It Is Daylight

Announcing the 2008 recipient of the Yale Younger Poets prize Arda Collins is the 2008 winner of the annual Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Mesmerizing and electric, her poems seem to be articulated in the privacy of an enclosed space. The poems are concrete and yet metaphysically challenging, both witty and despairing. Collins' emotional complexity and uncommon range make this debut both thrillingly imaginative and ethical in its uncompromising attention to detail. In her Foreword, contest judge Louise Gl ck observes, "I know no poet whose sense of fraud, the inflated emptiness that substitutes for feeling, is more acute." Gl ck calls Collins' volume "savage, desolate, brutally ironic . . . a book of astonishing originality and intensity, unprecedented, unrepeatable."

Benjamin Franklin conceived of it. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle endorsed it. Winston Churchill campaigned for it. Kaiser Wilhelm first employed it. Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt went to war with it, and more recently the United States fought an energy crisis with it. For several months every year, for better or worse, daylight savings time affects vast numbers of people throughout the world. And from Ben Franklin's era to today, its story has been an intriguing and sometimes-bizarre amalgam of colorful personalities and serious technical issues, purported costs and perceived benefits, conflicts between interest groups and government policymakers. It impacts diverse and unexpected areas, including agricultural practices, street crime, the reporting of sports scores, traffic accidents, the inheritance rights of twins, and voter turnout. Illustrated with a popular look at science and history, Seize the Daylight presents an intriguing and surprisingly entertaining story of our attempt to regulate the sunlight hours.

This book is an account of the personal and collective struggles of First Nations people and how the principles which held traditional societies together can be used today to promote harmonious and cooperative relationships by both aboriginals and non-aboriginals. Calvin Morrisseau provides in it the fundamentals for healing that he has learned over twenty years through his training in counselling and addiction studies; his education in traditional practices by aboriginal elders, healers, and teachers; and his personal recovery from alcoholism, drug addiction, abuse, and the effects of assimilation, racism and poverty. The model of healing Morrisseau advocates is simple, insightful, and based on the values that allowed aboriginal people to live in accord with each other in the past. His approach centres on people accepting responsibility and making choices that give them the freedom required to enter into recovery by recapturing their sense of harmony, cooperation, sharing, balance and spirituality. The deepest healing takes place on a spiritual level. Morrisseau describes an interdependent system of individual, family, and community in which needs, desires, values, and purpose are communicated, and the responsibility to ensure everyone has an opportunity to grow to their full potential is shared. The book is unique in that it offers guidance on ways in which communities can heal. While the book was written for people who work with aboriginal people, the wholistic approach Morrisseau uses can benefit anyone. The healing model can be used by an individual seeking to heal himself, by a professional as a tool for assessment and treatment, and by a community in crisis.

Daylight is the gripping follow up to Long Road to Mercy and A Minute to Midnight featuring Special Agent Atlee Pine, from one of the world’s most favourite thriller writers, David Baldacci. The hunt Ever since Mercy was abducted aged six, Atlee has been relentless in her search for her. Finally, she gets her most promising breakthrough yet – the identity of her sister’s kidnapper. The capture As Atlee and her assistant, Carol Blum, race to track down the suspect, they run into Pine’s old friend and fellow agent, John Puller, who is investigating the suspect’s family for another crime. The kill Working together, Pine and Puller must pull back the layers of deceit, lies and cover-ups that strike at the very heart of global democracy. And the truth about what happened to Mercy will finally be revealed. That truth will shock Atlee Pine to her very core. Continue the gripping series with Mercy.

Truth Wyman has watched Nicodemus, Kansas, grow into a busy little prairie town. And she has grown up, too. Her family was among the first settlers to homestead this area, and there is nowhere she'd rather live. She's always thought her husband felt the same way. . . . Then Moses comes home with news that he has been nominated for state office. If he wins, they'll need to move to the state capital. Pregnant with her first child, Truth does not plan to move to Topeka. How can she raise her baby in an unfamiliar city? How can she leave her family and her home? Yet what will happen if she refuses? Nicodemus's sister community, Hill City, is thriving, too. Macia Boyle returns to her family after a European holiday. The storekeeper's nephew, Garrett Johnson, captures her attention, but she can't seem to forget Jeb Malone, the young blacksmith who showed interest in her before her trip. Soon, Macia must make a choice: Should she return to Jeb's arms or seek a new life with Garrett?

Brian “Bad” Phelan, New Zealander and bomb-disposal expert, likes to live dangerously. While on vacation on the French–Italian border, he helps bring a body out of a rocky, wave-swept cove. The dead woman bears striking similarities to a young woman he met years ago, under mysterious circumstances, shortly before she disappeared in a flooded French cave and Bad is compelled to investigate. Meanwhile, Jesuit Father Daniel Octave is running his own investigation into the truth behind the story of the life of the Blessed Martine Raimondi, a WWII resistance heroine and martyred nun. Bad and Daniel’s questions lead them to Eve, the beautiful widow of a celebrated French artist, and to Dawn, Eve’s twin sister, who seems to be a vampire. For, though they don’t know it, Bad and Daniel are looking for the same thing: a secret family. Sensuous and heavenly, Daylight combines wildly imaginative storytelling and a clear eye for atmosphere and place. Set on the beautiful Mediterranean coast stretching from Avignon to Genoa, much of the novel takes place in a world the tourist never sees, a world of caves and secret passages. It is in this “world beneath the world” that Bad Phelan and Daniel Octave finds themselves face to face with history and myth, with phantoms whose hearts are still beating, hungry, and able to break.

Michael Downing is obsessed with Daylight Saving, the loopy idea that became the most persistent political controversy in American history. Almost one hundred years after Congressmen and lawmakers in every state first debated, ridiculed, and then passionately embraced the possibility of saving an hour of daylight, no one can say for sure why we are required by law to change our clocks twice a year. Who first proposed the scheme? The most authoritative sources agree it was a Pittsburgh industrialist, Woodrow Wilson, a man on a horse in London, a Manhattan socialite, Benjamin Franklin, one of the Caesars, or the anonymous makers of ancient Chinese and Japanese water clocks. Spring Forward is a portrait of public policy in the 20th century, a perennially boiling cauldron of unsubstantiated science, profiteering masked as piety, and mysteriously shifting time–zone boundaries. It is a true–to–life social comedy with Congress in the leading role, surrounded by a supporting cast of opportunistic ministers, movie moguls, stockbrokers, labor leaders, sports fanatics, and railroad execs.