Taking listeners on a thought-provoking journey into our ancestors’ beliefs about death, dying, and the afterlife, Gregory Shushan, Ph.D., reveals the powerful influence of near-death experiences (NDEs) on religious beliefs and ritual practices throughout human history. Focusing on five ancient world regions in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, and Mesoamerica, Shushan expertly explores each civilization’s afterlife beliefs.

When the Allen brothers sold Houston's first lots, the city became a magnet for enterprising tycoons and opportunistic crooks alike. As the young city grew, a scourge of crime and vice accompanied the success of oil and real estate. The Bayou City's seedy side—flashing Bowie knives, privileged bad boys, hardened prostitutes, and unchecked serial killers—established its hold. From a young Clyde Barrow to the Man Who Killed Halloween, Houston's past is filled with bloody tales, heartbreaking loss, and despicable deeds.

Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine are two of the most recognisable figures of the Middle Ages, and almost certainly the best-known couple. The lives of their sons have been examined in detail many times, but their daughters are barely known despite the influence they exerted on the world around them. Joanna, the youngest daughter, led an extraordinary life full of travel, adventure, danger, and controversy. Her story is told here in full for the first time.

In Forest Euphoria, Kaishian shows us this making of a scientist and introduces readers to the queerness, literal and otherwise, of all the life around us. Fungi, we learn, commonly have more than two biological sexes—and some as many as twenty-three thousand. Some intersex slugs mutually fire calcium carbonate “love darts” at each other during courtship.

With warmth and humour, Elizabeth Lovatt reimagines the women who called and volunteered for the Lesbian Line in the 1990s, whilst also tracing her own journey from accidentally coming out to disastrous dates to finding her chosen family. With callers and agents alike dealing with first crushes and break-ups, sex and marriage, loneliness and illness, this is a celebration of the ordinary lives of queer women.