In 2008, a Gallup poll showed that 44 percent of Americans believed God had created man in his present form within the last 10,000 years. In a Pew Forum poll in the same year, 42 percent believed that all life on earth has existed in its present form since the beginning of time.In 1859 Charles Darwin's masterpiece, On the Origin of Species, shook s...more
"Brought to life by a poetic and muscular style, Jenkins’s writing is a brew of history, philosophy, and raw emotion. His journeys are as intellectual and spiritual as they are physical, and we are by his side, in his head." So wrote Robin Russin for the LA Times about Mark Jenkins’s last book, The Hard Way. In A Man’s Life, Jenkins walks acr...more
"YOU'RE THE CARETAKER, SIR. YOU'VE ALWAYS BEEN THE CARETAKER. I SHOULD KNOW, SIR. I'VE ALWAYS BEEN HERE...." -- DELBERT GRADY OF THE OVERLOOK HOTEL THE SHINING First published in 1977, The Shining quickly became a benchmark in the literary career of Stephen King. This tale of a troubled man hired to care for a remote mountain resort over the win...more
Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork of honor and injustice in the deep South -- and the heroism of one man in the face of blind and violent hatred One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than thirty million copies worldwide, served as the basis of an ...more
First published in 1958, this raw, devastatingly haunting Holocaust memoir is Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel's best known work. After the German army invades, they first confine the Jewish community of Sighet, Transylvania, into a ghetto, and then pack them into cattle cars bound for the concentration camps. Fifteen-year-old Eliezer and his f...more
A Christian can almost be forgiven for not reading the Bible, but there's no salvation for a fantasy fan who hasn't read the gospel of the genre, J.R.R. Tolkien's definitive three-book epic, the Lord of the Rings (encompassing The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King), and its charming precursor, The Hobbit. That many ...more
A desperate young man plans the perfect crime -- the murder of a despicable pawnbroker, an old women no one loves and no one will mourn. Is it not just, he reasons, for a man of genius to commit such a crime, to transgress moral law -- if it will ultimately benefit humanity? So begins one of the greatest novels ever written: a powerful psychologica...more
On her way home from school on a snowy December day in 1973, 14-year-old Susie Salmon ("like the fish") is lured into a makeshift underground den in a cornfield and brutally raped and murdered, the latest victim of a serial killer--the man she knew as her neighbor, Mr. Harvey. Alice Sebold's haunting and heartbreaking debut novel, The Lovely Bones,...more
When Charles Wallace Murry goes searching through a 'wrinkle in time' for his lost father, he finds himself on an evil planet where all life is enslaved by a huge pulsating brain known as 'It'. How Charles, his sister Meg and friend Calvin find and free his father makes this a very special and exciting mixture of fantasy and science fiction, which ...more