The Sun Also Rises invites the reader to embark on a philosophical journey. The journey was initiated by World War I. Because of the war, the story’s protagonist, Jake Barnes, suffers an injury that prevents him from having sexual relationship with the woman he loves, thus preventing them from fully realizing their relationship as a couple. The tragedy of the war apparently invalidated for Jake the Grand Narrative of Christianity that clearly played an important part in his life before the...

The Girl and the Philosopher is about a young woman whose flight from tragedy becomes an epic journey not unlike Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Her journey inspires, amazes, and frightens. But what inspires, amazes, and frightens is not an imagined fantasy world, but reality, the reality of the world we live in seen through the looking glasses of science, history, philosophy, art and, of course, the lives of the characters. What is revealed about our world and about ours...

These poems were written in response to two events, one deeply affecting a family and friends, the other affecting thousands of families and an entire nation. The first was the death of Tatiana Prosvirnina, a high school student who attended my English class the year before she died. At the time of her death I wrote a collection of poems to preserve her memory beyond the thoughts and feelings of those who knew her. The first part of this book contains those early poems.The second e...

The correspondence shared by Emily Wilson and Jason Blake describes two lives that interlaced over a period of a decade. In the beginning, Emily and Jason were close friends, university students who enjoyed sharing ideas. The catalyst that took their relationship from a bond of friendship to that of love was Jason’s emotional collapse, which resulted in Jason’s quitting his job and migrating with his young family to Colorado to continue his studies in the serenity of a small college town. ...

Software engineer Smith discovers the reappearance of a colleague, E.R. Richman, who disappeared two years earlier. Richman was found in the Interdict Zone and hospitalized. Smith visits him but Richman is uncommunicative. Shortly afterwards, Richman is removed from the hospital. Curious about his colleague's disappearance but unable to contact him, Smith decides to investigate. Having learned that Richman first visited the Interdict Zone via a VR video game based on a battle that occurred...

Christine's Philosophical Journey to Paris - Revised Edition is a story about a young woman who is seeking understanding but also fleeing a troubled past. Guilt drove Christine from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and love and death cause her to leave San Diego for Paris, France, where she hopes to continue her quest for the truth about herself and about the world she now feels a stranger in. This quest not only gives Christine’s life new purpose but hope that her shattered identity might be rest...

Elen lives in the post-apocalyptic megacity state Usatopia. It is a city-state populated by robots and artificial organisms including humans. The world has been ravaged by war and disease. Most of humanity no longer exists. One evening Elen’s father, Usatopia’s Chairman, laments out loud the sad state of the world. Nostalgically he recalls the great leaders of the past and their simpler times. Turning to his daughter he confides that he would rather live as a common man among the Simpleton...

Welcome to Darwin’s world, where the hawk kills the dove and the lion eats the gazelle, where the strong destroys the weak, and the keen-witted defeats the dull-witted. Most people think of illegal immigration as a result of various failures—political, moral, or economic. Yet, more fundamentally it is simply a mechanism of survival—survival of the fittest, those whose numbers increase and eventually dominate an environment.Immigration is a problem only for those who are displaced b...

This book documents the history of religious persecution, especially focusing on early Jewish and Christian experiences and the culmination of horrors in the Nazi era, in which six million Jews, over a million Catholics, and many others were put to death for their beliefs. The book then focuses on the many types of religious intolerance in the world today, particularly the genocide against Christians in the Middle East and Africa, and resurgent Anti-Semitism in the Middle East, Europe and ...

As accountability in education has become an increasingly prominent topic, teacher preparation programs are being asked to provide credible evidence that their teacher candidates can impact student learning.Teacher Work Samples, first developed 30 years ago, have emerged as an effective method of quantifying the complex set of tasks that comprise effective teaching and documenting the effectiveness of preservice teachers' impact on student learning. Hilda Rosselli, Mark Girod, and ...

Government, industry, and academia need better tools to explore threats, opportunities, and human interactions in cyberspace. The interactive exercises called cyber wargames are a powerful way to solve complex problems in a digital environment that involves both cooperation and conflict. Cyber Wargaming is the first book to provide both the theories and practical examples needed to successfully build, play, and learn from these interactive exercises.The contributors to thi...

A dead friend. A dirty town. And one man who won't back down.Captain Frank Sherman rolls into a dusty Northern California town to visit his oldest friend—only to find him dead and the sheriff's story full of holes.The deeper he digs, the more bodies pile up. Crooked cops. A corrupt sheriff. A town so rotten it's begging to be burned down. And Sherman? He's just the man to light the match.What starts as a simple visit becomes a full-blown reckoning, ...