Promise Broken

Beware of the company you keep. K’wan’s urban fiction coming-of-age novel, Promise Broken, is set in the gritty streets of Newark, New Jersey. The story follows seventeen-year-old Promise Mohammed as she attempts to uphold friendships and new relationships—even if they lead to her demise. After Promise’s mother dies in a tragic car accident, it leaves a void in Promise’s life that she is yearning to fill. This titular novel finds Promise spiraling into a life of crime and drug affiliation by the company she chooses to keep. Also coping with abandonment and a lifelong broken commitment from her biological father, Promise ultimately has two goals: to graduate from high school and to be loved. But can she find the love that she seeks from her aunt Dell, two best friends, Mouse and Keys, or drug-dealer Asher—the man who captivates her—despite the fact that each relationship will lead to life-altering events? Only time will tell.

From the New York Times--bestselling author of No Safe House comes the first novel in an explosive trilogy about the disturbing secrets of a quiet small town. After his wife's death and the collapse of his newspaper, David Harwood has no choice but to uproot his nine-year-old son and move back into his childhood home in Promise Falls, New York. David believes his life is in free fall, and he can't find a way to stop his descent. Then he comes across a family secret of epic proportions. A year after a devastating miscarriage, David's cousin Marla has continued to struggle. But when David's mother asks him to check on her, he's horrified to discover that she's been secretly raising a child who is not her own--a baby she claims was a gift from an "angel" left on her porch. When the baby's real mother is found murdered, David can't help wanting to piece together what happened--even if it means proving his own cousin's guilt. But as he uncovers each piece of evidence, David realizes that Marla's mysterious child is just the tip of the iceberg. Other strange things are happening. Animals are found ritually slaughtered. An ominous abandoned Ferris wheel seems to stand as a warning that something dark has infected Promise Falls. And someone has decided that the entire town must pay for the sins of its past . . . in blood.

Makeer is a man of high hopes. Intelligent and educated, he is a teacher in Sudan when he leaves his home and family for the bush, to fight for freedom and human dignity. At home, his sons must fight their own battles, as violence and death by malnutrition increase. Yet, nothing is quite as horrific as the way man treats man in the African battle for peace. The Broken Promise is based on the true terrors of the Sudanese Civil War. Fighting for the prosperity of his country, Makeer is blind-sided by the hypocrisy of his leaders while dodging bullets and watching his family die. He finds strength in moments of hope, mixed with intense despair, but is hope enough to keep him fighting while the world goes mad? Makeer might glimpse ultimate victorytouch for a moment high ideals and moralitybut he soon comes face to face with blackmail and murder in South Sudan, a new country he helped curve out of the Sudan. War is a thing of corruption and betrayal, which Makeer learns fi rst hand. However, he fights onward, proving that no amount of suffering will ever suppress the quest for human dignity.

All Shannen wanted was a decent education. She found an ally in politician Charlie Angus, who had no idea she was going to change his life and inspire others to change the country. Children of the Broken Treaty is the story of the despair wrought upon Indigenous peoples. It is also a story of hope.

American science produces the best medical treatments in the world. Yet U.S. citizens lag behind in life expectancy and quality of life. Robert Kaplan marshals extensive data to make the case that U.S. health care priorities are sorely misplaced—invested in attacking disease, not in solving social problems that engender disease in the first place.

This is the first book to challenge the broken-windows theory of crime, which argues that permitting minor misdemeanors, such as loitering and vagrancy, to go unpunished only encourages more serious crime. The theory has revolutionized policing in the United States and abroad, with its emphasis on policies that crack down on disorderly conduct and aggressively enforce misdemeanor laws. The problem, argues Bernard Harcourt, is that although the broken-windows theory has been around for nearly thirty years, it has never been empirically verified. Indeed, existing data suggest that it is false. Conceptually, it rests on unexamined categories of law abiders and disorderly people and of order and disorder, which have no intrinsic reality, independent of the techniques of punishment that we implement in our society. How did the new order-maintenance approach to criminal justice--a theory without solid empirical support, a theory that is conceptually flawed and results in aggressive detentions of tens of thousands of our fellow citizens--come to be one of the leading criminal justice theories embraced by progressive reformers, policymakers, and academics throughout the world? This book explores the reasons why. It also presents a new, more thoughtful vision of criminal justice.

Food and the global agricultural system has become one of the defining public concerns of the twenty-first century. Ecological disorder and inequity is at the heart of our food system. This thoughtful and confronting book tells the story of how the development of modern agriculture promised ecological and social stability but instead descended into dysfunction. Contributing to knowledge in environmental, cultural and agricultural histories, it explores how people have tried to live in the aftermath of ‘ecological imperialism’. The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress: An environmental history journeys to the dry inland plains of Australia where European ideas and agricultural technologies clashed with a volatile and taunting country that resisted attempts to subdue and transform it for the supply of global markets. Its wide-ranging narrative puts gritty local detail in its global context to tell the story of how cultural anxieties about civilisation, population, and race, shaped agriculture in the twentieth century. It ranges from isolated experiment farms to nutrition science at the League of Nations, from local landholders to high profile moral crusaders, including an Australian apricot grower who met Franklin D. Roosevelt and almost fed the world. This book will be useful to undergraduates and postgraduates on courses examining international comparisons of nineteenth and twentieth century agriculture, and courses studying colonial development and settler societies. It will also appeal to food concerned general readers.

Communist and capitalist states alike were scarred by the economic shocks of the 1970s. Why did only communist governments fall in their wake? Fritz Bartel argues that Western democracies were insulated by neoliberalism. While austerity was fatal to the legitimacy of communism, democratic politicians could win votes by pushing market discipline.