The Umbra Wars

If you had the pleasure of meeting Martha right this minute, you would think that she is a wonderful little old lady with an infectious smile and a warm heart. And you would be right in thinking that too. But what if I told you that this is not all she is, and that her vocation has been born from a necessity? One deeply rooted in the stubborn refusal of us humans to just be better! What if she tirelessly fights the umbra on your behalf to keep the consciousness of the world tipped in the favour of the Lumna? What if I told you that she is the most powerful Archimage this world has ever seen? And that she regularly wields her considerable power to manipulate the Supreme Elementals. Or that she faces the nefarious Quells to conquer their umbra through the restorative qualities of love and forgiveness. What if she works with the Illuminaries, and has her very own Luminant to help her fight these battles? What if she needs apprentices to carry on this most noble of professions here on earth? If you knew that you could change your thoughts, words or actions to significantly contribute to her efforts, what would you do differently today?

If you had the pleasure of meeting Martha right this minute, you would think that she is a wonderful little old lady with an infectious smile and a warm heart. And you would be right in thinking that too. But what if I told you that this is not all she is, and that her vocation has been born from a necessity? One deeply rooted in the stubborn refusal of us humans to just be better! What if she tirelessly fights the umbra on your behalf to keep the consciousness of the world tipped in the favour of the Lumna? What if I told you that she is the most powerful Archimage this world has ever seen? And that she regularly wields her considerable power to manipulate the Supreme Elementals. Or that she faces the nefarious Quells to conquer their umbra through the restorative qualities of love and forgiveness. What if she works with the Illuminaries, and has her very own Luminant to help her fight these battles? What if she needs apprentices to carry on this most noble of professions here on earth? If you knew that you could change your thoughts, words or actions to significantly contribute to her efforts, what would you do differently today?

Despite the torrent of coverage devoted to war with Iraq, woefully little attention has been paid to the history of the region, the policies that led to the conflict, and the daunting challenges that will confront America and the Middle East once the immediate crisis has ended. In this collection, Micah L. Sifry and Christopher Cerf, coeditors of the acclaimed Gulf War Reader, have assembled essays and documents that present an eminently readable, up-to-the-moment guide -- from every imaginable perspective -- to the continuing crisis in the Gulf and Middle East. Here, in analysis and commentary from some of the world's leading writers and opinion makers -- and in the words of the key participants themselves -- is the engrossing saga of how oil economics, power politics, dreams of empire, nationalist yearnings, and religious fanaticism -- not to mention naked aggression, betrayal, and tragic miscalculation -- have conspired to bring us to the fateful collision of the West and the Arab world over Iraq. Contributors include: Fouad Ajami George W. Bush Richard Butler John le Carré Noam Chomsky Ann Coulter Thomas Friedman Al Gore Seymour Hersh Christopher Hitchens Arianna Huffington Saddam Hussein Terry Jones Robert Kagan Charles Krauthammer William Kristol Nicholas Lemann Kanan Makiya Kevin Phillips Kenneth Pollack Colin Powell Condoleezza Rice Arundhati Roy Edward Said William Safire Jonathan Schell Susan Sontag George Will

The War on Terror Narrative provides a longitudinal and holistic study of the formation, circulation, and contestation of the Bush administration's narrative about the "war on terror."

After triumphing in Star Wars: The Unifying Force, the heroes of the New Jedi Order return in a dazzling adventure! Luke Skywalker is worried: A handful of Jedi Knights, including his nephew and niece, Jaina and Jacen Solo, have disappeared into the Unknown Regions in response to a strange cry for help that only they could hear. Now the alien Chiss have angrily lodged a formal complaint, accusing the missing Jedi of meddling in a border dispute between the Chiss and an unidentified aggressor. Luke has no choice but to head to the Unknown Regions for serious damage control. Han and Leia follow, intent on protecting their children from what could be grave danger. But none of them are prepared for what they find when they reach their destination. A colony of mysterious aliens is expanding toward the edge of Chiss space. The leader of the alien nest is resolute. Adept in the Force, he is drawing old friends to his side, compelling them to join the colony and meld their Force-abilities with his, even if it leads to all-out war. . . . Features a bonus section following the novel that includes a primer on the Star Wars expanded universe, and over half a dozen excerpts from some of the most popular Star Wars books of the last thirty years!

e-artnow presents to you this unique Sci-Fi Boxed Set with carefully picked out stories from out of space, thrilling intergalactic adventures and tales from our own Solar System: H. G. Wells: The War of the Worlds The Shape of Things to Come In the Days of the Comet The War in the Air The Chronic Argonauts Otis Adelbert Kline: The Venus Trilogy: The Planet of Peril The Prince of Peril The Port of Peril The Mars Series: The Swordsman of Mars The Outlaws of Mars Other Novels Maza of the Moon The Metal Monster Stranger from Smallness Edgar Wallace: Planetoid 127 Stanley G. Weinbaum: Stories from the Solar System: A Martian Odyssey (Mars) Valley of Dreams (Mars) Flight on Titan (Titan) Parasite Planet (Venus) The Lotus Eaters (Venus) The Planet of Doubt (Uranus) The Red Peri (Pluto) The Mad Moon (Io) Redemption Cairn (Europa) Malcolm Jameson: The Captain Bullard Series: Admiral's Inspection White Mutiny Blockade Runner Bullard Reflects Devil's Powder Slacker's Paradise Brimstone Bill The Bureaucrat Orders C. S. Lewis: The Space Trilogy Out of the Silent Planet Perelandra That Hideous Strength Jules Verne: From the Earth to the Moon Around the Moon Off on a Comet Percy Greg: Across the Zodiac David Lindsay: A Voyage to Arcturus Edward Everett Hale: The Brick Moon

He was the king of the mercenary world, but he had fallen into a huge conspiracy ...

Epic and tragedy, from Homer's Achilles and Euripides' Pentheus to Marlowe's Tamburlaine and Milton's Satan, are filled with characters challenging and warring against the gods. Nowhere is the theme of theomachy more frequently and powerfully represented, however, than in the poetry of early imperial Rome, from Ovid's Metamorphoses at the beginning of the first century AD to Statius' Thebaid near its end. This book -- the first full-length study of human-divine conflict in Roman literature -- asks why the war against god was so important to the poets of the time and how this understudied period of literary history influenced a larger tradition in Western literature. Drawing on a variety of contexts -- politics, religion, philosophy, and aesthetics -- Pramit Chaudhuri argues for the fundamental importance of battles between humans and gods in representing the Roman world. A cast of tyrants, emperors, rebels, iconoclasts, philosophers, and ambitious poets brings to life some of the most extraordinary artistic products of classical antiquity. Based on close readings of the major extant epics and selected tragedies, the book replaces a traditionally Aeneid-centric view of imperial epic with a richer dialogue between Greek and Roman texts, contemporary authors, and diverse genres. The renewed sense of a tradition reveals how the conflicts these works represent constitute a distinctive theology informed by other discourses yet peculiar to epic and tragedy. Beginning with the Greek background and ending with a look ahead to developments in the Renaissance, this book charts the history of a theme that would find its richest expression in a time when men became gods and impiety threatened the very order of the world.