The Darkest Period

"When four-year-old William vanishes in the woods behind his home, the only witness is his older brother who whispers, 'The lights took him,' and then never speaks again. With these words, the boys' grandmother Lynn Roseworth fears only she knows the truth. But coming forward would ruin her family and her husband's political career. As Lynn and her best friend Roxy revisit the secrets of her long-buried past to find clues that will lead to William, they'll get ensnared in a much larger conspiracy. The truth is hidden for a reason, and not even a grandmother's love may be enough to save her grandson from what is coming for them all"

Before their relocation to the Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma, the Kanza Indians spent twenty-seven years on a reservation near Council Grove, Kansas, on the Santa Fe Trail. In The Darkest Period, Ronald D. Parks tells the story of those years of decline in Kanza history following the loss of the tribe’s original homeland in northeastern and central Kansas. Parks makes use of accounts by agents, missionaries, journalists, and ethnographers in crafting this tale. He addresses both the big picture—the effects of Manifest Destiny—and local particulars such as the devastating impact on the tribe of the Santa Fe Trail. The result is a story of human beings rather than historical abstractions. The Kanzas confronted powerful Euro-American forces during their last years in Kansas. Government officials and their policies, Protestant educators, predatory economic interests, and a host of continent-wide events affected the tribe profoundly. As Anglo-Americans invaded the Kanza homeland, the prairie was plowed and game disappeared. The Kanzas’ holy sites were desecrated and the tribe was increasingly confined to the reservation. During this “darkest period,” as chief Allegawaho called it in 1871, the Kanzas’ Neosho reservation population diminished by more than 60 percent. As one survivor put it, “They died of a broken heart, they died of a broken spirit.” But despite this adversity, as Parks’s narrative portrays, the Kanza people continued their relationship with the land—its weather, plants, animals, water, and landforms. Parks does not reduce the Kanzas’ story to one of hapless Indian victims traduced by the American government. For, while encroachment, disease, and environmental deterioration exerted enormous pressure on tribal cohesion, the Kanzas persisted in their struggle to exercise political autonomy while maintaining traditional social customs up to the time of removal in 1873 and beyond.

After their first contacts with whites in the seventeenth century, the Kansa Indians began migrating from the eastern United States to what is now eastern Kansas, by way of the Missouri Valley. Settling in villages mostly along the Kansas River, they led a semi-sedentary life, raising corn and a few vegetables and hunting buffalo in the spring and fall. It was an idyllic existence-until bad, and then worse, things began to happen. William E. Unrau tells how the Kansa Indians were reduced from a proud people with a strong cultural heritage to a remnant forced against their will to take up the whites' ways. He gives a balanced but hard-hitting account of an important and tragic chapter in American history.

Finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation A vivid, "mesmerizing" (New York Times Magazine) portrait of life in the shadow of violence and loss, for readers of both English and Persian The first selection of poems by renowned Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian to appear in English, this collection is a captivating, disorienting descent into the trauma of loss and its aftermath. In spare lines, Abdolmalekian conjures surreal, cinematic images that pan wide as deftly as they narrow into intimate focus. Time is a thread come unspooled: pain arrives before the wound, and the dead wait for sunrise. Abdolmalekian resists definitive separations between cause and effect, life and death, or heaven and hell, and challenges our sense of what is fixed and what is unsettled and permeable. Though the speakers in these poems are witnesses to the deforming effects of grief and memory, they remain alive to curiosity, to the pleasure of companionship, and to other ways of being and seeing. Lean Against This Late Hour illuminates the images we conjure in the face of abandonment and ruin, and finds them by turns frightening, bewildering, ethereal, and defiant. "This time," a disembodied voice commands, "send us a prophet who only listens."

Exploring the universal nature of suffering, this book uses personal anecdotes and biblical examples to illustrate the strength that God offers to those with trouble of any kind--reminding sufferers that they are never alone.

The Nightshade Guild: Chapter Three - The year the Guild was lost in time. As if the threat of the Time Scythe isn’t enough, the destruction of it certainly throws the Guild for a loop. Or rather through time. Charlie wakes up in an unknown location and, as she quickly realizes, an unknown time period. The Dark Ages is not where she planned to spend her pregnancy, but it seems she has no other choice. While Ameira works in the future to bring the mages back, Charlie puts her focus on finding her fragment of the Time Scythe along with a pure energy source to boost the spell. The problem is she has no idea where to look. She feels herself being drawn to the nearby mountains and the magic they radiate. Rumors circle the town of demons and other beings haunting the caverns, but Charlie knows better than to believe human superstition. However, since her arrival, something sinister has begun to stir deep in the pits of the caverns. Would working with the creatures within the caves help her get home to aid the Guild and the Elvin queen in protecting the future, or will it cause her to be lost forever in the darkest of times? Darkest Time is Book 5 of The Nightshade Guild Chapter Three. The reading order for this chapter is: Rocking Time by Lia Davis and Kerry Adrienne Defying Time by Mandy Rosko Illuminating Time by Renee Hewett Dueling Time by Sheri Lyn Darkest Time by Cherron Riser Losing Time by Jennifer Wedmore Time After Time by Louisa Bacio Swing Time by Cassidy K. O'Connor Time Maverick by Gracen Miller Crucible Time by Landra Graf Restoring Time by Lia Davis and Kerry Adrienne The Mages of the Guild encourage you to read Chapter One and Two which should be read in this order: Chapter One Mated to a Mage by Cassidy K. O'Connor Mage you Blink by Gracen Miller Mage you Look by Abigail Kade Shadow Mage by Lia Davis Mage Crafted by Cherron Riser Mage of Misfortune by Lily Winter Mage in Hell by Sheri Lyn Sunny Mage by Jessica Ripley Half-Blood Mage by Landra Graf Sea Mage by Louisa Bacio You Mage Me by Jennifer Wedmore Midwinter Mage by Kerry Adrienne Mage to Disobey by Mandy Rosko Chapter Two Magic Mishap by Lily Winter Magic Confined by Mandy Rosko Magic Clouded by Renee Hewett Magic Mayhem by Louisa Bacio Magic Mourning by Cherron Riser Magic Flawed by Jennifer Wedmore Magic Deadfall by Gracen Miller Magic Exposed by Lia Davis Magic Reflected by Sheri Lyn Magic Masque by Kerry Adrienne Magic Malfunction by Abigail Kade Magic Burned by Cassidy K. O'Connor

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • The first full history of Black America’s shocking mistreatment as unwilling and unwitting experimental subjects at the hands of the medical establishment. No one concerned with issues of public health and racial justice can afford not to read this masterful book. "[Washington] has unearthed a shocking amount of information and shaped it into a riveting, carefully documented book." —New York Times From the era of slavery to the present day, starting with the earliest encounters between Black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, Medical Apartheid details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge—a tradition that continues today within some black populations. It reveals how Blacks have historically been prey to grave-robbing as well as unauthorized autopsies and dissections. Moving into the twentieth century, it shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism was used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of Blacks. Shocking new details about the government’s notorious Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar, less-well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the armed forces, prisons, and private institutions. The product of years of prodigious research into medical journals and experimental reports long undisturbed, Medical Apartheid reveals the hidden underbelly of scientific research and makes possible, for the first time, an understanding of the roots of the African American health deficit. At last, it provides the fullest possible context for comprehending the behavioral fallout that has caused Black Americans to view researchers—and indeed the whole medical establishment—with such deep distrust.

At Christmas anything can happen: Scott creates a crisis for his family when the only thing he wants for Christmas is a unicorn. While spending Christmas in England, John meets a family from Cromwell's time. A ghost appears to Rose Lee just before Christmas and desperately tries to get her attention. Christopher goes out to his back yard to meet space aliens who have just landed on Christmas Eve. Martha searches her house for a treasure that a professional wise man says can be found in her home. Danny, a teenage boy genius, uses his time machine to see the future of Christmas. Charley meets a strange dog just before Christmas whose eyes turn red when aroused. This volume contains fifteen tales that catch the mystery, enchantment, and hope of the Christmas season for readers of all ages.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Discover the game-changing theory of the cycles of history and what past generations can teach us about living through times of upheaval—with deep insights into the roles that Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials have to play—now with a new preface by Neil Howe. First comes a High, a period of confident expansion. Next comes an Awakening, a time of spiritual exploration and rebellion. Then comes an Unraveling, in which individualism triumphs over crumbling institutions. Last comes a Crisis—the Fourth Turning—when society passes through a great and perilous gate in history. William Strauss and Neil Howe will change the way you see the world—and your place in it. With blazing originality, The Fourth Turning illuminates the past, explains the present, and reimagines the future. Most remarkably, it offers an utterly persuasive prophecy about how America’s past will predict what comes next. Strauss and Howe base this vision on a provocative theory of American history. The authors look back five hundred years and uncover a distinct pattern: Modern history moves in cycles, each one lasting about the length of a long human life, each composed of four twenty-year eras—or “turnings”—that comprise history’s seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and rebirth. Illustrating this cycle through a brilliant analysis of the post–World War II period, The Fourth Turning offers bold predictions about how all of us can prepare, individually and collectively, for this rendezvous with destiny.