Traveling the Life of Elinor Gregg, R.N.

A girl grieves the loss of her dog in an achingly beautiful wordless epic from the Caldecott Honor–winning creator of Journey. This year’s summer vacation will be very different for a young girl and her family without Sascha, the beloved family dog, along for the ride. But a wistful walk along the beach to gather cool, polished stones becomes a brilliant turning point in the girl’s grief. There, at the edge of a vast ocean beneath an infinite sky, she uncovers, alongside the reader, a profound and joyous truth. In his first picture book following the conclusion of his best-selling Journey trilogy, Aaron Becker achieves a tremendous feat, connecting the private, personal loss of one child to a cycle spanning millennia — and delivering a stunningly layered tale that demands to be pored over again and again.

Book #2 of The Genesis Trilogy. This special reissue of a classic work of spirituality from the author of A Wrinkle in Time offers life-transforming insights on the rich heritage of the Bible and shows how the characters of this ancient text are relevant for living the good life now. Includes a new reader's guide. In this book for the curious, spiritual seeker, Madeleine L'Engle offers relevant lessons drawn from the life of Jacob from the Old Testament. Here, the son of Isaac becomes a spiritual companion to L'Engle, equipping her to deal with earthly and psychological struggles. Throughout her journey, L'Engle offers contemporary answers to questions that burden modern day readers and believers. With her customary fearlessness and candor, she broaches such topics as the significance of angels, redemption, sexual identity, forgiveness, and the seemingly constant conflict between good and evil. Madeleine L'Engle possesses the same ambidextrous skill of storytelling as other literary giants, including C. S. Lewis and George MacDonald. Her fictional stories appeal to generations of readers, and are equally embraced in both the secular and religious markets. But, it is her ability in her nonfiction to engage with the historical text of the Bible through a dynamic unpacking of protagonists, antagonists, and matters of faith that establishes the Genesis Trilogy as a highly treasured collection of spiritual writings. A Stone for a Pillow acts as a compass for those traveling through the tumultuous landscape of faith in our cynical and divisive modern culture.

Following the sudden end of her marriage, Annabelle Beck returns from Melbourne to the sanctuary of her old family home in North Queensland. There she discovers that the former stockman, Bo Rennie, knows her from her childhood.

In this pathbreaking study of three of the most familiar texts in the Chinese tradition--all concerning stones endowed with magical properties--Jing Wang develops a monumental reconstruction of ancient Chinese stone lore. Wang's thorough and systematic comparison of these classic works illuminates the various tellings of the stone story and provides new insight into major topics in traditional Chinese literature. Bringing together Chinese myth, religion, folklore, art, and literature, this book is the first in any language to amass the sources of stone myth and stone lore in Chinese culture. Uniting classical Chinese studies with contemporary Western theoretical concerns, Wang examines these stone narratives by analyzing intertextuality within Chinese traditions. She offers revelatory interpretations to long-standing critical issues, such as the paradoxical character of the monkey in The Journey to the West, the circularity of narrative logic in The Dream of the Red Chamber, and the structural necessity of the stone tablet in Water Margin. By both challenging and incorporating traditional sinological scholarship, Wang's The Story of Stone reveals the ideological ramifications of these three literary works on Chinese cultural history and makes the past relevant to contemporary intellectual discourse. Specialists in Chinese literature and culture, comparative literature, literary theory, and religious studies will find much of interest in this outstanding work, which is sure to become a standard reference on the subject.

An American Library Association Notable Book When he proposed to his girlfriend, Tom Zoellner gave what is expected of every American man--a diamond engagement ring. But when the relationship broke apart, he was left with a used diamond that began to haunt him. His obsession carried him around the globe; from the "blood diamond" rings of Africa; to the sweltering polishing factories of India; to mines above the Arctic Circle; to illegal diggings in Brazil; to the London headquarters of De Beers, the secretive global colossus that has dominated the industry for more than a century and permanently carved the phrase "A diamond is forever" on the psyche. An adventure story in the tradition of Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief, The Heartless Stone is a voyage into the cold heart of the world's most unyielding gem.

A travelogue like no other, A guidebooks to India and its temples and hidden gems that you will cherish. Lotus In The Stone takes us on a journey to the dizzying array of deities, temples, festivals, rituals, art, architecture, applied sciences and living traditions of India, that is Bharat, bringing us to an understanding of the sublime, advanced society her culture nurtured. With her experiences and adventures in crisscrossing Inda for decades, the author shows us how ancient India's surviving heritage and living traditions are a testimony to her history and the invisible threads and sacred geography that bind her people together.

The acclaimed chronicle of the discovery of the legendary lost civilization of the Maya. Includes the history of the major Maya sites, including Palenque, Uxmal, Chichen Itza, Tuloom, Copan, and more. NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Illustrated with a map and more than 100 images. In 1839, rumors of extraordinary yet baffling stone ruins buried within the unmapped jungles of Central America reached two of the world’s most intrepid travelers. Seized by the reports, American diplomat John Lloyd Stephens and British artist Frederick Catherwood—both already celebrated for their adventures in Egypt, the Holy Land, Greece, and Rome—sailed together out of New York Harbor on an expedition into the forbidding rainforests of present-day Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. What they found would upend the West’s understanding of human history. In the tradition of Lost City of Z and In the Kingdom of Ice, former San Francisco Chronicle journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist William Carlsen reveals the remarkable story of the discovery of the ancient Maya. Enduring disease, war, and the torments of nature and terrain, Stephens and Catherwood meticulously uncovered and documented the remains of an astonishing civilization that had flourished in the Americas at the same time as classic Greece and Rome—and had been its rival in art, architecture, and power. Their masterful book about the experience, written by Stephens and illustrated by Catherwood, became a sensation, hailed by Edgar Allan Poe as “perhaps the most interesting book of travel ever published” and recognized today as the birth of American archaeology. Most important, Stephens and Catherwood were the first to grasp the significance of the Maya remains, understanding that their antiquity and sophistication overturned the West’s assumptions about the development of civilization. By the time of the flowering of classical Greece (400 b.c.), the Maya were already constructing pyramids and temples around central plazas. Within a few hundred years the structures took on a monumental scale that required millions of man-hours of labor, and technical and organizational expertise. Over the next millennium, dozens of city-states evolved, each governed by powerful lords, some with populations larger than any city in Europe at the time, and connected by road-like causeways of crushed stone. The Maya developed a cohesive, unified cosmology, an array of common gods, a creation story, and a shared artistic and architectural vision. They created stucco and stone monuments and bas reliefs, sculpting figures and hieroglyphs with refined artistic skill. At their peak, an estimated ten million people occupied the Maya’s heartland on the Yucatan Peninsula, a region where only half a million now live. And yet by the time the Spanish reached the “New World,” the Maya had all but disappeared; they would remain a mystery for the next three hundred years. Today, the tables are turned: the Maya are justly famous, if sometimes misunderstood, while Stephens and Catherwood have been nearly forgotten. Based on Carlsen’s rigorous research and his own 1,500-mile journey throughout the Yucatan and Central America, Jungle of Stone is equally a thrilling adventure narrative and a revelatory work of history that corrects our understanding of Stephens, Catherwood, and the Maya themselves.

When incidents around the world hint at the reemergence of an ancient evil known as Nyugo, the Sonzai-a clan of modern-day Japanese warriors equipped with supernatural abilities-are called into action. Their youthful commander Tsumisu knows little of the powers he possesses, but he wields them fiercely. Akari, his katana, is a blade that no human could have forged, and he is a swordsman of unmatched skill. As he searches for clues into Nyugo's return, Tsumisu, his trusted friend Shujin, and the Sonzai warriors soon realize that the spiritual balance of the world may be in danger. When their investigation turns up an ancient artifact, Tsumisu and Shujin quickly find themselves caught in the midst of a struggle between Devonians and Ordovicians-extraterrestrial beings whose eight-hundred-year-old search for the Chosen One has brought them to Earth. As dimensions are crossed and battles are waged, Tsumisu draws the attention of Nataliya Artemis, an Ordovician who holds the key to a magnificent power and the knowledge of a stunning truth about Shujin. In the first volume in the Journey of the Shadow saga, Stone Abdullah weaves a fantastical tale of good versus evil in a modern world of supernatural power.

With her red marker, an ordinary child steps through a portal into a luminous and magical landscape, beginning her quest toward an uncertain destiny.