Rachael Hanel – författare

Rachael Hanel’s name was inscribed on a gravestone when she was eleven years old. Yet this wasn’t at all unusual in her world: her father was a gravedigger in the small Minnesota town of Waseca, and death was her family’s business. Her parents were forty-two years old and in good health when they erected their gravestone-Rachael’s name was simply a branch on the sprawling family tree etched on the back of the stone. As she puts it: I grew up in cemeteries.And you don’t grow up in cemeteries-surrounded by headstones and stories, questions, curiosity-without becoming an adept and sensitive observer of death and loss as experienced by the people in this small town. For Rachael Hanel, wandering among tombstones, reading the names, and wondering about the townsfolk and their lives, death was, in many ways, beautiful and mysterious. Death and mourning: these she understood. But when Rachael’s father-Digger O’Dell-passes away suddenly when she is fifteen, she and her family are abruptly and harshly transformed from bystanders to participants. And for the first time, Rachael realizes that death and grief are very different.At times heartbreaking and at others gently humorous and uplifting, We’ll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down presents the unique, moving perspective of a gravedigger’s daughter and her lifelong relationship with death and grief. But it is also a masterful meditation on the living elements of our cemeteries: our neighbors, friends, and families-the very histories of our towns and cities-and how these things come together in the eyes of a young girl whose childhood is suffused with both death and the wonder of the living.

You’re in the middle of one of the most unpredictable natural disasters – an earthquake. No place is safe as the ground shudders, shakes, and splits. How will you survive as the world crashes around you? Will you:  experience an earthquake far from civilization in rural Alaska? Be trapped in a large city during an earthquake? Fight to survive during an earthquake in Japan and the tsunami that follows it? YOU CHOOSE what you’ll do next. The choices you make will either lead you to safety – or to doom.

You are surrounded by the vast, unforgiving landscape of the coldest place on Earth: Antarctica. Even during the summer months, bone chilling cold, raging blizzards, and treacherous ice threatens human survival. Will you join the race to be the first to reach the South Pole? Attempt to ski across the continent as part of an all-female expedition? Study Antarctic plant and animal life as a scientist at a research station? YOU CHOOSE what you''ll do next. The choices you make will either lead you to safety or to doom.

As internet use and global connectivity have skyrocketed, so too has identity theft. Even though hundreds of millions of people are affected every year by this crime, it remains unclear whose role it is to promote cybersecurity and investigate and prosecute identity theft in the United States. This book explains how identity theft, data breaches, and fraud occur, how to protect oneself against these threats, and what obstacles U.S. law enforcement faces as it seeks to fight back. Full-color photographs, a glossary, and sidebars help readers comprehend this complex issue, which is more pressing than ever for children and young adults.

The mystery of how an ordinary Minnesota girl came to be, briefly, one of the most wanted domestic terrorists in the United StatesBehind every act of domestic terrorism there is someone’s child, an average American whose life took a radical turn for reasons that often remain mysterious. Camilla Hall is a case in point: a pastor’s daughter from small-town Minnesota who eventually joined the ranks of radicals like Sara Jane Olson (aka Kathleen Soliah) in the notorious Symbionese Liberation Army before dying in a shootout with Los Angeles Police in May 1974. How could a “good girl” like Camilla become one of the most wanted domestic terrorists in the United States? Rachael Hanel tells her story here, revealing both the deep humanity and the extraordinary circumstances of Camilla Hall’s life.Camilla’s childhood in a tight-knit religious family was marred by loss and grief as, one after another, her three siblings died. Her path from her Minnesota home to her final, radical SLA family featured years as an artist and activist-in welfare offices, political campaigns, union organizing, culminating in a love affair that would be her introduction to the SLA. Through in-depth research and extensive interviews, Hanel pieces together Camilla’s bewildering transformation from a “gentle, zaftig, arty, otherworldy” young woman (as one observer remarked), working for social change within the system, into a gun-wielding criminal involved in the kidnapping of Patty Hearst.During this time of mounting unrest and violence, Camilla Hall’s story is of urgent interest for what it reveals about the forces of radicalization. But as Hanel ventures ever further into Camilla’s past, searching out the critical points where character and cause might intersect, her book becomes an intriguing, disturbing, and ultimately deeply moving journey into the dark side of America’s promise.

Examines the details of the crime identity theft and its punishment, as well as the controversy around the ways in which the government seeks to protect citizens from the problem.