Archive for August, 2015

Powerful and Inspiring Fall Reading

August 21st, 2015

APathAppears“Read this book. Seize one of the many opportunities it lists, and change lives for the better, including your own.” —The New York Times Book Review

With scrupulous research and on-the-ground reporting, Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn explore how altruism affects us, what are the markers for success, and how to avoid the pitfalls. In their recounting of astonishing stories from the front lines of social progress, we see the compelling, inspiring truth of how real people have changed the world, underscoring that one person can make a difference.

A Path Appears offers practical, results-driven advice on how best each of us can give and reveals the lasting benefits we gain in return. Kristof and WuDunn know better than most how many urgent challenges communities around the world face to­day. Here they offer a timely beacon of hope for our collective future.

“Full of rich and riveting true stories.” —Ann Curry

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FamilyFurnishings“Superb…. Munro is a writer to be cherished…. Generations to come will relish and study Family Furnishings.” —NPR

A Best Book of the Year:
San Francisco Chronicle, Minneapolis Star Tribune, NPR

Here is a selection of Munro’s most accomplished and powerfully affecting short fiction from the last two decades, a companion volume to A Wilderness Station: Selected Stories, 1968–1994. These stories encompass the fullness of human experience, from the wild exhilaration of first love (in “Passion”) to the punishing consequences of leaving home (“Runaway”) or ending a marriage (“The Children Stay”). And in stories that Munro has described as “closer to the truth than usual”—”Dear Life,” “Working for a Living,” and “Home”—we glimpse the author’s own life.

Subtly honed with her hallmark precision, grace, and compassion, these stories illuminate the quotidian yet astonishing particularities in the lives of men and women, parents and children, friends and lovers as they discover sex, fall in love, part, quarrel, suffer defeat, set off into the unknown, or find a way to be in the world.

“Brilliant…. In the simplest of words, and with the greatest of power, she makes us see and hear an ‘unremarkable’ scene we will never forget.” —The New York Review of Books

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TheMoorsAccount“An exciting tale of wild hopes, divided loyalties, and highly precarious fortunes.” —San Francisco Chronicle

Pulitzer Prize Finalist
Man Booker Prize Nominee
A Best Book of the Year:
The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR

In these pages, Laila Lalami brings us the imagined memoirs of the first black explorer of America: Mustafa al-Zamori, called Estebanico. The slave of a Spanish conquistador, Estebanico sails for the Americas with his master, Dorantes, as part of a danger-laden expedition to Florida. Within a year, Estebanico is one of only four crew members to survive.

As he journeys across America with his Spanish companions, the Old World roles of slave and master fall away, and Estebanico remakes himself as an equal, a healer, and a remarkable storyteller. His tale illuminates the ways in which our narratives can transmigrate into history—and how storytelling can offer a chance at redemption and survival.

“Compelling…. Mesmerizing…. Presents us a historical fiction that feels something like a plural totality.” —The New York Times Book Review

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FieldsofBlood“Powerful…. Both erudite and accurate, dazzling in its breadth of knowledge and historical detail.” —The Washington Post

With a New Postscript

In these times of rising geopolitical chaos, the need for mutual understanding between cultures has never been more urgent. Religious differences are seen as fuel for violence and warfare. In these pages, one of our greatest writers on religion, Karen Armstrong, amasses a sweeping history of humankind to explore the perceived connection between war and the world’s great creeds—and to issue a passionate defense of the peaceful nature of faith.

With unprecedented scope, Armstrong looks at the whole history of each tradition—not only Christianity and Islam, but also Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Judaism. Religions, in their earliest days, endowed every aspect of life with meaning, and warfare became bound up with observances of the sacred. Modernity has ushered in an epoch of spectacular violence, although, as Armstrong shows, little of it can be ascribed directly to religion. Nevertheless, she shows us how and in what measure religions came to absorb modern belligerence—and what hope there might be for peace among believers of different faiths in our time.

“Surprising and illuminating…. Should be read by anyone interested in understanding the interaction of religion with violence in the modern world.” —The New Republic

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