Several months after the tragic events set in motion by bully Betty Glengarry, Annabelle McBride is struck by lightning during a powerful summer storm, leaving her with heightened senses that give her a new understanding of animals and help her learn about compassion and forgiveness.

Using the Character of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the "father of the atomic bomb," as a jumping-off point, The Cloud That Contained the lightning explores the kinds of ethical choices we face as individuals and as a society with respect to the innovations and inventions we pursue. How are our fears, obsessions, prejudices, and cultures manifested in the ways we apply new technologies? In exploring our tendency for selective amnesia, this collection asks...

"Draws on hundreds of hours of interviews with family members, colleagues, historians and other insiders to trace the stories and heroic sacrifices of the elite Granite Mountain Hotshots who gave their lives fighting the catastrophic 2013 wildfire in Yarnell, Arizona,"--NoveList. When a bolt of lightning ignited a hilltop in the sleepy town of Yarnell, Arizona, in June 2013, setting off a blaze that would grow into one of the deadliest fires in American...

When his initiation into the Lightning Club takes a murderous turn, Charles Dickens is accused of the crime and is locked away in Newgate Prison where he must rely on his fiancé and her sleuthing skills to save him from the hangman's noose.

"Women of all ages, races, and nations share their hopes, fears, desires, advice, and support with the new Vice President. As the first woman of color elected as the Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris broke through many barriers and made history, energizing a host of women who have a lot to say. Seeing a model of themselves filling the second-most-powerful office in the Free World, women from Africa to California, Canada to Florida...

During his more than three decades at the head of the Consumer Technology Association, Gary Shapiro has witnessed, and been a part of, one of the most extraordinary periods of technological change in human history. Today's world is almost unrecognizable from that of just a decade or two before: in just a few short years, the internet has already transformed how we access information, purchase goods, get from place to place, and do our jobs. And even...

"In the early years of the twentieth-century, the use of airships known as dirigibles - some as large as one thousand feet long - was being promulgated in Southern California by a semi-clandestine lighter-than-air movement. Groups like the East LA Balloon Club and the Bessie Coleman Aero Club were hard at work to revolutionize travel in the pre-apocalyptic Southwest, with an aim to literally lift oppressed people out of racism and poverty. ELADATL...

"For many, the appearance of Occupy Wall Street seemed so sudden and so surprising it seemed to have come out of nowhere. But Occupy Wall Street was in some sense not unusual: it was part and parcel of a long history of riot, revolt, uprising, and sometimes even revolution that has shaped the city and the larger histories and geographies of which it is part. The history of New York is, in significant part, a history of revolt. Many citizens, activists,...

A new vision for America's future is quickly gaining momentum. Facing a global emergency, a younger generation is spearheading a national conversation around a Green New Deal and setting the agenda for a bold political movement with the potential to revolutionize society. Millennials, the largest voting bloc in the country, are now leading on the issue of climate change. While the Green New Deal has become a lightning rod in the political sphere,...

"W.H. Auden once wrote that "art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead." In his brilliant and compulsively readable new treatise BREAKING BREAD WITH THE DEAD, distinguished professor and author Alan Jacobs shows us that engaging with the great writings of the past might help us live less anxiously in the present. Today we are battling too much information, a society changing at lightning speed, algorithms aimed at shaping our every move,...