In 1957, Congress voted to set up the United States Civil War Centennial Commission. A federally funded agency within the Department of the Interior, the commission's charge was to oversee preparations to commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary of the central event in the Republic's history. Politicians hoped that a formal program of activities to mark the centennial of the Civil War would both bolster American patriotism at the height of the cold war and increase tourism in the South. A...

Dealing with the basics of the Christian life, this simple, informal book offers counsel from both the biblical text and human experience. More than 1,000,000 copies in print.

Miracles In El Salvador: A Minister's Journey for Justice and Hope documents the decades-long spiritual journey and human rights advocacy of Rev. Robert C. Cook, a Presbyterian pastor from Iowa who first visited El Salvador in 1990 during the country's civil war. Initially travelling to Cantón El Tablón to report on poverty for the Des Moines Presbytery's Rural Harvest Offering, Rev. Cook was deeply transformed by the extreme hardship, U.S.-backed military violence, and resilience...

Written in the thirteenth century, Njal's Saga is a story that explores perennial human problems-from failed marriages to divided loyalties, from the law's inability to curb human passions to the terrible consequences when decent men and women are swept up in a tide of violence beyond their control. It is populated by memorable and complex characters like Gunnar of Hlidarendi, a powerful warrior with an aversion to killing, and the not-so-villainous Mord Valgardsson. Full of dreams, strang...

Techno-Thriller Meets the Middle EastFrom IPPY gold medal winner Robert Cook comes the fourth installment in the Cooch series. With all the classic elements of a spy thriller—intrigue, violence, sex—The Mahdi is a narrative geopolitical battlefield where Islamic and Jewish ideologies clash, seen through the lens of a modern, liberal Muslim. Raised in a blend of Bedouin tradition and Western education,Alex Cuchulain, Cooch, is a former US Marine, C...

Inferencing is defined as 'the act of deriving logical conclusions from premises known or assumed to be true', and it is one of the most important processes necessary for successful comprehension during reading. This volume features contributions by distinguished researchers in cognitive psychology, educational psychology, and neuroscience on topics central to our understanding of the inferential process during reading. The chapters cover aspects of inferencing that range from the fundamen...

The American Civil War was without doubt the defining event in the history of the United States. This up-to-date analyisis of a critical period goes beyond the origins, course and consequences of the Civil War to bring in other important themes such as racial conflict, gender relations, religion, the popular memory and state formation.

A powerful and moving account of the campaign for civil rights in modern America. Robert Cook is concerned less with charismatic leaders like Martin Luther King, and more with the ordinary men and women who were mobilised by the grass-roots activities of civil-rights workers and community leaders. He begins with the development of segregation in the late nineteenth century, but his main focus is on the continuing struggle this century. It is a dramatic story of many achievements - even if ...

Iran’s nightmare nuclear attack on Israel is imminent, and former Marine and CIA Special Operations hunk, Alejandro Mohammed Cuchulain—otherwise known as Cooch—is back! Wielding his stunning brand of physical violence with the grace of a matador, Cooch brings intellect and Islamic scholarship to bear on the Iranians to entice them back to their senses in this third installment of the series. But before that can happen, a US-delivered electromagnetic pulse fries every circuit in Iran.

In 1961, twenty-eight-year-old Dr. Judah Folkman saw something while doing medical research in a United States navy lab that gave him the first glimmering of a wild, inspired hunch. What if cancerous tumors, in order to expand, needed to trigger the growth of new blood vessels to feed themselves? And if that was true, what if a way could be found to stop that growth? Could cancers be starved to death? Dr. Folkman had ample reason to be self confident - second in his class at Harvard Medica...

One of the most talented and influential American politicians of the nineteenth century, William Pitt Fessenden (1806--1869) helped devise Union grand strategy during the Civil War. A native of Maine and son of a fiery New England abolitionist, he served in the United States Senate as a member of the Whig Party during the Kansas-Nebraska crisis and played a formative role in the development of the Republican Party. In this richly textured and fast-paced biography, Robert J. Cook charts Fes...

This book is the first to specifically trace the movement of Mississippian maize farmers throughout the US Midwest and Southeast. By providing a backdrop of shifting climatic conditions during the period, this volume also investigates the relationship between farmers and their environments. Detailed regional overviews of key locations in the Mississippi Valley, the Ohio Valley, and the peripheries of the Mississippian culture area reveal patterns and variation in the expression of Mississi...