Life Crisis

On March 11, 2011, a powerful earthquake sent a 120-foot-high tsunami smashing into the coast of northeast Japan. By the time the sea retreated, more than eighteen thousand people had been crushed, burned to death, or drowned. It was Japan’s greatest single loss of life since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. It set off a national crisis and the meltdown of a nuclear power plant. And even after the immediate emergency had abated, the trauma of the disaster continued to express itself in bizarre and mysterious ways.

When COVID-19 hit the United States, New York governor Andrew Cuomo was thrust onto the national stage, hailed around the globe for his leadership. Alongside him every step of the way, Melissa DeRosa quickly became a household name. In her riveting memoir, DeRosa details her journey as a young woman in politics rising to the highest levels of government, writing with raw honesty and vulnerability about the personal challenges she faced—a failing marriage, infertility, death threats, misogyny—while navigating unprecedented professional landmines along the way.

A groundbreaking history of how the decades-long War on Terror changed virtually every aspect of American life, from the erosion of citizenship down to the cars we bought and TV we watched—by an acclaimed n+1 writer.

Hawke's narrator is a young man in torment, disgusted with himself after the collapse of his marriage, still half hoping for a reconciliation that would allow him to forgive himself and move on as he clumsily, and sometimes hilariously, tries to manage the wreckage of his personal life with whiskey and sex. What saves him is theater: in particular, the challenge of performing the role of Hotspur in a production of Henry IV under the leadership of a brilliant director, helmed by one of the most electrifying - and narcissistic - Falstaff's of all time.

Five years after his brilliantly successful, Pulitzer Prize-winning book about God as portrayed in the Old Testament, Jack Miles gives us his striking consideration of Christ. He presents Christ as a hero of literature based only in part on the historical Jesus, asking us to take the idea of Christ as God Incarnate not as a dogma of religion but as the premise of a work of art, the New Testament.

Confronted by the realities of adulthood, Romesh Ranganathan must face an uncomfortable truth: this is not quite how he imagined it. Watching his friends descend into middle age, his waistline thicken and his finances dwindle to fund his family’s middle class aspirations, Romesh reflects on the demands of daily life and the challenges of adulting in the modern world.

Baron Otto von Wächter, Austrian lawyer, husband, father, high Nazi official, senior SS officer, former governor of Galicia during the war, creator and overseer of the Krakow ghetto, indicted after as a war criminal for the mass murder of more than 100,000 Poles, hunted by the Soviets, the Americans, the British, by Simon Wiesenthal, on the run for three years, from 1945 to 1948....

Kevin Fulton was one of the British Army's most successful intelligence agents. Having been recruited to infiltrate the Provisional IRA at the height of the Troubles, he rose its ranks to an unprecedented level. Living and working undercover, he had no option other than to take part in heinous criminal activities, including the production of bombs which he knew would later kill. So highly was he valued by IRA leaders that he was promoted to serve in its infamous internal police - ironically, his job was now to root out and kill informers.

In 1978, Harvey Milk asked Gilbert Baker to create a unifying symbol for the growing gay rights movement, and on June 25 of that year, Baker's Rainbow Flag debuted at San Francisco's Gay Liberation Day parade. Baker had no idea his creation would become an international emblem of freedom. Rainbow Warrior is Baker's passionate personal chronicle, from a repressive childhood in 1950s Kansas to a harrowing stint in the US Army, and finally his arrival in San Francisco, where he bloomed as both a visual artist and social justice activist.

Interventions is the inside story of a world at the brink. After 40 years of service in the United Nations, former Secretary-General Kofi Annan shares his unique perspective on the terrorist attacks of September 11; the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan; the wars among Israel, Hezbollah, and Lebanon; the humanitarian tragedies of Somalia, Rwanda, and Bosnia; and the geopolitical transformations following the Cold War. With eloquence and unprecedented candor, Annan finally reveals his unique role and unparalleled perspective on decades of global politics.

The CIA is looking for walking contradictions. Recruiters seek people who can keep a secret, yet pull classified information out of others; who love their country, but are willing to leave it behind to head into dangerous places; who live double lives, but can be trusted with some of the nation's most sensitive tasks. Michele Rigby Assad was one of those people. As a CIA agent, Michele soon found that working undercover was an all-encompassing job. The threats were real. The mission was a perilous one. Trained as a counterterrorism expert, Michele spent over a decade in the agency.

Former ICE Director Tom Homan has been at the forefront of the conservative fight to secure our borders and offers proof that illegal immigration is not a victimless crime. In Defend the Border and Save Lives, Homan shares what illegal immigration is really about. Illegal immigration should not be a partisan issue. Now is the time to fix this issue that has claimed so many victims and divided this country. We need to pull the curtain back and expose what truly happens and separate facts from fiction.

This book is a memoir of an unlikely relationship between the author, Karen Hall — a television writer and producer of hit shows like M*A*S*H, Hillstreet Blues, Moonlighting and The Good Wife — and conservative Jesuit biblical scholar Fr. Paul Mankowski, SJ, who died in September 2020. It exposes the silencing of Fr. Mankowski by his religious order for airing its dirty laundry and for upholding the two-thousand-year magisterium of the Catholic Church.

Are you ready for a presidential adventure? Jack and Annie are! They are whisked back to Washington, DC, in 1861. Jack can’t wait to meet Abraham Lincoln himself! But the new president is too busy to see them, as he is desperately trying to save a nation in crisis. It’s a race against time as Jack and Annie try to aid a president and a troubled nation!

This audiobook will change your life by showing you how life changes. Why does happiness tend to get harder in your 40s? Why do you feel in a slump when you're successful? Where does this malaise come from, regardless of your gender, race, class or nationality? And, most importantly, will it ever end? Drawing on cutting-edge research and dozens of stories about a diverse set of people, award-winning journalist Jonathan Rauch answers all these questions.

Here’s a system that works to build mental fitness, resiliency and toughness, even when facing the worst events imaginable. Burnout becomes impossible when prepared to deal with the high-risk situations often met by public safety personnel and those in related high-stress occupations. This unique yet common sense approach for effectively coping with challenges so PTSD or other trauma reactions don’t take over is worth every minute spent practicing the stress-reducing A-to-Z exercises.

Between 1939 and 1945, Nazi genocide claimed the lives of nearly three hundred thousand people diagnosed with psychiatric illness or cognitive deficiencies. Not until the 1980s would these murders, as well as the coercive sterilizations of some four hundred thousand others classified as “feeble-minded,” be officially acknowledged as crimes at all. The Question of Unworthy Life charts this history from its origins in prewar debates about the value of disabled lives to our continuing efforts to unlearn eugenic thinking today.

Born into a wealthy Black Indianapolis family, Earl “Trey” Singleton III leaves his overbearing parents and their expectations behind by running away to New York City with only a few dollars in his pocket. Vibrant, humorous, and fraught with entanglements, Rasheed Newson’s My Government Means to Kill Me is an exhilarating, fast-paced coming-of-age story that lends itself to a larger discussion about what it means for a young gay Black man in the mid-1980s to come to terms with his role in the midst of a political and social reckoning.

Fourteen-year-old Ahmed is stuck in a city that wants nothing to do with him. Newly arrived in Brussels, Belgium, Ahmed fled a life of uncertainty and suffering in Aleppo, Syria, only to lose his father on the perilous journey to the shores of Europe. Now, Ahmed’s struggling to get by on his own, but with no one left to trust and nowhere to go, he’s starting to lose hope. Then he meets Max, a 13-year-old American boy from Washington, DC. Together, Max and Ahmed will defy the odds, learning from each other what it means to be brave and how hope can change your destiny.

Close to Hugh is a glorious, exuberant, poignant comic novel about youth and age, art and life, love and death - and about losing your mind and finding your heart's desire over the course of seven days one September. As the week opens, 50-something Hugh Argylle, owner of the Argylle Art Gallery, has a jarring fall from a ladder - a fall that leaves him with a fractured off-kilter vision of his own life and the lives of his friends, who are going through crises that leave them despairing and afraid.