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  Pillars - How Muslim Friends Led...

  Rachel Pieh Jones

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  Personal friendships with Somali Muslims overcome the prejudices and expand the faith of a typical American Evangelical Christian living in the Horn of Africa.When Rachel Pieh Jones moved from Minnesota to rural Somalia with her husband and twin toddlers eighteen years ago, she was secure in a faith that defined who was right and who was wrong, who was saved and who needed saving. She had been taught that Islam was evil, full of lies and darkness, and that the world would be better without it.Luckily, locals show compassion for this blundering outsider who can’t keep her headscarf on or her toddlers from tripping over AK-47s. After the murder of several foreigners forces them to evacuate, the Joneses resettle in nearby Djibouti.Jones recounts, often entertainingly, the personal encounters and growing friendships that gradually dismantle her unspoken fears and prejudices and deepen her appreciation for Islam. Unexpectedly, along the way she also gains a far richer understanding of her own Christian faith. Grouping her stories around the five pillars of Islam – creed, prayer, fasting, giving, and pilgrimage – Jones shows how her Muslim friends’ devotion to these pillars leads her to rediscover ancient Christian practices her own religious tradition has lost or neglected.Jones brings the reader along as she reexamines her assumptions about faith and God through the lens of Islam and Somali culture. Are God and Allah the same? What happens when one’s ideas about God and the Bible crumble and the only people around are Muslims? What happens is that she discovers that Jesus is more generous, daring, and loving than she ever imagined.

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  Twelve Years a Slave

  Solomon Northup

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  Twelve Years a Slave is the memoir of a freeborn African American from New York who is kidnapped and sold into slavery. After being held for twelve years on a Louisiana plantation, he is eventually freed and reunited with his family. (Summary by RobBoard)

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  On a Wave

  Thad Ziolkowski

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  In this wry and exhilarating coming-of-age story, a prizewinning poet poignantly looks back at his adolescent surfing years.   As a disenchanted, unemployed English professor, Thad Ziolkowski decides one day to sneak away from his temp job in Manhattan and catch a wave off a dingy Queens shoreline. In the meager cold waves, he contemplates how he could have possibly become a semidepressed, chain-smoking, aimless man when, for a few shining years of his boyhood, he was invincible. His lapsed love affair with the ocean begins amid the late-sixties counterculture in coastal Florida. After his parents’ divorce, nine-year-old Thad escapes from his difficult family—notably a new brooding and explosive stepfather—by heading for the thrilling, uncharted waters of the local beach. In the embrace of the surf, he is able to stay offshore for years, until his life is upended once again, this time by a double tragedy that deposits him at a crossroads between a life in the waves and a life on land. Lyrical and disarmingly funny, On a Wave is a glorious portrait of youth that reminds readers of Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life and Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time.   “A sharp, self-conscious portrait of the artist as a young grommet.” —The New Yorker

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  Dance Me to the End - Ten Months...

  Alison Acheson

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  Marty, age 57, was given a preliminary diagnosis of ALS by his family doctor. Seven weeks later, the diagnosis was confirmed by a neurologist. Ten months and ten days later, Marty passed away. 
  From day one, Alison, Marty’s spouse of over twenty-five years, kept a journal as a way to navigate the overwhelming state of her mind and soul. Soon the rawness of her words harmonized to tell the story of Marty’s diagnosis, illness, and decline. Her journal became a chronicle of caregiving as well as an emotional exploration of the tensions between the intuitive and the pragmatic, the logical and illogical, and the all-consuming demands of being both spouse and nurse. Divided into short pieces, some of which reads as free verse, Alison’s words are at times profoundly intense and painfully private. 
  The composition of the intricate notes of a life in its final movements includes another stanza of the journal that became Dance Me to the End: the guiding of children grappling with the imminent loss of a parent, and the shifting roles of family, friends, and community—all of which add their own complex rhythms. 
  Dance Me to the End is an evocative memoir about the emotional impact of witnessing a loved one suffer from a neurological, degenerative, and terminal disease. This is a detailed account of grief, shock and pain coexisting with the levity, laughter and love shared with her husband and sons in those final months of Marty's life.

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  Vincent Shadow: Toy Inventor

  Tim Kehoe

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  Award-winning toy maker Tim Kehoe—creator of the world’s first colored bubbles—pens a fun-filled tale about a brilliant young inventor. When Vincent  Shadow moves from New York to Minnesota, he is forced to leave behind most of the toys he created in his lab. Worse yet, he no longer experiences the visions that have always given him ideas. Down in the dumps, Vincent catches a break when he meets toy creator Howard G. Whiz, who is  sponsoring an invention contest.   “This is a solid, whimsically illustrated writing debut from a real-life toy inventor. It begs for a quick follow-up.”—School Library Journal

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  The Barefoot Bingo Caller - A...

  Antanas Sileika

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  Witty, wide-ranging stories of one man’s adventures in the world 
  		 
  “Filled with pleasures . . . I enjoyed it immensely.” — Meg Wolitzer, New York Times–bestselling author of The Interestings
  		 
  In The Barefoot Bingo Caller, Antanas Sileika finds what’s funny and touching in the most unlikely places, from a bingo hall to the collapsing Soviet Union. He shares stories of his attempts to shake off his suburban, ethnic, folk-dancing childhood; his divided allegiance as a Lithuanian Canadian father; and such memorable characters as aging beat poets, oblivious college students, and an obdurate porcupine.
  		 
  Passing through places as varied as a prime minister’s office and the streets of Paris, these wry and moving dispatches on work, family, art, and identity are masterpieces of comic memoir and social observation.
  		 
  “The memories have been vividly, deliberately shaped by a master storyteller over a lifetime of telling, to powerful and often hilarious effect.” — Quill & Quire (starred review)
  		 
  “Funny and wistful, always engaging and wholly original, The Barefoot Bingo Caller charts the geography of belonging from the suburbs of Weston to the streets of Vilnius, from iconic Parisian bookstores to secret fishing holes in the backwoods of Ontario.” — Will Ferguson, Giller Prize–winning author

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