About the Book
Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty-level wages. Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them, inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that any job equals a better life. But how can anyone survive, let alone prosper, on six to seven dollars an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich moved from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, working as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing home aid and Wal-Mart salesperson. “Nickel and Dimed” reveals low-wage America in all its tenacity, anxiety and surprising generosity–a land of “big box” stores, fast food and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Acclaimed for its insight, humor and passion, “Nickel and Dimed” was on The New York Times bestseller list for nine weeks.
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About the Book
The unforgettable novel of childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it, “To Kill a Mockingbird” became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Putlizer prize in 1961 and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film, also a classic.
Compassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving, “To Kill a Mockingbird” takes readers to the roots of human behavior—to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humor and pathos. Now with over 15 million copies in print and translated into forty languages, this regional story by a young Alabama woman claims universal appeal. Harper Lee always considered her book to be a simple love story. Today it is regarded as a masterpiece of American literature.
–from To Kill A Mockingbird, Warner Books Edition
Set in the small Southern town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the Depression, "To Kill a Mockingbird" follows three years in the life of 8-year-old Scout Finch, her brother, Jem, and their father, Atticus–three years punctuated by the arrest and eventual trial of a young black man accused of raping a white woman. Though her story explores big themes, Harper Lee chooses to tell it through the eyes of a child. The result is a tough and tender novel of race, class, justice, and the pain of growing up.
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About The Book
“Plainsong” is a heartstrong story of family and romance, tribulation and tenacity, set on the High Plains east of Denver. In the small town of Holt, Colorado, a high school teacher is confronted with raising his two boys alone after their mother retreats first to the bedroom, then altogether. A teenage girl—her father long since disappeared, her mother unwilling to have her in the house—is pregnant and alone with nowhere to go. And out in the country, two brothers, elderly bachelors, work the family homestead, the only world they’ve ever known.
From these unsettled lives emerges a vision of life, and of the town and landscape that bind them together— their fates somehow overcoming the powerful circumstances of place and station, their confusion, curiosity, dignity and humor intact and resonant. As the milieu widens to embrace fully four generations, Kent Haruf displays an emotional and aesthetic authority to rival the past masters of a classic American tradition.
Utterly true to the rhythms and patterns of life, “Plainsong” is a novel to care about, believe in, and learn. –Random House
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