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Recommended Reading

Fourteen-year-old Ishmael Leseur is certain that his name is the cause of his unhappy school life as the victim of the worst bully in his class, but when a new boy arrives, he shows Ishmael that things could be different.

In a heart-wrenching, candid autobiography, a human rights activist offers a firsthand account of war from the perspective of a former child soldier, detailing the violent civil war that wracked his native Sierra Leone and the government forces that transformed a gentle young boy into a killer as a member of the army.

Ex-secret agent Cotton Malone and his partner, the enigmatic Cassiopeia Vitt, are pitted against ruthless Central Asian dictator Irina Zovastina as they scour the globe in search of the final resting place of Alexander the Great, unaware that his grave holds the key to a deadly modern mystery that could save the lives of millions.

Chronicles the successful weight-loss story of a woman who relocated to another state and followed the Rice Diet, sharing health-bolstering recipes and candid discussions about such topics as eating binges, sex, and the role of denial in weight gain.

The devastating loss of their twin daughters in a flash flood turns the lives of Terry and Laura Sheldon upside down as their marriage is tested by grief, Terry’s brief love affair, and their growing relationship with their foster child, a ten-year-old African American boy.

Offered a coveted job to analyze and conserve a priceless Sarajevo Haggadah, Australian rare-book expert Hanna Heath discovers a series of tiny artifacts in the volume’s ancient binding that reveal its historically significant origins.

From its nineteenth-century origins to its rise to success via the mass-marketing of the banana as the original fast food and its links to the U.S. government, an account of the rise and fall of United Fruit Company shows how the corporation blazed the trail of global capitalism while documenting its devastating impact on Central America’s “banana republics.”

Offers up an alternative to chemical practices and delivers a program of natural hive management. Both novices and neo-pros receive tips on everything from genetics and breeding to pests and harvesting.

Dramatizes the events surrounding the May 7, 1965 collision between the Norwegian freighter Topdalsfiord and the American freighter Cedarville in Northern Lake Huron, the Coast Guard investigation into the tragedy, and the role played by U.S. Steel in attempting to manipulate the evidence.

Picking up her sixteen-year-old daughter Grace after a party, Deborah Monroe accepts responsibility for hitting a man with the car on the way home, even though Grace had been driving, a deception that takes on a life of its own, threatening their family and the bond between mother and daughter.

Murder comes to town when, during her business partner’s family reunion, a long-lost uncle is found dead with two slices of Hannah’s infamous carrot cake next to his body, a discovery that soon becomes a recipe for disaster.

Sent to medieval Cambridge in order to exonerate a group of Jewish prisoners with financial ties to King Henry I, University of Salerno medical examiner Adelia and a group of companions struggle to avoid being accused of witchcraft and discover that the killer may be a former crusader.

Inseparable best friends Kate and Tully, two young women who, despite their very different lives, have vowed to be there for each other forever, have been true to their promise for thirty years, until events and choices in their lives tear them apart.

Honoring the 150th anniversary of the first publication of the seminal medical text, a study that blends historical, medical, and scientific elements chronicles the work of anatomist Henry Gray and his collaborator, illustrator H. V. Carter.

In San Francisco in 1893 in search of a detective job, Gustav “Old Red” Amlingmeyer and his brother Otto, a.k.a. “Big Red,” devotees of the Sherlock Holmes method of “deducifying,” pursue an old acquaintance who takes a shot at them in Chinatown.

Two women born a generation apart witness the destruction of their home and family in wartorn Kabul, losses incurred over the course of thirty years that test the limits of their strength and courage.

Twenty years after a time capsule is buried under the front lawn of a small-town courthouse, the capsule is dug up and its contents stolen, an event that coincides with the murders of the contributors to the time capsule.

Brought together by a mutual fascination with pigeons, Louisa, a young chambermaid at the Hotel New Yorker, forms an unlikely friendship with the hotel’s most famous and unusual resident, eccentric and pioneering inventor Nikola Tesla, during his final days.

A portrait of Chris McCandless chronicles his decision to withdraw from society and adopt the persona of Alexander Supertramp, offering insight into his beliefs about the wilderness and his tragic death in the Alaskan wilderness.

When she stumbles across a waterlogged corpse while looking into a local legend about a diamond necklace lost in a nearby lake, part-time reporter Mira James is determined to solve the crime.

When her uncle takes her on a dream trip to the Antarctic wilderness, Sym’s obsession with Captain Oates and the doomed expedition becomes a reality as she herself is soon in a fight for her life in some of the harshest terrain on the planet.

After her grandfather commits suicide, Tamar inherits a box with a series of clues and coded messages, which leads her to another Tamar, a World War II British spy — a man involved in the terrifying world of resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied Holland some fifty years before.

In the aftermath of a horrific small-town school shooting, lawyer Jordan McAfee finds himself defending a youth who desperately needs someone on his side, while intrepid detective Patrick DuCharme works with a primary witness in the daughter of the superior court judge assigned to the case.

West Palm Beach paralegal, discount shopping queen, and slacker extraordinaire, Finley Anderson Tanner, discovers she has a knack for sleuthing when her boss forces her to help a client prove that her husband’s death was no accident, with the help of a sexy P.I.

Set during the 1967–1968 school year, Holling Hoodhood finds his seventh-grade year one filled with many challenges as he spends afternoons with Mrs. Baker discussing the plays of Shakespeare, defends his tasty cream puffs from a determined bully, and prepares for his big debut in the school play — all while the issue of Vietnam looms on a daily basis.

Recounts the story of a young sociologist whose infiltration of a Chicago drug gang was originally introduced in the work Freakonomics, describing the author’s idealism, his friendship with gang leader JT, and his witness to the organization’s crack-selling trade.

Draws on the author’s experiences as a foreign correspondent and reporter to evaluate more than three dozen countries for their happiness potential, in a lighthearted survey that includes profiles of such locales as the American shores, glacial Iceland, and the Bhutan jungles.