One of the top bobsledders in the world and leader of the four-man American team, Steven Holcomb had finished sixth in the 2006 Olympics and medaled in nearly every competition he entered. He was considered a strong gold contender for the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Winter Games. Talented, aggressive, and fearless, he was at the top of his game. But Steven Holcomb had a dangerous secret. Steven Holcomb was going blind. In the prime of his athletic career, he was diagnosed with keratoconus—a degenerative disease affecting 1 in 1,000 and leaving 1 in 4 totally blind without a cornea transplant. In the world of competitive sports, it was a dream killer. Not a sport for the timid, bobsledding speeds approach 100 miles per hour through a series of hairpin turns. Serious injuries—even deaths—can result. But Holcomb kept his secret from his coach, sled mates, and the public for months and continued to drive the legendary sled The Night Train. When he finally told his coach, Holcomb was led to a revolutionary treatment, later named the Holcomb C3-R. With his sight restored to 20/20, Holcomb became the first American in 50 years to win the International Bobsled and Skeleton Federation World Championship, and the first American bobsledder since 1948 to win the Olympic gold medal. With a foreword by Geoff Bodine, NASCAR champion and founder of the Bo-Dyn Bobsled Project, But Now I See is the intimate portrait of a man's pursuit of a dream, laced with humility and the faith to find a way when all seems hopeless. It's about knowing anything is possible and the gift of a second chance.

Once I Was Blind, But Now I See is a book written for all Christians, to give testimony to God's ever-present hand in our lives. For those who are outside the Christian faith, outside the Catholic Church, or simply feeling distant and questioning if God is really here, I believe this book will transform their lives. The book draws its readers into the same desire for communion with God and the Church, whichCharles Piccirilli has personally experienced. There is a great need for this type of personal testimony today, addressing the lack of hope in our culture, to which John Paul II said, "to show the faithful souls the unspeakable riches of the love of Christ."

Law professor Flagg contends that most white people associate race with skin pigment: the less someone has of the latter, the less they have of the former. Thinking they have no race therefore, they proclaim their decisions to be race-neutral when they actually reflect white race-specific norms that are invisible to them. She shows how the blindness translates into institutional racism in laws, and suggests some reforms. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Eight setups. Eight awkward dates. Eight things God tried to teach her along the way. (Some of which she’s still trying to figure out.) Stephanie Rische was starting to feel invisible. All around her, her friends were getting married, and she found herself decidedly alone. Stephanie couldn’t help but wonder if there was something broken in her—was she not pretty enough? Not fun enough? Not dateable enough (whatever that meant)? So she started praying in earnest for God to bring the right man into her life. And instead, He brought her matchmakers. Eight of them, to be precise. Beloved blogger Stephanie Rische debuts with this charming, vulnerable, and (who are we kidding?) often mortifying true story of a girl who tried really hard to find someone to fall in love with—even when she mostly just ended up falling flat on her face. But amid the most cringeworthy setups and awkward encounters, Stephanie found God’s grace and love meeting her there in ways she never could have imagined—once she opened her eyes to see.

The NIV is the world's best-selling modern translation, with over 150 million copies in print since its first full publication in 1978. This highly accurate and smooth-reading version of the Bible in modern English has the largest library of printed and electronic support material of any modern translation.

The term “conversion narrative” usually refers to a particular form of expression that arose in Puritan New England in the seventeenth century. In that sense—the purely religious—the conversion narrative belongs to a rather remote history. But in this lucid, pathbreaking work, Fred Hobson uses the expression in another sense—in the realm of the secular—to describe a much more recent phenomenon, one originating in the American South and marking a new mode of southern self-expression not seen until the 1940s. Hobson applies the term “racial conversion narrative” to several autobiographies or works of highly personal social commentary by Lillian Smith, James McBride Dabbs, Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, Sarah Patton Boyle, Will Campbell, Larry L. King, Willie Morris, Pat Watters, and other southerners, books written between the mid-1940s and the late 1970s in which the authors—all products of and willing participants in a harsh, segregated society—confess racial wrongdoings and are “converted,” in varying degrees, from racism to something approaching racial enlightenment. Indeed, the language of many of these works is, Hobson points out, the language of religious conversion—“sin,” “guilt,” “blindness,” “seeing the light,” “repentance,” “redemption,” and so forth. Hobson also looks at recent autobiographical volumes by Ellen Douglas, Elizabeth Spencer, and Rick Bragg to show how the medium persists, if in a somewhat different form, even at the very end of the twentieth century. But Now I See is a study both of this particular variety of the southern impulse to self-examination and of those who seem to have retained the habit of seeking redemption, even if of a secular variety. Departing from the old vertical southern religion—salvation-centered with heaven as its goal—these racial converts embrace a horizontal religion which holds that getting right with man is at least as important as getting right with God. A refreshingly original treatment of racial change in the South, Hobson’s provocative work introduces a new subgenre in the field of southern literature. Anyone interested in the history and literature of the American South will be fascinated by this searching volume.