Tainted Seas

So many love stories stop at the wedding vows...when couples pledge to love each other "for better or worse, in sickness and health, til death do us part." But not this one. In 1968, Linda sat next to a handsome sailor in the Penn State cafeteria. Who could resist a handsome sailor? Not Linda, who fell head over heels in love. Against the backdrop of the tumultuous sixties, they married and had three children, and Bud became the Navy officer of his dreams. But their perfect Navy family life unraveled with Bud's frightening symptoms hearkening back to two tours in Vietnam. A sudden collapse led to a diagnosis virtually impossible for a vital young man. While Linda raised their children and followed her vows to care for her husband, two questions plagued her: How could her young and healthy husband suddenly have such a sinister cancer? And how could his beloved Navy abandon him? On a mission of love, Linda spent years unearthing what really happened to Bud, only to find that the military that discarded him had hidden the truth about his illness for decades. Tainted Seas is the sometimes hilarious, sometimes heart-breaking story of a passionate couple coping with tragedy, and the continuing journey of a woman dedicated to justice for military families shattered by the very institutions they nobly served. A loving wife on a mission of true love and truth proves that nothing can stay hidden forever--even against the power of the US government.

The English explorer and author Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-90) began his long and adventurous career in India, where he arrived in 1842 to join the 18th regiment of Bombay infantry as a young commissioned officer. In 1844 Burton's regiment was posted to Sind, the province located in present-day southeastern Pakistan, at that time only recently annexed by the British. Burton lived in Sind for a number of years and published three early books based on his experiences and observations: Scinde, or, The Unhappy Valley (two volumes, 1851), Sindh, and the Races that Inhabit the Valley of the Indus (1851), and Falconry in the Valley of the Indus (1852). The "unhappy valley" of the title of his first book refers to the valley of the Indus, which, along with the Indus River delta, largely defines the geography of Sind. More than two decades later, in 1875-76, Burton and his wife Isabel made a return visit to the province. Sind Revisited, published in London in 1877, is a result of this later journey. The book contains Burton's observations on the cities of Karachi and Hyderabad; the state of the Anglo-Indian army; relations among Muslims and Hindus and, in particular, the relentless pressure on the Hindus to convert to Islam; Sindi men and women; the Indus Valley Railway; and many other topics. Throughout, Burton uses the literary device of a fictitious traveling companion, "Mr. John Bull," to whom he addresses comments and asides. He also includes translations of poems and summaries of colorful local tales and legends, for example, that of "the seven headless prophets." In concluding remarks, Burton judges British rule to have had a positive influence, by bringing improvements in health and access to education for the Sindi people. The book is indexed but has no maps or illustrations.

Carl Safina has been hailed as one of the top 100 conservations of the 20th century (Audubon Magazine) and A Sea in Flames is his blistering account of the months-long manmade disaster that tormented a region and mesmerized the nation. Traveling across the Gulf to make sense of an ever-changing story and its often-nonsensical twists, Safina expertly deconstructs the series of calamitous misjudgments that caused the Deepwater Horizon blowout, zeroes in on BP’s misstatements, evasions, and denials, reassesses his own reaction to the government’s crisis handling, and reviews the consequences of the leak—and what he considers the real problems, which the press largely overlooked. Safina takes us deep inside the faulty thinking that caused the lethal explosion. We join him on aerial surveys across an oil-coated sea. We confront pelicans and other wildlife whose blue universe fades to black. Safina skewers the excuses and the silly jargon—like “junk shot” and “top kill”—that made the tragedy feel like a comedy of horrors—and highlighted Big Oil’s appalling lack of preparedness for an event that was inevitable. Based on extensive research and interviews with fishermen, coastal residents, biologists, and government officials, A Sea In Flames has some surprising answers on whether it was “Obama’s Katrina,” whether the Coast Guard was as inept in its response as BP was misleading, and whether this worst unintended release of oil in history was really America’s worst ecological disaster. Impassioned, moving, and even sharply funny, A Sea in Flames is ultimately an indictment of America’s main addiction. Safina writes: “In the end, this is a chronicle of a summer of pain—and hope. Hope that the full potential of this catastrophe would not materialize, hope that the harm done would heal faster than feared, and hope that even if we didn’t suffer the absolutely worst—we’d still learn the big lesson here. We may have gotten two out of three. That’s not good enough. Because: there’ll be a next time.”

“Hezel writes clearly and with erudition and commands an impressive body of information. His book is a tour de force.... Not only will it be read eagerly by Pacific scholars, but it should find a wide audience among well-educated Micronesians hungry for greater understanding of how their islands have become ensnared in world geopolitics.” —Ethnohistory

In AD 1103, in the central lands of the Rus and the Siberian plains, the earth quaked as it was rent and torn asunder for hundreds of miles southward. Spilling forth from this deep abyss, chasm, was a deluge of enchanted energies and a series of interlocking deities who, having been trapped within the forming of the Earth, now ascended up, residing upon Luna, overlooking the world below. The dark and light energies of magic leaking into the atmosphere, encasing Earth and altering the civilizations upon her forever. Having learned to incorporate these new magical energies into restricted priesthoods, the militaries and daily life of all Europeans and Asians had, by AD 1337, changed wildly. And yet it was also at this time that Europe began to face a new and wholly daunting threat of a unified Lithuania, being the largest landmass kingdom in all of Europe, which was ruled over by the quasi-immortal Undeath Aristocracy. The Teutonic Order, having been invited by the Polish crown into the Baltic for their protection, was now Europe’s, and, even more dire, Christianity’s, last bulwark and defensive line against the encroaching corruption and vile taint of nature that was wrought by the undeath and their monstrous legions of Norr, the rank-and-file infantry who enforced the dark and enslaving rule of the undeath. The coming events and the newly arrived Teutonic member, Ludwig, would change, with steel, anger, and magical spells, not just the course and shape of events in the Baltic, but the very face and future of not just Christianity but humanity as a whole.

A collection of thrilling tales from H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos by one of horror's biggest legends. This volume contains the very best of Brian Lumley's Mythos novellas. Novellas included in this collection: The Horror at Oakdeene Born of the Winds The Fairground Horror The Taint Rising with Surtsey Lord of the Worms The House of the Temple