War Of The Wilted

Like flowers denied water, people are wilting under the emperor's tyranny. Rose will not rest until the Gardener is dead. But there are bigger battles to fight, and Rayce—leader of the rebellion and the only man Rose has ever loved—believes their best chance at winning the war is to join forces with her sworn enemy. Saving innocent people is more important than her quest for revenge. But their new ally can’t be trusted—and he knows her darkest secret. One betrayal could leave the war and Rayce’s life hanging in the balance, and Rose will need to make the ultimate sacrifice to save them all. The Garden of Thorns series is best enjoyed in order. Book #1 Garden of Thorns Book #2 War of the Wilted

“A tense, fast-paced fantasy.” —Taylor Fenner, author of The Haunting Love After seven grueling years of captivity in the Garden—a burlesque troupe of slave girls—sixteen-year-old Rose finds an opportunity to escape during a performance for the emperor. But the hostage she randomly chooses from the crowd isn't one of the emperor's men—not anymore. He's the former heir to the throne...and is now leading a rebellion against it. Rayce is a wanted man and dangerously charismatic. He’s the worst person for Rose to get involved with, no matter what his smile promises. Assuming the hostage-taking is part of the emperor’s plot to crush the rebellion, he decides to take Rose as his hostage instead. Now Rose must prove where her loyalties lie, so she offers Rayce a deal—if he helps her rescue the other girls, she'll tell him all the Garden's secrets. Well, almost all. Because there’s one secret she’s been keeping these seven years...and she’ll take it to the grave. The Garden of Thorns series is best enjoyed in order: Book #1 Garden of Thorns Book #2 War of the Wilted Book #3 Roots of Ruin

"Wilt writes... well and offers many sound perceptions." -- Choice "... a stimulating book... a timely warning against overindulgence in hindsight in evaluating the great issues of the war... " -- Parameters "... a significant new study... a clearly written, excellent book... " -- Airpower Journal "... an impressive work of scholarship... " -- British Politics Group Newsletter "Wilt's comparative approach permits us fresh perspectives on both sides of the war. Moreover, Wilt has chosen to compare two of the major rival belligerents at the most stimulating and interesting level at which such comparison might be made, the level of the summit of decision making -- with the magnetic figures of Hitler and Churchill playing major roles in his narrative and analysis." -- Russell F. Weigley "This is a masterful treatment of a complex subject and a must read book for anyone writing about the Second World War." -- The Historian

Barbary's life has been a tale of unfortunate and undeserved pain. He has been beaten and starved by his owners, traded around like an object, and treated like waste. After joining the war, and losing everything he has, he loses his faith. Nothing in his life has gone right, and he finds himself on a wagon in route to another owner. He eventually narrowly escapes to a mysterious cabin in the forest. Here he finds a tall, slender, sinister man, who goes by many names. As it turns out, it is the one and only Devil himself. When the Devil gives Barbary a chance at a perfect, free life, he reflects upon his life and makes a choice. He chooses to make a deal with the Devil, and life is going perfectly, until he suddenly has to pay his debt. When he refuses to, he pays the ultimate price. At the end of his life, he asks himself the question: At what cost?

They did the impossible, but their problems are far from over... After freeing the Delmarion empire, Rose and Rayce must go to Varsha, the desert home Rose fled when she was a child—the country she’s meant to rule. Rayce is the new emperor of Delmar, Varsha’s longtime enemy, but that won’t stop him from assisting the girl he loves. Armed with the brute force of Rayce’s military, Rose sets out to free her people from the oppressive rule of the usurper king who killed her father. But even if they win, how can she be queen to her homeland and in love with the man ruling its bitter enemy? With her loyalties split between heart and crown, Rose must find a way to do the impossible again...unite two kingdoms at war, or sacrifice half of herself to save the other.

Joel S. Migdal revisits the approach U.S. officials have adopted toward the Middle East since World War II, which paid scant attention to tectonic shifts in the region. After the war, the United States did not restrict its strategic model to the Middle East. Beginning with Harry S. Truman, American presidents applied a uniform strategy rooted in the country's Cold War experience in Europe to regions across the globe, designed to project America into nearly every corner of the world while limiting costs and overreach. The approach was simple: find a local power that could play Great Britain's role in Europe after the war, sharing the burden of exercising power, and establish a security alliance along the lines of NATO. Yet regional changes following the creation of Israel, the Free Officers Coup in Egypt, the rise of Arab nationalism from 1948 to 1952, and, later, the Iranian Revolution and the Egypt-Israel peace treaty in 1979 complicated this project. Migdal shows how insufficient attention to these key transformations led to a series of missteps and misconceptions in the twentieth century. With the Arab uprisings of 2009 through 2011 prompting another major shift, Migdal sees an opportunity for the United States to deploy a new, more workable strategy, and he concludes with a plan for gaining a stable foothold in the region.

Do What Thou Wilt: An exploration into the life and works of a modern mystic, occultist, poet, mountaineer, and bisexual adventurer known to his contemporaries as "The Great Beast" Aleister Crowley was a groundbreaking poet and an iconoclastic visionary whose literary and cultural legacy extends far beyond the limits of his notoriety as a practitioner of the occult arts. Born in 1875 to devout Christian parents, young Aleister's devotion scarcely outlived his father, who died when the boy was twelve. He reached maturity in the boarding schools and brothels of Victorian England, trained to become a world-class mountain climber, and seldom persisted with any endeavor in which he could be bested. Like many self-styled illuminati of his class and generation, the hedonistic Crowley gravitated toward the occult. An aspiring poet and a pampered wastrel - obsessed with reconciling his quest for spiritual perfection and his inclination do exactly as he liked in the earthly realm - Crowley developed his own school of mysticism. Magick, as he called it, summoned its users to embrace the imagination and to glorify the will. Crowley often explored his spiritual yearnings through drug-saturated vision quests and rampant sexual adventurism, but at other times he embraced Eastern philosophies and sought enlightenment on ascetic sojourns into the wilderness. This controversial individual, a frightening mixture of egomania and self-loathing, has inspired passionate - but seldom fair - assessments from historians. Lawrence Sutin, by treating Crowley as a cultural phenomenon, and not simply a sorcerer or a charlatan, convinces skeptic readers that the self-styled "Beast" remains a fascinating study in how one man devoted his life to the subversion of the dominant moral and religious values of his time.