It’s 1897. Gold has been discovered in the Yukon. New York is under the sway of Hearst and Pulitzer. And in a few months, an American battleship will explode in a Cuban harbor, plunging the U.S. into war. Spanning five years and half a dozen countries, this is the unforgettable story of that extraordinary moment: the turn of the twentieth century, as seen by one of the greatest storytellers of our time. Shot through with a lyrical intensity and stunning detail that recall Doctorow and Deadwood both, A Moment in the Sun takes the whole era in its sights—from the white-racist coup in Wilmington, North Carolina to the bloody dawn of U.S. interventionism in the Philippines. Beginning with Hod Brackenridge searching for his fortune in the North, and hurtling forward on the voices of a breathtaking range of men and women—Royal Scott, an African American infantryman whose life outside the military has been destroyed; Diosdado Concepcíon, a Filipino insurgent fighting against his country’s new colonizers; and more than a dozen others, Mark Twain and President McKinley’s assassin among them—this is a story as big as its subject: history rediscovered through the lives of the people who made it happen.

Political scientists are quite good at predicting 'optimal' policy positions that - under the given circumstances - allow parties to get maximal payoffs in terms of policy, office or votes. What we do not know is whether parties are actually able to take these positions or whether they are constrained to do so. This book attempts to narrow this gap. The major argument is that parties do not choose policy positions from scratch and that they cannot freely change their policy platforms. Rather, voters' lacking perception of changing party platforms and intra-party factors constrain parties when shifting their policy positions. An empirical analysis of party policy shifts in ten Western European democracies shows that these constraints differ across parties and thus affect the parties' position-taking differently. Considering this variation is important to derive more precise predictions for parties' policy platforms and for our understanding of party behaviour in general.

This engaging and inspirational book by Carl Lentz, the rock star pastor of Hillsong NYC, shows us the way toward a more connected, spiritually-grounded, and fulfilled life. When you think of a Christian pastor, you probably don’t envision a tattooed thirty-something who wears a motorcycle jacket, listens to hip-hop music, references The Walking Dead and Black Lives Matter in his sermons, and every Sunday draws a standing-room only crowd to a venue normally used for rock concerts—in godless New York City, no less. But then you clearly have never met Carl Lentz. As lead pastor of the first United States branch of global megachurch Hillsong, the former college basketball player is on a mission to make Christianity accessible in the 21st century. In Own The Moment, he shares the unlikely and inspiring story of how he went from being an average teenager who couldn’t care less about church to leading one of the country’s fastest-growing congregations—how one day he is trying to convince a Virginia Beach 7-Eleven clerk to attend his service, and just a few years later he is baptizing a global music icon in an NBA player’s Manhattan bathtub. Amid such candid personal tales, Lentz also offers illuminating readings of Bible passages and practical tips on how to live as a person of faith in an increasingly materialistic world. How do you maintain your values—and pass them onto your children—in a society that worships money and sex and fame? How do you embrace your flaws in this Instagram era that exalts the appearance of perfection? How do you forget about “living the dream” and learn to embrace the beauty of your reality? These are just a few of the many important questions Lentz answers in Own The Moment—a powerful book that redefines not just Christianity but spirituality as a whole.

Thomas Nesbitt is a divorced American writer in the midst of a rueful middle age. Living a very private life in Maine - in touch only with his daughter and still trying to reconcile himself to the end of a long marriage that he knew was flawed from the outset - he finds his solitude disrupted by the arrival, one wintry morning, of a box postmarked Berlin. The return address on the box - Dussmann - unsettles him completely. For it is the name of the woman with whom he had an intense love affair twenty-six years ago in Berlin - at a time when the city was cleaved in two, and personal and political allegiances were haunted by the deep shadows of the Cold War. Refusing initially to confront what he might find in that box, Thomas nevertheless finds himself forced to grapple with a past he has never discussed with any living person - and in the process relive those months in Berlin, when he discovered, for the first and only time in his life, the full, extraordinary force of true love. But Petra Dussmann - the woman to whom he lost his heart - was not just a refugee from a police state, but also someone who lived with an ongoing sorrow beyond dreams... and one which gradually rewrote both their destinies. In this, his tenth novel, Douglas Kennedy has written that rare thing: a love story as morally complex as it is tragic and deeply reflective. Brilliantly gripping, it is an atmospherically dense, ethically tangled tale of romantic certainty and conflicting loyalties, all set amidst a stunningly rendered portrait of Berlin in the final dark years before The Wall came down. Like all of Kennedy's previous, critically acclaimed bestselling novels, The Moment is both unputdownable and profound. Posing so many searching questions about why and how we fall in love - and the tangled way we project on to others that which our hearts seek - it is a love story of great epic sweep and immense emotional power.

Resulting from a near drowning incident as a child, Bellamy Lawrence lives with the effects of a traumatic brain injury, including profound hearing loss. Ostracized by her family, Bellamy expects to spend her adult life alone, illustrating children's books in the solace of her Rittenhouse Square apartment with her service dog Otis. But a spilled cup of coffee, and a chance meeting with local radio host Sofia Reyes turns every expectation Bellamy had for her life upside down, as she finds herself thrust into a whirlwind romance she never believed possible.

In The Reagan Moment, the ideas, events, strategies, trends, and movements that shaped the 1980s are revealed to have had lasting effects on international relations: The United States went from a creditor to a debtor nation; democracy crested in East Asia and returned to Latin America; the People's Republic of China moved to privatize, decentralize, and open its economy; Osama bin Laden founded Al Qaeda; and relations between Washington and Moscow thawed en route to the Soviet Union's dissolution. The Reagan Moment places US foreign relations into global context by examining the economic, international, and ideational relationships that bound Washington to the wider world. Editors Jonathan R. Hunt and Simon Miles bring together a cohort of scholars with fresh insights from untapped and declassified global sources to recast Reagan's pivotal years in power. Contributors: Seth Anziska, James Cameron, Elizabeth Charles, Susan Colbourn, Michael De Groot, Stephanie Freeman, Christopher Fuller, Flavia Gasbarri, Mathias Haeussler, William Inboden, Mark Atwood Lawrence, Elisabeth Mariko Leake, Melvyn P. Leffler, Evan D. McCormick, Jennifer Miller, David Painter, Robert Rakove, William Michael Schmidli, Sarah Snyder, Lauren Frances Turek, James Wilson