" This book is both spiritual and savage. This book makes you believe in immortality." - Kalki Koechlin December 1970, midnight. In a deserted Munich suburb, at a dismal bus stop, a young rebel shivers under a driving sleet. His long hair gathers icicles while he ponders: should he burn his bridges and flee impending prison time? As the bus appears out of the swirling mist and stops, he shakes off any lingering self-doubt and steps in. Little does he know he is embarking on an adventure far more demanding than his free spirit can imagine. It is the start of a journey that will take him half-way round the globe to distant India and the most remote reaches of the Himalayas. Embracing the life of a spiritual mendicant, he is forced into choices he never knew himself capable of, as he plunges headlong into a Quest that began centuries ago, and may find its conclusion in a far-off, uncharted future. Only when he confronts the spectre of violent death, will he understand that all his life experiences must be integrated into one rich, all-encompassing Sweep of Existence that stretches infinitely across the ages, in an unstoppable ascent of perpetual evolution. Experience the spiritual journey of Lionel across space and time in this literary fiction by Joel Koechlin.

A broad study of the Chicano/a movement in the Viet Nam War era.

1970. Fourteen year old Tony is seduced by the skinhead movement, sucked into a world of racist violence and bizarre ritual. It is a milieu in which he must hide his homosexuality, in which every encounter is explosively risky. 2003. James a young TV researcher becomes obsessed with the Neo Nazis and British Movement activist Nicky Crane in particular. As he becomes immersed in research, he begins to receive threatening phone calls. Two different worlds, two different eras but two lives that will ultimately and unforgettably collide.

On the Boston Common stands one of the great Civil War memorials, a magnificent bronze sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. It depicts the black soldiers of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry marching alongside their young white commander, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. When the philosopher William James dedicated the memorial in May 1897, he stirred the assembled crowd with these words: "There they march, warm-blooded champions of a better day for man. There on horseback among them, in the very habit as he lived, sits the blue-eyed child of fortune." In this book Shaw speaks for himself with equal eloquence through nearly two hundred letters he wrote to his family and friends during the Civil War. The portrait that emerges is of a man more divided and complex--though no less heroic--than the Shaw depicted in the celebrated film Glory. The pampered son of wealthy Boston abolitionists, Shaw was no abolitionist himself, but he was among the first patriots to respond to Lincoln's call for troops after the attack on Fort Sumter. After Cedar Mountain and Antietam, Shaw knew the carnage of war firsthand. Describing nightfall on the Antietam battlefield, he wrote, "the crickets chirped, and the frogs croaked, just as if nothing unusual had happened all day long, and presently the stars came out bright, and we lay down among the dead, and slept soundly until daylight. There were twenty dead bodies within a rod of me." When Federal war aims shifted from an emphasis on restoring the Union to the higher goal of emancipation for four million slaves, Shaw's mother pressured her son into accepting the command of the North's vanguard black regiment, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts. A paternalist who never fully reconciled his own prejudices about black inferiority, Shaw assumed the command with great reluctance. Yet, as he trained his recruits in Readville, Massachusetts, during the early months of 1963, he came to respect their pluck and dedication. "There is not the least doubt," he wrote his mother, "that we shall leave the state, with as good a regiment, as any that has marched." Despite such expressions of confidence, Shaw in fact continued to worry about how well his troops would perform under fire. The ultimate test came in South Carolina in July 1863, when the Fifty-fourth led a brave but ill-fated charge on Fort Wagner, at the approach to Charleston Harbor. As Shaw waved his sword and urged his men forward, an enemy bullet felled him on the fort's parapet. A few hours later the Confederates dumped his body into a mass grave with the bodies of twenty of his men. Although the assault was a failure from a military standpoint, it proved the proposition to which Shaw had reluctantly dedicated himself when he took command of the Fifty-fourth: that black soldiers could indeed be fighting men. By year's end, sixty new black regiments were being organized. A previous selection of Shaw's correspondence was privately published by his family in 1864. For this volume, Russell Duncan has restored many passages omitted from the earlier edition and has provided detailed explanatory notes to the letters. In addition he has written a lengthy biographical essay that places the young colonel and his regiment in historical context.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Once in a great while, a book comes along that changes our view of the world. This magnificent novel from the Nobel laureate and author of Never Let Me Go is “an intriguing take on how artificial intelligence might play a role in our futures ... a poignant meditation on love and loneliness” (The Associated Press). • A GOOD MORNING AMERICA Book Club Pick! Here is the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who, from her place in the store, watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass on the street outside. She remains hopeful that a customer will soon choose her. Klara and the Sun is a thrilling book that offers a look at our changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator, and one that explores the fundamental question: what does it mean to love?

From renowned fantasy author of the Old Kingdom series, Garth Nix, comes a dystopian fantasy perfect for fans of Hunger Games and Divergent. Imagine a world where your fourteenth birthday is your last and where even your protector may not be trusted…. In a futuristic urban wasteland, evil Overlords have decreed that no human shall live a day past their fourteenth birthday. On that Sad Birthday, the children of the Dorms are taken to the Meat Factory, where they will be made into creatures whose sole purpose is to kill. The mysterious Shade—once a man, but now more like the machines he fights—recruits the few teenagers who escape into a secret resistance force. With luck, cunning, and skill, four of Shade's children come closer than any to discovering the source of the Overlords' power—and the key to their downfall. But the closer they get, the more ruthless Shade seems to become.