Drew is caught in a world of light - just inches away from the dark What if...there was a world beyond our vision, a world just fingertips beyond our reach? What if...our world wasn’t beyond their influence? Tragedy and heartache seem to be waiting for Drew Carter at every turn, but college offers Drew a chance to start over—until an accident during a physics experiment leaves him blind and his genius friend, Benjamin Berg, missing. As his sight miraculously returns, Drew discovers that the accident has heightened his neuron activity, giving him skills and sight beyond the normal man. When he begins to observe fierce invaders that no one else can see, he questions his own sanity, and so do others. But is he insane or do the invaders truly exist? With help from Sydney Carlyle, a mysterious and elusive girl who offers encouragement through her faith, Drew searches for his missing friend, Ben, who seems to hold the key to unlocking this mystery. As the dark invaders close in, will he find the truth in time?
Baron Roman Fedorovich von Ungern-Sternberg (1885–1921) was a Baltic German aristocrat and tsarist military officer who fought against the Bolsheviks in Eastern Siberia during the Russian Civil War. From there he established himself as the de facto warlord of Outer Mongolia, the base for a fantastical plan to restore the Russian and Chinese empires, which then ended with his capture and execution by the Red Army as the war drew to a close. In The Baron’s Cloak, Willard Sunderland tells the epic story of the Russian Empire’s final decades through the arc of the Baron’s life, which spanned the vast reaches of Eurasia. Tracking Ungern’s movements, he transits through the Empire’s multinational borderlands, where the country bumped up against three other doomed empires, the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Qing, and where the violence unleashed by war, revolution, and imperial collapse was particularly vicious. In compulsively readable prose that draws on wide-ranging research in multiple languages, Sunderland re-creates Ungern’s far-flung life and uses it to tell a compelling and original tale of imperial success and failure in a momentous time. Sunderland visited the many sites that shaped Ungern’s experience, from Austria and Estonia to Mongolia and China, and these travels help give the book its arresting geographical feel. In the early chapters, where direct evidence of Ungern’s activities is sparse, he evokes peoples and places as Ungern would have experienced them, carefully tracing the accumulation of influences that ultimately came together to propel the better documented, more notorious phase of his career. Recurring throughout Sunderland’s magisterial account is a specific artifact: the Baron’s cloak, an essential part of the cross-cultural uniform Ungern chose for himself by the time of his Mongolian campaign: an orangey-gold Mongolian kaftan embroidered in the Khalkha fashion yet outfitted with tsarist-style epaulettes on the shoulders. Like his cloak, Ungern was an imperial product. He lived across the Russian Empire, combined its contrasting cultures, fought its wars, and was molded by its greatest institutions and most volatile frontiers. By the time of his trial and execution mere months before the decree that created the USSR, he had become a profoundly contradictory figure, reflecting both the empire’s potential as a multinational society and its ultimately irresolvable limitations.
The Chancellor has little real power... He is mired down by baseless accusations of corruption, Senator Palpatine told Queen Amidala in Episode I. Tracing the thrilling chain of events that leads up to the Republic's current chaotic state, CLOAK OF DECEPTION follows Chancellor Valorum as he struggles with his fall from power... and the dark forces who have benefitted greatly from his weakened position. Hoping to stem the growing tide of unrest, Valorum convenes an emergency trade summit on the planet Eriadu. At his request, a group of Jedi Knights is sent to protect the delegates from possible terrorist attack. But what should have been a simple peacekeeping assignment turns out to be a mission into the heart of a political firestorm. For shadowy forces are at work, pulling the strings in a masterful bid for power that could leave the Republic reeling. And the Chancellor is only its most visible victim... One man's fall from power could lead to the end of the Republic, and the irreversible rise of the dark side...
Wearing the Cloak contains nine stimulating chapters on Roman military textiles and equipment that take textile research to a new level. Hear the sounds of the Roman soldiers' clacking belts and get a view on their purchase orders with Egyptian weavers. Could armour be built of linen? Who had access to what kinds of prestigious equipment? And what garments and weapons were deposited in bogs at the edge of the Roman Empire? The authors draw upon multiple sources such as original textual and scriptural evidence, ancient works of art and iconography and archaeological records and finds. The chapters cover - as did the Roman army - a large geographical span: Egypt, the Levant, the Etruscan heartland and Northern Europe. Status, prestige and access are viewed in the light of financial and social capacities and help shed new light on the material realities of a soldier's life in the Roman world.
Walk the Wall, gaze northwards across hostile territory, man the turrets and milecastles… What was life like for the Roman troops stationed on Hadrian’s Wall? Follow the life of one man, a Tungrian soldier, through recruitment, training, garrison duty and war. Focussing on a single point in time and one fort on the Wall, we explore every aspect of military life on this bleak and remote frontier. Where was he born? What did he spend his money on? How did he fight? What did he eat? Did he have lice or fleas? Archaeology and the accounts of ancient writers come together to paint a vivid picture of a soldier on the Wall soon after its completion in AD 130. Historical reconstruction and experimentation fill in the gaps that are left. Step back into the past, step into the marching boots of Tungrian soldiers as they patrol Rome’s greatest frontier. 21 black-and-white drawings and maps and 34 colour illustrations
