Over the last twenty years, parents and educators have looked for ways to instill confidence in children. While confidence is useful for acquiring skills and tackling problems, the process of creating confident children is sometimes... Read More

The author was twenty-one years old when she set out to see the world. After a spur-of-the-moment wedding at a Berkeley tea shop in 1971, Schur and her new husband embarked on an eighteen-month-long honeymoon through five continents and... Read More

In 1926, avalanches were a constant threat to the Great Northern Railroad in Scenic, Washington. The railroad company decided to build an eight-mile tunnel that would make snow slides less of a hazard through this area, so recruits and... Read More

This thought-provoking novel about race incites discussion through spirited, well-crafted dialogue. A double negative, according to Teju Cole, the South African novelist who wrote the introduction to this engaging but at times... Read More

Whether or not a reader is familiar with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Dr. Qanta Ahmed’s debut memoir is a mesmerizing read. It’s also the perfect primer for those who want to know what life is really like for women in a rigidly... Read More

These delicate poems, charged with a sense of serenity that seems incredible to modern sensibilities, cast images of an almost mythic world—formal and austere, yet infused with the banked passion of “red pomegranate wine.”... Read More

Many of the statistics are well known and have been bantered around as evidence of a variety of problems. Nevertheless they remain shocking: one third of all black men in their twenties are either in jail, on parole, or on probation;... Read More

Poet Ted Kooser’s refreshingly compact meditation on his youth in Eastern Iowa is an essential addition to the growing number of prose autobiographical works by established Midwestern poets (see Mary Swander’s The Desert Pilgrim and... Read More