In "Reunion in Carmel", widowed Will Kempton, a former narcotics cop, flees the hard streets and rough memories of Jersey with his two young children to become police chief of the tiny tourist town of Carmel, California. His biggest... Read More

A book that uses subject material like Byzantine art and the writings of Christine de Pizan to launch an investigation into the way the mind works, and to get at the heart of thought before it can be analyzed would seem like a foolish,... Read More

"In the Fringe" by Eleanor Summers purports to be a novel. But with its mix of fictionalization exposition and reliance on the twelve-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous for its structural backbone the book resonates more as a work of... Read More

Mysticism, myth, and magic swirl, swagger, and stampede through Sunga’s haunting and frequently harrowing tale set in war-torn South Africa during the waning years of apartheid. Mating cobras are the talismans, and shrunken heads the... Read More

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then Americans’ standards of what’s desirable are only skin deep. That merging of clichés summarizes this collection of scholarly essays on skin color and its effect on societal norms in the... Read More

On October 6, 1951, the author was captured by the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army while fighting in the Korean War. He spent twenty-two months as a prisoner, one of 7,245 Americans captured there. Bassett recalls almost every day of... Read More

In this vibrant literary collection of short essays and poems, sacred hushes fill in pregnant days, women anguish at night, parents travel through the dissonance that occurs when the raw invasion of life head-butts doting smiles, the... Read More

Arguably the most definitive of the biographies of Siddhartha Gotama, this book is also a fine introduction to the Pali Canon. The Theravadin tradition of Buddhism, whose scriptures are preserved in the Pali Canon, is considered by... Read More