In the wake of European expansion, disease outbreaks in the New World caused the greatest loss of life known to history. Post-contact Native American inhabitants succumbed in staggering numbers to maladies such as smallpox, measles, influenza, and typhus, against which they had no immunity. A collection of case studies by historians, geographers, and anthropologists, "Secret Judgments of God" discusses how diseases with Old World origins devastated vulnerable native populations throughout Spanish America. In their preface to the paperback edition, the editors discuss the ongoing, often heated debate about contact population history.
#1 New York Times bestselling author Christine Feehan tells the story of Abigail Drake, one of seven elementally gifted sisters who are fated to find great love. As the third daughter in a magical bloodline, Abigail Drake was born with a mystical affinity for water, and possessed a particularly strong bond with dolphins. She spent her entire life studying them, learning from them, and swimming among them in the waters off her hometown of Sea Haven... Until the day Abby witnessed a cold-blooded murder on shore, and found herself fleeing for her life—right into the arms of Alexsandr Volstov. He’s an Interpol agent on the trail of stolen Russian antiquities, a relentless man who gets what he goes after—and the man who broke Abby’s heart. But he isn’t going to let the only woman he ever loved be placed in harm’s way—or slip away from his embrace.
“In climbing the Seven Summits, Silvia Vasquez-Lavado did nothing less than take back her own life—one brave step at a time. She will inspire untold numbers of souls with this story, for her victory is a win on behalf of all of us.”—Elizabeth Gilbert Endless ice. Thin air. The threat of dropping into nothingness thousands of feet below. This is the climb Silvia Vasquez-Lavado braves in her page-turning, pulse-raising memoir chronicling her journey to Mount Everest. A Latina hero in the elite macho tech world of Silicon Valley, privately, she was hanging by a thread. Deep in the throes of alcoholism, hiding her sexuality from her family, and repressing the abuse she’d suffered as a child, she started climbing. Something about the brute force required for the ascent—the risk and spirit and sheer size of the mountains and death’s close proximity—woke her up. She then took her biggest pain as a survivor to the biggest mountain: Everest. “The Mother of the World,” as it’s known in Nepal, allows few to reach her summit, but Silvia didn’t go alone. She gathered a group of young female survivors and led them to base camp alongside her. It was never easy. At times hair-raising, nerve-racking, and always challenging, Silvia remembers the acute anxiety of leading a group of novice climbers to Everest’s base, all the while coping with her own nerves of summiting. But, there were also moments of peace, joy, and healing with the strength of her fellow survivors and community propelling her forward. In the Shadow of the Mountain is a remarkable story of heroism, one which awakens in all of us a lust for adventure, an appetite for risk, and faith in our own resilience.
Here are more than 60 of the best articles that have appeared for more than a decade in Success Unlimited magazine. They cover such topics as the power of faith, ideas, love, courage and mind which will help you to discover your hidden potentials and achieve success.Some of most outstanding individuals reveal the way to happiness, health and success through their own experiences and reflections on life or the stories of people they have known and admired. World-renowned clergymen like Preston Bradley, Norman Vincent Peale and Harold Blake Walker describe how you can develop your natural talents, stop worrying and achieve seemingly impossible goals. Mahatma Gandhi tells why he is convinced that organized mind-power is greater than military power. There are many other fascinating articles, including one by W. Clement Stone on his extraordinary career from Chicago newsboy at the age of six to the head of a vast commercial and publishing empire. Of particular interest is the section entitled Sales Unlimited with its practical down-to-earth advice for salesman and would-be sales managers.
The first new novel in five years from “one of the most versatile and accomplished writers of her generation” —Joyce Carol Oates, The New Yorker. Jessica Speight, a young anthropology student in 1960s London, is at the beginning of a promising academic career when an affair with her married professor turns her into a single mother. Anna is a pure gold baby with a delightful, sunny nature, but it soon becomes clear that she will not be a normal child. As readers are drawn deeper into Jessica’s world, they are confronted with questions of responsibility, potential, even age, all with Margaret Drabble’s characteristic intelligence, sympathy and wit. Drabble once wrote, “Family life itself, that safest, most traditional, most approved of female choices, is not a sanctuary; it is, perpetually, a dangerous place.” Told from the point of view of the group of mothers who surround Jess, The Pure Gold Baby is a brilliant, prismatic novel that takes us into that place with satiric verve, trenchant commentary and a movingly intimate story of the unexpected transformations at the heart of motherhood.
The Colour of Milk is a literary tour de force of power, class, and fate, told in the fierce, urgent voice of the irrepressible Mary, a character as indelible as The Color Purple’s Celie and Margaret Atwood’s eponymous Alias Grace. Set in England in 1830, The Colour of Milk by Nell Leyshon is an emotionally haunting work of historical fiction — hailed as “charming, Brontë-esque...and hard to forget” (Marian Keyes) — about an illiterate farm girl’s emotional and intellectual awakening and its devastating consequences. Mary, the spirited youngest daughter of an angry, violent man, is sent to work for the local vicar and his invalid wife. Her strange new surroundings offer unsettling challenges, including the vicar’s lecherous son and a manipulative fellow servant. But life in the vicarage also offers unexpected joys, as the curious young girl learns to read and write — knowledge that will come at a tragic price.
From the acclaimed author of "Krik? Krak!". 1937: On the Dominican side of the Haiti border, Amabelle, a maid to the young wife of an army colonel falls in love with sugarcane cutter Sebastien. She longs to become his wife and walk into their future. Instead, terror unfolds them. But the story does not end here: it begins.
“This collection, because of its exceptional theoretical coherence and sophistication, is qualitatively superior to the most frequently consulted anthologies on Latin American women’s history and literature . . . [and] represents a new, more theoretically rigorous stage in the feminist debate on Latin American women.”—Elizabeth Garrels, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Inquisitionis Hispanicae Artes (Heidelberg, 1567), written by exiled Spanish Protestants, is the first systematic denunciation of the Spanish Inquisition. Its first part is a description of the Inquisition’s methods, making use of the Inquisition’s own instruction manual, which was not publicly known. Its second section presents a gallery of individuals who suffered persecution in Seville during the anti-Protestant repression (1557-1565). The book had a great impact, being almost immediately translated into English, French, Dutch, German, and Hungarian. The portraits very soon passed into Protestant martyrologies, and the most shocking descriptions (torture, auto de fe) became ammunition for anti-Spanish literature. This critical edition presents a new text as well as, for the first time, extensive notes.
