Most Popular Books by Michael Williams

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.

A rich novel about a young man from Soweto, whose life changes dramatically when he joins the cast of a musical that travels to Broadway.

The international drug trade is estimated to exceed four hundred billion dollars annually. With astronomical profit margins and insatiable demand, that underground economy provides unique opportunities for those on the "shadowy" side of America''s "war on drugs" to control world events and influence the global power structure. Just don''t get caught with your hands in their cookie jar. It''s 1972, and when Jeff Patten receives an urgent-albeit unusual-request from a new client, he agrees to drop what he''s doing and fly half-way across the country to retrieve a large cash investment for a new business venture. He figures out that all is not as it seems-but before he can learn his client''s true intentions, an unexpected accident takes his life, leaving his questions unanswered and millions of dollars unaccounted for. Thirty years later, Jack Hixson is approached by Jeff Patten''s daughter to look into the suspicious circumstances surrounding her father''s untimely demise. What he finds is a trail of cleverly disguised clues that set him on a perilous quest to locate the long lost money. The Four Horsemen is a suspenseful legal thriller that will pull you into the world of two small town attorneys who unwittingly become entangled a secretive conspiracy intent on controlling the international flow of drugs and manipulating the global power structure.

The third Dragonlance title ever published, now available for the first time in hardcover.

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.

“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 epic fantasy from the beloved Dragonlance book series! 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.

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.

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

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.

In the uneasy peace following the War of the Lance, Caramon and Tasslehoff the Kender set out to reform Caramon''s twin brother Raistlin, the most powerful warrior of evil in the land of Krynn.