A Reckoning

It’s 1855, and the Dickinson farm, in the bottom corner of Virginia, is already in debt when a Northern abolitionist arrives and creates havoc among the slaves. Determined to find his mother and daughter, who are already free in Canada, Bry is the first slave to flee, and his escape inspires a dozen others. Soon, the farm, owned by one brother and managed by another, is forfeited to the bank. One of the brothers, who is also a circuit-riding preacher, gathers his flock into a wagon train to find a new life in the west. But John Dickinson has a dangerous secret that compels him to abandon the group at the last minute, and his wife, two daughters, and thirteen-year-old son, Martin, now face life on the trail and an unknown future alone. After a fateful encounter along the way, Martin and Bry will hatch a plot to get Bry safely to Canada, but each member of the family will be changed, tormented, excited, and exposed by the journey. Linda Spalding brings an astonishing empathy to the telling of the fate of each of the travelers and to their shifting inner lives—compoundedof grief, fear, anger, and hope. Rich in character and incident, A Reckoning brilliantly-creates an America that was: the undefiled beauty of its lands and the grand mix of settlers and Native Americans; blacks and whites; riverboat captains, small businessmen, and people leaving one life behind for another they can only just begin to see. It moves with irresistible force toward an ending at once cataclysmic, inevitable, and profound.

Only two weeks ago, life was all too predictable. But that was before I saw my first ghost. Now along with my supernatural friends Tori, Derek, and Simon, I'm on the run from the Edison Group, which genetically altered us as part of their sinister experiment. We're hiding in a safe house that might not be as safe as it seems. We'll be gone soon anyway, back to rescue those we'd left behind and take out the Edison Group . . . or so we hope.

The instant New York Times and USA Today bestseller America is suffering from PTSD—The Reckoning diagnoses its core causes and helps us begin the healing process. For four years, Donald J. Trump inflicted an onslaught of overlapping and interconnected traumas upon the American people, targeting anyone he perceived as being an “other” or an enemy. Women were discounted and derided, the sick were dismissed as weak and unworthy of help, immigrants and minorities were demonized and discriminated against, and money was elevated above all else. In short, he transformed our country into a macro version of his malignantly dysfunctional family. How can we make sense of the degree to which our institutions and leaders have let us down? How can we negotiate a world in which all sense of safety and justice seems to have been destroyed? How can we—as individuals and as a nation—confront, process, and overcome this loss of trust and the ways we have been forever altered by chaos, division, and cruelty? And when the dust finally settles, how can we begin to heal, in the midst of ongoing health and economic crises and the greatest political divide since the Civil War? Mary L. Trump is uniquely positioned to answer these difficult questions. She holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology specializing in trauma, has herself been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, and happens to be Donald J. Trump’s only niece. In The Reckoning, she applies her unique expertise to the task of helping us confront an all-encompassing trauma, one that has taken an immense toll on our nation’s health and well-being. A new leader alone cannot fix us. Donald J. Trump is only the latest symptom of a disease that has existed within the body politic since America’s inception—from the original sin of slavery through our unceasing, organized commitment to inequality. Our failure to acknowledge this, let alone root it out, has allowed it to metastasize. Now, we are confronted with the limits of our own agency on a daily basis. Whether it manifests itself in rising levels of rage and hatred, or hopelessness and apathy, the unspeakable stress of living in a country we no longer recognize has affected all of us for a long time, in ways we may not fully understand. An enormous amount of healing must be done to rebuild our lives, our faith in leadership, and our hope for this nation. It starts with The Reckoning.

One girl. One chance. One destiny. In the village of Martindale, hundreds of miles north of the new English capital of Windsor, sixteen-year-old Silver Blackthorne takes the Reckoning. This coming-of- age test not only decides her place in society – Elite, Member, Inter or Trog – but also determines that Silver is to become an Offering for King Victor. But these are uncertain times and no one really knows what happens to the teenagers who disappear into Windsor Castle. Is being an Offering the privilege everyone assumes it to be, or do the walls of the castle have something to hide? Trapped in a maze of ancient corridors, Silver finds herself in a warped world of suspicion where it is difficult to know who to trust and who to fear. The one thing Silver does know is that she must find a way out . . . The heart-stopping first book in a new trilogy by UK author Kerry Wilkinson, Reckoning is the story of one girl's determination to escape the whims of a cruel king, and what she must do to survive against all odds.

Whether building a road or fighting a war, leaders from ancient Mesopotamia to the present have relied on financial accounting to track their state's assets and guide its policies. Basic accounting tools such as auditing and double-entry bookkeeping form the basis of modern capitalism and the nation-state. Yet our appreciation for accounting and its formative role throughout history remains minimal at best-and we remain ignorant at our peril. The 2008 financial crisis is only the most recent example of how poor or risky practices can shake, and even bring down, entire societies. In The Reckoning, historian and MacArthur "Genius" Award-winner Jacob Soll presents a sweeping history of accounting, drawing on a wealth of examples from over a millennia of human history to reveal how accounting has shaped kingdoms, empires, and entire civilizations. The Medici family of 15th century Florence used the double-entry method to win the loyalty of their clients, but eventually began to misrepresent their accounts, ultimately contributing to the economic decline of the Florentine state itself. In the 17th and 18th centuries, European rulers shunned honest accounting, understanding that accurate bookkeeping would constrain their spending and throw their legitimacy into question. And in fact, when King Louis XVI's director of finances published the crown's accounts in 1781, his revelations provoked a public outcry that helped to fuel the French Revolution. When transparent accounting finally took hold in the 19th Century, the practice helped England establish a global empire. But both inept and willfully misused accounting persist, as the catastrophic Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Recession of 2008 have made all too clear. A masterwork of economic and political history, and a radically new perspective on the recent past, The Reckoning compels us to see how accounting is an essential instrument of great institutions and nations-and one that, in our increasingly transparent and interconnected world, has never been more vital.

The politics of racism have returned with a vengeance in the wake of widespread outrage over racial violence, yet nothing about the idea of racism is the same because everything has changed in how we see, think, and talk about it.

"This is criticism at its best." —Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times Writing in the tradition of Susan Sontag and Elaine Scarry, Maggie Nelson has emerged as one of our foremost cultural critics with this landmark work about representations of cruelty and violence in art. From Sylvia Plath’s poetry to Francis Bacon’s paintings, from the Saw franchise to Yoko Ono’s performance art, Nelson’s nuanced exploration across the artistic landscape ultimately offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo, and permissibility.

A reticent stranger. A town keeping a grave secret. And there’s a score to settle, things to put right. An unsuspecting lone rider comes to a tiny town on the west bank of the Pecos River possessing a terrible secret the residents are determined to protect. By violence if necessary. When McNeil rode into Dead Horse Crossing, a tiny town on the west bank of the Pecos, he wasn’t looking for trouble. Tight-lipped about the purpose of his visit, he immediately gets a chilly reception from the townspeople. McNeil rents a room at the hotel, only to be harassed by a cowboy named Cotton Patrick for no apparent reason. McNeil’s attempts to get directions to an area ranch create further hostility, prompting a local powerful rancher, Bull Sommers, to take a keen interest in McNeil’s presence. McNeil visits the town marshal’s office for help only to discover that the marshal, Bud Long, also doubles as the town drunk and is useless. McNeil mentions he is trying to locate a rancher named Denton Everhart at the local Lazy E ranch and Long becomes as hostile as the rest of townsfolk. Then when he persists in riding out to the Lazy E, real trouble finds him. It becomes apparent that the good people of Dead Horse Crossing have something to hide. And when McNeil stumbles onto their terrible secret, he touches a nerve so sensitive he spends the rest of his time in town fighting for his life. But he isn’t the only one. Part of the secret McNeil uncovers means he has a score to settle. Before he quits this speck of a town on the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, others will fight to stay alive, too. For McNeil, it’s not about revenge. He demands a reckoning. Something terrible is happening in Dead Horse Crossing. And someone must stop it. Someone needs to pay. Outnumbered and outgunned, can McNeil survive to set things right? Or will evil triumph and the guilty go free? The Reckoning, the debut novel in the new Lone Rider classic western fiction series, is perfect for fans of the greats like Louis L’Amour, Ralph Compton, and Elmer Kelton.