"Mitch Albom has done it again with this moving memoir of love and loss. You can't help but fall for Chika. A page-turner that will no doubt become a classic." --Mary Karr, author of The Liars' Club and The Art of Memoir From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Tuesdays With Morrie comes Mitch Albom's most personal story to date: an intimate and heartwarming memoir about what it means to be a family and the young Haitian orphan whose short life would forever change his heart. Chika Jeune was born three days before the devastating earthquake that decimated Haiti in 2010. She spent her infancy in a landscape of extreme poverty, and when her mother died giving birth to a baby brother, Chika was brought to The Have Faith Haiti Orphanage that Albom operates in Port Au Prince. With no children of their own, the forty-plus children who live, play, and go to school at the orphanage have become family to Mitch and his wife, Janine. Chika's arrival makes a quick impression. Brave and self-assured, even as a three-year-old, she delights the other kids and teachers. But at age five, Chika is suddenly diagnosed with something a doctor there says, "No one in Haiti can help you with." Mitch and Janine bring Chika to Detroit, hopeful that American medical care can soon return her to her homeland. Instead, Chika becomes a permanent part of their household, and their lives, as they embark on a two-year, around-the-world journey to find a cure. As Chika's boundless optimism and humor teach Mitch the joys of caring for a child, he learns that a relationship built on love, no matter what blows it takes, can never be lost. Told in hindsight, and through illuminating conversations with Chika herself, this is Albom at his most poignant and vulnerable. Finding Chika is a celebration of a girl, her adoptive guardians, and the incredible bond they formed--a devastatingly beautiful portrait of what it means to be a family, regardless of how it is made.

Since 2000, America s most ambitious young evangelicals have been making their way to Patrick Henry College, a small Christian school just outside the nation s capital. Most of them are homeschoolers whose idealism and discipline put the average American teenager to shame. At "God s Harvard" they are groomed to become tomorrow s elite. Diplomas in hand, they are dispatched to the front lines of politics, entertainment, and science, where they will lead the battle to take back a godless nation. Hanna Rosin spent a year and a half embedded at the college, following students from the campus to the White House, Congress, conservative think tanks, Hollywood, and other centers of influence. Her account captures this nerve center of the evangelical movement at a moment of maximum influence and also of crisis, as it struggles to avoid the temptations of modern life and still remake the world in its own image. "

In an era when too many heroes have been toppled from too many pedestals, Sandy Koufax stands apart and alone, a legend who declined his own celebrity. As a pitcher, he was sublime, the ace of baseball lore. As a human being, he aspired to be the one thing his talent and his fame wouldn't allow: a regular guy. A Brooklyn kid, he was the product of the sedate and modest fifties who came to define and dominate baseball in the sixties. In Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy, former award-winning Washington Post sportswriter Jane Leavy delivers an uncommon baseball book, vividly re-creating the Koufax era, when presidents were believed and pitchers aspired to go the distance. He was only a teenager when Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley proclaimed him "the Great Jewish Hope" of the franchise. But it wasn't until long after the team had abandoned Brooklyn that the man became the myth. Old-fashioned in his willingness to play when he was injured and in his acute sense of responsibility to his team, Koutax answered to an authority higher than manager Walter Alston. When he refused to pitch the opening game of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, he inadvertently made himself a religious icon and an irrevocably public figure. A year later, he was gone -- done with baseball at age thirty. No other sports hero had retired so young, so well, or so completely. Despite Sandy Koufax's best efforts to protect his privacy, his legend has grown larger ever since. Part biography, part cultural history, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy gets as close to that legend as he will allow. Through meticulous reporting and interviews with five hundred of his friends, teammates, and opponents, Leavy penetrates the mythology to discover a man more than worthy of myth.

Although Galileo Galilei lived and died centuries ago, his story is more relevant to our lives than we might realize. Today we face enormous challenges such as climate change that are disregarded or questioned by those who fear that their implications will damage business profitability. Others posit a false dichotomy between religion and science in order to reject scientific evidence whose implications they fear. Galileo confronted this problem 400 years ago. His discoveries were based on observation and experiment. His telescopes revealed previously unknown planets, moons orbiting other planets, and other discoveries that essentially confirmed the Copernican universe that the Church had rejected as heretical because Church theologians insisted on a literal reading of the Bible. Even St. Augustine in the fifth century maintained that the Bible pertained to the realm of faith, not reason. But when Galileo argued essentially the same position before an ecclesiastical court in Rome, he was forbidden from publishing any more books. Livio's life of Galileo shows us how the great thinker made his discoveries about the heavens and also formulated fundamental laws of physics. As an astrophysicist, Livio brings insight into how Galileo reasoned his way to his conclusions, which we know today were accurate. Along with Newton, Galileo remains one of the two great figures at the dawn of the scientific revolution. He insisted on reaching the widest audience possible, publishing his work in Italian rather than Latin as had been the case until his time, when vernacular languages were rapidly replacing Latin throughout Europe. Galileo believed that every educated person should know science as well as literature. Did Galileo actually say at the end of his trial when he was forced to recant his discoveries, as legend has it, And still it moves, referring to the motion of the earth around the sun? Not likely, says Livio, but Galileo nonetheless remains an inspiration to scientists and those who value open-minded inquiry, which as Livio reminds us, remains threatened even today.

Toward a Meaningful Life is a spiritual road map for living based on the teachings of one of the foremost religious leaders of our time: Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Head of the Lubavitcher movement for forty-four years and recognized throughout the world simply as "the Rebbe," Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who passed away in June 1994, was a sage and a visionary of the highest order. Toward a Meaningful Life gives people of all backgrounds fresh perspectives on every aspect of their lives--from birth to death, youth to old a≥ marriage, love, intimacy, and family; the persistent issues of career, health, pain, and suffering; and education, faith, science, and government. We learn to bridge the divisions between accelerated technology and decelerated morality, between unprecedented worldwide unity and unparalleled personal disunity. Although the Rebbe's teachings are firmly anchored in more than three thousand years of scholarship, the urgent relevance of these old-age truths to contemporary life has never been more manifest. At the threshold of a new world where matter and spirit converge, the Rebbe proposes spiritual principles that unite people as opposed to the materialism that divides them. In doing so, he continues to lead us toward personal and universal redemption, toward a meaningful life, and toward God.

“An engaging, detailed and spirited work—both conversational and soul-searching, restless and reassuring all at once.” — Washington Times For decades, Michael Savage has been preaching his political faith of borders, language, and culture to millions. Now Savage gives his audience a look into his religious faith and his ideas about the Judeo-Christian foundation of the American culture he has fought all his life to preserve. But rather than an academic, theological treatise, Savage provides something more akin to an ancient mystery text. Drawing on Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, and other spiritual sources, as well as autobiographical material and highlights from his radio show, Savage shares the “glimpses of God” he has experienced over the whole of his life, before and during his groundbreaking radio career. Moving childhood stories, his dinner with an atheist and a Buddhist, an interview with a Jewish gangster, and Savage’s reflections on selected passages from ancient scriptures are just a few of the eclectic experiences and insights shared in this unique book. From his days as a boy growing up in New York City to many years searching for healing plants in the South Seas to his current incarnation as one of the most popular talk radio hosts in the world, Savage has been haunted by glimpses of the divine and has struggled to find their meaning. God, Faith, and Reason presents the reader with one man’s perceptions and considerations of the daily presence of God in the world around us and how the search to find God is the finding itself.

The Faith and Doubt of Holocaust Survivors reveals the victims' frank and thought-provoking answers to searching questions about their experiences: Was the Holocaust God's will? Was there any meaning or purpose in the Holocaust? Was Israel worth the price six million had to pay? Did the experience in the death camps bring about an avowal of faith? A denial of God? A reaffirmation of religious belief? Did the Holocaust change beliefs about the coming of the Messiah, the Torah, the Jews as the chosen people, and the nature of God? Drawing on the responses of seven hundred survivors, Reeve Robert Brenner reveals the changes, rejections, reaffirmations, doubts, and despairs that have so profoundly affected the faith, practices, ideas, and attitudes of survivors, and, by extension, the entire Jewish people. Many survivors carried their deepest secrets and innermost beliefs silently, from internment to interment. But Brenner's quest provided the impetus for many survivors to end their silence about the past and come forth with their feelings. In poignant vignettes scattered throughout the book, their answers to these profound questions are offered, disclosing ardent, overpowering passions and sensibilities.

"An anthropologist examines the nature of religiosity, and how it shapes and benefits humankind. Believers is a scientist's answer to attacks on faith by some well-meaning scientists and philosophers-- a firm rebuke of the "Four Horsemen": Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, known for writing about religion as something irrational and ultimately harmful. Konner, who was raised as an Orthodox Jew but has lived his adult life without such faith, explores the psychology, development, brain science, evolution, and even genetics of the varied religious impulses we as a species experience. Conceding that faith is not for everyone, he views religious people with a sympathetic eye; his own upbringing, his apprenticeship in the trancedance religion of the African Bushmen, and his friends in Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and other faiths have all shaped his perspective. He concludes that religion does much good as well as undoubted harm, and that for at least a large minority of humanity, the belief in things unseen neither can nor should go away"--