Tells the story of Paul Morel, a young artist growing into manhood in a British working-class community near the Nottingham coalfields. His mother Gertrude, unhappily married to Paul's hard-drinking father, devotes all her energies to her son. They develop a powerful and passionate relationship, but eventually tensions arise when Paul falls in love with a girl and seeks to escape his family ties. Torn between his desire for independence and his abiding...

"The Best Hospitals provides individuals and families with information they need to make informed decisions when they or loved ones face a serious illness. This best-selling guidebook includes a wealth of good reads about cutting-edge health trends and medical advances. Discover the top medical centers for adults and children in specialties from cancer and cardiology to pulmonology and orthopedics. Also, check out the best hospitals in your state."...

"Close to 50 percent of marriages in America fail, leading to about 1.5 million divorces a year. But for Suzanne Riss and Jill Sockwell, who've been there and done that, there's no comfort in statics, only community. Community is the one thing that can turn the shattering experience of divorce into a tolerable one-and, finally, a positive one. And community is what the authors offer in their inspiring and brilliantly helpful book, The Optimist's Guide...

Mara Tagarelli is, professionally, the head of a multimillion-dollar AIDS foundation; personally, she is a committed martial artist. But her life has turned inside out like a sock. She can't rely on family, her body is letting her down, and friends and colleagues are turning away--they treat her like a victim. She needs to break that narrative: build her own community, learn new strengths, and fight. But what do you do when you find out that the story...

"When a county initiative in the Piedmont of North Carolina forces the students at a mostly black public school on the east side to move across town to a nearly all-white high school on the west, the community rises in outrage. For two students, quiet and aloof Gee and headstrong Noelle, these divisions will extend far beyond their schooling. As their paths collide and overlap over the course of thirty years, their two seemingly disconnected families...

"Wendell Berry has never been afraid to speak up for the dispossessed. The Need to Be Whole continues the work he began in The Hidden Wound (1970) and The Unsettling of America (1977), demanding a careful exploration of this hard, shared truth: The wealth of the mighty few governing this nation has been built on the unpaid labor of others. Without historical understanding of this practice of dispossession--the displacement of Native peoples, the...

A stunning 11-part series that captures rare action, impossible locations, and intimate moments with our planet's best-loved, wildest, and most elusive creatures.

"Despite dire predictions in the late twentieth century that public libraries would not survive the turn of the millennium, their numbers have only increased. Two of three Americans frequent a public library at least once a year, and nearly that many are registered borrowers. Although library authorities have argued that the public library functions primarily as a civic institution necessary for maintaining democracy, generations of library patrons...