Seventh-grader Jesse Baron not only misses his father, a popular professional wrestler who is often on the road, he faces simple family outings that turn into fan-frenzy events, teachers who contrive excuses for parent-teacher conferences, and friendships that are all suspect.
Seventeen-year-old high school senior Cameryn Mahoney uses skills learned as assistant to her coroner father to try to unravel the mystery of a local teacher's gruesome death, while also awaiting a possible reunion with her long-missing mother.
Ronald Reagan's political career and his status as a cultural icon have been observed from every angle, but his role as a father to his daughter has been seen only in the harsh light of Patti's well-publicized tensions with Nancy Reagan. But now Patti Davis has reconciled with her mother and the catalyst was Angels Don't Die. In fact, her parents were so touched by the book they have contributed introductory comments. Angels Don't Die is a moving tribute to Ronald Reagan's spiritual strength and offers an intimate portrait that will appeal to people everywhere who admire the Reagans as well as to anyone contending with the challenges of parent-child relationships. Putting aside past hurts and misunderstandings, Patti Davis writes lyrically of the lessons she learned from watching her father cope with the various crises in his life. She writes of his forgiveness of John Hinckley, Reagan's would-be assassin, and of his near-death experience following surgery. She reveals Ronald Reagan to be a simple, quietly heroic man whose faith in God has never wavered.
After losing her daughter Charlotte to a rare genetic disorder, life for Sukey Forbes is completely shattered. As devastated as she is, Forbes searches for ways to deal with her grief. She wants desperately to recover a full, meaningful life on the private island of Naushon where she and her family live. Forbes begins exploring her family's rich history of spiritual seekers, including her great-great-great grandfather, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who similarly lost a young child.
In this "raucous, moving, and necessary" story by a Pulitzer Prize finalist (San Francisco Chronicle), the De La Cruzes, a family on the Mexican-American border, celebrate two of their most beloved relatives during a joyous and bittersweet weekend. "All we do, mija, is love. Love is the answer. Nothing stops it. Not borders. Not death." In his final days, beloved and ailing patriarch Miguel Angel de La Cruz, affectionately called Big Angel, has summoned his entire clan for one last legendary birthday party. But as the party approaches, his mother, nearly one hundred, dies, transforming the weekend into a farewell doubleheader. Among the guests is Big Angel's half brother, known as Little Angel, who must reckon with the truth that although he shares a father with his siblings, he has not, as a half gringo, shared a life. Across two bittersweet days in their San Diego neighborhood, the revelers mingle among the palm trees and cacti, celebrating the lives of Big Angel and his mother, and recounting the many inspiring tales that have passed into family lore, the acts both ordinary and heroic that brought these citizens to a fraught and sublime country and allowed them to flourish in the land they have come to call home. Teeming with brilliance and humor, authentic at every turn, The House of Broken Angels is Luis Alberto Urrea at his best, and cements his reputation as a storyteller of the first rank. "Epic . . . Rambunctious . . . Highly entertaining." -- New York Times Book Review"Intimate and touching . . . the stuff of legend." -- San Francisco Chronicle"An immensely charming and moving tale." -- Boston GlobeNational Bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award finalistA New York Times Notable BookOne of the Best Books of the Year from National Public Radio, American Library Association, San Francisco Chronicle, BookPage, Newsday, BuzzFeed, Kirkus, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Literary Hub
On the payroll as an assistant to her coroner father, seventeen-year-old Cameryn Mahoney uses her knowledge of forensic medicine to catch the killer of a friend while putting herself in terrible danger.
In this novel, the narrator greets nay, welcomes readers into a world of the absurd, with boundaries of neither space nor time. Barely do we arrive at the Crusades’ bloodbath when a zeppelin circles about Renaissance Florence’s Arno, and before we can catch our breath, Cologne is reduced to rubble through Allied bombardment. Next we find ourselves in fin-de-siecle Vienna sharing an espresso with Freud. According to the narrator’s father, appropriately unnamed and unnameable, historical time is a flow of events endlessly repeating themselves, where what is true one moment is false the next, what once beautiful now hideous. Everything is both earthly serious and airy as life itself. Put another way, true survival consists in this: trust nothing and no one, yet love everything and everyone. This the narrator’s father achieves to perfection. He is the perpetual student unbound by place and time, who learned the art of love from Sappho, war from Napoleon (“call me Boni”) and climbed the steep scaffold with a refreshing drink for the hard working Michelangelo. In his many incarnations (learned from Merlin no doubt), father’s ongoing struggle is on behalf of the downtrodden and against the obscenely powerful. The history of the world itself is too short to fully contain such an individual, just as it was too short to enfold Cervantes’ great Don.
Describes the life of Eva Mozes and her twin sister Miriam as they were interred at the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust, where Dr. Josef Mengele performed sadistic medical experiments on them until their release.