How did Norman Vincent Peale's blockbuster bestseller The Power of Positive Thinking capture the hearts and minds of millions of Americans, reshaping the nation's spiritual landscape?The dramatic untold story of how Peale and a handful of conservative allies fueled the massive rise of religiosity in the United States in the 1950s.Near the height of Cold War hysteria, when the threat of all-out nuclear war felt real and perilous, American minister Norman Vincent Peale publishe...

Can doubt be a catalyst for growth?The Victorian era was the first great "Age of Doubt" and a critical moment in the history of Western ideas. Leading nineteenth-century intellectuals battled the Church and struggled to absorb radical scientific discoveries that upended everything the Bible had taught them about the world.In The Age of Doubt, distinguished scholar Christopher Lane tells the fascinating story of a society under strain as virtually all aspects of life changed a...

Inupiat police officer Ray Attla joins two of his police buddies for a three-day caribou hunt in the Alaskan Bush country. But when gear and supplies are lost, the trio fishes for food and pulls in the remains of a human head. Ray assumes the deceased fell victim to a tragic accident -- until he and the party are dodging bullets. Fleeing on foot to an archaeological dig, Ray suspects that unearthed artifacts are not the only remains to be uncovered. Coincidentally, or at the hands of the I...

A mysterious ritual murder at a remote Alaskan oil rig brings an Inupiat Eskimo police detective back to the land of his People to catch a killer, and save his own hide.Police Detective Ray Attla, an Inupiat Eskimo, is spending a few days with his grandfather on the reservation when he's called into the icy Alaskan wilderness to investigate a death at an isolated oil rig. The killing has all the marks of a ritual murder, and Ray must confront the traditions of his People to catch a...

The concept of vocation in an early modern setting calls to mind the priesthood or religious life in a monastery or cloister; to be “called” by God meant to leave the concerns of the world behind. Beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, French Catholic clergy began to promote the innovative idea that everyone, even an ordinary layperson, was called to a vocation or “state of life” and that discerning this call correctly had implications for one’s happiness and salvation, and for the soci...

In The Ruling Passion, Christopher Lane examines the relationship between masculinity, homosexual desire, and empire in British colonialist and imperialist fictions at the turn of the twentieth century. Questioning the popular assumption that Britain’s empire functioned with symbolic efficiency on sublimated desire, this book presents a counterhistory of the empire’s many layers of conflict and ambivalence.Through attentive readings of sexual and political allegory in the w...

To understand hatred and civility in today's world, argues Christopher Lane, we should start with Victorian fiction. Although the word "Victorian" generally brings to mind images of prudish sexuality and well-heeled snobbery, it has above all become synonymous with self-sacrifice, earnest devotion, and moral rectitude. Yet this idealized version of Victorian England is surprisingly scarce in the period's literature--and its journalism, sermons, poems, and plays--where villains, hypocrites,...

Victoria Lord follows all the rules. Steve Solomon makes up his own.Steve Solomon is the sharpest lawyer ever to barely graduate from Key West School of Law. Victoria Lord is fresh from Yale, toiling for an ambitious DA, and soon to be married. And Katrina Barksdale is a sexy former figure skater charged with killing her incredibly wealthy, incredibly kinky husband. With all three tangled in Miami's steamiest trial of the century, the case is sure to make sparks fly, headlines scre...

Hailed "an extraordinary novel of men at war" (Washington Post), The Last Ship is the book that inspired the TNT miniseries starring Eric Dane, Rhona Mitra, and Adam Baldwin, with Michael Bay as executive producer.The unimaginable has happened: the world has been plunged into all-out nuclear war. Sailing near the Arctic Circle, the USS Nathan James is relatively unscathed, but the future is grim and Captain Thomas is facing mutiny from the tattered remnan...

Stein on Writing provides immediately useful advice for writers of fiction and nonfiction, whether newcomers or accomplished professionals. As Sol Stein, renowned editor, author, and instructor, explains, "This is not a book of theory. It is a book of usable solutions—how to fix writing that is flawed, how to improve writing that is good, how to create interesting writing in the first place."With examples from his bestsellers as well as aspiring students' writing, Stein of...

The practice of listening to subtle, inner sounds during meditation to concentrate and elevate the mind has a long history in various religions around the world, including Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. Today there are a number of new religious movements that have made listening to the inner sound current a cornerstone of their teachings. These groups include the Radhasoamis, the Divine Light Mission, Eckankar, the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness (MSIA...