a toss of a coin... In a single moment, a double twist decides Alexander’s future. During an epic tale, spanning two continents and thirty years, we follow Alexander through triumph and defeat as he sets out on parallel lives as Alex in New York and Sasha in London. As this unique story unfolds, both come to realize that to find their destiny they must face the past they left behind as Alexander in Russia.

Bugtussle, Tennessee, was a thriving tourist escape that featured a manmade lake until 1986, when Gilzen Dam, which was a source of water for the lake, was relocated, draining the beautiful lake and financially crippling the town. But today, things are about to change. Thirty-eight-year-old carpenter Bobby Baker was on his way to work when he learns through a surprise encounter with a wealthy businessman that Gilzen Dam is being relocated to its original spot, which could revive Lake Bugtussle. The businessman propositions Bobby and his crew of misfits to enter a building competition against Bobby's lifelong rival to save his mother's land. Heartfelt decisions will have to be made, and Bobby will need his family and friends more than ever.