According to literacy statistics 21% of Adults are illiterate, meaning that those adults cannot read at all or read a very low academic level. There are 54% of adults that have a literacy below the 6th grade reading level. The levels of children's literacy are also staggering. A child who cannot read, or reads at a lower academic level, and without proper education, will grow up to be an adult with the same level of literacy. What can you do? Read to your children or grandchildren. If you know an adult who has trouble reading, first let them know it's nothing to be ashamed of, and then help them, if they are willing, to learn to read. There are resources for illiterate adults who need help.
In this classic novel, Ken Kesey’s hero is Randle Patrick McMurphy, a boisterous, brawling, fun-loving rebel who swaggers into the world of a mental hospital and takes over. A lusty, life-affirming fighter, McMurphy rallies the other patients around him by challenging the dictatorship of Nurse Ratched. He promotes gambling in the ward, smuggles in wine and women, and openly defies the rules at every turn. But this defiance, which starts as a sport, soon develops into a grim struggle, an all-out war between two relentless opponents: Nurse Ratched, backed by the full power of authority, and McMurphy, who has only his own indomitable will. What happens when Nurse Ratched uses her ultimate weapon against McMurphy provides the story’s shocking climax.
The Call of the Wild is a novel by Jack London published in 1903. The story is set in the Yukon during the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush—a period in which strong sled dogs were in high demand. The novel's central character is a dog named Buck, a domesticated dog living at a ranch in the Santa Clara Valley of California as the story opens. Stolen from his home and sold into service as sled dog in Alaska, he reverts to a wild state. Buck is forced to fight in order to dominate other dogs in a harsh climate. Eventually he sheds the veneer of civilization, relying on primordial instincts and learned experience to emerge as a leader in the wild. London lived for most of a year in the Yukon collecting material for the book. The story was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post in the summer of 1903; a month later it was released in book form. The novel’s great popularity and success made a reputation for London. Much of its appeal derives from the simplicity of this tale of survival. As early as 1908 the story was adapted to film and it has since seen several more cinematic adaptations.
Vincent Pollack is a serial killer, whose evil roots were planted during a traumatic childhood, with an agenda to rob and kill women for financial gain. It is down to Mavis Bone, a forty-year-old Australian, lesbian Private investigator, and her German lesbian secretary, Gertrude Stick, to try and foil his murderous plans. Together they make up the Mavis Bone Detective Agency based in Wimbledon Broadway, London SW19.
It is a hands-on job to chase down this ingenious killer, and Mavis is not afraid to get them dirty. Dirty with the blood of her prostitute philandering husband, and the blood of a problem client that could send her secretary to prison for a war crime. Both detective’s and killer’s paths, have already crossed during their troubled youths, but as the murders pile up, they move towards a final conflict.
Mavis’s hard Australian outback childhood, led to her sexual and gender choices, as well as some questionable racist opinions. Not to mention the drug habit she picked up as a student, while backpacking in South America. This, making her, not your average South London Private Eye.
When Covid first showed up in 2020, it presented us with a choice: to respond with fear, or to respond with love. This book is an appeal to love, seeing in the 'virus' an agent of social reform, setting us free from the structures of exploitation and enslavement that have assailed mankind for millennia.
And there is no better author to deliver this message than Abdiel LeRoy, a Bible scholar and former journalist, a storyteller and poet, who has discerned and set out for us Covid's prophetic mission, likening it to the role of plague when wielded by Moses to abolish slavery in ancient Egypt.
Weaving between entertaining stories, prophetic analysis, and searing poetry, LeRoy hails the transformational power of this virus while denouncing the mindless response of world leaders who have no better answer than to enrich pharmaceutical companies. You will find here no flag-waving for party or candidate but recognition that the political system, with its imperial structures, is starting to break apart, that it must break apart for the good of planet, peoples, and species.
Celie has grown up poor in rural Georgia, despised by the society around her and abused by her own family. She strives to protect her sister, Nettie, from a similar fate, and while Nettie escapes to a new life as a missionary in Africa, Celie is left behind without her best friend and confidante, married off to an older suitor, and sentenced to a life alone with a harsh and brutal husband.
In an attempt to transcend a life that often seems too much to bear, Celie begins writing letters directly to God. The letters, spanning twenty years, record a journey of self-discovery and empowerment guided by the light of a few strong women. She meets Shug Avery, her husband’s mistress and a jazz singer with a zest for life, and her stepson’s wife, Sophia, who challenges her to fight for independence. And though the many letters from Celie’s sister are hidden by her husband, Nettie’s unwavering support will prove to be the most breathtaking of all.
Discovered in the attic in which she spent the last years of her life, Anne Frank’s remarkable diary has since become a world classic—a powerful reminder of the horrors of war and an eloquent testament to the human spirit.
In 1942, with Nazis occupying Holland, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl and her family fled their home in Amsterdam and went into hiding. For the next two years, until their whereabouts were betrayed to the Gestapo, they and another family lived cloistered in the “Secret Annex” of an old office building. Cut off from the outside world, they faced hunger, boredom, the constant cruelties of living in confined quarters, and the ever-present threat of discovery and death. In her diary Anne Frank recorded vivid impressions of her experiences during this period. By turns thoughtful, moving, and amusing, her account offers a fascinating commentary on human courage and frailty and a compelling self-portrait of a sensitive and spirited young woman whose promise was tragically cut short.
In Margaret Atwood’s dystopian future, environmental disasters and declining birthrates have led to a Second American Civil War. The result is the rise of the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian regime that enforces rigid social roles and enslaves the few remaining fertile women. Offred is one of these, a Handmaid bound to produce children for one of Gilead’s commanders. Deprived of her husband, her child, her freedom, and even her own name, Offred clings to her memories and her will to survive. At once a scathing satire, an ominous warning, and a tour de force of narrative suspense, The Handmaid’s Tale is a modern classic.
When Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass in 1855, he rocked the literary world and forever changed the course of poetry. In subsequent editions, Whitman continued to revise and expand his poems--but none matched the raw power and immediacy of the first edition.
This beautifully-designed volume presents the original edition Leaves of Grass in its entirety, along with Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous letter to Whitman.
The story of a transgender child based on the real-life experience of Jazz Jennings, who has become a spokesperson for transkids everywhere
From the time she was two years old, Jazz knew that she had a girl's brain in a boy's body. She loved pink and dressing up as a mermaid and didn't feel like herself in boys' clothing. This confused her family, until they took her to a doctor who said that Jazz was transgender and that she was born that way. Jazz's story is based on her real-life experience and she tells it in a simple, clear way that will be appreciated by picture book readers, their parents, and teachers.
In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Now, Gender Queer is here. Maia’s intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears.
Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal story: it is a useful and touching guide on gender identity—what it means and how to think about it—for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere.
A teen plunges into a downward spiral of addiction in this classic cautionary tale.
January 24th
After you’ve had it, there isn't even life without drugs…
It started when she was served a soft drink laced with LSD in a dangerous party game. Within months, she was hooked, trapped in a downward spiral that took her from her comfortable home and loving family to the mean streets of an unforgiving city. It was a journey that would rob her of her innocence, her youth—and ultimately her life.
Read her diary.
Enter her world.
You will never forget her.
Lizard of Transition
On his deathbed, a World War Two veteran, Joe Rubin, confesses to his son that he murdered a Japanese prisoner in the jungles of New Guinea seventy years ago. In his last hours, Joe enters the world between life and death, known as the world of transition. He tells of his journey, with an odd lizard leading the way, as he recants the tale of the murder prior to his imminent death.
He reveals to his son, Joshua, that he possesses a Good Luck flag – Hinomaru Yosegaki, that he had taken from the Japanese soldier he murdered on the island of New Guinea during the battle of the Druinimor River. The flag has handwritten messages from the prisoner’s family and friends, which reveals his identity and the village in Japan he came from.
His son, Joshua, is under tremendous pressure. He’s separated from his wife, who comes to visit her father-in-law, bringing the two together to face their problems under the gut-wrenching veil of his father’s passing. By attempting to reunite the flag with the son of the soldier his father killed seventy years ago, will the family find their way forward?
From the wisdom of the ages, and from the Jewish perspective on death and redemption, “Lizard of Transition” shines a light on how understanding death and dying will lead us to live rich and fuller lives.
Alone on a bridge staring into the dark water...
He was not born Noah Waters, but constant rejection often has a way of encouraging one to walk away from everything they have known while giving birth to the person they are meant to be. This is Noah's story...
I was a sixteen-year-old runaway when I worked my way to the edge of the Jackson River Bridge and peered at the moonlit water swirling below. To be fair, I wasn't an ordinary sixteen-year-old. I had an affliction akin to autism that left me with fragmented memories of my childhood, memories that inspired nightmares filled with demons that tormented me while I slept and awoke me screaming in the dark void of my room. Even I understood that I had few choices, and all were bad. There was nothing for me on the side of the river I had come from, and I had no reason to believe that the other side of the river offered anything better. Logically, jumping seemed a way to break the tie. The stalemate only broke when I heard a voice emanating from the darkness. The voice belonged to a man wearing a hooded garment that shadowed his face, a man who chose to live on the grounds of an old monastery with a dozen cats. The moment he stepped from the darkness my life began to pivot. I first learned to trust him, then love him. He put me on a path toward a future I never imagined possible that night as I stood on...The Jackson River Bridge.
Benzion Malik was on a path of discovery. He was keen to learn about everything in life through the teachings of his faith and only something cataclysmic could throw him off this course. In 1939, the 21-year-old Benzion was called up to the Romanian Army. Little did he know that he would not be a free man until 1945.
During six long years, Benzion served in three further armies. He was forced into hard labor and was constantly abused because of his Jewishness by the Hungarian army. He was then made to serve the German army which simply needed disposable bodies to be targets for Soviet bullets. Finally, the Soviet army needed young men like Benzion to help with the effort to fight the Nazis.
None of these acts of service and servitude were easy. Benzion was in a continuous dance with death but clung to life through the goodness of strangers. When WWII was over, Benzion had to make the 2,600-kilometer walk home and narrowly escaped being poisoned to death by mushroom soup. At home he was confronted with the ruins of his family, community, and people. Yet, he was not defeated.
Lovingly written by his grandson, this book provides an account of a man’s resilience to not give up on the world after extreme destruction, but instead to help rebuild a community and practice Tikkun Olam - Repairing of the World - by believing in cosmic justice and leaving an imprint on his family, friends, and strangers for generations.
Chris Longo served in the military for five years, but that was two decades ago. Today he’s just a regular middle-aged man working at a dull state-run veteran agency. After feeling disillusioned that he's not making a real difference there, he decides to quit and seek a new start. Yet only months later, he's contacted by his old employer and the DoD. He is told his interaction with the veterans were of great value. He's asked to lead a national pilot program that would have him traveling around the country to counsel some veterans in dire need who have lost their way. His mission: help them find their path back. He accepts the job of “De facto Pathfinder"—the title he conjured up since the position didn't even have one yet. On his journey, Chris will meet some interesting people and see some beautiful country. But most importantly, he will discover these veterans' pain and struggles and how each has a gift. And that together, they may all find their path back
