Here is a story of several people, each of whom has private reasons for traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow. Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame. Dene Oxendene is pulling his life together after his uncle's death and has come to work at the powwow to honour his uncle's memory. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil Red Feather, who has taught himself traditional...

The story of a Chinese mother and her daughter, who has been adopted by an American couple, tracing the very different cultural factors that compel them to consume a rare native tea that has shaped their family's destiny for generations. Li-yan and her family align their lives around the seasons and the farming of tea in their remote Yunnan village. Then a stranger arrives, finding the rare tea he has been seeking and a reticent Akha people. Li-yan...

Nina Redmond is a literary matchmaker. Pairing a reader with that perfect book is her passion ... and also her job. Or at least it was. Until yesterday, she was a librarian in the hectic city. But now the job she loved is no more. Determined to make a new life for herself, Nina moves to a sleepy village many miles away. There she buys a van and transforms it into a bookmobile -- a mobile bookshop that she drives from neighborhood to neighborhood,...

"As Alex and Elana try to make their home among the academics and young leftists in El Paso and Juárez, they are pulled from each other by an affair with a lucha libre fighter, their struggles to define themselves, and the loud cry of home"-- When Alex and Elana move from smalltown Virginia to El Paso, they are just a young married couple, intent on a new beginning. Mexican by birth but adopted by white American Pentecostal parents, Alex is hungry...

Traces the five-hundred year history and wide-ranging influence of the Roman historian's unflattering book about the ancient Germans that was eventually extolled by the Nazis as a bible.

The second segment in a 4 part series updating the controversial 1971 Stanford prison experiment, Dr. Philip Zimbardo's inquiry into the power of social situations to distort identity and erode moral behavior. This second segment presents a profile of the psychology of leadership, as a new prisoner joins the group in lockup, a master set of the guards' keys is stolen, and the two most forceful prisoners go head to head in a struggle for authority....

Japan, after suffering from a massive irreparable disaster, cuts itself off from the world. Children are so weak they can barely stand or walk: the only people with any get-go are the elderly. Mumei lives with his grandfather Yoshiro, who worries about him constantly. They carry on a day-to-day routine in what could be viewed as a post-Fukushima time, with all the children born ancient -- frail and gray-haired, yet incredibly compassionate and wise....

It is often assumed that the national identity of England must be a matter of values and ideas. But in Robert Winder's brilliantly-written account it is a land built on a lucky set of natural ingredients: the island setting that made it maritime; the rain that fed the grass that nourished the sheep that provided the wool, and the wheat fields that provided its cakes and ale. Then came the seams of iron and coal that made it an industrial giant. Here,...

"A history of a quintessentially American place - the rural and small town heartland -- that uncovers deep yet hidden currents of connection with the world"--

The third segment in a 4 part series updating the controversial 1971 Stanford prison experiment, Dr. Philip Zimbardo's inquiry into the power of social situations to distort identity and erode moral behavior. In segment three, as time creeps by, the exercise of reward and punishment and the friction of social inequality within the microsociety of prison take their toll, fraying nerves among the prisoners and generating anxiety among the guards. In...