About this product: An updated version for the 21st century of one of the best-selling devotional books of all time, this text is based on the NIV and will lead you from life's dry, desolate places to the waters of the River of Life -- and beyond, to their very Source.
About this product: Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, the noted author's most enduring nonfiction work, is an account of Abbey's seasons as a ranger at Arches National Park outside Moab, Utah. Abbey reflects on the nature of the Colorado Plateau desert, on the condition of our remaining wilderness, and on the future of a civilization that cannot reconcile itself to living in the natural world. He also recounts adventures with scorpions and snakes, obstinate tourists and entrenched bureaucrats, and, most powerful of all, with his own mortality. Abbey's account of getting stranded in a rock pool down a side branch of the Grand Canyon is at once hilarious and terrifying.
About this product: The definitive history of water resources in the American West, and a very illuminating lesson in the political economy of limited resources anywhere. Highly recommended!
About this product: Like the single white eyelash that graces her row of dark lashes–seen by her people as a mark of good fortune–Halima Bashir’s story stands out. Tears of the Desert is the first memoir ever written by a woman caught up in the war in Darfur. It is a survivor’s tale of a conflicted country, a resilient people, and the uncompromising spirit of a young woman who refused to be silenced.
Born into the Zaghawa tribe in the Sudanese desert, Halima was doted on by her father, a cattle herder, and kept in line by her formidable grandmother. A politically astute man, Halima’s father saw to it that his daughter received a good education away from their rural surroundings. Halima excelled in her studies and exams, surpassing even the privileged Arab girls who looked down their noses at the black Africans. With her love of learning and her father’s support, Halima went on to study medicine, and at twenty-four became her village’s first formal doctor.
Yet not even the symbol of good luck that dotted her eye could protect her from the encroaching conflict that would consume her land. Janjaweed Arab militias started savagely assaulting the Zaghawa, often with the backing of the Sudanese military. Then, in early 2004, the Janjaweed attacked Bashir’s village and surrounding areas, raping forty-two schoolgirls and their teachers. Bashir, who treated the traumatized victims, some as young as eight years old, could no longer remain quiet. But breaking her silence ignited a horrifying turn of events.
In this harrowing and heartbreaking account, Halima Bashir sheds light on the hundreds of thousands of innocent lives being eradicated by what is fast becoming one of the most terrifying genocides of the twenty-first century. Raw and riveting, Tears of the Desert is more than just a memoir–it is Halima Bashir’s global call to action.
About this product: Twilight in the Desert reveals a Saudi oil and production industry that could soon approach a serious, irreversible decline. In this exhaustively researched book, veteran oil industry analyst Matthew Simmons draws on his three-plus decades of insider experience and more than 200 independently produced reports about Saudi petroleum resources and production operations. He uncovers a story about Saudi Arabia’s troubled oil industry, not to mention its political and societal instability, which differs sharply from the globally accepted Saudi version. It’s a story that is provocative and disturbing, based on undeniable facts, but until now never told in its entirety. Twilight in the Desert answers all readers’ questions about Saudi oil and production industries with keen examination instead of unsubstantiated posturing, and takes its place as one of the most important books of this still-young century.
About this product: Mrs. Cowman's classic devotional will inspire fresh hope, confidence, and a deep awareness of God's presence in your life are presented in one volume for morning or evening devotional reading.
About this product: A biography of the woman who, indirectly, was the catalyst for many of the troubles in the Middle East, including the Gulf War. In 1918, Gertrude Bell drew the region's proposed boundaries on a piece of tracing paper. Her qualifications for doing so were her extensive travel, her fluency in both Persian and Arabic, and her relationships with sheiks and tribal and religious leaders. She also possessed an ability to understand the subtle and indirect politeness of the culture, something many of her colonialist comrades were oblivious to. As a self-made statesman her sex was an asset, enabling her to bypass the ladder of protocol and dive into the business of building an Empire.
A marvelous tale of an adventurous life of great historical import She has been called the female Lawrence of Arabia, which, while not inaccurate, fails to give Gertrude Bell her due. She was at one time the most powerful woman in the British Empire: a nation builder, the driving force behind the creation of modern-day Iraq. Born in 1868 into a world of privilege, Bell turned her back on Victorian society, choosing to read history at Oxford and going on to become an archaeologist, spy, Arabist, linguist, author (of Persian Pictures, The Desert and the Sown, and many other collections), poet, photographer, and legendary mountaineer (she took off her skirt and climbed the Alps in her underclothes).
She traveled the globe several times, but her passion was the desert, where she traveled with only her guns and her servants. Her vast knowledge of the region made her indispensable to the Cairo Intelligence Office of the British government during World War I. She advised the Viceroy of India; then, as an army major, she traveled to the front lines in Mesopotamia. There, she supported the creation of an autonomous Arab nation for Iraq, promoting and manipulating the election of King Faisal to the throne and helping to draw the borders of the fledgling state. Gertrude Bell, vividly told and impeccably researched by Georgina Howell, is a richly compelling portrait of a woman who transcended the restrictions of her class and times, and in so doing, created a remarkable and enduring legacy.
About this product: #1 New York Times bestseller Iris Johansen pairs an exotic locale with an irresistible man in this classic love story that proves anything is possible when a woman knows in her heart that it’s right….
Don’t look for me. I’ll come back when I’m ready. Pandora Madchen wrote those words when she ran off six years ago. In that time she’d become a sensation with the rock group Nemesis, toured the world, and grown up, but she never forgot the promise she made herself. Now Pandora was ready to return to the desert state of Sedikhan and the man she’d loved too soon and too much. Sheik Philip El Kabbar was a businessman whose power and influence extended throughout the world—but for six long years he’d been unable to find the woman he still considered it his duty to protect. She’d come back on her own terms and to take the kind of erotic gamble that Philip always won. Only this time he wasn’t sure that in winning they wouldn’t both lose what matters most. Or that in loving her, he wouldn’t be hurting them both.
About this product: For thirty years now Sister Benedicta Ward's translation of the sayings of 131 of the earliest monastics has served as an indispensable text for English speakers. In addition to her brief foreword and short biographical introductions (when they are known), the book includes simple maps on the inside front and back covers, a short glossary of terms, a chronological table of key events in the development of desert monasticism, a bibliography that is all too short and badly dated, and then two indices of key concepts, people and places. The sayings themselves stand alone without commentary. For contemporary extrapolations one can turn to the fine books by Archbishop Rowan Williams (Where God Happens, 2005) and John Chryssavgis (In the Heart of the Desert, 2003). For more complete primary resources, see the two works by John Cassian (360-435), Institutes and Conferences (900-plus pages), in which Cassian relates what he learned from and about the earliest monastics.
Beginning in the third century, three monastic experiments emerged in Egypt. St. Anthony (251-356), an uneducated Copt, is generally hailed as the father of the hermit monasticism centered in lower Egypt. Thanks to The Life of Saint Anthony by Athanasius, we know as much or more about Anthony than any other of the early ascetics. Other monks cooperated and collaborated in "cenobitic" monasticism. Pachomius (290-347) is generally credited with instigating this communal form of flight to the desert. Finally, in Nitria and Scetis small groups of monks lived near one another under the direction of an elder or "abba." In addition to Egypt, desert monasticism flourished in Syria, Asia Minor and in Palestine.
It's easy to dismiss the eccentricities of a Simon the Stylite (d. 459), who sat atop a fifty-foot pole outside of Antioch for forty years, or the ascetic excesses of food and sleep deprivation, but we honor these saints for their unique experimental spirituality that explored just what the words of Jesus might mean: "Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me." They stopped at nothing in "their lifetime of striving to re-direct every aspect of body, mind, and soul to God, and that is what they talked about" (Ward) in these "sayings."
In these sayings we are taught to "expect temptation until your last breath." That means doing battle with one's inner appetites, drives, thoughts, attachments (for example, to wealth) and desires. It also means the further you travel on the Christian journey the more you realize the breadth and depth of the struggle. Consequently, these monastics were above all things modest, non-judgmental, and deeply tender in regard to our human weaknesses. They were reluctant to take Christian office, made the certainty of their death a force for good in life, modest in what they thought they might know about Scripture, eager to keep silent, and appreciative of the diverse ways that each monk worked out his salvation. Ultimately, and in contrast to so much Christian spirituality of today, these desert monastics recommend a "hidden" form of discipleship, the focus of which is the interior geography of the human heart regardless of where they body finds itself. I have found these ancient saints to be wise guides for our contemporary world.
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