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Walking the Bible: a journey by land through the five books of Moses - Audiobook

Both a heart-racing adventure and an uplifting quest, Walking the Bible presents one man’s epic journey- by foot, jeep, rowboat, and camel- through the greatest stories ever told. From crossing the Red Sea to climbing Mount Sinai to touching the burning bush, Bruce Feiler’s inspiring odyssey will forever change your view of history’s most legendary events.

The stories in the first five books of the Bible, also known as the Torah, come alive as Feiler searches across three continents for the stories and heroes shared by Christians and Jews. You’ll visit the slopes of Mount Ararat, where Noah’s ark landed, trek to the desert outpost where Abraham first heard the words of God, and scale the summit where Moses received the Ten Commandments. Using the latest archeological research, Feiler explores how physical location affects the larger narrative of the Bible and ultimately realizes how much these places, as well as his experience, have affected his faith. A once-in-a-lifetime journey, Walking the Bible offers new insights into the roots of our common faith and uncovers fresh answers to the most profound questions of the human spirit.  - Amazon

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The Chronicles of Narnia - DVD

Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy decide to play hide-and-seek, and during the game Lucy discovers a mysterious wardrobe. She tucks herself inside and backs to the rear of the cabinet, there she finds herself in an entirely different world. The place is called Narnia, and it's been locked in winter for over 100 years by someone known as "The White Witch."

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Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series (5 books)

Cassandra Clare

The first five books in the #1 New York Times bestselling Mortal Instruments series, now available in a collectible ebook collection.

Enter the secret world of the Shadowhunters with this collection that includes City of Bones, City of Ashes, City of Glass, City of Fallen Angels, and City of Lost Souls. The Mortal Instruments books have more than five million copies in print, and this ebook collection is a perfect gift for newcomers to the series and for loyal fans alike.

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1984

George Orwell

One of the most celebrated classics of the twentieth century, Orwell’s cautionary tale of a man trapped under the gaze of an authoritarian state feels more relevant now than ever before.

Winston Smith, a member of the outer Party, spends his days rewriting history to fit the narrative that his government wants citizens to believe. But as the gap between the propaganda he writes and the reality he lives proves too much for Winston to swallow, he begins to seek some form of escape. His desperate struggle to free himself from an all-encompassing, tyrannical state illuminates the tendencies apparent in every modern society, and makes vivid the universal predicament of the individual. 

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Religion in Mississippi

Randy J. Sparks

In the 1600s Colonial French settlers brought Christianity into the lands that are now the state of Mississippi. Throughout the period of French rule and the period of Spanish dominion that followed, Roman Catholicism remained the principal religion. By the time that statehood was achieved in 1817, Mississippi was attracting Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and other Protestant evangelical faiths at a remarkable pace, and by the twentieth century, religion in Mississippi was dominantly Protestant and evangelical.

In this book Randy J. Sparks traces the roots of evangelical Christianity in the state and shows how the evangelicals became a force of cultural revolution. They embraced the poorer segments of society, welcomed high populations of both women and African Americans, and deeply influenced ritual and belief in the state's vision of Christianity. In the 1830s as the Mississippi economy boomed, so did evangelicalism. As Protestant faiths became wedded to patriarchal standards, slaveholding, and southern political tradition, seeds were sown for the war that would erupt three decades later.

Until Reconstruction many Mississippi churches comprised biracial congregations and featured women in prominent roles, but as the Civil War and the racial split cooled the evangelicals' liberal fervor and drastically changed the democratic character of their religion into archconservatism, a strong but separate black church emerged. As dominance by Protestant conservatives solidified, Jews, Catholics, and Mormons struggled to retain their religious identities while conforming to standards set by white Protestant society.

As Sparks explores the dissonance between the state's powerful evangelical voice and Mississippi's social and cultural mores, he reveals the striking irony of faith and society in conflict. By the time of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, religion, formerly a liberal force, had become one of the leading proponents of segregation, gender inequality, and ethnic animosity among whites in the Magnolia State. Among blacks, however, the churches were bastions of racial pride and resistance to the forces of oppression.

Randy J. Sparks, an associate professor of history at Tulane University, is the author of On Jordan's Stormy Banks: Evangelical Religion in Mississippi, 1773-1876.

Heritage of Mississippi Series, distributed for the Mississippi Historical Society

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The Catcher in the Rye

J.D. Salinger

The "brilliant, funny, meaningful novel" (The New Yorker) that established J. D. Salinger as a leading voice in American literature--and that has instilled in millions of readers around the world a lifelong love of books.
"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."
The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caufield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days.

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Ready Player One

Ernest Cline

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Now a major motion picture directed by Steven Spielberg.

“Enchanting . . . Willy Wonka meets The Matrix.”—USA Today • “As one adventure leads expertly to the next, time simply evaporates.”—Entertainment Weekly

A world at stake. A quest for the ultimate prize. Are you ready?

In the year 2045, reality is an ugly place. The only time Wade Watts really feels alive is when he’s jacked into the OASIS, a vast virtual world where most of humanity spends their days.

When the eccentric creator of the OASIS dies, he leaves behind a series of fiendish puzzles, based on his obsession with the pop culture of decades past. Whoever is first to solve them will inherit his vast fortune—and control of the OASIS itself. 

Then Wade cracks the first clue. Suddenly he’s beset by rivals who’ll kill to take this prize. The race is on—and the only way to survive is to win.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Entertainment Weekly • San Francisco Chronicle • Village Voice • Chicago Sun-Times • iO9 • The AV Club

“Delightful . . . the grown-up’s Harry Potter.”HuffPost

“An addictive read . . . part intergalactic scavenger hunt, part romance, and all heart.”—CNN

“A most excellent ride . . . Cline stuffs his novel with a cornucopia of pop culture, as if to wink to the reader.”Boston Globe

“Ridiculously fun and large-hearted . . . Cline is that rare writer who can translate his own dorky enthusiasms into prose that’s both hilarious and compassionate.”—NPR

“[A] fantastic page-turner . . . starts out like a simple bit of fun and winds up feeling like a rich and plausible picture of future friendships in a world not too distant from our own.”iO9
 

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Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale

Harold Bloom

- Comprehensive reading and study guides for some of the world's most important literary masterpieces - Concise critical excerpts provide a scholarly overview of each work - The Story Behind the Story details the conditions under which the work was written - Each book includes a biographical sketch of the author, a descriptive list of characters, an extensive summary and analysis, and an annotated bibliography

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Classical Mythology a to Z

Annette Giesecke

An encyclopedic A-to-Z guide, this beautifully illustrated volume offers hundreds of rich, fascinating definitions of 700 major and minor characters, creatures, and places of classical mythology.
Classical Mythology A-to-Z is a comprehensive and engrossing guide to Greek and Roman mythology. Written by Annette Giesecke, PhD, Professor of Classics and Chair of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies at the University of Delaware, this brilliant reference offers clear explanations of every character and locale, and captures the essence of these timeless tales.
From the gods and goddesses of Mount Olympus and the heroes of the Trojan War to the nymphs, monsters, and other mythical creatures that populate these ancient stories, Giesecke recounts, with clarity and energy, the details of more than 700 characters and places. Each definition includes cross-references to related characters, locations, and myths, as well their equivalent in Roman mythology and cult.
In addition to being an important standalone work, Classical Mythology A-to-Z is also written, designed, and illustrated to serve as an essential companion to the bestselling illustrated 75th-anniversary edition of Mythology by Edith Hamilton, including 10 full-color plates and 2-color illustrations throughout by artist Jim Tierney.

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Killing Jesus

Bill O'Reilly

Millions of readers have thrilled to bestselling authors Bill O'Reilly and historian Martin Dugard's Killing Kennedy and Killing Lincoln, page-turning works of nonfiction that have changed the way we read history.

The basis for the 2015 television film available on streaming.

Now the iconic anchor of The O'Reilly Factor details the events leading up to the murder of the most influential man in history: Jesus of Nazareth. Nearly two thousand years after this beloved and controversial young revolutionary was brutally killed by Roman soldiers, more than 2.2 billion human beings attempt to follow his teachings and believe he is God. Killing Jesus will take readers inside Jesus's life, recounting the seismic political and historical events that made his death inevitable - and changed the world forever.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Since its publication in 1925, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's account of the American dream gone awry, has established itself as one of the most popular and widely read novels in the English language. Until now, however, no edition has printed the novel exactly as Fitzgerald intended. The first edition was marred by errors resulting from Fitzgerald's extensive rewriting in proof and the conditions under which the book was produced; moreover, the subsequent transmission of the text introduced proliferating departures from the author's words. This critical edition draws on the manuscript and surviving proofs of the novel, together with Fitzgerald's subsequent revisions to key passages, to provide the first authoritative text of The Great Gatsby. This volume also includes a detailed account of the genesis, composition, and publication of the novel; a full textual apparatus; crucial early draft material; helpful glosses on the peculiar geography and chronology of the book; and explanatory notes on topical allusions and historical references that contemporary readers might otherwise miss. Fitzgerald's masterpiece is thus brought closer to a cross-section of readers, more accessibly and more authentically than ever before. Matthew J. Bruccoli has published widely. He is the author of Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1980) and editor of New Essays on The Great Gatsby (CUP, 1985).

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The Testaments

Margaret Atwood

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE The Testaments is a modern masterpiece, a powerful novel that can be read on its own or as a companion to Margaret Atwood’s classic, The Handmaid’s Tale.

More than fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid's Tale, the theocratic regime of the Republic of Gilead maintains its grip on power, but there are signs it is beginning to rot from within. At this crucial moment, the lives of three radically different women converge, with potentially explosive results.
 
Two have grown up as part of the first generation to come of age in the new order. The testimonies of these two young women are joined by a third: Aunt Lydia.  Her complex past and uncertain future unfold in surprising and pivotal ways.
 
With The Testaments, Margaret Atwood opens up the innermost workings of Gilead, as each woman is forced to come to terms with who she is, and how far she will go for what she believes.

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Sea of Tranquility

Emily St. John Mandel

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • WINNER OF THE GOODREADS CHOICE AWARD • The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads

“One of [Mandel’s] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet.” —The New York Times


Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.

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Our Missing Hearts

Celeste Ng

The Reese's Book Club October Pick!

From the #1 bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere, comes one of the most highly anticipated books of the year – the inspiring new novel about a mother’s unbreakable love in a world consumed by fear.

 
“It’s impossible not to be moved.” —Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review
 
“Riveting, tender, and timely.” —People, Book of the Week

“Thought-provoking, heart-wrenching…I was so invested in the future of this mother and son, and I can’t wait to hear what you think of this deeply suspenseful story!” – Reese Witherspoon (Reese’s Book Club October ’22 Pick)


Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. Bird knows to not ask too many questions, stand out too much, or stray too far. For a decade, their lives have been governed by laws written to preserve “American culture” in the wake of years of economic instability and violence. To keep the peace and restore prosperity, the authorities are now allowed to relocate children of dissidents, especially those of Asian origin, and libraries have been forced to remove books seen as unpatriotic—including the work of Bird’s mother, Margaret, a Chinese American poet who left the family when he was nine years old.
 
Bird has grown up disavowing his mother and her poems; he doesn’t know her work or what happened to her, and he knows he shouldn’t wonder. But when he receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, he is pulled into a quest to find her. His journey will take him back to the many folktales she poured into his head as a child, through the ranks of an underground network of librarians, into the lives of the children who have been taken, and finally to New York City, where a new act of defiance may be the beginning of much-needed change.
 
Our Missing Hearts is an old story made new, of the ways supposedly civilized communities can ignore the most searing injustice. It’s a story about the power—and limitations—of art to create change, the lessons and legacies we pass on to our children, and how any of us can survive a broken world with our hearts intact.

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