Student Volunteer

When Scott Dozier was sent to Nevada’s death row in 2007, convicted of a pair of grisly murders, he didn’t cry foul or embark upon a protracted innocence campaign. He sought instead to expedite his execution—to hasten his inevitable death. He decided he would rather face his end swiftly than die slowly in solitary confinement. In volunteering for execution, Dozier may have been unusual. But in the tortuous events that led his death date to be scheduled and rescheduled, planned and then stayed, his time on death row was anything but.

To uncover the fate of the thousands being interred at a mysterious Nazi camp on the border of the Reich, a young Polish resistance fighter named Witold Pilecki volunteered for an audacious mission: intentionally get captured and transported to the new camp to report back on what was going on there. But gathering information was not his only task: he was to execute an attack from inside - where the Germans would least expect it. The name of the camp was Auschwitz.

In 1982, a 20-something named Michael Ross left home to backpack across Europe. Little did he know that his vacation would set in motion a chain of events that would hurl him into a career where the bosses are seasoned spies, and the work is tracking the world’s most dangerous terrorists. The Volunteer is a fast-paced memoir that provides insight into our world, both pre- and post-9/11, told by a man on the front lines in the war against terror.

She’s served in battle. She’s killed. She’s watched as her friends have fallen away, either to death or to the brainwashing that forces the government’s agenda into young, hungry minds. But Riley is one of the few citizens who has seen the inside of the Stilts, the flooded buildings that surround Manhattan. Now that she knows what life is really like on the other side of the wall, she must decide which path to take. She can continue her career as a soldier in the Service, or she can turn spy against the government and begin working with the Volunteers.

A small boy speaking an unknown language is abandoned by his father at an international airport, with only the clothes on his back and a handful of money jammed in the pocket of his coat. In order to understand this heartbreaking and indefensible decision, the story must return to the moment, decades earlier, when Vollie Frade, almost on a whim, enlists in the US Marine Corps to fight in Vietnam. Breaking definitively from his rural Iowan parents, Vollie puts in motion an unimaginable chain of events that sees him go to work for insidious people with intentions he cannot yet grasp.

In this mix of serious topics and humour, Becky Bexley is in her second year of university, at the age when most children are just starting secondary school. She does voluntary work for a new blind student called Barbara who needs people to read her study material to her. They strike up a friendship, often have a laugh together, and Becky meets her brother and some of her disabled friends. They all tell her about their experiences of living with disabilities, a few of them amusing.

Many people dream of being at work or school only to realize that they are naked. For university student Danielle Keaton, this dream is about to become her reality. Facing the consequences of a severe lack of judgement, she is forced to make a choice: either give up her scholarships and her plan for graduating from college debt-free, or volunteer to be the test subject in a unique sociological study that will leave her naked and vulnerable to the entire university.

In the summer of 1940, after the Nazi occupation of Poland, an underground operative called Witold Pilecki accepted a mission to uncover the fate of thousands of people being interred at a new concentration camp on the border of the Reich. His mission was to report on Nazi crimes and raise a secret army to stage an uprising. The name of the detention centre - Auschwitz. It was only after arriving at the camp that he started to discover the Nazis' terrifying designs.

Radical Volunteers tells the largely unknown story of southern student activism in Tennessee between the Brown decision in 1954 and the national backlash against the Kent State University shootings in May 1970. As one of the first statewide studies of student activism—and one of the few examinations of southern student activism—it broadens scholarly understanding of New Left and Black student radicalism from its traditionally defined hotbeds in the Northeast and on the West Coast.