"On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." With this celebrated sentence, Thornton Wilder begins The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the towering achievements in American fiction and a novel read throughout the world. By chance, a monk witnesses the tragedy. Brother Juniper seeks to prove that it was div…
Suddenly I became aware of another person in the room. I sat upright, totally alert, straining to see in the dark. That's when it happened. A boy - small, thin, dressed in mud brown clothes - leaned out from behind the radio and whispered, "Johnny, will you help me?"
A nazi led us up the stairs and into a small room at the end of a hall. Two boys younger than me and girl closer to Jaro's age followed me, and we joined about a dozen other Lidice children already standing in what looked like a science classroom. I stopped in the doorway, amazed by what 1 saw. It wasn't who was there that surprised me. I recognized most everyone from school. But all of us had…
Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step. Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappea…
When archaeologist Tess Dickenson arrives in Java, she is confronted with seemingly impossible memories, overpowering fears and intense feelings for two very different men, one the local head of the office financing her project, the other an irrepressible anthropologist.
Beverly, Harriet, Madison, and Eston are Thomas Jefferson's children by one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, and while they do get special treatment - better work, better shoes, even violin lessons - they are still slaves, and are never to mention who their father is. The lighter-skinned children have been promised a chance to escape into white society, but what does this mean for the children who…