New Releases by Brooke Allen

Thousands of people across the United States struggle with symptoms of anxiety on a daily basis . It is estimated that 13% of people are affected by anxiety in their lifetime ( Narr & Teachman, 2017). In today''s society there are many roles and obligations people are expected to fill. With these roles and obligations often comes stress and anxiety. Anxiety Centre (2016) further reports that the number of people in the North America who experience anxiety symptoms are actually much higher (about 30%) than are reported, as many people are misdiagnosed or do not seek treatment for their symptoms

Benazir Bhutto, the first woman to lead a Muslim nation, served two terms as the prime minister of Pakistan before charges of corruption resulted in her self-imposed exile. Bhutto later returned to her homeland, where she was assassinated by a sniper while waving from her motorcade upon leaving a political rally. Brooke Allen, a leading literary critic and the author of Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers and two collections of essays, ventures into new territory in this brief biography of a charismatic figure who had a profound effect on the politics of South Asia.

Brooke Allen first travelled to Syria in 2009, expecting it to be much as American news media routinely depicted it -- an ultra-conservative Muslim society, a rogue nation committed to an anti-American stance. She found, instead, a welcoming and captivating country where she and her family were treated with courtesy and gentleness. She soon returned for a more leisurely trip through Syria''s rich historical and archaeological treasures: the ancient cities of Aleppo and Damascus, the great Crusader castles, the Bronze Age ruins of Ebla and Mari, the Greco-Roman cities of Palmyra and Apamea. With her keen and appreciative eye (and ear) Allen introduces us to Syria''s people, culture, and history. This book illustrates one traveller''s enlightenment, while reflecting on our American ways. For, as she writes, "To visit Syria is to confront the unhappy truth about our media, which is that much of the international news we read or see serves not as a window looking out at the world but as a mirror: a mirror that reflects our own fears and obsessions and shines them right back at us".

The guiding spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, Ms. Allen explains, was not Jesus Christ but John Locke. In direct and accessible prose, she provides fascinating chapters on the religious lives of the six men she considers the key Founding Fathers: Franklin, Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton. Far from being the conventional pious Christians we too often imagine, these men were skeptical intellectuals, in some cases not even Christians at all. Enlivened by generous portions of the founders'' own incomparable prose, Moral Minority makes an impassioned and scintillating contribution to the ongoing debate--more heated now than ever before--over the separation of church and state and the role (or lack thereof) of religion in government.

"Ms. Allen goes on to show how the incendiaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were, in real terms, far more daring and more disturbing to the moral and ideological systems of their time than is the modern mutineer, who stages his rebellion within a social framework that condones - or at least pretends to condone - rebellion. In incisive essays, she considers such liberators as Pepys, Sterne, Boswell, Sheridan, Jane Austen, Hans Christian Andersen, Byron, Hawthorne, Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, L. Frank Baum, Sinclair Lewis, and William Saroyan. She finds it surprising that so many writers held on to artistic rectitude in the face of all-but-insuperable personal failings."--Jacket.

Allen explores the lives and work of the last century''s most brilliant and eccentric literary talents.