My Forbidden Face: Growing Up Under the Taliban: A Young Woman's Story


Latifa - 2001
    With painful honesty and clarity, Latifa describes her ordered world falling apart, in the name of a fanaticism that she could not comprehend, and replaced by a world where terror and oppression reigned.

The Snow Leopard


Peter Matthiessen - 1978
    This is a radiant and deeply moving account of a "true pilgrimage, a journey of the heart."

I'm Perfect, You're Doomed: Tales from a Jehovah's Witness Upbringing


Kyria Abrahams - 2009
    "Disfellowshipped" and exiled from the only world she’d ever known, Kyria realized that the only people who could save her were the very sinners she had prayed would be smitten by God’s wrath. Written with scorching wit and deep compassion, I’m Perfect, You’re Doomed manages to be hilarious about the ironic absurdity of growing up believing that nothing matters because everything’s about to be destroyed.

Expecting to See Jesus: A Wake-Up Call for God's People


Anne Graham Lotz - 2011
    And, she wants to make sure you and all other Christians are ready for that moment when your faith becomes sight.Anne knows from personal experience that it's in the busyness of our days, as we're drifting in comfortable complacency, that we most need a wake-up call--a jolt that pushes us to seek out a revival of our passion for Jesus that began as a blazing fire but somehow has died down to an ineffective glow.In Expecting to See Jesus, Anne points out the biblical signs she sees in the world all around us and shows how you can experience an authentic, deeper, richer relationship with God in a life-changing, fire-blazing revival.

The Seven Storey Mountain


Thomas Merton - 1948
    The Seven Storey Mountain tells of the growing restlessness of a brilliant and passionate young man, who at the age of twenty-six, takes vows in one of the most demanding Catholic orders—the Trappist monks. At the Abbey of Gethsemani, "the four walls of my new freedom," Thomas Merton struggles to withdraw from the world, but only after he has fully immersed himself in it. At the abbey, he wrote this extraordinary testament, a unique spiritual autobiography that has been recognized as one of the most influential religious works of our time. Translated into more than twenty languages, it has touched millions of lives.

Freefall to Fly: A Breathtaking Journey Toward a Life of Meaning


Rebekah Lyons - 2013
    In a female culture built on Photoshopped perfection and Pinterest fantasies, we've lost the ability to dream our own big dreams. So busy trying to do it all and have it all, we've missed the life we were really designed for. And we are paying the price. The rise of loneliness, depression, and anxiety among the female population in Western cultures is at an all-time high. Overall, women are two and a half times more likely to take antidepressants than men. What is it about our culture, the expectations, and our way of life that is breaking women down in unprecedented ways?In this vulnerable memoir of transformation, Rebekah Lyons shares her journey from Atlanta, Georgia, to the heart of Manhattan, where she found herself blindsided by crippling depression and anxiety. Overwhelmed by the pressure to be domestically efficient, professionally astute, and physically attractive, Rebekah finally realized that freedom can come only by facing our greatest fears and fully surrendering to God's call on our lives. This book is an invitation for all women to take that first step toward freedom. For it is only when we free-fall that we can truly fly.

Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People


Nadia Bolz-Weber - 2015
    But God keeps showing up in the least likely of people—a church-loving agnostic, a drag queen, a felonious Bishop and a gun-toting member of the NRA. As she lives and worships alongside these “ac­cidental saints,” Nadia is swept into first-hand en­counters with grace—a gift that feels to her less like being wrapped in a warm blanket and more like being hit with a blunt instrument. But by this grace, people are trans­formed in ways they couldn’t have been on their own. In a time when many have rightly become dis­illusioned with Christianity, Accidental Saints dem­onstrates what happens when ordinary people share bread and wine, struggle with scripture together, and tell each other the truth about their real lives. This unforgettable account of their faltering steps toward wholeness will ring true for believer and skeptic alike. Told in Nadia’s trademark confessional style, Accidental Saints is the stunning next work from one of today’s most important religious voices.From the Hardcover edition.

How to Talk Dirty and Influence People


Lenny Bruce - 1965
    This book and soon-to-be-released private tapes are sure to bring the extent of Bruce's influence into sharp focus. Photo insert.

Too Close to the Falls


Catherine Gildiner - 1999
    It is the mid-1950s in Lewiston, New York, a sleepy town near Niagara Falls. Divorce is unheard of, mothers wear high heels to the beauty salon, and television has only just arrived.At the tender age of four, Cathy accompanies Roy, the deliveryman at her father's pharmacy, on his routes. She shares some of their memorable deliveries-sleeping pills to Marilyn Monroe (in town filming Niagara), sedatives to Mad Bear, a violent Tuscarora chief, and fungus cream to Warty, the gentle operator of the town dump. As she reaches her teenage years, Cathy's irrepressible spirit spurs her from dangerous sled rides that take her "too close to the Falls" to tipsy dances with the town priest.

The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness


Simon Wiesenthal - 1969
    Haunted by the crimes in which he'd participated, the soldier wanted to confess to--& obtain absolution from--a Jew. Faced with the choice between compassion & justice, silence & truth, Wiesenthal said nothing. But even years after the war had ended, he wondered: Had he done the right thing? What would you have done in his place?In this important book, 53 distinguished men & women respond to Wiesenthal's questions. They are theologians, political leaders, writers, jurists, psychiatrists, human rights activists, Holocaust survivors & victims of attempted genocides in Bosnia, Cambodia, China & Tibet. Their responses, as varied as their experiences of the world, remind us that Wiesenthal's questions are not limited to events of the past. Often surprising, always thought provoking, The Sunflower will challenge you to define your beliefs about justice, compassion & responsibility.

No Longer a Slumdog: Bringing Hope to Children in Crisis


K.P. Yohannan - 2011
    Days turned into weeks, and my stomach would growl. He never gave me enough to eat,” said Nadish. “Weeks turned into months, and my body would ache. The work was hard, and there was never enough time to rest. Months turned into years, and I began to think that this would never end.”But through a miraculous event, Nadish found his way back into the loving embrace of his mother. Dr. K.P. Yohannan’s book, No Longer a Slumdog, unveils the true-life accounts of many of South Asia’s children, like Nadish. The message hits hard. He speaks of “winds of change” and a powerful move of God.The children’s stories tell of going from a life of heartache and poverty to finding joy, laughter and a bright future. Despite the affliction these children face, Yohannan shows us there’s opportunity for change as many find new life in God’s redeeming love.No Longer a Slumdog inspires faith that a better tomorrow is truly possible.

Rediscover Jesus: An Invitation


Matthew Kelly - 2015
    I don’t know Jesus anywhere near as well as I would like to know him. The desire is there, but life gets in the way. There are times when I seem to be making great progress, and other times when I wonder if I know him at all. But I always arrive back at the same inspiring and haunting idea: If there is one person that we should each get to know in a deeply personal way, it is Jesus – the carpenter from Nazareth, the itinerant preacher, the Son of God, the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, the Lamb of God, the new Adam, the Messiah, the Alpha and the Omega, the Chosen One, the Light of the World, the God-Man who wants good things for us more than we want them for ourselves, the healer of our souls.

No Compromise


Melody Green - 1989
    Who better to tell Keith Green's story than the woman who shared his life and mission?his wife, Melody. At the time Keith and two of their children were killed in a tragic plane crash, Melody was pregnant and had a one?year?old child at home. She inherited Keith's musical legacy of published and unpublished songs and his private journals, which she has put together in this extremely personal biography of Keith.

A Prayer for Orion: A Son's Addiction and a Mother's Love


Katherine James - 2020
    When Katherine James and her husband found out their son was using heroin, their responses ran the gamut: disbelief, anger, helplessness, guilt. As they struggled to come to grips with their son's addiction and decide how best to help him, their home became a refuge for an unlikely assortment of their son's friends, each with their own story, drawn by the simple love and acceptance they found there--"the Lost Boys," James calls them. In this sensitive, vulnerable memoir, award-winning novelist James turns her lush prose to a new purpose: to tell her family's story through the twists and turns of her son's addiction, overdose, and slow recovery. The result is not just a look at the phenomenon of drug abuse in suburban America, but also a meditation on the particular anguish of loving a wayward child and clinging to a desperate trust in God's providence through it all.

Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul


Tony Hendra - 2004
    Father Joe is Tony Hendra’s inspiring true story of finding faith, friendship, and family through the decades-long influence of a surpassingly wise Benedictine monk named Father Joseph Warrillow.Like everything human, it started with sex. In 1955, fourteen-year-old Tony found himself entangled with a married Catholic woman. In Cold War England, where Catholicism was the subject of news stories and Graham Greene bestsellers, Tony was whisked off by the woman’s husband to see a priest and be saved.Yet what he found was a far cry from the priests he’d known at Catholic school, where boys were beaten with belts or set upon by dogs. Instead, he met Father Joe, a gentle, stammering, ungainly Benedictine who never used the words “wrong” or “guilt,” who believed that God was in everyone and that “the only sin was selfishness.” During the next forty years, as his life and career drastically ebbed and flowed, Tony discovered that his visits to Father Joe remained the one constant in his life—the relationship that, in the most serious sense, saved it.From the fifties and his adolescent desire to join an abbey himself; to the sixties, when attending Cambridge and seeing the satire of Beyond the Fringe convinced him to change the world with laughter, not prayer; to the seventies and successful stints as an original editor of National Lampoon and a writer of Lemmings, the off-Broadway smash that introduced John Belushi and Chevy Chase; to professional disaster after co-creating the legendary English series Spitting Image; from drinking to drugs, from a failed first marriage to a successful second and the miracle of parenthood—the years only deepened Tony’s need for the wisdom of his other and more real father, creating a bond that could not be broken, even by death.A startling departure for this acclaimed satirist, Father Joe is a sincere account of how Tony Hendra learned to love. It’s the story of a whole generation looking for a way back from mockery and irony, looking for its own Father Joe, and a testament to one of the most charismatic mentors in modern literature.From the Hardcover edition.