No book except the Bible itself had a greater influence on the Middle Ages than City of God. Since medieval Europe was the cradle of today’s Western civilization, this work by consequence is vital for understanding our world and how it came into being. Saint Augustine is often regardarded as the most influential Christian thinker after Saint Paul, and City of God is his materpiece, a cast synthesis of religious and secular knowledge. It began as a reply to the charge that Christian otherworldiness was causing the decline of the Roman Empire. Augustine produced a wealth of evidence to prove that paganism bore within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Then he proceeded to his larger theme, a cosmic interpretation of in terms of the struggle between good and evilL the City of God in conflict with the Earthly City or the City of the Devil. This, the first serious attempt at a philosophy of history, was to have incalculable influence in forming the Western mind on the relations of church and state, and on the Christian’s place in the temporal order. The original City of God contained twenty-two books and filles three regular-sized volumes. This edition has been skillfully abridged for the intelligent general reader by Vernon J. Bourke, author of Augustine’s Quest for Wisdom, making the heart of this monumental work available to a wide audience.

The year is 2021. No child has been born for twenty-five years. The human race faces extinction. Under the despotic rule of Xan Lyppiat, the Warden of England, the old are despairing and the young cruel. Theo Faren, a cousin of the Warden, lives a solitary life in this ominous atmosphere. That is, until a chance encounter with a young woman leads him into contact with a group of dissenters. Suddenly his life is changed irrevocably as he faces agonising choices which could affect the future of mankind. NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE

In 1987, twelve-year-old Cooper Balsam's mother, Arden, disappears without a trace. Cooper's father, Percy, a Vietnam veteran struggling with PTSD, doesn't seem too concerned. "This isn't the first time. She's done it before." As days pass, Cooper begins to act out and withdraw from the world, and his growing animosity toward his father's ambivalence begins to escalate even as Percy and Cooper begin to actively search for the woman in their lives. From the hills of Southern California, to the deserts of Arizona, and down to the beaches of Mexico, the father and son will look for someone who may not want to be found for reasons they don't yet understand.

The searing novel on which the internationally acclaimed hit film was based. “A Scarface-like urban epic . . . punctuated with lyricism and longing” (Publishers Weekly). City of God is a gritty, gorgeous tour de force from one of Brazil’s most notorious slums. Cidade de Deus: a place where the streets are awash with narcotics, where violence can erupt at any moment over drugs, money, and love—but also a place where the samba beat rocks till dawn, where the women are the most beautiful on earth, and where one young man wants to escape his background and become a photographer. When City of God erupted on screens worldwide, it became one of the most critically and commercially successful foreign films of recent years. But few were aware of the story behind the film. Written by Paulo Lins, who grew up in the favela (shantytown) Cidade de Deus in Rio de Janeiro and who spent years researching its gang history, City of God began life as a coruscating, harrowing novelistic account of twenty years in the illicit pursuits of the youth gangs born from the favela. “With plot devices sometimes as minimal as the dawning of a new day, City of God seems more like a mosaic than a novel, but it’s a mosaic with unforgettably vibrant colors.” —Booklist

Why does life in society make us so unhappy? Why has civilization always been marked with social unrest? From the time of Plato, our greatest thinkers have understood that in order to confront the ills of the city, one must first look to the individual, to the maladies and discontents of the human soul. In this novel reading of Plato's Republic, the insights of Nietzsche and Freud are brought to bear on one of western civilization's most important texts. But what is at stake is far more than our interpretation of the Republic. City of Man will leave readers better equipped to face the crises that confront us today by reintroducing the import of that oft-quoted but rarely practiced Delphic maxim: know thyself.

The City of God is a book of Christian philosophy written in Latin by Augustine of Hippo in the early 5th century AD. The book was in response to allegations that Christianity brought about the decline of Rome and is considered one of Augustine's most important works. Augustine wrote The City of God as an argument for the truth of Christianity over competing religions and philosophies. He argues that Christianity was not responsible for the Sack of Rome, but instead responsible for its success. Even if the earthly rule of the Empire was imperiled, it was the City of God that would ultimately triumph. As a work of one of the most influential Church Fathers, The City of God is a cornerstone of Western thought, expounding on many profound questions of theology, such as the suffering of the righteous, the existence of evil, the conflict between free will and divine omniscience, and the doctrine of original sin.

James Mallery explores the implications of such social constructs as gender, race, and class for the development of San Francisco from the gold rush through World War I.

"In the 1930s, Shanghai was a haven for outlaws from all over the world: a place where pasts could be forgotten, fascism and communism outrun, names invented, fortunes made--and lost. 'Lucky' Jack Riley was the most notorious of those outlaws. An ex-Navy boxing champion, he escaped from prison in the States, spotted a craze for gambling and rose to become the Slot King of Shanghai. 'Dapper' Joe Farren--a Jewish boy who fled Vienna's ghetto with a dream of dance halls--ruled the nightclubs. His chorus lines rivaled Ziegfeld's. In 1940 they bestrode the Shanghai Badlands like kings, while all around the Solitary Island was poverty, starvation and genocide. They thought they ruled Shanghai; but the city had other ideas. This is the story of their rise to power, their downfall, and the trail of destruction they left in their wake."--Jacket

Reproduction of the original: The City of God by Aurelius Augustine

From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road comes a "profoundly disturbing and gorgeously rendered" novel (The Washington Post) that returns to the Texas-Mexico border, setting of the famed Border Trilogy. The time is our own, when rustlers have given way to drug-runners and small towns have become free-fire zones. One day, a good old boy named Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by a bodyguard of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law—in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell—can contain. As Moss tries to evade his pursuers—in particular a mysterious mastermind who flips coins for human lives—McCarthy simultaneously strips down the American crime novel and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines. No Country for Old Men is a triumph. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.