A young boy asks his grandfather questions about life and nature, and gets some humorous answers.

Alien is the star controller for the entire galaxy, but one night something disastrous happens, and he faces the biggest problem of his life.

When celebrated neuropsychologist Paul Broks's wife died of cancer, it sparked a journey of grief and reflection that traced a lifelong attempt to understand how the brain gives rise to the soul. The result of that journey is a gorgeous, evocative meditation on fate, death, consciousness, and what it means to be human. The Darker the Night, The Brighter the Stars weaves a scientist’s understanding of the mind – its logic, its nuance, how we think about what makes a person – with a poet’s approach to humanity, that crucial and ever-elusive why. It’s a story that unfolds through the centuries, along the path of humankind’s constant quest to discover what makes us human, and the answers that consistently slip out of our grasp. It’s modern medicine and psychology and ancient tales; history and myth combined; fiction and the stranger truth. But, most importantly, it’s Broks’ story, grounded in his own most fascinating cases as a clinician—patients with brain injuries that revealed something fundamental about the link between the raw stuff of our bodies and brains and the ineffable selves we take for who we are. Tracing a loose arc of loss, acceptance, and renewal, he unfolds striking, imaginative stories of everything from Schopenhauer to the Greek philosophers to jazz guitarist Pat Martino in order to sketch a multifaceted view of humanness that is as heartbreaking at it is affirming.

A family saga--told in a captivating narrative that leaps forwards and backwards in time--of one family's struggle to survive in the rural United States over 100 years. Carol was thirteen when her daddy lost her in a game of cards. One year later--pregnant and with nowhere to go--she is taken in by Bessie and Martha, who run a secret refuge for "lost women." Fifty years on in the same small Kentucky town, Carol's thirteen-year-old grandson rides his BMX and watches wrestling, mesmerized by 1980s excess, while his community fights to stay employed in factories and on farms. Simon Van Booy has woven the many struggles and small triumphs of three generations of a single Kentucky family into an intimate portrayal of American life that includes the Depression, war, faith, the hardship of women, racial prejudice, and rural disenfranchisement. Van Booy captures the distinctive voices of each generation, time and again revealing the sacred bonds of family and friendship in times of crisis. With stark, poetic clarity, Night Came with Many Stars is a captivating journey through one century that reveals an America rarely seen.

A book of twelve star-gazing activities, one for each month of the year.

The bonds of family are tested in the wake of a profound tragedy, providing a look at the darker side of our society

Hollywood 1942. When attorney Audra Schaeffer's sister disappears, Audra flies to Hollywood to find her but instead must identify her body. Determined to bring the killer to justice, Audra takes a job with the second Hollywood Victory Caravan. Together with Robert Garfield and other stars, she crisscrosses the southern United States in a campaign to sell war bonds. When two other women are found dead on the train, Audra knows the deaths are tied to that of her sister. Could the killer be the man with whom she's falling in love?