In the early morning hours of July 26, 1953, several hundred Arizona state officials and police officers moved into the polygamist community of Short Creek, Arizona, to serve warrants on thirty-six men and eighty-six women. Officials staging the raid believed they were rescuing the community’s 263 children from a life of bondage and immorality.

Kidnapped from that Land is the first book to bring together the story of the 1953 raid and two previous raids in 1935 and 1944. Martha Bradley tells the story with insight and compassion for the families that were fragmented by the arrests. She also deals with the complex legal issues that persist in both Arizona and Utah, where the practice of polygamy is a felony that is no longer prosecuted.

Kidnapped from that Land will appeal to those interested in the study of Mormon history, of polygamy, and of western regional and American social history.
 

Víctor Montejo’s story recounts the near-death experience of his grandfather, Antonyo Mekel Lawuxh (Antonio Esteban), who fell gravely ill in Guatemala in the late 1920s but survived to tell his family and community what he had witnessed of the afterlife.

Narrated from Antonio’s perspective, the reader follows along on a journey to the Maya underworld of Xibalba, accompanied by two spirit guides. Antonio traverses Xibalba’s levels of heaven and hell, encountering instructive scenes of punishment and reward: in one chapter, conquistadors are perpetually submerged in a pool of their victims’ blood; in another, the souls of animal abusers are forever unable to cross a crocodile-infested river. Infused with memory, the author illustrates Guatemala’s unique religious syncretism, exploring conceptions of heaven and hell shared between Catholicism and Indigenous Maya spirituality. In the tradition of both the Popol Vuh and the Divine Comedy, Montejo’s narrative challenges easy categorization—this is a work of family history, religious testimony, political allegory, and sacred literature.