Best Selling Books by Michael Williams

“Anyone who doubts the power of history to inform the present should read this closely argued and sweeping survey. This is rich, timely, and sobering historical fare written in a measured, non-sensationalist style by a master of his craft. One only hopes (almost certainly vainly) that today’s policymakers take its lessons to heart.”—Brian Fagan, Los Angeles Times Published in 2002, Deforesting the Earth was a landmark study of the history and geography of deforestation. Now available as an abridgment, this edition retains the breadth of the original while rendering its arguments accessible to a general readership. Deforestation—the thinning, changing, and wholesale clearing of forests for fuel, shelter, and agriculture—is among the most important ways humans have transformed the environment. Surveying ten thousand years to trace human-induced deforestation’s effect on economies, societies, and landscapes around the world, Deforesting the Earth is the preeminent history of this process and its consequences. Beginning with the return of the forests after the ice age to Europe, North America, and the tropics, Michael Williams traces the impact of human-set fires for gathering and hunting, land clearing for agriculture, and other activities from the Paleolithic age through the classical world and the medieval period. He then focuses on forest clearing both within Europe and by European imperialists and industrialists abroad, from the 1500s to the early 1900s, in such places as the New World, India, and Latin America, and considers indigenous clearing in India, China, and Japan. Finally, he covers the current alarming escalation of deforestation, with our ever-increasing human population placing a potentially unsupportable burden on the world’s forests.

The world’s least promising knight gets his first taste of high-stakes adventure in this rollicking and fantastical Dragonlance tale Weasel''s luck was not always good . . . Galen Pathwarden, known as "the Weasel", would give anything to stay clear of adventure, danger, or heroism. Cowardly, deceitful, and hardly noble—and mired in a backwater castle far from any action—he bickers with his siblings and schemes against his elders. But one fateful night, Galen’s dreary life is turned upside down when a sinister visitor arrives bearing gold, unspeakable magic, and a centuries’ old curse. The encounter launches Galen on a bizarre quest into swamp and forest, headed toward a mythical fortress. With the great Solamnic Knight, Sir Bayard Brightblade, and a none-too-bright centaur named Agion at his side, Galen must overcome the schemes and traps of a sinister illusionist known only as the Scorpion.

... This book provides step-by-step instruction for implementing a narrative-based approach as an alternative to traditional discipline strategies.

Keep Putting One Foot in Front of the Other Have you ever felt like giving up? Many of us experience struggle, pain, and loss, and it can be hard to know what to do next. Yet when we are confronted with obstacles or hardship, God is there with us and will provide us with a way forward. We must simply take the first step. In The Long Road to Blessed, author Michael Williams shares the unbelievable roller coaster of events that shaped his life. While struggling to find his place in a confusing world, he made many mistakes and suffered many losses. Yet he overcome tremendous adversity to raise his family in a better way than he was taught. Even in our most difficult moments, God is there for us, and he often uses what we have been through to help others learn from our experiences. Hardships can break us if we allow it, but when we find something positive and rewarding to invest our time into, we can have faith and the determination to stay true to ourselves and to the plan that God has set out in our lives. Every great journey begins with one step forward.

The How to Read the Bible Pack, Second Edition includes six books from six leading biblical scholars in one pack that will help you understand the Bible more clearly and get the most out of your Bible-reading experience.

The world’s most reluctant knight, Galen Pathwarden, returns for another misadventure in this exciting sequel to Weasel’s Luck Becoming a knight has changed the Weasel very little. Galen Pathwarden is still wary of seeking adventure—and still out to save his own skin at virtually any cost. But when his brother Brithelm vanishes mysteriously, Galen sets aside his better judgment and embarks on a quest that leads him under the earth, deep into a conspiracy of darkness, and to the very end of his courage. Once more, this reluctant knight returns to the imperiled nation of Solamnia, where he will learn if he has what it takes to be a true hero.

New York Times–bestselling series: Discover the backstory of Sturm Brightblade, the noble Solamnic Knight and future Hero of the Lance Although twins Raistlin and Caramon Majere urge him not to go, Sturm Brightblade attends an annual Solamnic ceremony that is interrupted by a stranger who offers a taunting challenge and clues from the past. He speaks of death . . . Once young Sturm accepts a mysterious gauntlet, he must undertake a dangerous journey with some curious friends, rescue a fair if querulous maid, defeat a traitor knight, and learn the secret fate of his long-lost father. And most important of all, he must learn the true meaning of honor.

Dr Williams begins by exploring the role of the forest in American culture: the symbols, themes, and concepts - for example, pioneer woodsman, lumberjack, wilderness - generated by contact with the vast land of trees. He considers the Indian use of the forest, describing the ways in which native tribes altered it, primarily through fire, to promote a subsistence economy.

This book is structured as a step-by-step course of study along the lines of a VLSI integrated circuit design project. The entire Verilog language is presented, from the basics to everything necessary for synthesis of an entire 70,000 transistor, full-duplex serializer-deserializer, including synthesizable PLLs. The author includes everything an engineer needs for in-depth understanding of the Verilog language: Syntax, synthesis semantics, simulation and test. Complete solutions for the 27 labs are provided in the downloadable files that accompany the book. For readers with access to appropriate electronic design tools, all solutions can be developed, simulated, and synthesized as described in the book. A partial list of design topics includes design partitioning, hierarchy decomposition, safe coding styles, back annotation, wrapper modules, concurrency, race conditions, assertion-based verification, clock synchronization, and design for test. A concluding presentation of special topics includes System Verilog and Verilog-AMS.

My father says that a journey should always change your life in some way. Well, when you have nothing, I suppose a journey promises everything. "Diamonds for everyone." That''s what fifteen-year-old Patson Moyo hears when his family arrives in the Marange diamond fields. Soon Patson is working in the mines along with four friends, pooling their profits for a chance at a better life. Each of them hopes to find a girazi, a priceless stone that could change their circumstances forever. But when the government''s soldiers come to Marange, Patson''s world is shattered. Set against the backdrop of Zimbabwe''s brutal recent history, Diamond Boy is the story of a young man who succumbs to greed but finds his way out through a transformative journey to South Africa in search of his missing sister, in search of freedom, and in search of himself. A high-stakes, harrowing adventure in the blood-diamond fields of southern Africa, from the critically acclaimed author of Now Is the Time for Running.

In Unnatural Doubts, Michael Williams constructs a masterly polemic against the very idea of epistemology, as traditionally conceived. Although philosophers have often found problems in efforts to study the nature and limits of human knowledge, Williams provides the first book that systematically argues against there being such a thing as knowledge of the external world. He maintains that knowledge of the world consitutes a theoretically coherent kind of knowledge, whose possibility needs to be defended, only given a deeply problematic doctrine he calls "epistemological realism." The only alternative to epistemological realism is a thoroughgoing contextualism.

My new book, Within the Depths of Life in the Raw at Its Essence . . . is an original, intricate, deep, insightful, vivid, truthful, and optimistic journey through life, through history, through the inner self that is you at its rawest essence. This book contains quotes that are relatable and positive, and they universally connect and reflect our inner prana, which is energy that elevates humanity to a higher level of third-eye mental consciousness.

Inspired by the work of Wilfrid Sellars, Michael Williams launches an all-out attack on what he calls "phenomenalism," the idea that our knowledge of the world rests on a perceptual or experiential foundation. The point of this wider-than-normal usage of the term "phenomenalism," according to which even some forms of direct realism deserve to be called phenomenalistic, is to call attention to important continuities of thought between theories often thought to be competitors. Williams''s target is not phenomenalism in its classical sense-datum and reductionist form but empiricism generally. Williams examines and rejects the idea that, unless our beliefs are answerable to a "given" element in experience, objective knowledge will be impossible. Groundless Belief was first published in 1977. This second edition contains a new afterword in which Williams places his arguments in the context of some current discussions of coherentism versus the Myth of the Given and explains their relation to subsequent developments in his own epistemological views.

When tragedy strikes, Deo''s love of soccer is all he has left. Can he use that gift to find hope once more? Just down the road from their families, Deo and his friends play soccer in the dusty fields of Zimbabwe, cheered on by Deo''s older brother, Innocent. It is a day like any other ..until the soldiers arrive and Deo and Innocent are forced to run for their lives, fleeing the wreckage of their village for the distant promise of safe haven. Along the way, they face the prejudice and poverty that await refugees everywhere, and must rely on the kindness of people they meet to make it through. Relevant, timely, and accessibly written, Now Is the Time For Running is a staggering story of survival that follows Deo and his mentally handicapped older brother on a transformative journey that will stick with readers long after the last page.

The conceptual process of drug discovery is one that is often the result of an identified need in a defined disease area. This need represents a mandate from the marketing department of a phar maceutical company or a breakthrough at the research level that has agreed applicability in response to a valid therapeutic demand. Although the intelligent design and development of new thera peutic entities, as evidenced by Sir James Black''s H -receptor an 2 tagonist cimetidine (Tagamet), is intellectually satisfying, many novel drugs arise from serendipity, from the chance observation of the research scientist or the clinician, that a compound has unex pected actions of use for the treatment of human disease states. Drugs that have been identified by this route include the antipsy chotic chlorpromazine and the putative anxiolytic buspirone. The events surrounding the process of drug discovery and de velopment are the theme of the present volume, which attempts to present, in a logical and lucid manner, the complexity of a process that is often naively assumed to represent nothing more than the identification of a new compound and its rapid introduction into humans, free of such complications as efficacy, selectivity, safety, bioavailability, toxicity, and need.

South African teenager Seraki joins the cast of a musical written to express rage at conditions in his South African township and travels to perform it in New York.

Excerpt from American Catholics in the War: National Catholic War Council, 1917-1921 That promise meant the consecration in patriotic service not only of our priests and of our religious but also of our laymen and laywomen; it meant not only one organization but every organization; not only one source of support within the command of the body Catholic - chaplains in the service: men in the army and navy: trained Catholic men and women who would devote themselves to all the men of the service the support of government appeals by our Catholic parishes, the erection of huts and visitors'' houses within the camps here: of service clubs in the cities of welfare work both at home and abroad. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

A look back from a future in which racism is no more—inspiring us to start taking positive action today “It’s the year 2050... and racism has ended.” Could this really be our future? If so, what has to happen now to achieve such a radical change? In How We Ended Racism, Justin Michael Williams and Shelly Tygielski reveal a path for real and lasting global impact—not just talking about it, studying it, or making small steps, but actually ending racism in one generation. Williams and Tygielski draw from a wide array of scientific studies, as well as their practical successes in teaching a multitude of diverse groups across perceived “divides,” to show us how to shift our perspective and enact lasting change in our families, workplaces, communities, and beyond. Here they provide solid answers to the questions future generations will ask about this pivotal time in history, by laying out the eight conditions that needed to arise in humanity to realize this possibility, covering: • How was it possible? The research on large-scale social change that showed racism could end • What were the first steps? Overcoming doubt, owning our emotions, and committing to truth • What were the biggest challenges? Shadow work, big conversations, and forgiveness • Which tools actually worked? The field-tested methods that allowed us to heal and connect • Who ended racism? How we—each of us—helped our culture evolve to make racism a thing of the past “You don’t fix racism,” say the authors. “You don’t fight it. You don’t make it better. You end it. We learned how to bridge any political or ideological divide—inviting liberals, conservatives, and everyone in between to cocreate a future worth fighting for.” Here is a guide that dares to envision a world beyond typical diversity, equity, and inclusion work while providing tools and action steps to create a liberated future—so that our descendants can look back at this era as the time when we decided to end racism for the good of all.

Primed for a battle between good and evil, Raistlin, the corrupted mage, returns to the Dragonlance series along with a new generation of characters, the inheritors of the fabled Heroes of the Lance. 175,000 first printing.

After the first tractors appeared on the scene in the late 1890s, it took another two decades and plenty of modifications for farmers to embrace this once-crude technology in favor of the steam engine, further advancing the power-farming revolution. Written by an international expert in agricultural machinery, Farm Tractors takes readers back to the nineteenth century to look at the precursors to modern tractors and travels through the years to follow the machine’s evolution as tractors became indispensable equipment on farms across America. INSIDE FARM TRACTORS: •How steam-powered machinery gave way to tractors, and how tractors changed the way that farmers worked •Prominent early manufacturers and models, including Henry Ford’s legendary Model F, International Harvester’s Farmall, the Waterloo Boy, John Deere, and many more •The use of hydraulics, the advent of diesel engines, the availability of four-wheel drive, and other technical breakthroughs •The introduction of new fuel sources as alternatives to gasoline •Specialized tractors for orchard work, high-acreage operations, carrying loads, cultivating, and other scenarios •The tractor industry’s major expansion following World War II •Modern-day tractors and an outlook on the future of farm machinery