Expecting to become a supervillain on his 16th birthday, Damien Locke, son of one of Golden City's most notorious supervillains, is horrified to discover that he may instead be destined to become a superhero.
Can a half villain ever be a full hero? Damien Locke didn't choose for his supervillain mom to disown him - just because he sort of defied her and ruined her evil plans to take over Golden City - and he didn't choose for his superpower to be flying, a superhero ability that involves his least favorite thing: heights. But now that he's living with his dad's superhero family and enrolling at Heroesworth Academy, he's ready to embrace his new life, get his H, and finally belong somewhere. But belonging isn't as easy as signing up for classes, and Damien finds himself struggling to fit in more than ever. Just when he's sure his fate as a hero has been decided, though, he gets a new villain power that he can't control. And things only get worse when he accidentally screws up one of his sidekick Sarah's gadgets, altering her personality and turning her into a crazed, anti-supervillain vigilante - leaving him no choice but to team up with her annoying superhero boyfriend if he hopes to have any chance of getting the old Sarah back, before she captures - or kills - another supervillain like him.
Part of the Jewish Encounter series In 1656, Amsterdam’s Jewish community excommunicated Baruch Spinoza, and, at the age of twenty–three, he became the most famous heretic in Judaism. He was already germinating a secularist challenge to religion that would be as radical as it was original. He went on to produce one of the most ambitious systems in the history of Western philosophy, so ahead of its time that scientists today, from string theorists to neurobiologists, count themselves among Spinoza’s progeny. In Betraying Spinoza, Rebecca Goldstein sets out to rediscover the flesh-and-blood man often hidden beneath the veneer of rigorous rationality, and to crack the mystery of the breach between the philosopher and his Jewish past. Goldstein argues that the trauma of the Inquisition’ s persecution of its forced Jewish converts plays itself out in Spinoza’s philosophy. The excommunicated Spinoza, no less than his excommunicators, was responding to Europe’ s first experiment with racial anti-Semitism. Here is a Spinoza both hauntingly emblematic and deeply human, both heretic and hero—a surprisingly contemporary figure ripe for our own uncertain age.
"Damien's always been afraid of heights, but he's never been afraid of fieldwork or of being in the spotlight. At least, he wasn't before the gala-- the one where his grandpa nearly caused a massacre and heroes from the League almost killed his best friend. Now he finds himself dreading the very things he used to love, and all he wants is to skate by in school, avoid fieldwork, and keep a low profile. But avoiding his fears isn't as easy as he hopes, especially when the school decides to send him and his best friend to hunt down a dangerous criminal. And as if that isn't bad enough, it turns out he also has to pass a flying test if he wants to make it through the school year, even though his debilitating fear of heights means it's pretty much impossible. In order to pass the test and catch a criminal, Damien accepts help from unlikely allies. But when his mission goes south and he accidentally lets a terrible weapon fall into the wrong hands, he'll have to overcome his doubts and save his friends from a psychotic killer bent on using his worst fears against him."--Provided by publisher.
Sixteen-year-old Damien Locke has a plan: major in messing with people at the local supervillain university and become a professional evil genius, just like his supervillain mom. But when he discovers the shameful secret she's been hiding all these years, that the one-night stand that spawned him was actually with a superhero, everything gets messed up. His father's too moral for his own good, so when he finds out Damien exists, he actually wants him to come live with him and his goody-goody superhero family. Damien gets shipped off to stay with them in their suburban hellhole, and he has only six weeks to prove he's not a hero in any way, or else he's stuck living with them for the rest of his life, or until he turns eighteen, whichever comes first. To get out of this mess, Damien has to survive his dad's "flying lessons" that involve throwing him off the tallest building in the city--despite his nearly debilitating fear of heights--thwarting the eccentric teen scientist who insists she's his sidekick, and keeping his supervillain girlfriend from finding out the truth. But when Damien uncovers a dastardly plot to turn all the superheroes into mindless zombie slaves, a plan hatched by his own mom, he discovers he cares about his new family more than he thought. Now he has to choose: go back to his life of villainy and let his family become zombies, or stand up to his mom and become a real hero.
Can a half villain ever be a full hero? Damien Locke didn't choose for his supervillain mom to disown him - just because he sort of defied her and ruined her evil plans to take over Golden City - and he didn't choose for his superpower to be flying, a superhero ability that involves his least favorite thing: heights. But now that he's living with his dad's superhero family and enrolling at Heroesworth Academy, he's ready to embrace his new life, get his H, and finally belong somewhere. But belonging isn't as easy as signing up for classes, and Damien finds himself struggling to fit in more than ever. Just when he's sure his fate as a hero has been decided, though, he gets a new villain power that he can't control. And things only get worse when he accidentally screws up one of his sidekick Sarah's gadgets, altering her personality and turning her into a crazed, anti-supervillain vigilante - leaving him no choice but to team up with her annoying superhero boyfriend if he hopes to have any chance of getting the old Sarah back, before she captures - or kills - another supervillain like him.
As the Third World War rages on, America is confronted by Soviet spies and American traitors. In this shadowy world of uncertain alliances, the Roadhouse Sons must distinguish between friend, foe and a serial killer.
The figure of the renegade - a European Christian or Jew who had converted to Islam and was now serving the Ottoman sultan - is omnipresent in all genres produced by those early modern Christian Europeans who wrote about the Ottoman Empire. As few contemporaries failed to remark, converts were disproportionately represented among those who governed, administered, and fought for the sultan. Unsurprisingly, therefore, renegades have attracted considerable attention from historians of Europe as well as students of European literature. Until very recently, however, Ottomanists have been surprisingly silent on the presence of Christian-European converts in the Ottoman military-administrative elite. The Sultan's Renegades inserts these 'foreign' converts into the context of Ottoman elite life to reorient the discussion of these individuals away from the present focus on their exceptionality, towards a qualified appreciation of their place in the Ottoman imperial enterprise and the Empire's relations with its neighbours in Christian Europe. Drawing heavily on Central European sources, this study highlights the deep political, religious, and cultural entanglements between the Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe beyond the Mediterranean Basin as the 'shared world' par excellence. The existence of such trans-imperial subjects is not only symptomatic of the Empire's ability to attract and integrate people of a great diversity of backgrounds, it also illustrates the extent to which the Ottomans participated in processes of religious polarization usually considered typical of Christian Europe in this period. Nevertheless, Christian Europeans remained ambivalent about those they dismissed as apostates and traitors, frequently relying on them for support in the pursuit of familial and political interests.
Don't miss this third adventure in the Rebel Force series! X-7, the Empire's deadly assassin, has infiltrated the Rebel Alliance. Trained by ruthless Commander Rezi Soresh, he feels nothing and sees everything. But despite his training, eliminating Luke Skywalker proves more difficult than he imagined. Surrounded by friends and allies, Luke seems all but impervious to the usual tactics. So this time, X-7 knows how to bring Luke down: he'll shatter the trust that holds the Rebel Alliance together and manufacture the ultimate betrayal.