AfterVero Leland discovered his true identity in book one, he must continue to maintain his life on earth as a regular 12-year-old kid, which is hard to do when you are really a fledgling, a guardian angel in training to become one of the fiercest of all angels. At any moment, he could be called to the Ether, the spiritual realm surrounding the earth, where he must face whatever trials come his way in angel school, aka C.A.N.D.L.E. (the Cathedral of Angels for Novice Development, Learning and Edification). In book two, part of Vero’s training involves the Angel Trials, a set of three challenges where he and his group of fellow fledglings compete with angels from other realms. But while he is competing in the Ether, back on earth his sister is in trouble. She has a new friend who is leading her down the wrong path. During the third trial, Vero realizes he must choose between saving his sister or winning his competition. But the attack on Clover is only a means to get to Vero, and he finds himself face-to-face with an evil even greater than what he experienced in the Bottomless Pit. Once again, he is tested beyond what any previous fledgling has endured, and how the battle ends will affect not only his grade in C.A.N.D.L.E., but also the fate of the world.

Acclaimed as one of the finest authors of historical novels today, Judith Tarr has crafted a daring and provocative new interpretation of a crucial turning point in human history. This powerful saga is an intimate account of the lives of men and women in the ancient Egyptian empire.

From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch, the second part of his epic trilogy on Martin Luther King, Jr. and the American Civil Rights Movement. In the second volume of his three-part history, a monumental trilogy that began with Parting the Waters, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Taylor Branch portrays the Civil Rights Movement at its zenith, recounting the climactic struggles as they commanded the national stage. Beginning with the Nation of Islam and conflict over racial separatism, Pillar of Fire takes the reader to Mississippi and Alabama: Birmingham, the murder of Medgar Evers, the "March on Washington," the Civil Rights Act, and voter registration drives. In 1964, King is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Branch's magnificent trilogy makes clear why the Civil Rights Movement, and indeed King's leadership, are among the nation's enduring achievements. In bringing these decades alive, preserving the integrity of those who marched and died, Branch gives us a crucial part of our history and heritage.

"Pillar of Fire" is classical space Sci-Fi short story written by the master of the genre, Ray Bradbury. Excerpt: "He came out of the earth, hating. Hate was his father; hate was his mother. It was good to walk again. It was good to leap up out of the earth, off of your back, and stretch your cramped arms violently and try to take a deep breath! He tried. He cried out."

At the birth of the United States, African Americans were excluded from the newly-formed Republic and its churches, which saw them as savage rather than citizen and as heathen rather than Christian. Denied civil access to the basic rights granted to others, African Americans have developed their own sacred traditions and their own civil discourses. As part of this effort, African American intellectuals offered interpretations of the Bible which were radically different and often fundamentally oppositional to those of many of their white counterparts. By imagining a freedom unconstrained, their work charted a broader and, perhaps, a more genuinely American identity. In Pillars of Cloud and Fire, Herbert Robinson Marbury offers a comprehensive survey of African American biblical interpretation. Each chapter in this compelling volume moves chronologically, from the antebellum period and the Civil War through to the Harlem Renaissance, the civil rights movement, the black power movement, and the Obama era, to offer a historical context for the interpretative activity of that time and to analyze its effect in transforming black social reality. For African American thinkers such as Absalom Jones, David Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Frances E. W. Harper, Adam Clayton Powell, and Martin Luther King, Jr., the exodus story became the language-world through which freedom both in its sacred resonance and its civil formation found expression. This tradition, Marbury argues, has much to teach us in a world where fundamentalisms have become synonymous with “authentic” religious expression and American identity. For African American biblical interpreters, to be American and to be Christian was always to be open and oriented toward freedom.