Previously Discussed Books
![]() A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol is one of the best loved and most quoted of all English language Christmas stories. First published in 1843, it never fails to make an appearance every Christmas in some form. Ebenezer Scrooge, a most disagreeable curmudgeon, is visited by the ghost of his partner Jacob Marley. Marley informs him that he is to receive three visitors this Christmas Eve. They are the spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. By the next morning the change in Scrooge is astonishing, he has become a kind, generous, caring, and thoughtful person. Dickens' flair for characters has left us with two who have gone past the story and entered into the English speaking culture -- Scrooge and Tiny Tim. [7] |
![]() A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini After 103 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and with four million copies of The Kite Runner shipped, Khaled Hosseini returns with a beautiful, riveting, and haunting novel that confirms his place as one of the most important literary writers today. |
![]() Aging: The Fulfillment of Life by Henri Nouwen with Walter Gaffney This is a short book, an essay written in 1974 on the title topic enhanced by many black and white photos illustrating the text. The author shares his moving and inspirational thoughts on what aging can mean to all of us. It is a warm, caring book that shows us how to make the later years a source of hope rather than a time of loneliness.
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![]() Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy by Donald B. Kraybill, Steven M. Nolt, David L. Weaver-Zercher On Monday morning, October 2, 2006, a gunman entered a one-room Amish school in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. In front of twenty-five horrified pupils, thirty-two-year-old Charles Roberts ordered the boys and the teacher to leave. After tying the legs of the ten remaining girls, Roberts prepared to shoot them execution with an automatic rifle and four hundred rounds of ammunition that he brought for the task. The oldest hostage, a thirteen-year-old, begged Roberts to “shoot me first and let the little ones go.” Refusing her offer, he opened fire on all of them, killing five and leaving the others critically wounded. He then shot himself as police stormed the building. His motivation? “I’m angry at God for taking my little daughter,” he told the children before the massacre.
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![]() Could I Have This Dance? by Harry Kraus You can't dance this dance unless it's in your blood. Claire McCall is praying it's not in hers. Claire McCall is used to fighting back against the odds. Hard work, aptitude, and sheer determination have helped her rise from adverse circumstances to an internship in one of the nation's most competitive surgical residencies. |
![]() Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr In this indictment of George W. Bush's White House, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the country's most prominent environmental attorney, charges that this administration has taken corporate cronyism to such unprecedented heights that it now threatens our health, our national security, and democracy as we know it. In a headlong pursuit of private profit and personal power, Kennedy writes, George Bush and his administration have eviscerated the laws that have protected our nation's air, water, public lands, and wildlife for the past thirty years, enriching the president's political contributors while lowering the quality of life for the rest of us. Crimes Against Nature is ultimately about the corrosive effect of corporate corruption on our core American values - free-market capitalism and democracy. It is about an administration, the author argues, that has sacrificed respect for the law, public health, scientific integrity, and long-term economic vitality on the altar of corporate greed. It is a book for both Democrats and Republicans, people like the traditionally conservative farmers and fishermen Kennedy represents in lawsuits against polluters. Synopsis: Kennedy, an environmental attorney and activist, indicts the George W. Bush administration for its destruction of the nation's air, water, public lands and wildlife. Kennedy cites corporate cronyism as the cause of environmental decline and the desire for profit and power as a threat to the American values of free-market capitalism and democracy. He supports his accusations with details of specific incidents, contending that the knowledge of these facts will lead all Americans to share his outrage. The book lacks an index. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR |
![]() Development and the church in Angola: Jesse Chipenda the trailblazer by Lawrence W. Henderson [10] |
![]() Eden Close by Anita Shreves Andrew, in his mid-thirties, returns to his hometown to attend his mother's funeral. Planning to remain only a few days, he is drawn into the tragic legacy of the beautiful girl next door, Eden Close. An adopted child, Eden has learned to avoid the mother who did not want her and to please the father who did. She also aimed to please Andrew and his friends, first by being one of the boys and later by seducing them. Then one hot night Andrew was awakened by gunshots and piercing screams from the next farm: Mr. Close had been killed and Eden, blinded. Now, seventeen years later, Andrew begins to uncover the grisly story -- to unravel the layers of thwarted love between the husband, wife, and tormented girl. And as the truth about Eden's past comes to light, so too does Andrew's strange and binding attachment to her reveal itself. [20] |
![]() Empire Falls by Richard Russo Richard Russo—from his first novel, Mohawk—has demonstrated a peerless affinity for the human tragicomedy, and with this stunning new novel he extends even further his claims on the small-town, blue-collar heart of the country.
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![]() Five Smooth Stones by Ann Fairbairn Five Smooth Stones by Ann Fairbairn was written in 1966. It is the story of David, an African American boy of New Orleans who leaves his poor roots to attend a northern college. He then returns to his home and becomes involved in the civil rights movement. An interesting book to read in 2005 remembering it was written in the 60's....Priscilla Branford [26] |
![]() Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World around Them by Erin Gruwell Straight from the front line of urban America, the inspiring story of one fiercely determined teacher and her remarkable students. As an idealistic twenty-three-year-old English teacher at Wilson High School in Long beach, California, Erin Gruwell confronted a room of “unteachable, at-risk” students. One day she intercepted a note with an ugly racial caricature, and angrily declared that this was precisely the sort of thing that led to the Holocaust--only to be met by uncomprehending looks. So she and her students, using the treasured books Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl and Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo as their guides, undertook a life-changing, eye-opening, spirit-raising odyssey against intolerance and misunderstanding. They learned to see the parallels in these books to their own lives, recording their thoughts and feelings in diaries and dubbing themselves the “Freedom Writers” in homage to the civil rights activists “The Freedom Riders.” |
![]() Gilead by Marilyn Robinson In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowa preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He preached men into the Civil War, then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. |
![]() Harvest of Hope by Jane Goodall Jane Goodall argues that when we sit down at our kitchen tables, we should be thinking globally, eating locally. She maintains that we can transform the social and environment of the world by the way we produce and consume the foods we eat. This book is intended to empower. Goodall explains both the dangers of today's foods and the benefits of eating locally grown, organic produce. An exploration of the global meaning of food and what all of us can do to exercise power over the food industry and, ultimately, our environment. |
![]() Home Town by Tracy Kidder In this book, one of America's masters of nonfiction takes us home - into Hometown, U.S.A., the town of Northampton, Massachusetts, and into the extraordinary, and the ordinary, lives that people live there. As Tracy Kidder reveals how, beneath its amiable surface, a small town is a place of startling complexity, he also explores what it takes to make a modern small city a success story. Weaving together compelling stories of individual lives, delving into a rich and varied past, moving among all the levels of Northampton's social hierarchy, Kidder reveals the sheer abundance of life contained within a town's narrow boundaries. Does the kind of small town that many Americans came from and long for, still exist? Kidder says yes, although not quite in the form we may imagine. A book about civilization in microcosm, Home Town makes us marvel afresh at the wonder of individuality, creativity, and civic order - how a disparate group of individuals can find common cause and a code of values that transforms a place into a home. And this book makes you feel you live there. [27] |
![]() In an Instant: A Family's Journey of Love and Healing by Lee Woodruff & Bob Woodruff
In one of the most anticipated books of the year, Lee Woodruff, along with her husband, Bob Woodruff, share their never-before-told story of romance, resilience, and survival following the tragedy that transformed their lives and gripped a nation. |
![]() Letters of E.B. White by Edited by Dorothy Lobrano, Martha White, Martha White, Allene White Forward by John Updike “Congratulations on your manly attempt to make me into a literary character,” E. B. White wrote in a letter to his biographer. “It isn’t going to work, but it makes great reading. I was in stitches much of the way, recalling my Early Ineptitude, my Early Sorrows, my Immaculate Romancing. What a mess I was! No wonder my father worried about me.” After the biography was published (in 1984), White offered this insider’s review: “I wish you the joy of the book and am only sorry my life wasn’t crowded with exciting, bawdy, violent events. I know how hard it is to write about a fellow who spends most of his time crouched over a typewriter. That was my fate, too.” |
![]() Life of Pi by Yann Martel Life of Pi is a masterful and utterly original novel that is at once the story of a young castaway who faces immeasurable hardships on the high seas, and a meditation on religion, faith, art and life that is as witty as it is profound. Using the threads of all of our best stories, Yann Martel has woven a glorious spiritual adventure that makes us question what it means to be alive, and to believe. |
![]() Mary: A Novel by Janis Cooke Newman Mary Todd Lincoln is one of history’s most misunderstood and enigmatic women. The first president’s wife to be called First Lady, she was a political strategist, a supporter of emancipation, and a mother who survived the loss of three children and the assassination of her beloved husband. Yet she also ran her family into debt, held seances in the White House, and was committed to an insane asylum. In Janis Cooke Newman’s debut novel, Mary Todd Lincoln shares the story of her life in her own words. Writing from Bellevue Place asylum, she takes readers from her tempestuous childhood in a slaveholding Southern family through the years after her husband’s death. A dramatic tale filled with passion and depression, poverty and ridicule, infidelity and redemption, Mary allows us entry into the inner, intimate world of this brave and fascinating woman. [51] |
![]() Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis In 1943 England, when all hope was threatened by the inhumanity of war, C. S. Lewis was invited to give a series of radio lectures addressing the central issues of Christianity. First heard as informal radio broadcasts, the lectures were then published as three books and subsequently combined as Mere Christianity. C. S. Lewis proves that at the center of each there is something, or a Someone, who against all divergences of belief, all differences of temperament, all memories of mutual persecution, speaks with the same voice, rejecting the boundaries that divide Christianity's many denominations. [15] |
![]() Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, The Private Writings of the ‘Saint of Calcutta’ by Mother Teresa During her lifelong service to the poorest of the poor, Mother Teresa became an icon of compassion to people of all religions; her extraordinary contributions to the care of the sick, the dying, and thousands of others nobody else was prepared to look after has been recognized and acclaimed throughout the world. Little is known, however, about her own spiritual heights or her struggles. This collection of her writing and reflections, almost all of which have never been made public before, sheds light on Mother Teresa's interior life in a way that reveals the depth and intensity of her holiness for the first time. |
![]() My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult is widely acclaimed for her keen insights into the hearts and minds of real people. Now she tells the emotionally riveting story of a family torn apart by conflicting needs and a passionate love that triumphs over human weakness. |
![]() Night by Elie Weisel, Marion Wiesel (Translator) An autobiographical narrative in which the author describes his experiences in Nazi concentration camps, watching family and friends die, and how they led him to believe that God is dead. Night is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie's wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author's original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man's capacity for inhumanity to man. Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be. Elie Wiesel is the internationally celebrated author, Nobel laureate, and spokesperson for humanity whose decision to dedicate his life to bearing witness for the Holocaust's martyrs and survivors found its earliest and most enduring voice in Night, his penetrating and profound account of the Nazi death camps. Born in the town of Sighet, Transylvania, he was a teenager when he and his family were taken from their home in 1944 to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and then to Buchenwald. Night is the terrifying record of Elie Wiesel's memories of the death of his family, the death of his own innocence, and his despair as a deeply observant Jew confronting the absolute evil of man. |
![]() On Borrowed Wings by Chandra Prasad Adele Pietra has heard her mother say that her destiny is carved in the same brilliantly hued granite her father and brother cleave from the Stony Creek mine: she is to marry a quarryman. But when Adele’s brother, Charles, dies in a mining accident, Adele sees the chance to change her life. Enrolling at Yale as Charles, Adele assumes his identity -- and gender -- as a way to leave behind her mother’s expectations and the limitations of her provincial Connecticut town. |
![]() Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives inhabiting the forested mountains and struggling small farms of southern Appalachia. |
![]() Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi We all have dreams - things we fantasize about doing and generally never get around to. This is the story of Azar Nafisi's dream and of the nightmare that made it come true. For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. They were all former students whom she had taught at university. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; several had spent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they began to open up and to speak more freely, not only about the novels they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments. Their stories intertwined with those they were reading - Pride and Prejudice, Washington Square, Daisy Miller and Lolita - their Lolita, as they imagined her in Tehran. |
![]() Reincarnation: The Missing Link in Christianity by Elizabeth Claire Profit This true story of a soul's life after death will change the way you look at A provocative work that makes the case that Jesus taught reincarnation. Using evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls and Gnostic texts, it argues persuasively that Jesus was a mystic who taught that our destiny is to unite with the God within.
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![]() Sea Glass by Anita Shreve A moving new novel about marriage, memory, and troubled times. It is a house on the beach. Honora doesn't mind renting...despite its age and all its flaws, the old house is the perfect place for a new marriage. She and Sexton throw themselves into fixing it up, just as they throw themselves into their new life together. Each morning, Honora collects sea glass washed up on the shore, each piece carrying a different story in its muted hues. Sexton finds a way to buy the house, but his timing is perfectly wrong. The economy takes a sickening plunge, and as financial pressures mount, Honora begins to see how little she knows this man she has married...and to realize just how threatening the world outside her front door can be. Like those translucent shards that Honora finds on the beach, Sea Glass is layered with the textures, colors, and voices of another time. There is Vivian, an irreverent Boston socialite who becomes Honora's closest friend even as she rejects every form of convention. McDermott, a man who works in a nearby mill, presses Honora's deepest notions of trust...even as he embroils her in a dangerous dispute. And there's Alphonse, a boy whose openness becomes the bond that holds these people together as their world is flying apart. [41] |
![]() The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home by George Howe Colt Faced with the sale of the century-old family summer house on Cape Cod where he had spent forty-two summers, George Howe Colt returned for one last stay with his wife and children. This poignant tribute to the eleven-bedroom jumble of gables, bays, and dormers that watched over weddings, divorces, deaths, anniversaries, birthdays, breakdowns, and love affairs for five generations interweaves Colt’s final visit with memories of a lifetime of summers. Run-down yet romantic, the Big House stands not only as a cherished reminder of summer’s ephemeral pleasures but also as a powerful symbol of a vanishing way of life. [54] |
![]() The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad With The Bookseller of Kabul, award-winning journalist Asne Seierstad has given readers a first-hand look at Afghani life as few outsiders have seen it. Invited to live with Sultan Khan, a bookseller in Kabul, and his family for months, this account of her experience allows the Khans to speak for themselves, giving us a genuinely gripping and moving portrait of a family, and of a country of great cultural riches and extreme contradictions. |
![]() The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. Although gifted with a superbly logical brain, Christopher is autistic. Everyday interactions and admonishments have little meaning for him. Routine, order and predictability shelter him from the messy, wider world. Then, at fifteen, Christopher's carefully constructed world falls apart when he finds his neighbor's dog, Wellington, impaled on a garden fork, and he is initially blamed for the killing. Christopher decides that he will track down the real killer and turns to his favorite fictional character, the impeccably logical Sherlock Holmes, for inspiration. But the investigation leads him down some unexpected paths and ultimately brings him face to face with the dissolution of his parents' marriage. As he tries to deal with the crisis within his own family, we are drawn into the workings of Christopher's mind. And herein lies the key to the brilliance of Mark Haddon's choice of narrator: The most wrenching of emotional moments are chronicled by a boy who cannot fathom emotion. The effect is dazzling, making for a novel that is deeply funny, poignant, and fascinating in its portrayal of a person whose curse and blessing is a mind that perceives the world literally. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is one of the freshest debuts in years: a comedy, a heartbreaker, a mystery story, a novel of exceptional literary merit that is great fun to read. Mark Haddon is a writer and illustrator of numerous award-winning children's books and television screenplays. As a young man, Haddon worked with autistic individuals. He teaches creative writing for the Arvon Foundation and at Oxford University. He lives in Oxford, England. [28] |
![]() The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown While in Paris on business, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon receives an urgent late-night phone call: the elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum. Near the body, police have found a baffling cipher. While working to solve the enigmatic riddle, Langdon is stunned to discover it leads to a trail of clues hidden in the works of Da Vinci -- clues visible for all to see -- yet ingeniously disguised by the painter. Langdon joins forces with a gifted French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, and learns the late curator was involved in the Priory of Sion -- an actual secret society whose members included Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Da Vinci, among others. In a breathless race through Paris, London, and beyond, Langdon and Neveu match wits with a faceless powerbroker who seems to anticipate their every move. Unless Langdon and Neveu can deipher the labyrinthine puzzle in time, the Priory's ancient secret -- and an explosive hysterical truth -- will be lost forever. The DaVinci Code heralds the arrival of a new breed of lightening-paced, intelligent thriller…utterly unpredictable right up to its stunning conclusion. [4] |
![]() The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom From the author of the phenomenal #1 New York Times bestseller Tuesdays with Morrie, a novel that explores the unexpected connections of our lives, and the idea that heaven is more than a place; it's an answer. |
![]() The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and above all, how to embrace life fearlessly. Rose Mary, who painted and wrote and couldn't stand the responsibility of providing for her family, called herself an "excitement addict." Cooking a meal that would be consumed in fifteen minutes had no appeal when she could make a painting that might last forever. |
![]() The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck Wang Lung, rising from humble Chinese farmer to wealthy landowner, gloried in the soil he worked. He held it above his family, even above his gods. But soon, between Wang Lung and the kindly soil that sustained him, came flood and drought, pestilence and revolution.... |
![]() The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge by David McCullough First published in 1972, The Great Bridge is the classic account of one of the greatest engineering feats of all time. Winning acclaim for its comprehensive look at the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, this book helped cement David McCullough's reputation as America's preeminent social historian. Now, The Great Bridge is reissued with a new introduction by the author.
This monumental book brings back for American readers the heroic vision of the America we once had. It is the enthralling story of one of the greatest events in our nation's history during the Age of Optimism--a period when Americans were convinced in their hearts that all great things were possible. In the years around 1870, when the project was first undertaken, the concept of building a great bridge to span the East River between the great cities of Manhattan and Brooklyn required a vision and determination comparable to that which went into the building of the pyramids. Throughout the fourteen years of its construction, the odds against the successful completion of the bridge seemed staggering. Bodies were crushed and broken, lives lost, political empires fell, and surges of public emotion constantly threatened the project. But this is not merely the saga of an engineering miracle: it is a sweeping narrative of the social climate of the time and of the heroes and rascals who had a hand in either constructing or obstructing the great enterprise. Amid the flood of praise for the book when it was originally published, Newsday said succinctly 'This is the definitive book on the event. Do not wait for a better try: there won't be any.' [29] |
![]() The Hungry Ocean by Linda Greenlaw In The Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger describes Linda Greenlaw as one of the best sea captains, period, on the East Coast. Now Greenlaw tells her own riveting story of a thirty-day swordfishing voyage aboard one of the best-outfitted boats on the East Coast, complete with danger, humor, and characters so colorful they seem to have been ripped from the pages of Moby Dick. |
![]() The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini An epic tale of fathers and sons, of friendship and betrayal, that takes us from the final days of Afghanistan?s monarchy to the atrocities of the present. |
![]() The Lost Diaries of Franz Hals by Michael Kernan When ancient notebooks turn up in a Long Island garage, Peter Van Overloop, a Columbia graduate student, sets to translating them, and finds himself immersed in the life and times of the Dutch painter Frans Hals. For the notebooks seem to be Hals's diaries, and proving their authenticity could make Peter famous and the owners rich. But beyond their historical resonance and potential value, the diaries offer a fascinating portrait of a man living in the age of Rembrandt and Descartes, and bursting with a lust for the world that surrounds him. With his sharp and knowing painter's eye, Hals observes and records the joys and hardships of his life, from marriage and family to the great tulip crash, the plague, and his continuing struggle to earn a living as a portrait artist. Emerging as a thoroughly funny, charming, energetic man, Hals reaches out from centuries past to touch and change Peter's life forever. A seamless merging of literary invention and historic fact, The Lost Diaries of Frans Hals is a remarkable, unforgettable novel. [11] |
![]() The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards Award-winning writer Kim Edwards's The Memory Keeper's Daughter is a brilliantly crafted family drama that explores every mother's silent fear: what would happen if you lost your child and she grew up without you? |
![]() The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. |
![]() The Red Tent by Anita Diamant Her name is Dinah. In the Bible, her life is only hinted at in a brief and violent detour within the more familiar chapters of the Book of Genesis that are about her father, Jacob, and his dozen sons. Told in Dinah's voice, this novel reveals the traditions and turmoils of ancient womanhood - the world of the red tent. It begins with the story of her mothers - Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah - the four wives of Jacob. They love Dinah and give her gifts that are to sustain her through a damaged youth, a calling to midwifery, and a new home in a foreign land. Dinah's story reaches out from a remarkable period of early history and creates an intimate, immediate connection. [6] |
![]() The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis A masterpiece of satire, this classic has entertained and enlightened readers the world over with its sly and ironic portrayal of human life from the vantage point of Screwtape, a highly placed assistant to Our Father Below. At once wildly comic, deadly serious, and strikingly original, C. S. Lewis gives us the correspondence of the worldly-wise old devil to his nephew Wormwood, a novice demon in charge of securing the damnation of an ordinary young man. The Screwtape Letters is the most engaging and humorous account of temptation - and triumph over it - ever written. [16] |
![]() The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, author Stephen R. Covey presents a holistic, integrated, principle-centered approach for solving personal and professional problems. With penetrating insights and pointed anecdotes, Covey reveals a step-by-step pathway for living with fairness, integrity, honesty, and human dignity -- principles that give us the security to adapt to change and the wisdom and power to take advantage of the opportunities that change creates. [36] |
![]() The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien One of the first questions people ask about The Things They Carried is this: Is it a novel, or a collection of short stories? The title page refers to the book simply as "a work of fiction," defying the conscientious reader's need to categorize this masterpiece. It is both: a collection of interrelated short pieces which ultimately reads with the dramatic force and tension of a novel. Yet each one of the twenty-two short pieces is written with such care, emotional content, and prosaic precision that it could stand on its own. |
![]() Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace...One School at a Time by by Greg Mortenson, David Oliver Relin, David Oliver Relin The astonishing, uplifting story of a real-life Indiana Jones and his humanitarian campaign touse education to combat terrorism in the Taliban’s backyard. |
![]() To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has earned many distinctions since its original publication in 1960. It won the Pulitzer Prize, has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than thirty million copies worldwide, and been made into an enormously popular movie. Most recently, librarians across the country gave the book the highest of honors by voting it the best novel of the twentieth century. [9] |
![]() Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt Doomed to - or blessed with - eternal life after drinking from a magic spring, the Tuck family wanders about trying to live as inconspicuously and comfortably as they can. When ten-year-old Winnie Foster stumbles on their secret, the Tucks take her home and explain why living forever at one age is less a blessing that it might seem. Complications arise when Winnie is followed by a starnger who wants to market the spring water for a fortune. [3] |
![]() Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson by Mitch Albom Maybe it was a grandparent, or a teacher. Someone older who understood you when you were young and searching, who helped you see the world as a more profound place, and gave you advice to help you make your way through it. For Mitch Albom, that person was Morrie Schwartz, his college professor from nearly twenty years ago. Maybe, like Mitch, you lost track of your mentor as you made your way, and the insights faded, and the world seemed colder. Wouldn't you like to see that person again, ask the bigger questions that still haunt you? Mitch Albom had that second chance. He rediscovered Morrie in the last months of the older man's life. Knowing he was dying, Morrie visited with Mitch in his study every Tuesday, just as they used to back in college. Tuesdays With Morrie is a magical chronicle of their time together, through which Mitch shares Morrie's lasting gift to the world. [2] |
![]() Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen As a young man, Jacob Jankowski was tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. It was the early part of the great Depression, and for Jacob, now ninety, the circus world he remembers was both his salvation and a living hell. A veterinary student just shy of a degree, he was put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It was there that he met Marlena, the beautiful equestrian star married to August, the charismatic but twisted animal trainer. And he met Rosie, an untrainable elephant who was the great gray hope for this third-rate traveling show. The bond that grew among this unlikely trio was one of love and trust, and, ultimately, it was their only hope for survival. [49] |

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