I he most authoritative history of piracy, Frank Sherry's rich and colorful account reveals the rise and fall of the real "raiders and rebels" who terrorized the seas. From 1692 to 1725 pirates sailed the oceans of the world, plundering ships laden with the riches of India, Africa, South America, and the Caribbean. Often portrayed as larger-than-life characters, these outlaw figures and their bloodthirsty exploits have long been immortalized in fiction and film. But beneath the legends is ...

Basil was a successful filmmaker and the golden child of an ordinary, middle class family until the day he was found naked and staring in his apartment one morning. No one knows how long Basil has been in this catatonic state. There is no indication of drug use or violence, so he is taken to a special institution to recover.What his family and the doctors dont realize is that Basil is on a supernatural journey of the subconscious, fraught with challenges, danger, and mystery. Someh...

Philip Francis Parkman, Democrat Congressman from the 14th District of New Jersey, fortified by his unexpected victory at the polls and motivated by high ideals and good intentions, embraces his perceived role as not only spokesman for his constituency, but also as caretaker of the Constitution of the United States. However, intervening reality soon crushes his idealism and vanquishes his hope he can make a difference.Thus begins his slide on the greasy griddle as he calls it. He t...

Simon Spicer is a lonely, melancholy professor in Maine. A widower, he was once a talented poet, but writes no more. At the age of thirty-five, he simply exists, aged beyond his years by disappointment. Spice is unaware of the physical and mental properties that set him apart from his fellows and fit him for a bizarre missionbut he will soon find out.In the world of the Keepers, one of their own has gone rogue. Calling himself ShadowCaster, he has taken over the planet Talar and br...

It is 1715 in County Mayo, Ireland. The nineteen-year-old bastard son of an English lord and a deceased Irish mother reveals his dreams to a beautiful witch who has captured his heart. Sean OGara, tired of not being recognized as the legal heir to his fathers estate, has also grown tired of living under the brutal watch of Robert Hyde, the sadistic overseer of the Irish manor. Days later, when faced with a dire choice, Sean commits a crime with life-changing consequences.Forced to ...

The Ten Thousand were a band of aristocratic mercenary warriors who fought for the losing side in a war far from their own country. To escape their enemies in a now hostile foreign land, they set off to return home, but the journey is treacherous. One of their formations is separated from the main body and now must makes its way alone.The lost wanderers, near starvation, stumble out of a mountain pass into a miraculously fair land on the bank of a river. They refresh themselves wit...

When Cyril Hadrian still considered truth knowable and virtue measurable, he had charge of a great fortress of learning and scholarship called the Lord Institute. Those within the fortresss thick walls had gathered together to battle common enemiesignorance, illness, and poverty. Hadrian, a man committed to rationality and to the notion that science in the service of humanity could accomplish at least a limited happiness on earth, did not then concern himself with philosophical questions o...

Fifty-four-year-old Gabriel Fallon is a writer who no longer writes and who regularly contemplates ending his wasted existence on earth. As he stands at a crucial crossroads in his life, Gabriel knows he needs to accept that he has failed to realize his ambitions. But when he receives news that his estranged brother, Michael, is dying, Gabriel embarks on a spiritual quest into his past that causes him to question everything he has ever known.Gabriel last saw his brother six years e...

The past half-century has been marked by major changes in the treatment of mental illness: important advances in understanding mental illnesses, increases in spending on mental health care and support of people with mental illnesses, and the availability of new medications that are easier for the patient to tolerate. Although these changes have made things better for those who have mental illness, they are not quite enough.In Better But Not Well, Richard G. Frank and Sherr...

Sherri Franks Johnson explores the roles of religious women in the changing ecclesiastical and civic structure of late medieval Bologna, demonstrating how convents negotiated a place in their urban context and in the church at large. During this period Bologna was the most important city in the Papal States after Rome. Using archival records from nunneries in the city, Johnson argues that communities of religious women varied in the extent to which they sought official recognition from the...

Anne Frank wrote a diary from the age of 13 as she hid for over two years in the back of an Amsterdam warehouse escaping the horrors of Nazi occupation. An intimate record of tension and struggle, adolescence and confinement, anger and heartbreak, it is among the most enduring documents of the twentieth century, famed throughout the world.Recently discovered letters, documents and photographs of Anne and her family including letters from her, her father's letters from Auschwitz and...

An old lady, an antiques dealer, dies in Basel, Switzerland. Her devoted daughter-in-law finally steels herself to do what all families must in the aftermath of a death—she heads upstairs to the attic to sort through the old lady's effects. But this wasn't just any old lady, and this wasn't just any old family house. Helene (Leni) Elias was born Helene Frank, only daughter of Alice Frank and sister of Otto Frank, who in turn was Anne Frank's father.1929 destroyed the Franks' bankin...