Will Kiehn is seemingly destined for life as a humble farmer in the Midwest when, having felt a call from God, he travels to the vast North China Plain in the early twentieth-century. There he is surprised by love and weds a strong and determined fellow missionary, Katherine. They soon find themselves witnesses to the crumbling of a more than two-thousand-year-old dynasty that plunges the country into decades of civil war. As the couple works to improve...

Shares the story of the author's family and upbringing, describing how they moved from poverty to an upwardly mobile clan that included the author, a Yale Law School graduate, while navigating the demands of middle class life and the collective demons of the past.

"Seamlessly interweaves five love stories that, together, chronicle sixty years of Bangladeshi history. Shahryar, a recent PhD graduate and father of nine-year-old Anna, must leave the US when his visa expires. In their last remaining weeks together, we learn Shahryar's history, in a village on the Bay of Bengal, where a poor fisherman and his wife are preparing to face a storm of historic proportions. That story intersects with those of a Japanese...

From Tanzania and Zambia to Ivory Coast and Ghana belief in witchcraft continues to terrorize women: the denunciation, brutal beating, the banishment to an unknown village without family or friends. In Northern Ghana alone there are estimated to be more than 5000 'witches' confined to 'witches villages,' part sanctuaries, part prisons. Witches in Exile is the first film to tell their story and the story of the human rights struggle to find a solution...

Ewa Cybulski and her sister sail to New York from their native Poland in search of a new start and the American dream. When they reach Ellis Island, doctors discover that Magda is ill, and the two women are separated. Ewa is released onto the mean streets of Manhattan while her sister is quarantined. Alone, with nowhere to turn and desperate to reunite with Magda, Ewa quickly falls prey to Bruno, a charming but wicked man who takes her in and forces...

Mark Thackeray returns to Chicago after he retires from teaching school in London. However the challenge of reaching the kids in the inner city school is just too much to resist.

For generations of migrant workers, Imperial County--the California desert region where the U.S. borders Mexico--has held the promise of paradise and the reality of hell. Award-winning writer Vollmann takes readers deep into the heart of this haunted region.

A carpet designer in Kabul describes his childhood before the Mujahedin took over, his family's struggle for survival after fleeing their home, and how his secret carpet factory provided both employment and education for neighborhood girls.

After having been missing for four years and presumed dead, Travis emerges from the desert near the Texas-Mexico border and collapses at a gas station. His younger brother, Walt, a billboard artist, takes him to Walt's Los Angeles home where Travis' son, Hunter, has lived with Walt and Walt's wife, Anne, since Travis and his wife, Jane, disappeared. Travis reestablishes a relationship with Hunter, finds Jane and brings about a reunion between Jane...