Hawk Rising

Early morning and a ruffle of feathers, A shadow gliding through the backyard. High above your house Father Hawk circles, sharp eyes searching for prey. From the front porch, you watch. Swoosh! He dives after chipmunks, crows, sparrows, squirrels. Screech! The sun sets low in the sky. What’s for dinner? A father red-tailed hawk hunts prey for his family in a suburban neighborhood in this thrilling, fierce, and gorgeous nonfiction picture book, Hawk Rising, illustrated by Caldecott medalist Brian Floca.

Thousands in the Western world have sought a brighter life through the practice of Eastern meditation. While many have experienced a deeper sense of calm, most have never experienced the enlightenment promised by these methods. Through witty, entertaining anecdotes, Hawk Rising shares the secret to understanding, observing, and then managing a calming approach that softens, but does not stifle the desire for achievement. John Cowan has spent his lifetime learning within the worlds of spirituality and motivational psychology and offers an innovative method derived from the Buddhist system that effectively reduces anxiety through meditation and visualization. Cowan teaches through exercises and personal stories that viewing the imagination as part of the here and now will end frustration and increase the ability to begin each day with renewed power and confidence. Anyone interested in remaining in the hustle and bustle of the world and still achieving a new level of inner-peace will benefit from his explorations of the sources of anxiety, its causes, and how to develop a method for being usefully anxious while living a free, active, and creative life.

Scott Russell Sanders reveals how the pressure of the sacred breaks through the surfaces of ordinary life-a life devoted to grown-up children and aging parents, the craft of writing, and the natural world. Whether writing to his daughter and his son as each prepares to get married, or describing an encounter with a red-tailed hawk in whose form he glimpses his dead father, or praising the disciplines of writing and carpentry and teaching, Sanders registers, in finely tuned prose, the force of spirit.

Hawk Knight takes place in the mayan land, shortly after the olmecas, the toltecas and the teotihuacanos had vanished, destroyed by the Akabil, messenger from the Nine Dark Lords that want the world disappearing the humanity, trying to run over the Knights of Kukulkn, Order founded by the very god to teach in the city-school of Chichn Itz, where the Knights train their chosen apprentices to create new Knights. Now a new apprentice had arrived along a new ascention of the Akabil, a Knight apostatize the Order and his Master looks for eliminate him, the young Florid Field has decisions to take and his Master tries to fi nd out the new champion of the order.

In the last twenty years preceding the war between the states, life in Southern Georgia was slow and gentle, seemingly caught up in an age of assumed innocence and preferred isolation. With only a smattering of the gentility of the South to grace its society, it would be readily evident to any visitor that Carsons Cove was not on par with one of the more metropolitan areas like Savannah or Atlanta. It might well have been considered rather basic by some standards. But neither was it such a place where one would expect to discover dark, elaborate, and deadly secrets hidden, smoldering just beneath the surface, secrets interlaced into the network and the fiber of the community so that tragedy and titillation had almost equal impact. In such a close-knit setting, the casual visitor would hardly suspect the level of hurt and the depth of deception that were part and parcel of the very fabric of day-to-day living.

Was Caesar like the eagle because of his aquiline (from aquila, for “eagle” in Latin) nose, or does the eagle seem imperial because of his Caesar-like beak? Does the sharp vision of a “hawk-eyed” observer have any basis in nature? And what the heck is “kettling” to a bird-watcher, or, for that matter, a bird? Raptors have captured the imagination from time immemorial and have an especially rich history in Minnesota. The ancient peoples whose pictographs adorn the rock faces of Lake Superior's North Shore may well have witnessed the first hawk movements along Lake Superior—the same annual migration that today draws as many as twenty thousand people to Duluth's Hawk Ridge. These birds, passing through in astounding numbers, are among the hawks and accipiters, buteos and harriers, eagles and ospreys pictured and profiled in detail in this book. Written by one of Minnesota's best-known bird authorities, with images by one of the state's favorite illustrators, Hawk Ridge is as fun as it is informative. It introduces the state's raptors, from the rare visitor to the most familiar hawk, noting each species' signature traits—osprey wings, for instance, are crooked to help them catch fish; vultures urinate on their legs to cool themselves—and their nesting, breeding, and migrating habits. Did you know that Sharp-shinned Hawks banded at Hawk Ridge have been found throughout Central America and even into South America, and also, in midwinter, in Wisconsin? Laura Erickson offers a broad perspective (a bird's-eye view!), making sense of the raptor's role in the larger ornithological scheme. With descriptions of various species—and helpful distinctions between species, families, and orders—the book gives readers a clear idea of which raptors might be seen in Minnesota, when, where, and how often. It also includes a hawk migration primer that explains the movements that bring these birds in such awe-inspiring numbers to places like Hawk Ridge. Filled with curious facts and practical information for expert and amateur bird-watcher alike, the book is at once a guide to the hawks of Minnesota and a beautifully illustrated album of the most regal members of the avian kingdom.

“Black Hawks Rising” tells the story of the formation and deployment of the African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM) in March 2007. Initially confined to peacekeeping within the Mogadishu enclave, it transformed into a peace-making mission. Many - including the author, who predicted the mission was DOA (Dead on Arrival) - gave the mission little chance of success. As a fighting force, however, AMISOM took on the Somali insurgents in 2010; expelled them from Central Mogadishu on Saturday, 6 August 2011; and expanded control of territory under the Somali Government in the succeeding years to most of Somalia. The opening chapters of the book take the reader behind the scenes to highlight the inconsistent - and sometimes disastrous - US policy in the Horn of Africa generally, and in Somalia (specifically dating back to the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s). Under President George Bush, the US strongly and vigorously opposed deployment of regional African troops in Somalia - instead sponsoring Somali factions to fight against each other and, when that flopped, egged on Ethiopia to invade Somalia in December 2006, which caused the rise of violent insurgency that spilled across borders. Young jihadists streamed from the heart of USA to fight the invaders. To clean up the mess, the Bush administration finally supported the deployment of regional troops. Black Hawks Rising captures intimately the stories of the men and women who made up AMISOM: their triumphs, setbacks and victories. The spotlight focuses on the Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF), whose Herculean efforts supported by Burundi National Defence Forces (BNDF) - and later the Kenya Defence Forces (KDF), Forces Armées Djiboutiennes (FAD), Ethiopian National Defence Forces (ENDF) and Republic of Sierra Leone Armed Forces (RSLAF) - were pivotal to the success of the mission. Their dedication, professionalism, ideological commitment, hard work and humanity turned Somalia from a wasted nation to one with hope for peace, stability and a better future for the Somali people. Like Heru - the Hawk-God of Ancient Egypt - AMISOM’s new breed of African peace-warriors have demonstrated the capacity to work across borders regionally, continent-wide and globally to help resolve conflicts whenever and wherever they arise - protecting lives and property, and preventing genocides before they happen.

At the end of a winter-long journey into manhood, Little Hawk returns to find his village decimated by a white man's plague and soon, despite a fresh start, Little Hawk dies violently but his spirit remains trapped, seeing how his world changes.