The bluestocking Phillippa ’Phil’ Ford likes books, cats, driving at high speed, and most importantly her independence. Maxwell ‘Max’ Mowbray likes chess, good investments, riding as fast as possible, and most importantly women. The two only peripherally know each other and have no desire to deepen the connection until they die in the same carriage accident. Suddenly they are ghosts and the only two able to see each other. The two strangers seem to disagree on literally everything – except that marriage is not for them. As they navigate London trying to find a way to pass on or simply pass time, sympathy starts to build between them, and they slowly understand each other’s motives better. But what chance do two ghosts have of a happy ever after?
Contributions by Allan Amanik, Kelly B. Arehart, Sue Fawn Chung, Kami Fletcher, Rosina Hassoun, James S. Pula, Jeffrey E. Smith, and Martina Will de Chaparro Till Death Do Us Part: American Ethnic Cemeteries as Borders Uncrossed explores the tendency among most Americans to separate their dead along communal lines rooted in race, faith, ethnicity, or social standing and asks what a deeper exploration of that phenomenon can tell us about American history more broadly. Comparative in scope, and regionally diverse, chapters look to immigrants, communities of color, the colonized, the enslaved, rich and poor, and religious minorities as they buried kith and kin in locales spanning the Northeast to the Spanish American Southwest. Whether African Americans, Muslim or Christian Arabs, Indians, mestizos, Chinese, Jews, Poles, Catholics, Protestants, or various whites of European descent, one thing that united these Americans was a drive to keep their dead apart. At times, they did so for internal preference. At others, it was a function of external prejudice. Invisible and institutional borders built around and into ethnic cemeteries also tell a powerful story of the ways in which Americans have negotiated race, culture, class, national origin, and religious difference in the United States during its formative centuries.
True crime writer and sometime-sleuth Bailey Weggins took the world by storm in Kate White's sexy and suspenseful debut novel, If Looks Could Kill. Now, in Bailey's latest outing, she takes the plunge into a world of domestic divas and deadly nuptial doings... When she gets a call from Ashley Hanes on a frigid night, Bailey expects to be hit up for fashion show tickets. Instead Ashley reveals that two bridesmaids from Peyton Cross's wedding have recently died in freak accidents...and Ashley is terrified she's next. A bridesmaid herself-with the dress to prove it-Bailey dashes off to Ivy Hill Farm, the home of Peyton's catering empire in Greenwich, Connecticut. Bailey's barely warmed up after the cold drive before another bridesmaid takes a walk down the aisle of no return. Now following a dangerous trail of clues that will take her from New York's trendy Lower East Side to a fabulous oceanfront hotel in Miami, Bailey could become the headline of the next true crime story: Four Funerals and a Wedding.
Vashti or, Until Death Us Do Part is a book by Augusta Jane Evans. It depicts a romantic story of old times where women were quiet and candid, where an orphaned girl called Salome falls in love with a doctor from another culture.
Martin Marietta Corporation was an American company founded in 1961 and was a leader in chemicals, aerospace, and electronics. In 1982, Bendix Corporation, headed by William Agee, made a hostile takeover bid, buying the majority of Martin shares and in effect owned the company. However, Martin Marietta's management used the short time separating ownership and control to sell non-core businesses and launch its own hostile takeover of Bendix. This became known as the Pac-Man defense. Thomas G. Pownall, CEO of Martin Marietta, was successful and the end of this bitter battle saw Martin Marietta survive; Bendix was bought by Allied Corporation. This book is based on interviews with the main participants.
The last contraction never comes. Melanie cannot feel Ezra. Her body thinks that he is already out. She can hear "Melanie, push this baby out." But she can't feel anything to push. She can hear the call to 911, hear them ask for the address. --- Beliefs don't make a story. It's what happens when they meet an experience that flies in their face and seemingly discredits them, a juxtaposition that pits the intellectual content of belief, so hidden and implausible, squarely against the emotional and psychological experience of suffering, so obvious and real. It's one thing to profess faith in a loving, merciful God who looks out for your best interests and works out all things for good. It's another to believe that in the face of your infant turning blue and screaming from suffocating to death, night after night, after night... to attempt to reconcile your feelings of complete abandonment to a purportedly loving God's promises of comfort, peace and even joy.
Ingrid Betancourt, a senator and a presidential candidate in Colombia, grew up among diplomats, literati, and artists who congregated at her parents' elegant home in Paris, France. Her father served as Colombia's ambassador to UNESCO and her mother, a political activist, continued her work on behalf of the country's countless children whose lives were being destroyed by extreme poverty and institutional neglect. Intellectually, Ingrid was influenced by Pablo Neruda and other Latin American writers like Gabriel García Márquez, who frequented her parents' social circle. She studied at École de Sciences Politiques de Paris, a prestigious academy in France. From this charmed life, Ingrid Betancourt -- not yet thirty, happily married to a French diplomat, and a mother of two children -- returned to her native country in the late 1980s. On what was initially just a visit, she found her country under internal siege from the drug cartels and the corrupt government that had allowed them to flourish. After seeing what had become of Colombia's democracy, she didn't feel she could leave. Until Death Do Us Part is the deeply personal story of a woman who gave up a life of comfort and safety to become a political leader in a country being slowly demolished by terrorism, violence, fear, and a pervasive sense of hopelessness. It is a country where democracy has been sacrificed for the well-being of the few, where international criminals determine policy, and where political assassinations are a way of life. Now forty, Ingrid Betancourt has been elected and reelected as a representative and as a senator in Colombia's national legislature. She has founded a political party that has openly confronted Colombia's leaders and has earned the respect of a nation. And now she has become a target of the establishment and the drug cartels behind it. Forced to move her children out of Colombia for protection against death threats, Ingrid Betancourt remained and continued to fight the political structure that has crumbled under the destructive power of the paramilitary forces, the financial omnipotence of the drug cartels, and the passivity of governmentfor-sale. Here is a political cocktail that has destroyed countless lives in Colombia and has spread to countries beyond its borders. A memoir of a life in politics that reads like a fastpaced political thriller, Until Death Do Us Part -- already an international bestseller -- is a hair-raising account of one woman's fight against the establishment. It is a story of a woman whose love for her country and faith in democracy gave her the courage to stand up to the power that has subjugated, intimidated, or corrupted all those who opposed it. A chilling account of the dangerous, byzantine machine that runs Colombia, it is also an inspiring story of privilege, sacrifice, and true patriotism.
Don Sheehan's early life, plagued by his father's alcoholic violence, was at the same time blessed by the good stories this intelligent man read aloud to his children. In his teens, unhappy in school, Don joined a street gang and then the Army Reserves, where he found he had renounced violence. On his eighteenth birthday, happening upon his post library, he walked straight to a book of Japanese poems. It went, in turn, straight to his heart, for eight hours. He'd come home at last. The house of Don's pilgrimage encompasses a wide territory: spiritual, lyric, scholarly, usually all at once. At our best, what we can take from engaging these essays is a way of falling into the heart to embrace, suffer, and, in Christ, transfigure the world's "ruining oppositions." In doing so, we fulfill what St. Maximus the Confessor saw as our human calling: to unify the polarities embedded in God's creation and thus make, not only ourselves, but all Creation whole.
This book fills a vacuum in our understanding of the Eastern Church by revealing themes, persons, and insights that offer resources for a contemporary moral theology. Reviewing the Eastern tradition from patristic times to the present, Woodill shows its relevance to contemporary virtue ethics and identifies both differences and similarities between Orthodox and other - Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish - virtue ethics. Woodill's study centers on the fundamental elements of classical Greek ethics: telos, practice, virtue, community, narrative, and mentoring. He analyzes the ancient Greek fathers and the writings of modern Orthodox ethicists Stanley Harakas, Vigen Gurolan, and Christos Yannaras to show how those elements relate to the process of Christian transformation. He then demonstrates how the movement from creation to redemption contains an implicit virtue ethic.
