The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother by James McBride
Upon the tenth anniversary of The Color of Water’s release in 1996, reporter James McBride’s tribute to his white, Orthodox Jewish mother was reissued. Ruth McBride Jordan grew up in 1930s Virginia with a strict Polish émigré family, who banished her for marrying a black man. Upon finishing high school she escaped to New York, converting to Christianity and bearing the author’s father and her second husband twelve children. In tracing the history of his mother, a pariah growing up in her Southern community because of her Judaism and an oddity after marrying a black man and co-founding a Baptist church, the biracial McBride ponders his own unease growing up in an America most comfortable with clear-cut racial categories. Through describing a woman who refused to allow hidebound views of race or religion to limit her children or herself, he pays loving homage to a mother who motivated her children to realize the American dream through obtaining advanced degrees, despite their early poverty and eccentric upbringing. This highly moving memoir explores McBride’s search to define himself through uncovering his mother’s painful past while finding his own values in her Jewish history, emphasis on education, and Christian faith. He reveals her as a quintessential American success story who gave him and his accomplished siblings the courage to create their own American identities.

Ghost by Alan Lightman
David, an unassuming bank employee, has just been laid off. His rationalistic worldview suddenly shatters when he sees an inexplicable presence while apprenticing at a funeral home. After his experience makes the news, David finds himself caught between New Age spiritualists who use him to publicize their hypotheses, desperate patrons clamoring to contact deceased relatives, and scientists who refuse to believe in unprovable phenomena. In the process, the mysteries of his seemingly ordinary life and relationships emerge. Can he reconcile science and spirituality? Is memory, or even his perception of so-called concrete events, a reliable indicator of reality? Did he catch a split-second glimpse of eternity through sensing a spirit liberated from its human frame? Lightman, a former MIT physicist, presents a simply written but sophisticated meditation on love, grief, the nature of consciousness, and people’s search for meaning and belief in a world less straightforward than it appears.

A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose by Eckhart Tolle
Oprah-anointed spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle’s first bestseller, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, introduced his philosophy that living in the present is the only true way to achieve higher consciousness. This subsequent book expands his compelling theory that the human ego’s emphasis on continually reliving the past and ignoring the present in favor of planning an unrealistic future promotes a false, resentful, and dissatisfied sense of self, thereby creating the individual and communal suffering that pervades the globe and prevents the joy of enlightenment. Many will find his compassionate advice to transcend the ego a useful reminder to experience happiness by living in the now, escaping the trap of over-thinking, and avoiding unnecessary emotional reactions to fleeting conflicts and problems.

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
A hilarious satire poking fun at overripe rural novels by D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, and their ilk, Cold Comfort Farm remains an unsurpassed British comedy. With an introduction by Lynne Truss, author of Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, this 2006 Penguin Classics edition will provoke belly laughs and stay on your bookshelf for years to come. The inimitable Flora Poste, a twenty-year-old orphan, sets out to impose order and decency among her mad Sussex relatives, the disaster-prone Starkadders. Dominated by her Great-Aunt Ada Doom, a shut-in who saw “something nasty in the woodshed” as a child, Flora’s country kin revel in roistering and rollicking, wallowing in misery, frolicking with water voles, and mollocking with village wenches. When methodical, cool-headed Flora moves in, their days of melodrama are numbered. This brilliant book is a must-read for anyone who cherishes sly wit and the florid excesses of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature.

< Prev		Next >