Archived Posts

Here you'll find items that we've posted recently.

GRAPHIC NOVELS

Booked

by Kwame Alexander

Between dealing with bullies, crushing on the girl of his dreams, and receiving a bombshell announcement that threatens everything he knows, Nick leans on his family and friends as he tries to figure out how to navigate challenges that seem even harder than scoring a tie-breaking, game-winning goal.

Roaming

by Jillian Tamaki & Mariko Tamaki

On their first March break as college students, old friends Dani and Zoe plan to reunite in a place they've wanted to visit forever—New York City. Dani's new classmate, Fiona, tags along and quickly threatens to upend the whole trip. As the trio wind their way through tourist traps, photo ops, and lots and lots of shopping, old friendships and new romances are put to the test. Emotional tensions new and old vibrate against the resplendently illustrated backdrop of the city.

Squire

by Nadia Shammas & Sara Alfageeh

Born a second-class citizen, Aiza has always dreamt of becoming a Knight. It's the highest military honor in the once-great Bayt-Sajji Empire and, as a member of the recently colonized Ornu people, it's her only way to full citizenship. Now, ravaged by famine and mounting tensions between the different provinces, Bayt-Sajji finds itself on the brink of war once again, and Aiza can finally enlist in the competitive Squire training program.

It's not how she imagined it, though. Hiding her Ornu status in order to better blend in, Aiza must navigate new friendships, rivalries, and rigorous training under the merciless General Hende. As the pressure mounts, Aiza realizes that the "greater good" Bayt-Sajji's military promises might not include her, and that the recruits might be in more danger than she ever imagined. She will have to choose: loyalty to her heart and heritage, or loyalty to the Empire.

DUNE: The Graphic Novel, Book 1

by Frank Herbert

DUNE, Frank Herbert's epic science-fiction masterpiece, set in the far future amid a sprawling feudal interstellar society, tells the story of Paul Atreides as he and his family accept control of the desert planet Arrakis, the only source of the most important and valuable substance in the cosmos.

Originally published in 1965 and now faithfully adapted as a graphic novel by New York Times bestselling authors Brian Herbert, son of Frank Herbert, and Kevin J. Anderson, Dune explores the complex, multilayered interactions of politics, religion, ecology, technology, and human emotion as the forces of the empire confront each other for control of Arrakis.

NON-FICTION

The Science of the Earth: The Secrets of Our Planet Revealed

by DK

This breathtakingly beautiful book reveals the unique wonders of our planet, from core to atmosphere.

Illustrated with detailed images of fascinating objects—from colorful crystals to ancient fossils—along with awe-inspiring landscape photography, it brings to life the story of Earth's past and the dynamic processes that shape its present.

The Dog Encyclopedia

by DK

Profiles more than 400 breeds from around the world, with stunning, specially commissioned photographs of every dog, expert summaries, intriguing stories of famous canines and their owners, and the history of each breed's origins.

Includes fascinating insights into the evolution of the dog and its anatomy, followed by expert advice on care and training.

Explores the role of dogs through history as willing workers, sporting champions, and beloved pets, and their enduring place in global art and culture.


A History of Magic, Witchcraft, and the Occult

by DK

Magic has intrigued us for thousands of years...

Since prehistoric times people have looked to other realms to explain the wonders of the universe, and believed that they could manipulate spiritual forces to influence the physical world. This enchanting book takes a magical, mystical tour through history, stopping at alchemy, divination, paganism, shamanism, witchcraft, and more on its way to modern-day Wicca, tarot, and spells for the 21st century. Expect the unexpected as this beautiful and intelligent account opens your eyes to other worlds.

Whether you are a believer or a skeptic, this history of magic will leave you spellbound.

The Power to Change: Mastering the Habits That Matter Most

by Craig Groeschel

Few things in life are more frustrating than knowing you need to change, wanting to change, and trying to change, but not changing. Pastor and bestselling author Craig Groeschel knows what it's like to be caught in that demoralizing cycle. That was his own story—until he discovered practical principles for experiencing lasting change. In the twenty-five years since, Craig has helped countless others find true change in their relationships, habits, and thought patterns.

In The Power to Change, Craig helps you understand:

A powerful blend of biblical wisdom and fascinating psychology, The Power to Change includes helpful exercises, real-life stories, and life-changing spiritual insights.

Whether you want to lose weight, breathe new life into your marriage, read the Bible more, get out of debt, or give up an addiction, the step-by-step, time-tested strategies in this book will equip you to make the changes you long to make. Discover why you do what you do so you can become who you really are, and live the life God created you to experience.

Think Ahead: 7 Decisions You Can Make Today for the God Honoring Life You Want Tomorrow

by Craig Groeschel

What happens between our good intentions and the choices we actually make in the moment? If only we could make decisions ahead of time rather than when we're under stress, overwhelmed, or swayed by fear or emotion. In Think Ahead, we learn how to do just that and live the life God wants for us.

Pastor Craig Groeschel knows from personal experience and as a counselor to others what being trapped in a cycle of poor decision-making is like. In Think Ahead, he shares what he has discovered about the power of "pre-deciding."

With thought-provoking exercises and questions for your reflection, this interactive book teaches you how to position yourself to make the choices you really want to make as a follower of Jesus and avoid those you do not. Think Ahead will help you:

Becoming the person you want to be starts before you even make a decision. In Think Ahead, you'll discover the power of pre-deciding today to help you live the life you want to have tomorrow. 

How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

by David Brooks

As #1 New York Times bestselling author David Brooks observes, "There is  one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society: the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen—to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood."

And yet we humans don't do this well. All around us are people who feel invisible, unseen, misunderstood. In How to Know a Person, Brooks sets out to help us do better, posing questions that are essential for all of us: If you want to know a person, what kind of attention should you cast on them? What kind of conversations should you have? What parts of a person's story should you pay attention to?

Driven by his trademark sense of curiosity and his determination to grow as a person, Brooks draws from the fields of psychology and neuroscience and from the worlds of theater, philosophy, history, and education to present a welcoming, hopeful, integrated approach to human connection. How to Know a Person helps readers become more understanding and considerate toward others, and to find the joy that comes from being seen. Along the way it offers a possible remedy for a society that is riven by fragmentation, hostility, and misperception.

The act of seeing another person, Brooks argues, is profoundly creative: How can we look somebody in the eye and see something large in them, and turn, see something larger in ourselves? How to Know a Person is for anyone searching for connection, and yearning to be understood.

Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

by Charles Duhigg

We all know people who seem capable of connecting with almost anyone. They're the ones we love talking to, who we turn to for advice, who hear what we are trying to say and make us feel seen.

What do they know about conversation that makes them so special?

Supercommunicators, Charles Duhigg argues, understand that whenever we speak, we're actually participating in one of three conversations: practical (What's this really about?), emotional (How do we feel?), and social (Who are we?). If you don't know what kind of conversation you're having, connection is hard.

Skilled communicators know the importance of recognizing—and then matching—each kind of conversation, and how to hear the complex emotions, subtle negotiations, and hidden beliefs that color so much of what we say and how we listen. Our experiences, our values, our emotional lives, and how we see ourselves and others shape every discussion from who will pick up the kids to how we want to be treated at work.

With his trademark clarity and storytelling, Duhigg shows readers how to recognize these three conversations—and teaches us the skills we need to navigate them more successfully.

Communication is a superpower. By bringing readers into jury deliberations and fraught CIA recruitments, into Netflix's company-wide conversations about equity and the writers' room of The Big Bang Theory, Duhigg uncovers why some people are able to make themselves heard—and to hear others—so clearly. We learn how to identify and leverage the hidden layers that lurk beneath every conversation.

In the end, we learn a simple but powerful lesson: With the right tools, we can connect with anyone.

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds

by Merlin Sheldrake

 When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting bodies, analogous to apples on a tree. Most fungi live out of sight, yet make up a massively diverse kingdom of organisms that supports and sustains nearly all living systems. Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel, and behave.

In the first edition of this mind-bending book, Sheldrake introduced us to this mysterious but massively diverse kingdom of life. This exquisitely designed volume, abridged from the original, features more than one hundred full-color images that bring the spectacular variety, strangeness, and beauty of fungi to life as never before.

Fungi throw our concepts of individuality and even intelligence into question. They are metabolic masters, earth makers, and key players in most of life's processes. They can change our minds, heal our bodies, and even help us remediate environmental disaster. In vivid, surprising images, Sheldrake reveals how these extraordinary organisms—and our relationships with them—are changing our understanding of how life works.

Untangle Your Emotions: Naming What You Feel and Knowing What to Do About It

by Jennie Allen

How often have you heard, "Don't let your emotions get the best of you"? But what if instead of ignoring our feelings, we notice them, name them, and let God use them to draw us closer to Himself and others?

Many of us need to unlearn damaging messages about our emotions. We've been taught, for example, that emotions are untrustworthy, when, in fact, God can use them to help us see where we need His healing.

In Untangle Your Emotions, Jennie Allen uses scientific research, biblical insight, and her own story to help you

Feelings aren't something to fix; they are something to feel. As we discover how to name and navigate our emotions, we'll learn how they can draw us closer to the God who built us—soul, mind, and heart.

Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold on to What Matters

by Charan Ranganath

In Why We Remember, pioneering neuroscientist and psychologist Charan Ranganath radically reframes the way we think about the everyday act of remembering. Memory, Dr. Ranganath shows, is much more than a record of the past. It is a powerful force always at work in our brains, shaping how we experience the world in far-reaching, often invisible ways.

Memory affects how we experience emotions, how quickly we learn, and how we make decisions. It exposes us to implicit bias (we tend to like what is familiar) and group influence (memory favors the loudest voice in the room). It equips us with the "spider-sense" to detect hidden danger. Knowing how memory works can help us with daily remembering tasks, such as finding our keys, and with the challenge of memory loss as we age. It yields a range of other life-altering benefits as well. When we work with the brain's ability to learn and reinterpret past events, we can heal trauma, shed our biases, and grow in self-awareness.

In these pages, Dr. Ranganath draws on his twenty-five years of scientific discovery in the lab, weaving in stories from his life as a father, a punk musician, and a child of immigrants. The result is a rare science narrative through which we gain the ability to more fully know ourselves.

The Courage to Be Disliked: The Japanese Phenomenon That Shows You How to Change Your Life and Achieve Real Happiness

by Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga

Is happiness something you choose for yourself? The Courage to Be Disliked presents a simple and straightforward answer. Using the theories of Alfred Adler, one of the three giants of nineteenth-century psychology alongside Freud and Jung, this book follows an illuminating dialogue between a philosopher and a young man. Over the course of five conversations, the philosopher helps his student to understand how each of us is able to determine the direction of our own life, free from the shackles of past traumas and the expectations of others.

Rich in wisdom, The Courage to Be Disliked will guide you through the concepts of self-forgiveness, self-care, and mind decluttering. It is a deeply liberating way of thinking, allowing you to develop the courage to change and ignore the limitations that you might be placing on yourself. This plainspoken and profoundly moving book unlocks the power within you to find lasting happiness and be the person you truly want to be. Millions have already benefited from its teachings; now you can too.

Class: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education

by Stephanie Land

When Stephanie Land wrote her memoir Maid, she never could have imagined what was to come, including it being handpicked by President Barack Obama as one of the Best Books of 2019. Called "a tireless advocate for people living in poverty and survivors of domestic violence" by the New York Times, Stephanie brought the story of her escape out of poverty and abuse to life in a way that inspired millions.

In Class, Land takes readers with her as she finishes college and pursues her writing career. Facing barriers at every turn, including a Byzantine loan system, the lack of money for food, and the judgments of others, Land finds a way to survive again, graduating in her midthirties.

Bringing us into the homes and jobs that made her time in the classroom possible, Class paints an intimate portrait of motherhood as it converges and conflicts with personal desire and professional ambition. Who has the right to create art? Who has the right to go to college? And what kind of work is valued in our culture? In clear, candid, and moving prose, Class grapples with these questions, offering a searing indictment of America's educational system and a riveting testimony of a mother's triumph against all odds.

Be a Revolution: How Everyday People Are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World—and How You Can, Too

by Ijeoma Oluo

In her previous books, Ijeoma Oluo discussed the issues of race and racism in society, how they persist, and how to talk about them. But now that we better understand these systems of oppression, the question is this: What can we do about them?

With Be a Revolution, Oluo aims to show how people across America are working to create real positive change in our structures. Looking at many of our most powerful systems—such as education, media, labor, health, housing, policing, and more—she highlights what people are doing to create change for intersectional racial equity. She also illustrates various ways in which the reader can find entryways into change in these same areas, or can bring some of this important work being done elsewhere to where they live.

This book aims not only to be educational, but to inspire action and change. Oluo wishes to take our conversations on race and racism out of a place of pure pain and trauma and into a place of loving action. Be a Revolution is both an urgent chronicle of this important moment in history as well as an inspiring and restorative call for action.

How to Win Friends and Influence Fungi: Collected Quirks of Science, Tech, Engineering, and Math from Nerd Nite

by Chris Balakrishnan & Matt Wasowski

For 21 years, Nerd Nite has delivered to live audiences around the world the most interesting, fun, and informative presentations about science, history, the arts, pop culture—you name it. There hasn't been a rabbit hole that its army of presenters hasn't been afraid to explore. Finally, after countless requests to bring Nerd Nite to more fans across the globe, cofounders and college pals Matt Wasowski and Chris Balakrishnan are bringing readers the quirky and accessible science content that they crave in book form, focused on STEM and paired with detailed illustrations that make the content pop. The resulting range of topics is quirky and vast, from kinky, spring-loaded spiders to the Webb telescope's influence on movie special effects.

How to Win Friends and Influence Fungi features narratives, bursts, and sketches on all things STEM from scientists in numerous disciplines. Chapters are sure to make you laugh out loud with titles such as "The Science of the Hangover," "What Birds Can Teach Us About the Impending Zombie Apocalypse," and "Lessons from The Oregon Trail." With fascinating details, facts, and illustrations, combined with Chris's and Matt's incredible wit and humor, How to Win Friends and Influence Fungi is sure to reach joyful STEM enthusiasts of all ages around the world.

FICTION

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

by James McBride

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new housing development, the last thing they expected to uncover was a human skeleton. Who the skeleton was and how it got buried there were just two of the long-held secrets that had been kept for decades by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side, sharing ambitions and sorrows.

Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, which served the neighborhood's quirky colelction of blacks and European immigrants, helped by her husband, Moshe, a Romaninan-born theater owner who integrated the town's first dance hall. When the state came looking for a deaf black child, claiming that the boy needed to be institutionalized, Chicken Hill's residents—roused by Chona's kindness and the courage of a local black worker named Nate Timblin—banded together to keep the boy safe.

As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear how much the people of Chicken Hill have to struggle to survive at the margins of white Christian America and how damaging bigotry, hypocrisy, and deceit can be to a community. When the truth is revealed about the skeleton, the boy, and the part the town's establishment played in both, McBride shows that it is love and community—heaven and earth—that ultimately sustain us.

Bringing his masterful storytelling skills and his deep faith in humanity to The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride has written a novel as compassionate as Deacon King Kong and as inventive as The Good Lord  Bird.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: The Illustrated Edition

by J.K. Rowling

The Dursleys were so mean and hideous that summer that all Harry Potter wanted was to get back to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. But just as he's packing his bags, Harry receives a warning from a strange, impish creature named Dobby who says that if Harry Potter returns to Hogwarts, disaster will strike.

And strike it does. For in Harry's second year at Hogwarts, fresh torment and horrors arise, including an outrageously stuck-up new professor, Gilderoy Lockhart; a spirit named Moaning Myrtle who haunts the girls' bathroom; and the unwanted attentions of Ron Weasley's younger sister, Ginny.

But each of these seem minor annoyances when the real trouble begins, and someone—or something—starts turning Hogwarts students to stone. Could it be Draco Malfoy, a more poisonous rival than ever? Could it possibly be Hagrid, whose mysterious past is finally told? Or could it be the one everyone at Hogwarts most suspects... Harry Potter himself!

The second book of the Harry Potter series, now illustrated in brilliant full color by award-winning artist Jim Kay.

Punching the Air

by Ibi Zoboi & Yusef Salaam

Amal Shahid has always been an artist and a poet. But even in his diverse art school, because of a biased system he's seen as disruptive and unmotivated. Then, one fateful night, an altercation in a gentrifying neighborhood escalates into tragedy. "Boys just being boys" turns out to be true only when those boys are white.

Suddenly, at just sixteen years old, Amal is convicted of a crime he didn't commit and sent to prison. Despair and rage almost sink him until he turns to the refuge of his words, his art. This never should have been his story. But can he change it?

With spellbinding lyricism, award-winning author Ibi Zoboi and prison reform activist Yusef Salaam tell a moving and deeply profound story about how one boy is able to maintain his humanity and fight for the truth in a system designed to strip him of both.

Small Mercies

by Dennis Lehane

In the summer of 1974, a heat wave blankets Boston, and Mary Pat Fennessy is trying to stay one step ahead of the bill collectors. Mary Pat has lived her entire life in the housing projects of Southie, the Irish American enclave that stubbornly adheres to old tradition and stands proudly apart.

One night, Mary Pat's teenage daughter, Jules, stays out late and doesn't come home. That same evening, a young Black man is found dead under mysterious circumstances, struck by a subway train.

The two events seem unconnected. But Mary Pat, propelled by a desperate search for her missing daughter, begins turning over stones best left untouched—asking questions that bother Mary Butler, chieftain of the Irish mob, and the men who work for him, men who don't take kindly to any threat to their business.

Set against the hot, tumultuous months when the city's desegregation of its public schools exploded in violence, Small Mercies is a superb thriller, a brutal depiction of criminality and power, and an unflinching portrait of the dark heart of American racism. It is a mesmerizing and wrenching work that only Dennis Lehane could write.

When the Angels Left the Old Country

by Sacha Lamb

Uriel the angel and Little Ash (short for Ashmedai) are the only two supernatural creatures in their shtetl (which is so tiny, it doesn't even have a name other than Shtetl).

The angel and the demon have been studying together for centuries, but pogroms and the search for a new life have drawn all the young people from their village to America. When one of those young people, Essie, goes missing, Uriel and Little Ash set off to find her.

Along the way the angel and demon encounter humans in need of their help, including Rose Cohen, whose best friend (and the love of her life) has abandoned her to marry a man, and Malke Shulman, whose father died mysteriously on his way to America.

But there are obstacles ahead of them as difficult as what they've left behind. Medical exams (and demons) at Ellis Island. Corrupt officials, cruel mob bosses, murderers, poverty. The streets are far from paved with gold.

With cinematic sweep and tender observation, Sacha Lamb presents a totally original drama about individual purpose, the fluid nature of identity, and the power of love to change and endure.