The pilgrims quoted his story. Franklin and Jefferson proposed he appear on the U.S. seal. Washington and Lincoln were called his incarnations. The Statue of Liberty and Superman were molded in his image. Martin Luther King, Jr., invoked him the night before he died. Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama cited him as inspiration. For four hundred years, one figure inspired more Americans than any other. His name is Moses.
In this groundbreaking book, New York Times bestselling author Bruce Feiler travels through touchstones in American history and traces the biblical prophet’s influence from the Mayflower through today.
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A miraculous lesson in courage and recovery, Bending Toward the Sun tells the story of a unique family bond forged in the wake of brutal terror.
Rita Lurie was five years old when she was forced to flee her home in Poland to hide from the Nazis in a cramped, dark attic with fourteen members of her family. Young Rita watched her younger brother and her mother die before her eyes. But the tragedy of the Holocaust was only the beginning of Rita’s story.
Decades later, Rita’s daughter Leslie began probing the traumatic events of her mother’s childhood to discover how Rita’s pain has affected not only Leslie’s life and outlook but that of her own daughter,
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This spellbinding debut novel takes you inside the clique-driven, emotionally and physically charged world of high school and proves that the students aren’t the only ones wrestling with maturity, self-confidence and self-doubt.
Spend a year at the Carmine-Casey School for Girls, an elite prep school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The year when the intimate private school community becomes tempestuous and dangerously incestuous, as the rivalries and secrets of teachers and students interact, intersect, and eventually collide.
In the world of students, popular and coquettish Dixie Doyle with ironic pigtails battles to wrest attention away from the smart and disdainful Liz Warren and her self-written plays based on Oresteia.
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On the morning of her release from prison, Sunny, who grew up in a snakehandling church in the Little Egypt region of Southern Illinois, rents a garage apartment from Jackson. She’s been serving a five-year sentence for shooting, but not killing, her husband, the pastor of the Church of the Burning Bush with Signs Following, after he forced her at gunpoint to put her arm in a box of rattlesnakes.
Sunny and Jackson become lovers, but they’re pulled in different directions. Sunny, drawn to science and eager to put her snake handling past behind her,
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What happens when small-time reporter Matthew Prior quits his job to gamble everything on a quixotic notion: a Web site devoted to financial journalism in the form of blank verse? Before long, he wakes up to find himself jobless, hobbled with debt, spying on his wife’s online flirtation, and six days away from losing his home. . . . Until, one night on a desperate two a.m. run to 7-Eleven, he falls in with some local stoners, and they end up hatching the biggest—and most misbegotten—plan yet.
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Meet the Patel-Joneses—Babo, Sian, Mayuri, and Bean—in their little house with orange and black gates next door to the Punjab Women’s Association in Madras. Babo grew up here, but he and Sian, his cream-skinned Welsh love, met in London. Babo’s parents disapproved. And then they disapproved unless the couple moved back to Madras. So here they are. And as the twentieth century creaks and croaks its way along, Babo, Sian, and the children navigate their way through the uncharted territory of a “hybrid” family: the hustle and bustle of Babo’s relatives; the faraway phone-line crackle of Sian’s; the eternal wisdom and soft bosom of Great-Grandmother Ba;
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