Summer on the river

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Charles Elton

"THE SONGS follows Iz Herzl, famed political activist and protest singer, who has always told his children that it is the future not the past they should concentrate on. Now, at 80, an almost forgotten figure, estranged from everyone who has ever loved him, his refusal to look back on his extraordinary life leaves his teenage children, the brilliant Rose and her ailing younger brother, Huddie, adrift in myths and uncertainty that cause them to retreat into a secret world of their own. Iz's other child, Joseph, a faltering Broadway songwriter 40 years older than Rose and Huddie, whose one disastrous meeting as a child with his father has left him lost and alone, is on a shocking and violent path to self-destruction. When the disparate members of the Herzl family begin to converge, the ambiguities at the heart of Iz Herzl's life begin to surface in a way that will change all of them"--

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Amanda Brooke

Newlyweds Holly and Tom have just moved into an old manor house in the picturesque English countryside. When Holly discovers a moondial in the overgrown garden little does she suspect that it will change her life forever. The moondial lets Holly see into the future -- a future which holds Tom cradling their baby daughter, Libby, and mourning Holly's death in childbirth.

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Nicholas Sparks

One of America's bestselling authors returns with a tale about the greatest commitment of all: loving someone forever. When a near-fatal car crash brings Taylor McAden together with Denise Holden, a new resident of Edenton, North Carolina, he must look into his past to see if it's not too late to take a chance on the future.

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Paula S. Fass

"The End of American Childhood takes a sweeping look at the history of American childhood and parenting, from the nation's founding to the present day. Renowned historian Paula Fass shows how, since the beginning of the American republic, independence, self-definition, and individual success have informed Americans' attitudes toward children. But as parents today hover over every detail of their children's lives, are the qualities that once made American childhood special still desired or possible? Placing the experiences of children and parents against the backdrop of social, political, and cultural shifts, Fass challenges Americans to reconnect with the beliefs that set the American understanding of childhood apart from the rest of the world. Fass examines how freer relationships between American children and parents transformed the national culture, altered generational relationships among immigrants, helped create a new science of child development, and promoted a revolution in modern schooling. She looks at the childhoods of icons including Margaret Mead and Ulysses S. Grant--who as an eleven-year-old, was in charge of his father's fields and explored his rural Ohio countryside. Fass also features less well-known children like ten-year-old Rose Cohen, who worked in the drudgery of nineteenth-century factories. Bringing readers into the present, Fass argues that current American conditions and policies have made adolescence socially irrelevant and altered children's road to maturity, while parental oversight threatens children's competence and initiative. Showing how American parenting has been firmly linked to historical changes, The End of American Childhood considers what implications this might hold for the nation's future"--