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Click the book title to learn more about it! Before You Know Kindness For ten summers, the Seton family — all three generations — met at their country home in New Hampshire, to spend a week together playing tennis, badminton, and golf, and savoring gin and tonics on the wraparound porch to celebrate the end of the season. In the eleventh summer, everything changed. A hunting rifle with a single cartridge left in the chamber wound up in exactly the wrong hands at exactly the wrong time, and lead to a nightmarish accident that put to the test the values that unite the family — and the convictions that just may pull it apart. "Gunfire and its aftermath force the survivors to confront a surprisingly complicated question: How best to live? . . . Before You Know Kindness is messier, funnier and, I think, better [than Midwives]." "Chris Bohjalian's many fans will be glad to know he's back on the high wire, expertly balancing topical issues with the more timeless concerns of the human heart. His well- drawn, sympathetic characters deepen and intensify the novel's gripping plot rather than simply serving it. Before You Know Kindness is smart, first-rate storytelling." [ Back to Top ] |
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When the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, few could have anticipated its potential for devastation. Pulitzer prize-winning author John Hersey recorded the stories of Hiroshima residents shortly after the explosion and, in 1946, Hiroshima was published, giving the world first-hand accounts from people who had survived it. The words of Miss Sasaki, Dr. Fujii, Mrs. Nakamara, Father Kleinsorg, Dr. Sasaki, and the Reverend Tanimoto gave a face to the statistics that saturated the media and solicited an overwhelming public response. On August 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb is dropped from an American plane on the 245,000 residents of Hiroshima, Japan. Most of the city is destroyed and thousands of its inhabitants die. Some of its citizens survive and suffer the debilitating effects of terrible burns and radiation illness. The lives of six of those survivors are recounted in the days following the bombing. “The quietest and the best, of all the stories that have been written about the most spectacular explosion in the time of man.” “Compelling, unforgettable, and more timely than ever, this is absolutely essential for collections from junior high on.” [ Back to Top ] |
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The Kite Runner An epic tale of fathers and sons, of friendship and betrayal, that takes us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy to the atrocities of the present.
The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father's servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption, and it is also about the power of fathers over sons - their love, their sacrifices, their lies. 1. Alex Awards “In The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini gives us a vivid and engaging story that reminds us how long his people have been struggling to triumph over the forces of violence -- forces that continue to threaten them even today.” -New York Times[ Back to Top ] |
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Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America Millions of Americans work for poverty-level wages, and one day Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that any job equals a better life. But how can anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 to $7 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich moved from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, taking the cheapest lodgings available and accepting work as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing-home aide, and Wal-Mart salesperson. She soon discovered that even the "lowliest" occupations require exhausting mental and physical efforts. And one job is not enough; you need at least two if you intend to live indoors. “We have Barbara Ehrenreich to thank for bringing us the news of America's working poor so clearly and directly, and conveying with it a deep moral outrage and a finely textured sense of lives as lived. As Michael Harrington was, she is now our premier reporter of the underside of capitalism.” [ Back to Top ] |
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Water for Elephants An atmospheric, gritty, and compelling novel of star-crossed lovers, set in the circus world circa 1932, by the bestselling author of Riding Lessons. 1. 2007 Alex Awards “Water for Elephants is the story of that secret, told through the medium of Jacob's thoughts. This beautifully written, superbly paced novel presents life as it was in the traveling circuses of the Great Depression: the glamour, the deceit, the wickedness and the cruelty to animals and humans alike.” [ Back to Top ] |
