In lieu of the obligatory holiday gift guide, this year I am just going to give you all a list of every book I worked on that was released in 2012. Since I am already working on 2014 books, this certainly feels like a trip down memory lane for me! So I have also added a couple pictures of authors and fun stuff, too. You’ll notice that I’m not calling this the list of “best 2012 books” or anything like that because, when it comes to my authors and their books, I just can’t pick favorites! It would be like asking a mother to pick her favorite kid. If you’re looking for a cool gift idea for someone in your life, scan through this list and perhaps one of these will be the perfect

Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Mambo Chita Tann, author of Haitian Vodou. One of the things indigenous religions have in common, no matter where they arise, is a strong continuity between living people and their ancestors. Whether or not a culture thinks of its dead as benevolent or dangerous—and sometimes, both at the same time—the culture will have an origin myth and honor its ancestors in some way, as part of religious and cultural practices. Most indigenous groups fully embrace the idea that the dead are not actually dead, but removed from the world of the living and in another place, where they can interact with living descendants. When Christianity spread

For about two years I worked full time in the computer industry. I worked in quality assurance for two computer game companies (including Disney Interactive) and then taught basic computer operation, graphics and 3D animation at USC. Later, I returned to QA (quality assurance) at another company and also did some customer support. When you help consumers, to keep track of how you spend your time, you keep a record of each call and how you handled it. There is an abbreviation often seen in the record: RTFM. Without going into details, it basically means that the consumer could have avoided their problem and not wasted our time if they had just Read The Freakin' Manual. (The "F" doesn't

It seems like wars today change little except names. They still cause massive death and destruction, most often to people who wanted nothing to do with such wars. One set of leaders is ousted and another put in power. They often turn out not much better or even worse than those who came before them. This was not always the case. The Western world was dramatically changed by WWI and much of the entire world was changed by WWII. After the attack on Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941, there were only a few minor attacks on 48 U.S. states during WWII. As a result, the knowledge of what war is like for Americans tends to be quite different than for people of Europe. For the past century, to the