"In his author's note to this book, Rob Bell asks rhetorically, "The Jesus story is the best story ever, isn't it?" Then he continues: "Velvet Elvis is about being caught up in this story so much that you're willing to give everything to it and orient your entire life around it, because you can't imagine anything better." This unconventional book is a call to faith for people who, in the words of the author, "are fascinated with Jesus, but can't do the standard Christian package..."

"The Death of a Pope by the highly acclaimed British writer Read is a novel of intrigue, church espionage, and an attempt to destroy the longest continuous government in the world-the Papacy.  A priest who seems to be the model of compassion for the poor is accused of terrorist activities. His worldwide charitable outreach is suspected of..."

"From the author of Mad Girls in Love comes this lively multigenerational tale of six charming, unforgettable Southern women — a novel of love and laughter, pain and redemption.  Though she was born in Tennessee, Miss Gussie is no country fool. A woman who can handle any situation, she has her hands full with two headstrong daughters who happen to be complete opposites..."

"President Obama is so 'distracted by his vice president's indiscipline' that he has been forced to rebuke privately Vice President Joe Biden, according to a new book by Newsweek journalist Richard Wolffe, who interviewed Obama a dozen times.  'He can't keep his mouth shut,' Wolffe quotes a 'senior Obama aide' as saying of the gaffe-prone Biden in Renegade: The Making of a President, set for release June 2."

"Legendary FBI undercover agent Thomas McShane is one of the world's foremost authorities on the billion-dollar art theft business, and here he presents a unique memoir that provides a thrilling ride through the underworld of stolen art and historical artifacts..."

"Set sail to the heart of adventure with cabin boy, Jim Hawkins, aboard the legendary scoundrel, Captain Long John Silver. A secret treasure map becomes the key to heart-pounding thrills, danger and swashbuckling action as a boy faces the high seas and the grandest pirate of all in the adventure of a life time..."

"Great cooking goes beyond following a recipe--it's knowing how to season ingredients to coax the greatest possible flavor from them. Drawing on dozens of leading chefs' combined experience in top restaurants across the country, Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg present the definitive guide to creating "deliciousness" in any dish..."

"This is the story of wunderkind physicist Jan Hendrik Schön who faked the discovery of a new superconductor made from plastic. A star researcher at the world-renowned Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, he claimed to have stumbled across a powerful method for making carbon-based crystals into transistors, the switches found on computer chips. Had his experiments worked..."

"Allow yourself to be drawn into a fantasy world like no other…where a beautiful princess is seduced into a love triangle with a handsome prince and her winsome maid…where a mysterious gentleman's young bride is deliciously disciplined for her unchecked curiosity…where a naive daughter is married off to a beast of a man whose carnal appetites awaken..."

"Alva Noë is one of a new breed—part philosopher, part cognitive scientist, part neuroscientist—who are radically altering the study of consciousness by asking difficult questions and pointing out obvious flaws in the current science. In Out of Our Heads, he restates and reexamines the problem of consciousness, and then proposes a startling solution..."

"[O]n booksellers’ shelves there is no shortage of machine-oriented picture books, but what makes William Low’s contribution a standout is his skillful matching of dramatic oil paintings with fine-tuned, age-appropriate, gently surprising text..."

"Cross Academy is attended by two groups of students: the Day Class and the Night Class. At twilight, when the students of the Day Class return to their dorm, they cross paths with the Night Class on their way to school. Yuki Cross and Zero Kiryu are the Guardians of the school, protecting the Day Class from the Academy's dark secret: the Night Class is full of..."

"Father Dietrich is the village priest of Eifelheim, in the year 1348, when the Black Death is gathering strength but is still not nearby. Dietrich is an educated man, and to his astonishment becomes the first contact person between humanity and an alien race from a distant star, when their ship crashes in..."

"One of the most popular Fortune articles in many years was a cover story called "What It Takes to Be Great." Geoff Colvin offered new evidence that top performers in any field--from Tiger Woods and Winston Churchill to Warren Buffett and Jack Welch--are not determined by their inborn talents. Greatness doesn't come from DNA but from practice and perseverance honed over decades..."

"With a combination of hard-SF concepts, tight plotting, and appealing characters, Vinge tells a now-classic story of the Few triumphing over the Many. The Peace Authority, wielding a new state-of-the-art weapon, takes over the world, and claims to be..."

"From award-winning Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett, who enraged Wall Street leaders with her newsbreaking warnings of a crisis more than a year ahead of the curve, Fool's Gold tells the astonishing unknown story at the heart of the 2008 meltdown."

"A puzzling case of roboticide sends New York Detective Elijah Baley on an intense search for a murderer. But can anything prepare a simple Earthman for the psychological complexities of a world where a beautiful woman can easily have fallen in love with an all-too-human robot?"

"A big city garbage truck makes its rounds, consuming everything from apple cores and banana peels to leftover ziti with zucchini."

"In his new novel, Lethem blends elements as diverse as John Ford's classic Western "The Searchers" and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita in an utterly unique way. The heroine is fourteen-year-old Pella Marsh, whose mother dies just before her family flees a post-apocalyptic Brooklyn for the frontier of a recently discovered planet. Hating her ineffectual..."

"In this highly entertaining book, Lawrence Weschler chronicles the antics of J. S. G. Boggs, an artist whose consuming passion is money, or perhaps more precisely, value. Boggs draws money-paper notes in standard currencies from all over the world-and tries to spend his drawings. It is a practice that regularly lands him in trouble with treasury police around the globe and provokes fundamental questions regarding the value of art and the value of money..."

"Jean Clocker is conceived by her mother Wisteria only as a means to entrap a damaged First World War veteran into marriage. Having achieved wedlock but failed in her plan to rid herself of the now-redundant snare, Wisteria visits maternal tyranny on Jean with enthusiasm and diabolical skill. Born of rage and envy, into a body as epic as the life she will live, Jean spends her early years avoiding her mother's blows and striving to make herself just a little less extraordinary. She is finally released from servitude in the..."

"It's been eighty-five years since Yankee Stadium opened. Soon the Yankees will leave the field, fans will file out and the lights will fade. But the lights will never go out on the Stadium that has proudly worn the moniker 'The House That Ruth Built'."

"George Miksch Sutton is one of the best known and most beloved bird artists of the twentieth century. This marvelous book presents thirty-five paintings of downy chicks, nestlings, and fledglings painted from life by Sutton. The exquisite watercolors, housed in the Field Museum of Natural History, span three decades and depict nineteen species of North American birds. Many of the paintings are reproduced here for the first time."

"With The Reserve, Banks has again transported us to his local wilderness, only this time he has added the trappings of historical fiction.  Set in the 1930s at an elite mountain sanctuary where wealthy New Yorkers come to play rugged, The Reserve exploits the theatricality promised by this backdrop from the outset. Banks opens with a beautiful, elegant woman slipping away from a party to take in the rustic sunset..."

"A mother bird leaves her egg in the nest to go look for some food. While she's gone, the egg hatches, and the baby bird sets off to find his mother - but he doesn't know what she looks like. His search leads him to ask a variety of animals and machines, "Are you my mother?" Finally, a crane..."

"Long before Saddam Hussein became a household name and the alleged presence of "weapons of mass destruction" became the center of a national debate, we now know with certainty that the former Iraqi dictator was perilously close to manufacturing nuclear weapons as far back as the early 1980s. If it wasn't for the bold and, at the time, controversial 1981 military strike by the Israeli air force on a nuclear reactor outside Baghdad, the balance of power in the Middle East might look significantly different than it does today."

"One evening Harold decided to go for a walk in the moonlight. But there wasn't any moon, and Harold needed a moon for a walk in the moonlight. Fortunately, he had brought his purple crayon. So he drew a moon. He also needed something to walk on. So he drew a path..."

"Alexandra Fuller returns with the unforgettable true story of Colton H. Bryant, a soulful boy with a mustang-taming heart who comes of age in the oil fields and open plains of Wyoming. After surviving a sometimes cruel adolescence with his own brand of optimistic goofiness, Colton goes to work on an oil rig—and there the biggest heart in the world can't save him from the new, unkind greed that has possessed his beloved Wyoming during the latest boom."

"The echoes of a murder reach deep into the halls of the U.S. Supreme Court in this electrifying new thriller featuring defense attorney Paul Madriani from New York Times bestselling author Steve Martini.   Terry Scarborough is a legal scholar and provocateur who craves headline-making celebrity, but with his latest book he may have gone too far."

"In April of 1846, Sarah Graves was twenty-one and in love with a young man who played the violin. But she was torn. Her mother, father, and eight siblings were about to disappear over the western horizon forever, bound for California. Sarah could not bear to see them go out of her life, and so days before the planned departure she married the young man with the violin, and..."

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains." So begins Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an expanded edition of the beloved Jane Austen novel featuring all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem. As our story opens, a mysterious plague ..."

"Armed with recent medical evidence that supports the cliche that older people are, indeed, wiser, Alford sets off to interview people over 70 - some famous (Phyllis Diller, Harold Bloom, Edward Albee), some accomplished (the world's most-quoted author, a woman who walked across the country at age 89 in support of campaign finance reform), some unusual..."

"The Known World tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia. Making certain he never circumvents the law, Townsend runs his affairs with unusual discipline. But when death takes him..."

"Despite its title, this book is not a guide to building a model of a dinosaur. MacArthur Award–winning paleontologist Jack Horner is interested in growing a living, breathing T. rex from a manipulated chicken embryo. In How to Build a Dinosaur, he explains the science and reasoning behind this ambitious project and describes what it will tell us about the history of evolution."

"What I Loved begins in New York in 1975, when art historian Leo Hertzberg discovers an extraordinary painting by an unknown artist in a SoHo gallery. He buys the work; tracks down the artist, Bill Wechsler; and the two men embark on a life-long friendship. Leo's story, which spans twenty-five years, follows the growing involvement between his family and Bill's--an intricate constellation of attachments that includes the two men, their wives, Erica..."

"On a clear spring day in 1955, Air Force pilot Willingham was flying an F-86 fighter jet across West Texas when he saw an object streak past him and then execute a 90-degree turn going 2,000 miles per hour. Giving chase in his jet, the decorated World War II and Korean War veteran watched in awe as the UFO suddenly plummeted to Earth near Del Rio, Texas."

"What if apes had their own culture rather than one their human observers imposed on them? What if they reacted to situations with behavior learned through observation of their elders (culture) rather than with pure genetically coded instinct (nature)? Contemplating such a possibility is bound to shake centuries-old cultural convictions..."

"Among the best books ever written on professional basketball."

" 'All life in all worlds' -this was the object of the author's seventeen-year quest for knowledge and discovery, culminating in this book. In a manner unmistakably his own, Murchie delves into the interconnectedness of all life on the planet and of such fields as biology, geology, sociology, mathematics, and physics. He offers us what the poet May Sarton has called "a good book to take to a desert island as sole companion, so rich is it in knowledge and insight."

"A decorated troop commander in the Persian Gulf War and former history teacher at the United States Military Academy, Major H.R. McMaster, Ph.D., has written a new book that unearths disturbing new evidence concerning the Vietnam conflict. It deftly proves how America's top leaders in the 1960s..."

"Twenty-five years ago, Joe Haldeman became an instant presence in the science fiction field with the publication of The Forever War, which went on to win both the Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novel. The Forever War is an ingenious, complex account of soldiers whose lives have been brutally disrupted by the combined effects of relativity and interstellar war. It has remained in print continuously since its initial appearance..."

"Trust me or die…That’s the choice Morgan Kingsley, exorcist, is given by the gorgeous rogue demon who’s gotten inside her. The truth is, Morgan has dozens of reasons not to trust anyone, from the violence that torched her house and killed her father to a love life that’s left her questioning her relationship with her erstwhile boyfriend, Brian. But Lugh, a king among demons, won’t take..."

"Nobody Owens, known to his friends as Bod, is a normal boy.  He would be completely normal if he didn't live in a sprawling graveyard, being raised and educated by ghosts, with a solitary guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor of the dead..."

"Working was a forum for Americans to talk about what it’s like to earn a living in the workaday world. This musical version retains the book’s rhythm and spirit."  And the best part was, Mr. Wonderful was in the musical as 'The Mason', the only non-singing part, for when I sang, the director grimaced.

"Thousands of children have learned to read with Richard Scarry’s busy, colorful, generous books. But Scarry has done more than help kids read. With their bright illustrations, simple text, and gentle lessons on sharing and tolerance, Scarry's stories have also helped kids grow up and relate to people around them."

"At the start of this taut crime novel from Shamus Award — winner Ure (The Fault Tree), Jessie Dancing, an operator for a roadside emergency service in Phoenix, Ariz., receives a call from a driver in Tucson, Darren Markson, who sounds as if he's being murdered. Not content to merely contact the local police, Jessie tracks down Markson's family and is surprised when his wife tells her he's still alive. Back in her hometown of Tucson, Jessie's past returns to haunt her, including..."

"At the height of the roaring ’20s, Swedish émigré Ivar Kreuger made a fortune raising money in America and loaning it to Europe in exchange for matchstick monopolies. His enterprise was a rare success story throughout the Great Depression.  Yet after Kreuger’s suicide in 1932, the true nature of his empire emerged. Driven by success to adopt ever-more perilous practices, Kreuger had turned to shell companies in..."

"J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2009--the nation's all-time top-selling tax guide--is a proven, accessible resource with important strategies, useful recommendations and of course, all the latest tax law changes. With over 39 million copies sold, Your Income Tax 2009 is the #1 choice for taxpayers around the country."

"One of my favorite moments in Wells Tower's debut collection of short stories does not concern any of his human characters at all. It comes right after a family dinner in a Manhattan restaurant has gone horribly wrong, in the way things do when people bound to each other through years of ill will and forced intimacy are confined to a small public space in which they have no choice but to act out major battles under the constraint of public decorum. A group of men stands..."

"In a world that celebrates live journalism, we are increasingly in need of big-picture authors like Jared Diamond, who think historically and spatially -- across an array of disciplines -- to make sense of events that journalists may seem to be covering in depth, but in fact aren't..."

"Imagine a world, if you will, where crime does not exist. A startling proposition that seems outlandish, but our imaginations, of course, need not be bounded by the rules and restrictions imposed by realism. It would be a world, one might suppose, where equality reigned, where the thought of violence was so alien that it need not be practiced. People would smile more. They would..."

"It is autumn 1981 when the inconceivable comes to Blackeberg, a suburb in Sweden. The body of a teenage boy is found, emptied of blood, the murder rumored to be part of a ritual killing. Twelve-year-old Oskar is personally hoping that revenge has come at long last---revenge for the bullying he endures at school, day after day.  But the murder is not..."

"The twentieth century has entered history as an age of tyrants. Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao Zedong. In The Corporation, Yuri Felshtinsky and Vladimir Pribylovsky expose a new type of tyrant in Vladimir Putin. While dictators of the past have been self-motivated and self-appointed, Putin was handpicked for power by Russia's newest ruling class, the Federal Security Service (FSB)..."

"Imagine if you woke up one day and found you could talk to animals! A lighthearted tale with lots of appeal for early chapter-book readers.   Even though Daisy Dawson is late for school — again — she can’t help but stop to free a butterfly trapped in a web. And when she does, something amazing happens! Now Daisy can understand everything animals say, from her favorite farm dog, Boom, to the classroom gerbils, to a singing-and-dancing ant...."

"Cuba was to become an offshore base for a new kind of organized crime, one that Lansky and Luciano had been working on for years, appealing as always to personal vice but with a sleeker veneer. Prefiguring Las Vegas, Havana became a headquarters for a kind of color-blind sex and music tourism. Jim Crow prevailed at home, but Jews and Italians could mix easily while listening to the dulcet tones of Eartha Kitt, Ella Fitzgerald and Johnny Mathis in the Cuban capital..."
Kirkus Reviews

"What the average person does not know about the directors of our monetary policy, the Federal Reserve, is the fact that there is absolutely nothing "Federal" about the Federal Reserve System, and neither does it have any "Reserves." Eggelletion describes how the average American taxpayer struggles financially, because the important decisions about the economy are made not by elected officials, but by a group of businessmen out for profit. "Thieves in the Temple" is a must read for every thinking American."

"ON A CONTINENT, WHERE MAGNIFICENT RICHES WERE HIDDEN...He began life at his twin brother’s side, soon running wild on his father’s ranch on the edge of Africa. But violence, desire, and fate sent Sean Courtney into exile—where he would fight and love his way to extraordinary success and heartbreaking failure..."

"Sorry, beautiful people. These days, from government to business to technology to Hollywood, geeks rule the world.    Finally, here’s the book no self-respecting geek can live without–a guide jam-packed with 314.1516 short entries both useful and fun. Science, pop-culture trivia, paper airplanes, and pure geekish nostalgia coexist as happily in these pages as they do..."

"Ethics, unwritten or otherwise, are at the core of A Terrible Splendor, Marshall Jon Fisher’s vivid account of what has been described as the greatest tennis match of all time. No, not any of the recent and sublime encounters between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal but a Davis Cup match between Germany and the US that featured two giants of the game: Don Budge and Gottfried von Cramm.    The compelling nature of the match, in tennis terms alone, would be enough to make this a gripping read. Budge was a brash, freckled Californian..."