Beacon: 545 books

Getting old sucks, says best-selling author Dr. Lillian Rubin. With refreshing candor, she digs down under the statistics about our graying population and offers a provocative and unflinching examination of all the burning issues that mark aging today. Tackling the subject over a broad swath of the...

A 2006 Lambda Literary finalist in the LGBT anthology category  After author Harlyn Aizley gave birth to her daughter, she watched in unanticipated horror as her partner scooped up the baby and said, "I'm your new mommy!" While they both had worked to find the perfect sperm donor,...

**The riveting story of how cosmetic surgery and plastic money melted together to create a subprime mortgage crisis of the body    **   Plastic surgery has become “the answer” for many Americans, and in *American Plastic *sociologist Laurie Essig explores how we arrived at this particular...

**“Beautiful and important on many levels, *Course Correction *is about rowing and so much more . . . Ultimately it is about the transforming power of love, and, damnit all, it made me cry.”—Daniel James Brown, author of The Boys in the Boat   “Written with poetic grace and true grit ....

The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity

Quietly powerful essays, weaving keenly observed insights into the mysteries of nature with those of family and community   “It’s not easy,” Catherine Reid writes, “to love a person and a place in equal measure.” Love she does, however, as described in these intimate, lyric essays about...

The acclaimed actress and author of Jesse: A Mother’s Story tells the story of her outspoken, frequently outrageous Italian immigrant mother. Marianne Leone’s Ma is in many senses a larger-than-life character, one who might be capable, even from the afterlife, of shattering expectations....

A landmark in comparative history and a challenge to scholars of all lands who are trying to learn how we arrived at where we are now. -New York Times Book Review

Renowned conservationist Aldo Leopold once wrote, "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it does otherwise." Few have taken Leopold's vision more to heart than Steven I. Apfelbaum, who has, over the...

A unique gathering of poems by two great twentieth-century poets, with the original Spanish versions and powerful English translations on facing pages. In a new preface, editor and translator Robert Bly explores what the poems reveal today about politics, the spirit, and the purpose of art.

After an angry confrontation with his son on a hiking trip intended to restore their relationship, Scott Sanders realizes that his own despair has darkened his son's world. In Hunting for Hope he sets out to gather his own reasons for facing the future with hope, finding powers of healing in nature, in culture, in community, in spirit, and within each of us.

Earl Grollman's Living When a Loved One Has Died has brought comfort to more than 250,000 readers. In Living with Loss, Healing with Hope, Grollman speaks directly to mourners of the Jewish faith. By weaving quotations from Jewish writers and philosophers into his comforting and expert prose, Grollman...

Who says women don’t go to war? From Vikings and African queens to cross-dressing military doctors and WWII Russian fighter pilots, these are the stories of women for whom battle was not a metaphor. The woman warrior is always cast as an anomaly—Joan of Arc, not GI Jane. But women, it turns...

As floodwaters drained in the weeks following Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans residents came to a difficult realization. Their city was about to undertake the largest disaster recovery in American history, yet they faced a profound leadership vacuum: members of every tier of government, from the municipal...