Between Two Kingdoms

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission to re-entry into “normal” life—from the author of the Life, Interrupted column in The New York Times ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, The Rumpus, She Reads, Library Journal, Booklist • “I was immersed for the whole ride and would follow Jaouad anywhere. . . . Her writing restores the moon, lights the way as we learn to endure the unknown.”—Chanel Miller, The New York Times Book Review “Beautifully crafted . . . affecting . . . a transformative read . . . Jaouad’s insights about the self, connectedness, uncertainty and time speak to all of us.”—The Washington Post In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter “the real world.” She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone. It started with an itch—first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times. When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward—after countless rounds of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant—she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal—to survive. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live. How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad embarked—with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt—on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who’d spent his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.

Woman Between Two Kingdoms explores the story of Dara Rasami, one of 153 wives of King Chulalongkorn of Siam in Thailand during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Born in a kingdom near Siam called Lan Na, Dara served as both hostage and diplomat for her family and nation. Thought of as a harem by the West, Siam's Inner Palace actually formed a nexus between the domestic and the political. Dara's role as an ethnic Other among the royal concubines assisted the Siamese in both consolidating the kingdom's territory and building a local version of Europe's hierarchy of civilizations. Dara Rasami's story provides a fresh perspective on both the sociopolitical roles played by Siamese palace women, and Siam's response to the intense imperialist pressures it faced in the late nineteenth century.

In this work of allegorical fantasy, author Boyd takes readers on a pilgrimage to a land of two kingdoms, but only one true King. An ancient land, where children never grow old. But also a dying land, where a false prince threatens to swallow everything in a dark shadow.

A compilation of articles written by and about Suleika Jaouad and a journey through cancer from age 22."My life was interrupted overnight. But guess what? That interruption was the best thing that's ever happened to me. I would never go so far as to say "cancer is a gift." It's not. And I've seen it take way too many lives, way too soon. But when I found out I had cancer, I also began to find my voice."

Modern movements such as neo-Calvinism, the New Perspective on Paul, and the emerging church have popularized a view of Christianity and culture that calls for the redemption of earthly society and institutions. Many Christians have reflexively embraced this view, enticed by the socially active and engaged faith it produces. Living in God’s Two Kingdoms illustrates how a two-kingdoms model of Christianity and culture affirms much of what is compelling in these transformationist movements while remaining faithful to the whole counsel of Scripture. By focusing on God’s response to each kingdom—his preservation of the civil society and his redemption of the spiritual kingdom—VanDrunen teaches readers how to live faithfully in each sphere. Highlighting vital biblical distinctions between honorable and holy tasks, VanDrunen’s analysis will challenge Christians to be actively and critically engaged in the culture around them while retaining their identities as sojourners and exiles in this world.

Winner of the 2015 RBC Taylor Prize Winner of the 2016 Forest of Reading® Evergreen Award™ After almost twenty years of caring for elderly parents—first for their senile father, and then for their cantankerous ninety-three-year-old mother—author Plum Johnson and her three younger brothers experience conflicted feelings of grief and relief when their mother, the surviving parent, dies. Now they must empty and sell the beloved family home, which hasn’t been de-cluttered in more than half a century. Twenty-three rooms bulge with history, antiques, and oxygen tanks. Plum remembers her loving but difficult parents who could not have been more different: the British father, a handsome, disciplined patriarch who nonetheless could not control his opinionated, extroverted Southern-belle wife who loved tennis and gin gimlets. The task consumes her, becoming more rewarding than she ever imagined. Items from childhood trigger memories of her eccentric family growing up in a small town on the shores of Lake Ontario in the 1950s and 60s. But unearthing new facts about her parents helps her reconcile those relationships with a more accepting perspective about who they were and what they valued. They Left Us Everything is a funny, touching memoir about the importance of preserving family history to make sense of the past and nurturing family bonds to safeguard the future.

Pre-revolutionary Paris comes to life in this fascinating story surrounding the correspondence between two colorful and witty society figures: the French author Louise d'Épinay and the Italian priest-diplomat Ferdinando Galiani. Their friends included Voltaire, Diderot, Melchior Grimm, and the famous women of the salons, and their letters touched upon everything from social gossip to issues of education and politics. Francis Steegmuller's book is at once a unique history and a charming account of friendship sustained in a turbulent age. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

A Tale of Two Kingdoms traces the conflict between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Man. The Scriptural account that begins in Genesis comes to a climax in the Book of Revelation as one kingdom is destroyed and one has a glorious future. Jesus had much to say about these two kingdoms as He challenged His hearers to turn from the kingdom of this world and align themselves with the Kingdom of God. God's final revelation was given to John to make clear how this conflict will end. In the Book of Revelation the Kingdom of Man (called "Babylon") comes under God's judgment and is destroyed while the Kingdom of God (led by Jesus Christ) rules eternally over all creation. The Book of Revelation becomes very practical as a prospectus for those who would make a wise investment with eternal dividends.