Early Reviewers: Free advance copies of books

In book two of the Gemstone Thriller series, fast-talking gem expert Lonny Cushman chaperones a young female seminarian from New York to Rwanda in search of her missing father. Once they reach Africa, Lonny chases a suite of flawless green diamonds through the killing fields of the Eastern Congo. Survival depends on negotiating the bloody machinery that benefits from the conflict diamond trade—Islamic jihadis, corrupt African military officers, con men, Israeli diamantaires, and Ukrainian arms dealers. Can Lonny save himself and the young seminarian from a vengeful machete?

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Lily never guessed that hate could be so fierce. She’s always thought of hate as a verb for clothing (I hate pink) or weather (I hate when it’s hot), but now she uses hate and feels hate in a new way. Lily hates her father.

It isn’t because of her parents’ divorce. Lily has settled pretty comfortably into her new life. When her mother remarried and had a baby, she could cope with it. But it hasn’t been the same for Lily’s younger brother, Michael. ... (show rest)

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"Before I Lose My Style" is a playful but melancholy meditation on the various ways sex and love can be integrated into our lives. Damon, a scientist in his early 30s, finds himself unexpectedly single after his long-time boyfriend leaves him. He is content with transient hook-ups in the LA club scene to fill the void until a charming musician from Budapest and a sexually ambiguous basic-cable celebrity complicate his frisky bachelorhood. From nude beaches in Santa Barbara, to house parties in West Hollywood, to drag clubs in Silver Lake, Damon and his intimate group of friends endure petty blow ups and disagreements. Damon is finally left to reconsider the importance of love.

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A talented woman becomes entranced with a mega-wealthy family in a story about a mysterious love with two faces; the battle to stay relevant in the post-literate world; a shocking betrayal that exposes the past of characters "rotten with secrets"; and, finally, the passion to reclaim old dreams. This genre-bending novel mixes heartbreak, Gothic atmospherics, and a satire of New York's high-stakes players.

Conscience Point is about Madeleine Shaye, a beautiful over-achiever with a dual career as concert pianist and TV arts correspondent; her adored college-age daughter, adopted as an infant under murky circumstances; and a blissful relationship with editor Nick Ashcroft, scion of an uber-rich family (whose sister earlier played a decisive role in Maddy's young life). Then it all unravels. Maddy loses her footing in a late-90's marketplace skewed toward youth and pop culture. Her daughter announces she's leaving college to work in Guatemala, hinting darkly at mysterious trouble. And Maddy discovers that Nick has betrayed her in a way she could never have imagined. Her tough resilience, ability to love and sacrifice while making moral choices informs the emotional center of this novel. ... (show rest)

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Rip Squeak returns in a rollicking adventure when a trip to a bookshop sends Rip and his friends off on a fantastic journey through history and imagination. The is the fourth book in the Rip Squeak series.

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At the age of seven a mulatto slave boy with an indomitable spirit, Jimmy Gates, is freed by his owner-father, separated from his mother and everything he holds dear, and sent to England for an education. Four years later when his father drowns at sea, leaving him bereft, Jimmy is apprenticed to a London workhouse where he spends six hard years making saddles, reading heroic novels to his companions, finding the comfort of prostitutes, and discovering the inspirational speeches of an Irish revolutionary name Cornelius O Keefe, or O Keefe of the Sword. At eighteen, dreaming himself a warrior and a hero, he returns to the states intending to rescue his mother. Both blessed and cursed by his late father s words-to-live-by and armed with his free papers and a copy of the Declaration of Independence, Jimmy grows into manhood while he's on the battlefields of the Civil War and in the gold camps of the American West, repeatedly forced to reckon the joys, terrors, and ironies of his freedom. He also discovers chameleon-like ability to shift identities and re-invent himself along the way. Freeman Walker is an adventure story filled with contradictory epiphanies, ironies, and paradoxes rolled into one man's quest to discover a defining inner truth that might allow him to survive a life of terrible misadventures-gritty, sublime, fantastical-and to finally understand the true meaning of moral freedom.

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At the turn of the nineteenth century, the young Indian woman Sacagawea leads Lewis and Clark to the Pacific. But what about that tiny infant in the commemorative engraving, perched on Sacagawea’s back? He is her son, Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, the youngest member of the Expedition, a child caught between two worlds who grows into a man haunted by the mother he barely knew and the wilderness she betrayed.

In Museum of Human Beings Colin Sargent explores the fantastic life and times of Baptiste Charbonneau. Raised by Clark as his foster son, the mixed-race boy struggles for footing in a White world. When the teenage Baptiste attracts the notice of the visiting Duke Paul, Prince of Württemberg, Clark approves of the duke’s “experiment” to educate the boy at court. A gleeful Duke Paul exhibits Baptiste throughout Europe as a “half gentleman–half animal.” Eventually Baptiste turns his back on the Old World and returns to the New, determined to find his true place there. He travels deep into the heart of the American wilderness, and into the depths of his mother’s soul, on an epic quest for identity that brings sacrifice, loss, and the distant promise of redemption.

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Sentenced to death for crimes he didn’t commit, ex-cop Tom O’Brien is now a hunted fugitive. After fifteen years in prison, he’s determined to prove his innocence–but first he must convince his daughter, whose testimony helped put him behind bars, that he has damning evidence of a plot to frame him.

Claire is no longer the naïve teenager who arrived home to find her mother and her mother’s lover shot dead and her father holding the murder weapon. She’s a successful fraud investigator who assumes everyone lies. Though Claire is convinced of her father’s guilt, curiosity propels her to look into the disappearance of a law student who claimed to have proof of Tom’s innocence. But seeking answers only leads to more questions, reinforcing Claire’s belief that there’s no one left to trust. ... (show rest)

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It is the Night of the Radishes and Don Pedro wants to carve the best radish sculpture in town. But one feisty radish won't cooperate. Written in the style reminiscent of The Gingerbread Man and based on annual festival in Oaxaca, Mexico.

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In Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s experimental thriller The Assignment, the wife of a psychiatrist has been raped and killed near a desert ruin in North Africa. Her husband hires a woman named F. to reconstruct the unsolved crime in a documentary film. F. is soon unwittingly thrust into a paranoid world of international espionage where everyone is watched—including the watchers. After discovering a recent photograph of the supposed murder victim happily reunited with her husband, F. becomes trapped in an apocalyptic landscape riddled with political intrigue, crimes of mistaken identity, and terrorism.

F.’s labyrinthine quest for the truth is Dürrenmatt’s fictionalized warning against the dangers of a technologically advanced society that turns everyday life into one of constant scrutiny. Joel Agee’s elegant translation will introduce a fresh generation of English-speaking readers to one of European literature’s masters of language, suspense, and dystopia. ... (show rest)

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When tasting the broad range of flavors Jackie Jones has assembled for you in The Black Whole, remember that your tastes tomorrow will be much different than today’s. More than that, though, what you read here will alter you just a tad, so that tomorrow you might re-read with a totally different eye, with totally different taste buds.

Think of Secrets by Greg Rose and Tom Courtney’s Unless as bookends between which Jackie has placed rich reading experiences. After reading Shay Wells’ Mars or Die, you will never think of EVA in quite the same way. Jackie’s own yarns (there are 3 of them) are guaranteed to twist your head around. ... (show rest)

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Humpty Dumpty Jr. has always gotten the bad guy. Always. Except once, when the case got too personal. You know that case. The one about his dad...

When he gets a call from his good friend screaming for help, he knows that someone is making it personal again. "Johnny" Cakes, a two-bit pancake punk, has escaped from jail. And Patty, of the famous (and delicious) Pat-A-Cake Bakery, has disappeared. Could "Johnny" Cakes be behind it? Whoever kidnapped Patty better watch out; Humpty is no soft-cooked Egg. He is 100% Hardboiled.

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Hoping for a better life, five war veterans colonize an abandoned island. They take with them everything they could possibly need - food, clothes, tools, weapons, even wives.

But an unanticipated discovery shatters their dream and replaces it with a very different one. The colonists feel sure that their friendship will keep them together. Only then do they begin to realize that they've brought with them rather more than they bargained for. ... (show rest)

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A novel about the confrontation of youth’s crisp idealism with reality—the reality that life is not so easily understood or tamed, and that, despite our best efforts, we are all inevitably subject to the slow slide into entropy.

Aaron Rosclatt is lost. And this is strange, because life has always been sequential and linear for him. Or at least he thought it was; these days, he's not even so sure about that anymore. ... (show rest)

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From award-winning author Fred Stenson–a richly evocative new novel, at once brutal and tender, spare of language, and profoundly moving–a major work to thrill his fans and win him many new ones.

In 1899, Frank Adams, a cowboy from Pincher Creek, joins the Canadian Mounted Rifles and sets out to defend the Empire in South Africa. There, against a landscape of extremes, Frank forms intense bonds with Ovide Smith, a reluctant soldier from the Alberta plains, and Jeff Davis, son of a Blood Indian determined to prove himself in a white man’s war. As the young Canadians engage in battle with a determined and wily enemy, they are forced to realize the bounds of their own loyalty and courage, and confront the arrogance and indifference of those who have led them into conflict. ... (show rest)

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Against a backdrop of Immigration, Prohibition, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, and the new millennium, the Verbicaro family make their way from Southern Italy to San Francisco to the Yucatan, finding ways to reinvent themselves as each of them brushes up against some aspect of the divine, or the profane. The family matriarch, Rosari, is a little girl whose family flees Italy because her prodigality is exploited by illiterate kidnappers. When she and her father reach San Francisco, she meets the man she ll marry, a handsome, fiercely strong peasant named Giuseppe Verbicaro. Rosari and Giuseppe's oldest son, Narciso, a handsome and dim-witted dandy, barely evades disaster by his simple-minded innocence and luck. His passionate brother Ludovico, a talented third-baseman in the old San Francisco minor leagues, falls prey to the illicit dreams of a wise guy from the Gambino family. Their youngest brother, Joe, a brilliant child and shrewd businessman, is ashamed of his ethnicity and, in particular, his father, in part because Giuseppe, wandering North Beach, believes that God directs him to marry a teenage, pregnant Mexican prostitute named Maria. Further senility, faith, or vermouth convinces the old man that Maria's child, Jesus, is the product of an immaculate conception. The event is both a family disgrace and a bizarre blessing. The child's life and death have a profound effect on Giuseppe's progeny, particularly Joe's children: Penelope, who flees the country following involvement in deadly anti-Vietnam War activities, and her brothers Paulie and Angelo, who are inspired by the young Jesus to embark upon a quest of several thousand miles to heal old wounds and recover the family's lost, but most-prized spiritual treasures.

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The Lost Episodes of Beatie Scareli is an experimental novel written as a hybrid of a bizarre television script. With prose resulting in quick, readable, deftly crafted scenes. What starts off innocently told through the voice of a 12 year old girl (Beatie Scareli) is the story of how the young girl tries to make sense of her life through a nickelodeon view of the world.

At the same time a woman watches the young girl's difficult past on her television. The story soon turns and twists until everything about the girl and her family becomes darkly connected to what becomes reality and fiction in the girl or woman's mind. ... (show rest)

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Forty-year-old Pearl Swain is a failure—a failure at love, at music, and sometimes, she feels, a failure at life. A recently divorced violin teacher working at a neighborhood music store, Pearl walks through life, exerting only enough effort to make it from one day to the next, nothing more. That is, until Hallie Bolaris, a sullen girl of fourteen, enters the store with an old violin and a perfect ear for music. For the first time in her life, Pearl is confronted with someone who is more than talented—this young girl has the potential to be truly great—and through this girl she starts to feel alive again. So when confronted with an ugly secret having to do with Hallie’s home life, Pearl is so anxious for the girl’s success that she pushes it aside—and unwittingly puts the girl into a position of grave danger. When faced with the inevitable day or reckoning, Pearl is forced to confront her own failures and to take a look at the ugly secrets in her own life.

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THE PETS is the first book to be published in English by Bragi Olafsson (author of the Nordic Prize finalist THE AMBASSADOR, and former bassist in The Sugarcubes) and is a very funny, very original novel—most of which takes place with the protagonist hiding under his bed.

Back in Reykjavik after a vacation in London, Emil Halldorsson is waiting for a call from a beautiful girl, Greta, that he met on the plane ride home, and he’s just put on a pot of coffee when an unexpected visitor knocks on the door. Peeking through a window, Emil spies an erstwhile friend—Havard Knutsson, his one-time roommate and current resident of a Swedish mental institution—on his doorstep, and he panics, taking refuge under his bed and hoping the frightful nuisance will simply go away. ... (show rest)

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Bestselling novelist David Bergen follows his Scotiabank Giller Prize—winning The Time in Between with a haunting novel about the clash of generations — and cultures.

In 1973, outside of Kenora, Ontario, Raymond Seymour, an eighteen-year-old Ojibway boy, is taken by a local policeman to a remote island and left for dead. ... (show rest)

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A haunting fugue of music, politics, and passion set against half a century of Spanish history, through the Spanish Civil War and World War II.

"An impressive and richly atmospheric debut." — New York Times Book Review

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Praised by Thomas Pynchon, who called him "a true master," Rubem Fonseca is one of the greatest Brazilian writers of the twentieth century. His stories about the gritty side of life in Rio de Janeiro (think CITY OF GOD) have been enormously influential on the younger generation of Brazilian writers, and are only now being made available to English readers (guess that shows how rough the state of literary translation in contemporary publishing).

Whether recounting the story of a businessman who runs over pedestrians to let off steam, a serial killer being pushed to ever greater crimes by his bourgeois lover, the desperate poor rushing to butcher a cow that has been killed in a traffic accident, or a man seeking out confirmation for a past which his friends deny, Fonseca repeatedly reaffirms his status as one of the purest storytellers on the contemporary Brazilian literary scene.

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It’s a case tailor-made for the Peculiar Crimes Unit. A lonely hearts killer is targeting middle-aged women at some of England’s most well-known pubs—including one torn down eighty years ago. What’s more, Arthur Bryant happened to see one of the victims only moments before her death at the pub that doesn’t exist. Indeed, this case is littered with clues that defy everything the veteran detectives know about the habits of serial killers, the methodology of crime, and the odds of making an arrest. Now, with the public on the verge of panic and their superiors determined to shut the PCU down for good, Detectives Bryant and May must rise to the occasion in defense of two great English traditions—the pub and the Peculiar Crimes Unit.

That’s easier said than done. A lost funeral urn, the eighteenth-century mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, the Knights Templars, the secret history of pubs, and the discovery of an astounding religious relic may be enough to convince one of the pair to take back his resignation letter. But with Bryant consulting a memory specialist and May encountering a brush with mortality, do the Peculiar Crimes Unit’s two living legends have enough life left to stop a murderous conspiracy…and a deadly cupid targeting one of their own.

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Those Who Dream By Day is an historical thriller that envisions the sabotage behind the second explosion aboard the Lusitania during World War I.

Dora Benley stands on the Cunard Pier on the morning of May 1, 1915. She shivers in the cold, damp weather as she keeps her eye on a dangerous looking man in a wide-brimmed hat who stares at her. When her parents arrive on the train from Pittsburgh, they board the Lusitania. But soon afterwards the stranger ransacks her cabin. Later that night he sends her a note to meet him in the ship's first class lounge. He insists that she has something that belongs to him. She narrowly escapes to a party being thrown by multi-millionaire Vanderbilt. She meets another passenger the next day who claims to have seen the stranger in the engine room playing with "fuses," incendiary bombs! For snitching, he's stabbed. Dora survives the sinking of the great liner only to find at Ware House outside London that Sir Adolphus has employed the very same saboteur. Ali is the baronet's gardener.

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The remarkable true story of a family who move into a rundown zoo– already a BBC documentary miniseries and excerpted in The Guardian.

In the market for a house and an adventure, Benjamin Mee moved his family to an unlikely new home: a dilapidated zoo in the English countryside. Mee had a dream to refurbish the zoo and run it as a family business. His friends and colleagues thought he was crazy. ... (show rest)

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"Appetizers are the new entrées." —New York Magazine

Starters, amuses-bouche, antipasti, hors d'oeuvres, mezes, antojitos, dim sum, tapas, canapés, finger foods—no matter what you call them, people everywhere are choosing small plates over traditional entrée-based meals. ... (show rest)

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You Say You Want a Reformation?

It is no secret that our world desperately needs change. Politicians know this and use it to collect votes. Journalists exploit it to sell newspapers and magazines. Advertisers, to sell everything else. Each of these groups (and countless others) spend their lives working to convince others that they hold the key to a better country, a better life, a better future. ... (show rest)

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The story of how Electronica brought an entire generation together in peace and revolutionized the entertainment business, all without ever waking up before noon.

Through hundreds of personal interviews and thousands of hours of research, James Cummins has put together a snapshot of a culture representing millions around the world. It is the lost history of hundreds of little-known genius DJs whose fame never flowered, and the need for something more in the world felt deep in the throat of a youth growing up in the Information Age. ... (show rest)

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George Washington insisted that his portrait be painted with one. Daniel Boone created a legend with one. Abraham Lincoln shot them on the White House lawn. And Teddy Roosevelt had his specially customized.

Now, in this first-of-its-kind book, historian Alexander Rose delivers a colorful, engrossing biography of an American icon: the rifle. Drawing on the words of soldiers, inventors, and presidents, based on extensive new research, and encompassing the Revolution to the present day, American Rifle is a balanced, wonderfully entertaining history of this most essential firearm and its place in American culture. ... (show rest)

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"It is the nature of babies to be in bliss." —Deepak Chopra

Award-winning photographer Rachael Hale turns her lens on a new subject, babies. ... (show rest)

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From the author of the acclaimed Cooking for Kings and Beau Brummel comes the definitive biography of the world's most famed lover, Giacomo Casanova. Ian Kelly reveals previously unpublished documents by Giacomo himself, as well as his friends and lovers, which give new insights into the life of the famous libertine, revealing that in addition to his sexual exploits, Giacomo Casanova acted as spy, diplomat, playwright, musician, priest, mathematician, physician, philosopher, librarian and more.

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How much of an impact can an animal have? How many lives can one cat touch? How is it possible for an abandoned kitten to transform a small library, save a classic American town, and eventually become famous around the world? You can't even begin to answer those questions until you hear the charming story of Dewey Readmore Books, the beloved library cat of Spencer, Iowa.

Dewey's story starts in the worst possible way. Only a few weeks old, on the coldest night of the year, he was stuffed into the returned book slot at the Spencer Public Library. He was found the next morning by library director, Vicki Myron, a single mother who had survived the loss of her family farm, a breast cancer scare, and an alcoholic husband. Dewey won her heart, and the hearts of the staff, by pulling himself up and hobbling on frostbitten feet to nudge each of them in a gesture of thanks and love. For the next nineteen years, he never stopped charming the people of Spencer with his enthusiasm, warmth, humility, (for a cat) and, above all, his sixth sense about who needed him most. ... (show rest)

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An evangelical Christian comes to terms with his gayness by becoming an international male fashion model. In the mid-90s Robert has a seemingly ideal life: a secure corporate job, a string of pretty girlfriends, and a condo in a SoCal beach town. Conflict between this outward success and his inner turmoil prompts him, at 29, to run away to Europe. Set during a slip from sobriety that eventually becomes an eight-year fall, "Falling Off the Catwalk" recounts a year and a half of global debauchery: sex with girls, sex with boys, acid trips and absinthe in Tokyo.

Robert repeatedly discovers and then forgets what the journey is all about. In the process the question of what he is running from becomes just as pronounced as what he thinks he is moving towards. All of this against a backdrop of runway shows for Hugo Boss and Fendi, appearances in GQ and French Cosmopolitan, partying with models in Milan, and clubbing in Paris and Madrid. ... (show rest)

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Their names are legendary: Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Thomas Hit Man Hearns, and Roberto Duran. They were exceptional boxers with unique combinations of power and speed. In another era, with few rivals of equal caliber, each might have held championship belts for years on end. But as it was, they matured together in the 1980s and fought each other as middleweights. With unforgettable courage and skill, they ruled the ring and ushered in the last Golden Age of boxing.

George Kimball takes an authoritative look at the rivalries that fueled this great era in sports history. Veteran sports journalist Kimball reported on every one of the Four Kings’ nine internecine fights. Here his eye-witness coverage is enhanced by recent interviews with each of the boxers and other seasoned analysts. The result is a fast-paced, blow-by-blow account of four extraordinary adversaries and a remarkable boxing epoch.

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". . . a sort of David Sedaris-like take on knitting—laugh-out-loud funny most of the time and poignantly reflective when it's not cracking you up." —Library Journal on Yarn Harlot

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee returns to pen another hilarious and poignant collection of essays surrounding her favorite topics: knitting, knitters, and what happens when you get those two things anywhere near ordinary people. ... (show rest)

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People wanting basic advice about stocks, bonds, mutual funds, retirement planning, and tax strategies are often frustrated by information overload. Picking the right book seems as daunting as deciding what to do with their savings and investments.

Investing 101: Updated and Expanded removes both roadblocks, putting people on a path that they can understand and stick with. Kristof is renowned for taking the mystery and anxiety out of investing by keeping choices manageable. ... (show rest)

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My true-life book, covers extreme childhood abuses including mental, emotional, physical and sexual maltreatments. At the age of six, my father sold me as a prostitute; this ended six years later in an act of murder.

The material is presented as a case study. Therefore, I detail every single incident using explicit language. This work is rare because I survived to tell the story.

... (show rest)

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Living Agelessly is for anyone who rejects the idea that aging is a dreaded event that must be halted. Linda Altoonian, award-winning author of the column Dear Ageless, teaches readers how to live long and well, and celebrate healthy aging as they approach mid-life and beyond.

She answers frequently asked questions so readers can prepare themselves, and their aging parents, for greater comfort as they deal with the practical issues of growing older. Living Agelessly addresses the questions that readers often ask: ... (show rest)

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Mary Ellen Geist decided to leave her job as a CBS Radio anchor to return home to Michigan when her father's Alzheimer's got to be too much for her mother to shoulder alone. She chose to live her life by a different set of priorities: to be guided by her heart, not by outside accomplishment and recognition.

The New York Times wrote a front page story on Mary Ellen on Thanksgiving 2005. It was one of the most e-mailed stories for the month. Through her own story and through interviews with doctors and other women who've followed the "Daughter Track"—leaving a job to care for an aging parent—Geist offers emotional insights on how to encourage interaction with the loved one you're caring for; how to determine daily tasks that are achievable and rewarding; how the personality of the patient affects the caregiving and the progression of the diseases; as well as invaluable advice about how caregivers can take care of themselves while accomplishing the Herculean task of constantly caring for others. ... (show rest)

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"An entertaining and informative look at our paranormal presidencies." —Bill Fawcett, author of Oval Office Oddities

The Discovery Channel's A Haunting meets the History Channel's The Presidents inside this collection of strange-but-true tales of White House weirdness. ... (show rest)

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In 1943, eighteen year old Pierre Berg picked the wrong time to visit a friend's house—at the same time as the Gestapo. He was thrown into the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp. But through a mixture of savvy and chance, he man­aged to survive...and ultimately got out alive. "As far as I'm concerned," says Berg, "it was all shithouse luck, which is to say—inelegantly—that I kept landing on the right side of the randomness of life."

Such begins the first memoir of a French gentile Holocaust survivor published in the U.S. Originally penned shortly after the war when memories were still fresh, SCHEISSHAUS LUCK re­counts Berg's constant struggle in the camps, escaping death countless times while enduring inhumane conditions, exhaustive labor, and near starvation. The book takes readers through Berg's time in Auschwitz, his hair's breadth avoid­ance of Allied bombing raids, his harrowing "death march" out of Auschwitz to Dora, a slave labor camp (only to be placed in another forced labor camp manufacturing the Nazis' V1 & V2 rockets), and his eventual daring escape in the middle of a pitched battle between Nazi and Red Army forces. ... (show rest)

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A hilarious parody of "wish books" from the chicest, most stratospheric luxury retailers. This fake catalog takes the wretched excess of the hyper-rich and ratchets it up to hysterical levels. Products include a Fab Fur Toilet Tissue, a completely sheer Emperor's New Tee, an Unlisted Number License Plate and much more.

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In December of 1936, King Edward VIII of Great Britain shocked the world by giving up his kingdom in order to marry a twice-divorced American commoner named Wallis Simpson. The King and Mrs. Simpson: The True Story of the Commoner Who Captured the Heart of a King recounts the extraordinary love story between the popular King and the enigmatic woman that began at a party in England and culminated with the downfall of his reign nearly six years later. The King and Mrs. Simpson: The True Story of the Commoner Who Captured the Heart of a King is a narrative history that utilizes flashbacks, short passages and dialogue from their memoirs. The King and Mrs. Simpson reads like a story and is sized like a novella, but still captures the historical detail that makes their story one of legend.

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THE OXFORD PROJECT

An illuminating portrait of the American spirit that will surprise, touch and utterly absorb you ... (show rest)

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At 49, cartoonist Marian Henley hasn't committed to marrying the man with whom she has been dating for seven years. But as the Big 5-0 looms, she realizes that above all else she wants a child. Her story follows the heartbreaking ups and downs of going through the international adoption process; deciding when it's time to grow up and maybe even get married; and in the end, it's the story of a daughter's relationship with her father, and how becoming a mother finally led her to understand him. THE SHINIEST JEWEL is a touching narrative, accompanied by Marian's winsome drawings, that beautifully weaves together her realizations about the joy, and sometimes heartbreak, of building a family.

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New, updated 2nd Printing, August 2008

You can enjoy better health without prescription drugs with this health and wellness Guide for mind, body, and spirit

... (show rest)

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In "What God Can Do for You Now," Rabbi Levine enters into the heated public debate between the “new atheists” (Hitchens, Dawkins, etc.) and the religious fundamentalists (Warren, Dobson, etc.), providing a necessary third alternative in the spectrum of religious belief—-a God-concept in which there is a shared responsibility between God and man. Rabbi Levine’s argument goes one step further, stating that the new atheists and the religious fundamentalists actually share an “equally extremist, wrongheaded view of God.” A skilled orator, he is able to draw on a variety of different sources, ranging from the Torah to ancient Navajo prayers, in order to carefully articulate a non-denominational approach toward defending God in an era where he is dismissed by the atheists, and demonized by religious fundamentalists.

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Although Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane spent only a few weeks in Deadwood at the same time, their fame and fate have become intertwined and their relationship legendary. James D. McLaird examines the contemporary accounts that turned these two Wild West wanderers into dime-novel and motion-picture stars.

Contemporary novelists and journalists created an astonishingly strong legacy for both Calamity Jane and Wild Bill, accounting for much of their notoriety. Gun fights, scouting missions, and daring escapes from enemies filled stories about the dashing pair; even their day-to-day existence seems to have been fraught with danger and excitement, teetering on the brink between lawful and unlawful. ... (show rest)

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When Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin signed up for Teach for America right after college, they quickly realized they were in over their heads. But they were determined to learn how best to teach their low-income at-risk students. Observing the methods of extraordinary teachers and eventually developing their own unconventional classroom model, these two young men overcame the obstacles, challenged the statistics, and revamped their classrooms into successful learning centers.

The result: an exhilarating fifth-grade program that encouraged them to create a nationwide network of middle schools called the KNOWLEDGE IS POWER PROGRAM (KIPP). Along the way many people said it couldn’t be done, but Mike and Dave stayed true to their belief that with high expectations, lively classrooms, and involved teachers, inner-city kids could learn just as well as middle income kids. In this true story of unusual dedication and an inspired vision, Washington Post journalist Jay Mathews delivers an uplifting account that gives us hope for the future of American education.

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This clearly written and accessible guide is a wonderful introduction to yoga for teens, their parents, and their teachers. Perfect for anyone who works with children age 13-18, it provides activities for groups and individuals that stimulate the mind, increase stamina and restore calm.

Divided into sections, the book groups the exercises by sitting, standing and movement poses, by content (breathing, stretching, or visualization) and by requirements (a mat, an outdoor space, physical contact). Helpful icons designate when an activity is intended for partners or when they are for a single teen. Clear illustrations throughout the book demonstrate the poses, and special sections of tips for teachers and a study on the mental and physical benefits of yoga for teens are also included. Easy to read and easier to use, this book will help you and your teen begin a lifelong practice that nourishes the mind and the body.

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Click the Publisher information link below to sign up to receive In The Beginning, the free prequel story to Any Given Doomsday. ... (show rest)

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Nidali, the rebellious daughter of an Egyptian Greek mother and a Palestinian father, narrates the story of her childhood in Kuwait, her teenage years in Egypt (to where she and her family fled the 1990 Iraqi invasion), and her family’s last flight to Texas. Nidali mixes humor with a sharp, vibrant portrait of an eccentric middle class family, and this perspective keeps her buoyant through the hardships she encounters: the humiliation of going through a checkpoint on a visit to her father’s home in the West Bank; the fights with her father, who wants her to become a famous professor and stay away from boys; the end of her childhood as Iraq invades Kuwait on her thirteenth birthday; and the scare she gives her family when she runs away from home.

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This book contains a 21st Century tale of celebrity-obsession, identity crisis and personality disorder. Ben Tippet's "novel autobiography" is ostensibly a self-portrait, but the arsonist's tale takes broader strokes, painting the landscape of a contemporary world hooked on sex, fame and fortune. Nuanced with literary and pop-cultural references, it explores universal themes of love, loss, sex and death.

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The snow ceased as the assistant state pathologist arrived, black medical bag in hand. I stood by the river as she worked, and watched the sun exploding low over the horizon. ... (show rest)

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In this extraordinary novel, Karen Maitland delivers a dazzling reinterpretation of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—an ingenious alchemy of history, mystery, and powerful human drama. ... (show rest)