Which Way Is The Sky Falling

Are Batman and 24's Jack Bauer heroic loners defending our way of life - or right-wing vigilantes attacking it? Is Avatarjust a National Geographic version of Star Wars or a passionate assault on capitalism? And what about Game of Thrones- sword and sorcery fantasy, or lesson in mainstream politics? In The Sky is Falling!bestselling cultural critic Peter Biskind takes us on a dizzying ride across two decades of pop culture to show how the TV and movies we love have taught us to love political extremism. Welcome to a darkly pessimistic, apocalyptic world where winter has come, the dead are walking, and ultra violence, revenge and torture are all in a day's work. Welcome to the new normal.

From the winner of the 2006 Marian Engel Award comes a funny, absorbing and timely novel about fear in our time. On a spring day in 2004, Jane Z. a physician’s wife and mother of a teenage son, opens her morning newspaper and is shocked to see a familiar face on the front page. Sonia, a lost friend accused of terrorism, has just been released after twenty years in prison. It all comes flooding back to Jane, how twenty years before her life took a very different course. At nineteen, Jane rents a room in a shared student house with a mismatched trio of idealists: Sonia, who yearns to save the world’s children from nuclear war; the Marxist-leaning Dieter; and the anarcho-feminist-pacifist Pete. A bookish misfit, her radical housemates quickly draw Jane into NAG!, a non-violent, anti-nuclear direct action group. To Jane, who is studying Russian and Russian literature, her compatriots, with their utopian dreams and youthful pathos, soon seem Chekhovian to her. Meanwhile, NAG! plans its most ambitious action, crossing the border into the United States to chain themselves to the Boeing factory fence. Tension increases as the group mounts each successive protest, until a bomb explodes and changes everything. The Sky Is Falling deftly intertwines themes of first love, sexual confusion, and the dread of nuclear disaster with the comical infighting of a cast of well-meaning political activists, and the timelessness of the great Russian classics. A story for our own age of paranoia and terror, Caroline Adderson’s witty, accomplished novel returns the reader to another fearful era, when the world teetered on the brink of nuclear annihilation and the end of world seemed inevitable.

"The Sky Is Falling" by Lester Del Rey. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

A blackly comic campus satire combined with a heart-breaking family mystery, The Falling Sky brilliantly mixes fiction and astronomy into a fascinating, compelling and moving narrative. Jeanette is a young, solitary post-doctoral researcher who has dedicated her life to studying astronomy. Struggling to compete in a prestigious university department dominated by egos and incompetents, and caught in a cycle of brief and unsatisfying affairs, she travels to a mountain-top observatory in Chile to focus on her research. There Jeanette stumbles upon evidence that will challenge the fundamentals of the universe, drawing her into conflict with her colleagues and the scientific establishment, but also casting her back to the tragic loss that defined her childhood. As the implications of her discovery gather momentum, and her relationships spiral out of control, Jeanette's own grip on reality is threatened, finally forcing her to confront the hidden past. Pippa Goldschmidt's bittersweet debut novel blends black comedy, heart-breaking tragedy and fascinatingly accessible science, in this intricate and beautiful examination of one woman's disintegration and journey to redemption.

A compelling critique of the mish-mash of environmental crises on the minds of citizens and policy makers today. Without hype, Kyle manages to navigate the reader toward questions of fact and away from declarations of opinion. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

A Sunday Times (London), Best Book of 2018 “A thoughtful, entertaining, and occasionally profound critical study of the texts that entertain, move and, sometimes, shape us.” —The Spectator (London) “A bold, witty, and brilliantly argued analysis of the role pop culture has played in the rise of American extremism.” —Ruth Reichl “You’ll never look at your favorite movies and TV shows the same way again. And you shouldn’t.” —Steven Soderbergh A bestselling cultural journalist shows how pop culture prepared Americans to embrace extreme politics Almost everything has been invoked to account for Trump’s victory and the rise of the alt-right, from job loss to racism to demography—everything, that is, except popular culture. In The Sky Is Falling bestselling cultural journalist Peter Biskind dives headlong into two decades of popular culture—from superhero franchises such as the Dark Knight, X-Men, and the Avengers and series like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones to thrillers like Homeland and 24—and emerges to argue that these shows are saturated with the values that are currently animating our extreme politics. Where once centrist institutions and their agents—cops and docs, soldiers and scientists, as well as educators, politicians, and “experts” of every stripe—were glorified by mainstream Hollywood, the heroes of today’s movies and TV, whether far right or far left, have overthrown this quaint ideological consensus. Many of our shows dramatize extreme circumstances—an apocalypse of one sort or another—that require extreme behavior to deal with, behavior such as revenge, torture, lying, and even the vigilante violence traditionally discouraged in mainstream entertainment. In this bold, provocative, and witty investigation, Biskind shows how extreme culture now calls the shots. It has become, in effect, the new mainstream.

Lisa Cressman, founder of Backstory Preaching, offers preachers tools to craft difficult sermon messages that can be heard. The gospel changes lives, but to do that it must first be heard. For it to be heard, people have to trust they are "seen" and their concerns and fears are acknowledged. They have to feel their perspectives are real, valid, and respected. Preachers have a difficult message to preach, a message many will not want to hear: new life always emerges from death. Cressman shows preachers how to craft sermons with the right tone and how to have the courage to say what you're called to say. Part 1 of the book provides the preparatory work needed before crafting those difficult sermon messages. Here the focus is on how preachers prepare themselves, build relationships of mutual trust with listeners, and understand and appropriately use authority and leadership to proclaim the gospel. Part 2 focuses on the sermon itself with suggestions on what to say and how to say it. The preacher will find new tools and sharpen existing ones to preach difficult messages with empathy, compassion, and skill.

The thrilling new historical adventure in the Warrior of Rome series from Sunday Times bestseller Harry Sidebottom. *** 'What Bernard Cornwell is to the Napoleonic Wars, Harry Sidebottom is to Roman legions: unassailable' - THE TIMES *** _________________________________ AD 265, Gaul - The Roman Empire is on the brink. Emperor Gallienus has amassed a huge army across the Alps to seize back the mountains from the usurper Postumus. War has come. Ballista and his cavalry are on the frontline, battling in the most brutal of conditions. But if he is to survive the campaign and finally retire to his beloved Sicily, it's not just the battlefield he needs to navigate. As he and Praetorian Prefect Volusianus lay siege to Postumus' armies, it becomes clear the greatest threat to Ballista's life might just come from within his ranks. After all, Volusianus has shown he will go to any distance for his own ends. Is Ballista just another pawn in his game? _________________________________ Praise for Harry Sidebottom's historical novels: 'An extraordinarily vivid take on the ancient world' - EVENING STANDARD 'Explosive action and knuckle-whitening drama' - GUARDIAN 'The best sort of red-blooded historical fiction' - ANDREW TAYLOR 'More twists and turns than the Tiber itself' - RORY CLEMENTS 'Sidebottom's prose blazes with searing scholarship' - THE TIMES 'Relentless, brutal, brilliant' - BEN KANE 'A storming triumph' - DAILY TELEGRAPH 'Epic' - MARY BEARD