When she was seven, Rachel Manija Brown’s parents, post-60s hippies, left California for an ashram in a cobra-ridden, drought-stricken spot in India to devote themselves to Meher Baba, best known as the guru to Pete Townshend of The Who. Despite the fact that Rachel is the only foreign child within a 100-mile radius, she manages to keep her wits and humor about her when everyone else seems to have lost touch with reality. Filled with eccentric characters, this astutely observed and laugh-out-loud funny debut memoir marks the arrival of a major new literary talent.
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The Innocent Man unfolds with the taut suspense, intriguing characters, and vivid scenes that have made John Grisham one of the most widely read novelists in America. But this time, he’s reporting on actual events–and a courtroom drama that results in a real-life nightmare for all the wrong people. Sentenced to death for a murder he did not commit, Ron Williamson experienced a flagrant miscarriage of justice so regrettably common in criminal prosecutions across the country. His story will leave you hungering for answers; whether you read it with a group of friends or as part of a forum,
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In 1960, five young men arrived at the imposing gates of Parkminster, the largest center of the most rigorous and ascetic monastic order in the Western world: the Carthusians. This is the story of their five-year journey into a society virtually unchanged in its behavior and lifestyle since its foundation in 1084. An Infinity of Little Hours is a uniquely intimate portrait of the customs and practices of a monastic order almost entirely unknown until now. It is also a drama of the men’s struggle as they avoid the 1960s—the decade of hedonism, music, fashion, and amorality—and enter an entirely different era and a spiritual world of their own making.
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Julia and her adopted brother, David, are sixteen years old. Julia is white. David is black. It is the mid-1980s, and their family has just moved to rural Indiana, a landscape of cottonwood trees, trailer parks, and an all-encompassing racism. At home are a distant mother—more involved with her church’s missionaries than her own children—and a violent father. In this riventing and heartrending memoir, Julia and David strive to make it through these ordeals and their tale is relayed here with startling immediacy, extreme candor, and wry humor.
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Meredith Hall’s moving but unsentimental memoir begins in 1965, when she becomes pregnant at sixteen. Shunned by her insular New Hampshire community, she is then kicked out of the house by her mother. Her father and stepmother reluctantly take her in, hiding her before they finally banish her altogether. After giving her baby up for adoption, Hall wanders recklessly through the Middle East, where she survives by selling her possessions and finally her blood. She returns to New England and stitches together a life that encircles her silenced and invisible grief. When he is twenty-one, her lost son finds her.
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Through more than 100 personal experiences, this anthology illuminates how the practice of Nichiren Buddhism has changed people’s lives for the better. These first-person narratives—representing folks from all across the country of various ages and ethnic backgrounds—examine the challenges of daily life associated with health, relationships, career, and aging, and the ensuing experiences of hope, success, inspiration, and personal enlightenment that come about as a result of living as Nichiren Buddhists.
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