When Charlie Watson retired from the Army and returned home from Afghanistan, he looked forward to a life he had left on hold. Years later, with almost everything taken from him, he has only the family farm and his brother left. Andy Watson isn't in the best shape either, as a small town cop he's suffered for years under the mental burden of a fatal shooting and his subsequent downspiral into the bottom of a bottle. Each day has become a battle for the both of them, the enemy far more dangerous than any conjured from the swirling sands of the East or the surprisingly lethal country roads. It's a struggle to simply maintain their sanity, and sometimes they don’t appear to be winning. On a clear spring evening all that is compounded as they are drawn into the biggest scientific discovery of the millennia, something that may very well lead them to their death, after lives spent just ahead of it. Invasion rocks what little sense of peace they have, one from an enemy too horrible to contemplate, and another from a government that’s as shifty as it is dangerous. Faced with consequences bigger than any two men should, the Watson brothers must fight their way out of a newfound hell – their own backyard.

In his new textbook, Joel Best gives readers a complete set of tools for analyzing any social problem.

Best helps readers think carefully about how activists, experts, and their opponents frame social problems through the logic that they use, the rhetoric of claims-making, and the ways that access to resources determines who gets their claims heard. In order to help students connect theory to everyday life, the text includes colorful examples and case studies from the real world.