Carol Henderson tells the spellbinding story of how her one-day writing workshop for bereaved mothers turned into an ongoing journey of self-discovery and healing for 13 women who had lost children. Each woman brought to the group a powerful story of loss and bereavement, and each discovered the sustaining power of reflective writing. The women's stories, harrowing and poignant, are rendered both by Henderson and by the women themselves--the book includes generous portions of their own writing. Farther Along is at once the history of an evolving writers group, and a detailed guide for group leaders and facilitators who are interested in using writing as a tool for healing.

Jonathan Franzen's Freedom was the runaway most-discussed novel of 2010, an ambitious and searching engagement with life in America in the twenty-first century. In The New York Times Book Review, Sam Tanenhaus proclaimed it "a masterpiece of American fiction" and lauded its illumination, "through the steady radiance of its author's profound moral intelligence, [of] the world we thought we knew." In Farther Away, which gathers together essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, Franzen returns with renewed vigor to the themes, both human and literary, that have long preoccupied him. Whether recounting his violent encounter with bird poachers in Cyprus, examining his mixed feelings about the suicide of his friend and rival David Foster Wallace, or offering a moving and witty take on the ways that technology has changed how people express their love, these pieces deliver on Franzen's implicit promise to conceal nothing. On a trip to China to see first-hand the environmental devastation there, he doesn't omit mention of his excitement and awe at the pace of China's economic development; the trip becomes a journey out of his own prejudice and moral condemnation. Taken together, these essays trace the progress of unique and mature mind wrestling with itself, with literature, and with some of the most important issues of our day. Farther Away is remarkable, provocative, and necessary.

The book traces the progenitors of the Harlan County, Kentucky, Cobb, Pope, and Ball families from their known North American origins in colonial Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina to their eventual settlement in eastern Tennessee, western Virginia, and southeastern Kentucky. Substantial national, state, and local history is included in the narrative for the purpose of setting the people discussed in the context of their times. Issues such as the Methodist Church and the slavery issue, and Kentucky and the secession crisis are considered, as is Harlan County and the Civil War. Much attention is given to Harlan County's political history, from its Democratic-Whig beginnings to the Radical Republicanism of the Reconstruction Era (1865-1877. The narrative ends about 1900. Roughly 100 of the 500 pages of the book are exhibits.

The author, a white, Jewish Northerner, recounts how he became involved in the Civil Rights movement

He wants to get away from it all. Despite a satisfying career as chief curator of a museum devoted to the vanished American past, he finds he himself wants to vanish. So with the help of a book on the life and culture of a vanished tribe of Indians known as Bluff-dwellers, he takes up residence in the wilderness of the Ozark mountains, with only a dog for company and only an atlatl--a primitive spear thrower--to provide him with his supper. His few amusements are the playing of tunes on a hair-comb-and-tissue and writing what he intends to be an indictment of modern civilization in his journals. He makes the acquaintance of a young moonshiner who keeps him supplied abundantly with corn liquor. But after six years of this life he realizes that what he is trying to get away from is himself.

The honest and compelling narrative about a naive mother whose carefully constructed life unravels when her infant son dies from devastating illness discusses emotional devastation and recovery, family taboos, and a newfound sense of self.

The original The Road Less Travelledspent more than ten years on the bestseller lists and is one of the biggest-selling self-help books of all time. In this wonderfully wise and accessible sequel M. Scott Peck delves more deeply into the issues that confront and challenge all of us in the modern world: blame and forgiveness; sexuality and spirituality; death and the meaning of life; families and relationships; accepting responsibility and growing up. Writing throughout with insight and sensitivity, he draws on his own extensive experience -- both professional and personal -- to challenge false assumptions, suggest a way forward and demonstrate that personal change is always possible, no matter how difficult and complex the journey.