Glade Church
Blacksburg, Virginia
We are a caring faith community, open and affirming, in the free church tradition
where worship is central and diversity is celebrated.
We are a caring faith community, open and affirming, in the free church tradition
where worship is central and diversity is celebrated.
The Glade Women's Book Group has been meeting monthly since 2004. Each month a new book is read and discussed. All types of books are read -- fiction, non-fiction, spiritual, secular, biography, humor, etc. Join us (both members and friends of Glade church) every 4th Monday of the month at 7:00 p.m. for discussion and fellowship. We meet at the church or, sometimes, at each others' homes. For further information, contact Rebecca Herman:
Phone: 540-961-6262
Email: rherman813@aol.com
Facebook: Rebecca Shearouse Herman
Meetings will be held at Glade Church unless otherwise noted
January 25
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
by Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows
January 1946: writer Juliet Ashton receives a letter from a stranger, a founding member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. And so begins a remarkable tale of the island of Guernsey during the German occupation, and of a society as extraordinary as its name.
February 22
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.
March 22
Family Tree
by Barbara Delinsky
An unforgettable novel about family, race, and the choices people make in times of crisis.
Dana Clarke has just given birth to her first child. The little girl is lovely but no one can help noticing how little she resembles her parents. Dana's husband, among others, suspects that she may have had an affair. In order to put the rumors and speculation to rest, Dana has to delve deep into her past and her husband's heritage to unearth some uncomfortable secrets. Can her marriage survive what she finds out?
April 26
The Help
by Kathryn Stockett
As different from one another as can be, three women come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed. In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women--mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends--view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don't.
May 24
The Little Giant of Aberdeen County
by Tiffany Baker
Love, hate, forgiveness, revenge, mystery, witchcraft...when these elements become prose in the hands of Tiffany Baker the results are finer than fine. The Little Giant of Aberdeen County is memorable in every way, not only as an extraordinarily well-written first novel, but also as a story rich with meaning.
June 28
The Holy Man
by Susan Trott
The Holy Man is a delightful pilgrim's tale set in the modern world. Written with wit and verve, it tells the story of a gentle-natured disciple who, in the space of a week, moves from fear and doubt to joyful enlightenment. Anna's teacher is Joe, a wise and patient sage who sees in her the acolyte he has long been seeking. As their relationship grows, she begins to assume his mantle, while he sees her become ever more sure-footed. Watching this relationship unfold is wonderful, and Susan Trott shows uncanny insight into the nature of friendship as well as the interplay between pupil and teacher.
Abigail Adams: Witness to a Revolution
by Natalie Bober
Abigail Adams was an extraordinary woman who witnessed the gathering storm of the American Revolution and saw the battle of Bunker Hill from a hilltop near her home. Through her letters to friends and family, Abigail Adams lives in history--and now in this award-winning biography by Natalie Bober. Black & white illustrations.
American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon
by Stephen Prothero
Jesus the Black Messiah; Jesus the Jew; Jesus the Hindu sage; Jesus the Haight-Asbury hippie: these Jesuses join the traditional figure of Jesus Christ in American Jesus, which was acclaimed upon publication in hardcover as an altogether fresh exploration of American history--and as the liveliest book about Jesus to appear in English in years.
The Beauty Myth
by Naomi Wolf
In today's world, women have more power, legal recognition, and professional success than ever before. Alongside the evident progress of the women's movement, however, writer and journalist Naomi Wolf is troubled by a different kind of social control, which, she argues, may prove just as restrictive as the traditional image of homemaker and wife. It's the beauty myth, an obsession with physical perfection that traps the modern woman in an endless spiral of hope, self-consciousness, and self-hatred as she tries to fulfill society's impossible definition of "the flawless beauty."
Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue (Book 1)
by Neale Donald Walsch
Conversations with God Book 1 began a series that has been changing millions of lives for more than ten years. Finally, the bestselling series is now a movie, starring Henry Czerny (The Pink Panther and Clear and Present Danger) and Ingrid Boulting (The Last Tycoon). Produced and directed by Stephen Simon (producer of Somewhere in Time and What Dreams May Come) and distributed by Samuel Goldwyn Films and Fox Home Entertainment, the theatrical release is set for October 27, 2006. The movie is the true account of Walsch (played by Cierny), who went from an unemployed homeless man to an "accidental spiritual messenger" and author of the bestselling book
Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine
by Sue Monk Kidd
"I was amazed to find that I had no idea how to unfold my spiritual life in a feminine way. I was surprised, and, in fact, a little terrified, when I found myself in the middle of a feminist spiritual reawakening." ––Sue Monk Kidd
For years, Sue Monk Kidd was a conventionally religious woman. Then, in the late 1980s, Kidd experienced an unexpected awakening, and began a journey toward a feminine spirituality. With the exceptional storytelling skills that have helped make her name, author of When the Heart Waits tells her very personal story of the fear, anger, healing, and freedom she experienced on the path toward the wholeness that many women have lost in the church. From a jarring encounter with sexism in a suburban drugstore, to monastery retreats and to rituals in the caves of Crete, she reveals a new level of feminine spiritual consciousness for all women– one that retains a meaningful connection with the "deep song of Christianity," embraces the sacredness of ordinary women's experience, and has the power to transform in the most positive ways every fundamental relationship in a woman's life– her marriage, her career, and her religion.
Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
by Elizabeth Gilbert
The celebrated author of The Last American Man creates an irresistible, candid, and eloquent account of her pursuit of worldly pleasure and spiritual devotion.
Escape
by Carolyn Jessop & Laura Palmer
The dramatic first-person account of life inside an ultra-fundamentalist American religious sect, and one woman’s courageous flight to freedom with her eight children.
When she was eighteen years old, Carolyn Jessop was coerced into an arranged marriage with a total stranger: a man thirty-two years her senior. Merril Jessop already had three wives. But arranged plural marriages were an integral part of Carolyn’s heritage: She was born into and raised in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), the radical offshoot of the Mormon Church that had settled in small communities along the Arizona-Utah border. Over the next fifteen years, Carolyn had eight children and withstood her husband’s psychological abuse and the watchful eyes of his other wives who were locked in a constant battle for supremacy.
Carolyn’s every move was dictated by her husband’s whims. He decided where she lived and how her children would be treated. He controlled the money she earned as a school teacher. He chose when they had sex; Carolyn could only refuse—at her peril. For in the FLDS, a wife’s compliance with her husband determined how much status both she and her children held in the family. Carolyn was miserable for years and wanted out, but she knew that if she tried to leave and got caught, her children would be taken away from her. No woman in the country had ever escaped from the FLDS and managed to get her children out, too. But in 2003, Carolyn chose freedom over fear and fled her home with her eight children. She had $20 to her name.
Escape exposes a world tantamount to a prison camp, createdby religious fanatics who, in the name of God, deprive their followers the right to make choices, force women to be totally subservient to men, and brainwash children in church-run schools. Against this background, Carolyn Jessop’s flight takes on an extraordinary, inspiring power. Not only did she manage a daring escape from a brutal environment, she became the first woman ever granted full custody of her children in a contested suit involving the FLDS. And in 2006, her reports to the Utah attorney general on church abuses formed a crucial part of the case that led to the arrest of their notorious leader, Warren Jeffs.
Except for One Little Problem: Memoir of a Life in Hiding
by Joan Denson
Joan Denson was the American Dream except for one little problem: she was a lesbian. This is a memoir of the girl-next-door who faces her homosexuality and finds herself unwelcome in her surroundings.
A child during WWII, the author came of age reading The Diary of Anne Frank. The memories of oppression and suffering of the innocent so captured her imagination that she struck up a friendship with Anne Frank's father and visited Anne's annex, where she found in her desire for Anne a hidden piece of herself.
By early adulthood Denson absorbed the culture of the fifties, an era famous for its "loud events and quiet discontents." With a husband and children, she coveted suburban bliss as much as the next girl. But something was amiss. That something came in the form of a lesbian experience that led her to realize what had been missing all along.
A precursor to the "lipstick lesbian" the author, now a prominent Beverly Hills psychotherapist, recounts the struggles, joys, and humor of growing up homosexual in an era of repression. Her memoir provides a first-person account of the evolution of sexual mores over the last thirty years.
The Gift of Change: Spiritual Guidance for a Radically New Life
by Marianne Williamson
In this book, bestselling author Marianne Williamson delves deeply into the powerful role of change in our lives today. Far from something to fear and avoid, she says, every change — even the most difficult and painful — gives us an opportunity to receive the miraculous gift of personal transformation into what we are capable of becoming. The only real failure in life is the failure to grow from what we go through.
Williamson leads us across key bridges of transformation including:
These simple but profound changes empower us to see life's transitions as opportunities for growth and rebirth, providing not only keys for shaping our lives today, but also hope for transforming our world into a place of greater love and peace.
God Speaks, Women Respond: UCC Women in Ministry Tell Their Stories
by Nancy Peeler Keppel & Jeanette Stokes
Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith
by Anne Lamott
In Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith, the author of the bestsellers Traveling Mercies and Plan B delivers a poignant, funny, and bittersweet primer of faith, as we come to discover what it means to be fully alive.
The Hiding PlaceCorrie ten Boom was a woman admired the world over for her courage, her forgiveness, and her memorable faith. In World War II, she and her family risked their lives to help Jews escape the Nazis, and their reward was a trip to Hitler's concentration camps. But she survived and was released--as a result of a clerical error--and now shares the story of how faith triumphs over evil.
For thirty-five years Corrie's dramatic life story, full of timeless virtues, has prepared readers to face their own futures with faith, relying on God's love to overcome, heal, and restore. Now releasing in a thirty-fifth anniversary edition for a new generation of readers, The Hiding Place tells the riveting story of how a middle-aged Dutch watchmaker became a heroine of the Resistance, a survivor of Hitler's death camps, and one of the most remarkable evangelists of the twentieth century.
The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical
by Shane Claiborne
Using unconventional examples from his own life, Shane Claiborne stirs up questions about the church and the world, and challenges readers to truly live out their Christian faith.
The Jim and Dan Stories: A Journey of Grief and Faith
by Colleen Redman
Guest speaker, author Colleen Redman
Knowing Woman: A Feminine Psychology
by Irene Claremont De Castillejo
In this classic work, a noted Jungian analyst explores the division of the human psyche into masculine and feminine. Characteristic of feminine consciousness, she writes, is diffuse awareness, which recognizes the unity of all life and promotes acceptance and relationship. The masculine attitude is one of focused consciousness, the capacity to formulate ideas and to change, invent, and create. Concerned with the experience of women in a culture dominated by masculine values, the author discusses topics such as the animus (the masculine "soul image" in a woman's unconscious); women's roles in relation to work, friends, children, and lovers; and issues such as abortion, aging, and self-determination.
The Last American Man
by Elizabeth Gilbert
In this rousing examination of contemporary American male identity, acclaimed author and journalist Elizabeth Gilbert explores the fascinating true story of Eustace Conway. In 1977, at the age of seventeen, Conway left his family's comfortable suburban home to move to the Appalachian Mountains. For more than two decades he has lived there, making fire with sticks, wearing skins from animals he has trapped, and trying to convince Americans to give up their materialistic lifestyles and return with him back to nature. To Gilbert, Conway's mythical character challenges all our assumptions about what it is to be a modern man in America; he is a symbol of much we feel how our men should be, but rarely are.
Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna
by China Galland
With this book, China Galland brought increased attention to the spiritual traditions of the Black Madonna and other cross-cultural expressions of the feminine divine. The popularity of recent works by authors like Sue Monk Kidd and Kathleen Norris have only increased readers' fascination. Now with a new introduction by the author, Longing for Darkness explores Galland's spellbinding and deeply personal journey from New Mexico through Nepal, India, Switzerland, France, the former Yugoslavia, and Poland—places where such figures as Tara, the female Buddha of the Tibetan tradition, and the Black Madonna are venerated today.
The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion
by Barbara Brown Taylor
An introduction to the contemporary debate between science and religion. The author describes her journey as a preacher who is trying to learn what the insights of quantum physics, the new biology, and chaos theory can teach the believer.
Matters of Faith
by Kristy Kiernan
At age twelve, Marshall Tobias saw his best friend killed by a train. It was then that he began his search for faith—delving into one tradition, then discarding it for another. His parents, however, have little time for spiritual contemplation. Their focus has been on his little sister Megan, who suffers from severe food allergies. Now Marshall is home from college with his first real girlfriend, but there is more to Ada than meets the eye—including her beliefs about the evils of medical intervention. What follows is a crisis that tests not only faith, but the limits of family, forgiveness, and our need to believe.
Mercy
by Jodi Picoult
Cameron McDonald is the police chief of a small Massachusetts town. His cousin Jamie comes to him to confess outright that he has killed his terminally ill wife out of mercy. The murder trial plunges the town into upheaval.
Mountain Sisters: From Convent to Community in Appalachia
by Helen Lewis & Monica Appleby
Guest speaker, author Monica Appleby
"Monica Appleby and Helen Lewis reveal the largely untold story of women who stood up to the Church and joined Appalachians in their struggle for social justice. Their poignant story of how faith, compassion, and persistence overcame obstacles to progress in Appalachia is a fascinating example of how a collaborative and creative learning community fosters strong voices. Mountain Sisters is a prophetic first-person account of the history of American Catholicism, the war on poverty, and the influence of the turbulent 1960s on the cultural and religious communities of Appalachia. Founded in 1941, The Glenmary Sisters embraced a calling to serve rural Appalachian communities where few Catholics resided. The sisters, many of them seeking alternatives to the choices available to most women during this time, zealously pursued their duties but soon became frustrated with the rules and restrictions of the Church. Outmoded doctrine — even styles of dress — made it difficult for them to interact with the very people they hoped to help. In 1967, after many unsuccessful attempts to persuade the Church to ease its requirements, some seventy Sisters left the security of convent life. Over forty of these women formed a secular service group, FOCIS (Federation of Communities in Service). Mountain Sisters is their story.
Mutant Message Down Under
by Marlo Morgan
Mutant Message Down Under is the fictional account of an American woman's spiritual odyssey through outback Australia. An underground bestseller in its original self-published edition, Marlo Morgan's powerful tale of challenge and endurance has a message for us all.
Summoned by a remote tribe of nomadic Aborigines to accompany them on walkabout, the woman makes a four-month-long journey and learns how they thrive in natural harmony with the plants and animals that exist in the rugged lands of Australia's bush. From the first day of her adventure, Morgan is challenged by the physical requirements of the journey—she faces daily tests of her endurance, challenges that ultimately contribute to her personal transformation.
By traveling with this extraordinary community, Morgan becomes a witness to their essential way of being in a world based on the ancient wisdom and philosophy of a culture that is more than 50,000 years old.
Night
by Elie Wiesel
Guest speaker, local Holocaust survivor
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.
Out of Africa
by Isak Dinesen
In this book, the author of Seven Gothic Tales gives a true account of her life on her plantation in Kenya. She tells with classic simplicity of the ways of the country and the natives: of the beauty of the Ngong Hills and coffee trees in blossom: of her guests, from the Prince of Wales to Knudsen, the old charcoal burner, who visited her: of primitive festivals: of big game that were her near neighbors--lions, rhinos, elephants, zebras, buffaloes--and of Lulu, the little gazelle who came to live with her, unbelievably ladylike and beautiful.
The Persian Pickle Club
by Sandra Dallas
It is the 1930s, and hard times have hit Harveyville, Kansas, where the crops are burning up, and there's not a job to be found. For Queenie Bean, a young farm wife, a highlight of each week is the gathering of the Persian Pickle Club, a group of local ladies dedicated to improving their minds, exchanging gossip, and putting their quilting skills to good use. When a new member of the club stirs up a dark secret, the women must band together to support and protect one another. In her magical, memorable novel, Sandra Dallas explores the ties that unite women through good times and bad.
Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
by Anne Lamott
With Anne Lamott's trademark wisdom, humor and honesty, Plan B is a spiritual antidote to anxiety and despair in our increasingly fraught times. This New York Times bestseller picks up where Traveling Mercies left off.
The Power of Now: A Guide To Spiritual Enlightenment
by Eckhart Tolle
A spiritual teaching of rare power and clarity, presented in the form of dialogue between teacher and seeker. Profound insights are gained --we are not our mind; we can find our way out of psychological pain; authentic power is found in surrendering to the now. More than a book --a precious gift, a loving companion, a guide to enlightened living.
The Reading Group
by Elizabeth Noble
A bestseller in the UK, THE READING GROUP is about a group of women who meet regularly to read and discuss books, and how their lives become intertwined, both with the books they read and with each other's lives.
What starts out as a good idea born from a glass of wine and the need to socialize, turns into much more. Over the span of a year, Clare, Harriet, Nicole, Polly and Susan -- five women of different ages, backgrounds and contrasting dilemmas -- transform themselves through the shared community of a book group.
Their reading group becomes a forum for each of the women's views, expressed initially by the book they're reading and increasingly openly as the bonds of friendship cement. As the months pass, these women's lives become more and more intertwined.
In the THE READING GROUP, Nobel reveals the many complicated paths in life we all face as well as the power and importance of friendship.
Redwall
by Brian Jacque
As the inhabitants of Redwall Abbey bask in the glorious Summer of the Late Rose, all is quiet and peaceful. But things are not as they seem. Cluny the Scourge, the evil one-eyed rat warlord, is hell-bent on destroying the tranquility as he prepares to fight a bloody battle for the ownership of Redwall. This dazzling story in the Redwall series is packed with all the wit, wisdom, humor, and blood-curdling adventure of the other books in the collection, but has the added bonus of taking the reader right back to the heart and soul of Redwall Abbey and the characters who live there.
Rubyfruit Jungle
by Rita Mae Brown
Rubyfruit Jungle is the first milestone novel in the extraordinary career of one of this country's most distinctive writers. Bawdy and moving, the ultimate word-of-mouth bestseller, Rubyfruit Jungle is about growing up a lesbian in America – and living happily ever after.
Born a bastard, Molly Bolt is adopted by a dirt-poor Southern couple who want something better for their daughter. Molly plays doctor with the boys, beats up Leroy the tub and loses her virginity to her girlfriend in sixth grade.
As she grows to realize she's different, Molly decides not to apologize for that. In no time she mesmerizes the head cheerleader of Ft. Lauderdale High and captivates a gorgeous bourbon-guzzling heiress.
But the world is not tolerant. Booted out of college for moral turpitude, an unrepentant, penniless Molly takes New York by storm, sending not a few female hearts aflutter with her startling beauty, crackling wit and fierce determination to become the greatest filmmaker that ever lived.
Critically acclaimed when first published, Rubyfruit Jungle has only grown in reputation as it has reached new generations of readers who respond to its feisty and inspiring heroine.
Sacred Spaces: Stations on a Celtic Way
by Margaret Silf
The Celts believed that the visible and invisible worlds, the material and the spiritual, were one. For them, certain places were sacred - places where the divide between visible and invisible was very thin, where the presence of the spiritual was almost palpable.
In this book, Margaret Silf introduces seven traditional sacred spaces, such as "hilltops," "groves and springs," and "boundaries," and invites us to reflect on the meaning of these sacred spaces in our own lives. Beautifully written and illustrated with color photographs, Sacred Spaces is a book for all those who are engaged on the inner journey. Drawing on the riches of the Celtic tradition, it helps us to see that as we go deeper into our own sacred space we move closer to the center and heart of all creation.
Same Kind of Different As Me: A Modern-Day Slave, an International Art Dealer, and the Unlikely Woman Who Bound Them Together
by Ron Hall and Denver Moore
Meet Denver, a man raised under plantation-style slavery in Louisiana in the 1960s; a man who escaped, hopping a train to wander, homeless, for eighteen years on the streets of Dallas, Texas. No longer a slave, Denver's life was still hopeless-until God moved. First came a godly woman who prayed, listened, and obeyed. And then came her husband, Ron, an international arts dealer at home in a world of Armani-suited millionaires. And then they all came together.
But slavery takes many forms. Deborah discovers that she has cancer. In the face of possible death, she charges her husband to rescue Denver. Who will be saved, and who will be lost? What is the future for these unlikely three? What is God doing?
Same Kind of Different As Me is the emotional tale of their story: a telling of pain and laughter, doubt and tears, dug out between the bondages of this earth and the free possibility of heaven. No reader or listener will ever forget it.
The Secret Life of Bees
by Sue Monk Kidd
Sue Monk Kidd's ravishing debut novel has stolen the hearts of reviewers and readers alike with its strong, assured voice. Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the town's fiercest racists, Lily decides they should both escape to Tiburon, South Carolina--a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. There they are taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters who introduce Lily to a mesmerizing world of bees, honey, and the Black Madonna who presides over their household. This is a remarkable story about divine female power and the transforming power of love--a story that women will share and pass on to their daughters for years to come.
The Shack: Where Tragedy Confronts Eternity
by William Paul Young
A kidnapped daughter is presumed dead, and when her grieving father receives a letter, apparently from God, inviting him to the scene of the crime, he can't help but go. What he finds there will change his world forever.
Sisters of the Earth: Women's Prose and Poetry About Nature
by Lorraine Anderson
Sisters of the Earth is a stirring collection of women’s writing on nature: Nature as healer. Nature as delight. Nature as mother and sister. Nature as victim. Nature as companion and reminder of what is wild in us all. Here, among more than a hundred poets and prose writers, are Diane Ackerman on the opium of sunsets; Ursula K. Le Guin envisioning an alternative world in which human beings are not estranged from their planet; and Julia Butterfly Hill on weathering a fierce storm in the redwood tree where she lived for more than two years. Here, too, are poems, essays, stories, and journal entries by Emily Dickinson, Alice Walker, Terry Tempest Williams, Willa Cather, Gretel Erlich, Adrienne Rich, and others—each offering a vivid, eloquent response to the natural world.
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
by Lisa See
In nineteenth-century China, in a remote Hunan county, a girl named Lily, at the tender age of seven, is paired with a laotong, an “old same,” in an emotional match that will last a lifetime. The laotong, Snow Flower, introduces herself by sending Lily a silk fan on which she’s written a poem in nu shu, a unique language that Chinese women created in order to communicate in secret, away from the influence of men. As the years pass, Lily and Snow Flower send messages on the fan and compose stories on handkerchiefs, reaching out of isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments. Together they endure the agony of footbinding and reflect upon their arranged marriages, their loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. The two find solace in their friendship, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive. But when a misunderstanding arises, their relationship suddenly threatens to tear apart.
Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission To Promote Peace. . . One School at a Time
by Greg Mortenson
Some failures lead to phenomenal successes, and this American nurse's unsuccessful attempt to climb K2, the world's second tallest mountain, is one of them. Dangerously ill when he finished his climb in 1993, Mortenson was sheltered for seven weeks by the small Pakistani village of Korphe; in return, he promised to build the impoverished town's first school, a project that grew into the Central Asia Institute, which has since constructed more than 50 schools across rural Pakistan and Afghanistan. Coauthor Relin recounts Mortenson's efforts in fascinating detail, presenting compelling portraits of the village elders, con artists, philanthropists, mujahideen, Taliban officials, ambitious school girls and upright Muslims Mortenson met along the way. As the book moves into the post-9/11 world, Mortenson and Relin argue that the United States must fight Islamic extremism in the region through collaborative efforts to alleviate poverty and improve access to education, especially for girls. Captivating and suspenseful, with engrossing accounts of both hostilities and unlikely friendships, this book will win many readers' hearts.
Uncle Tom's Cabin
by Harriet Beecher Stowe
A monumental work of American literature, Uncle Tom's Cabin charts the progress to freedom of fugitives who escape the chains of slavery, and of a martyr who transcends all earthly ties. This edition firmly locates the novel within the context of African-American writing, the issues of race, and the role of women. Its appendices include the most important contemporary African-American literary responses to the glorification of Uncle Tom's Christian resignation, as well as excerpts from popular slave narratives, quoted by Stowe in her justification of the dramatization of slavery, Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin.
The Weight of Silence
by Heather Gudenkauf
It happens quietly one August morning. As dawn's shimmering light drenches the humid Iowa air, two families awaken to find their little girls have gone missing in the night.
Seven-year-old Calli Clark is sweet, gentle, a dreamer who suffers from selective mutism brought on by tragedy that pulled her deep into silence as a toddler.
Calli's mother, Antonia, tried to be the best mother she could within the confines of marriage to a mostly absent, often angry husband. Now, though she denies that her husband could be involved in the possible abductions, she fears her decision to stay in her marriage has cost her more than her daughter's voice.
Petra Gregory is Calli's best friend, her soul mate and her voice. But neither Petra nor Calli has been heard from since their disappearance was discovered. Desperate to find his child, Martin Gregory is forced to confront a side of himself he did not know existed beneath his intellectual, professorial demeanor.
Now these families are tied by the question of what happened to their children. And the answer is trapped in the silence of unspoken family secrets.
Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers in Exile
by John Shelby Spong
An important and respected voice for liberal American Christianity for the past twenty years, Bishop John Shelby Spong integrates his often controversial stands on the Bible, Jesus, theism, and morality into an intelligible creed that speaks to today's thinking Christian. In this compelling and heartfelt book, he sounds a rousing call for a Christianity based on critical thought rather than blind faith, on love rather than judgment, and that focuses on life more than religion.
The Women Who Raised Me: A Memoir
by Victoria Rowell
Unlike so many children who fall through the cracks of the overburdened foster care system, Rowells experience was nothing short of miraculous—thanks to several extraordinary women who stepped forward to give Rowell the love and guidance she needed to succeed.
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