The Second Favorite Son

Narrator of Favorite Sons Hutch Van Buren is fifteen years old, playing sports and searching for arrowheads in a small industrial town in Ohio with his three closest friends when an altercation between the comrades and Petey Sanchez, a troubled seventeen- year-old, leads to Petey’s accidental death. Together, Hutch and his friends become ensnared in a web of secrets and moral dilemmas. A local ne’er-do-well goes to jail for the crime while the boys keep their pact of silence. Each boy shoulders the burden of truth in his own way as each attempts to leave the past behind. Thirty-three years later, in 2004, Van Buren is the prosecuting attorney in Summit County, Ohio, and a candidate for state attorney general when he learns that he and his boyhood friends weren’t the only ones keeping a secret about Petey’s death. A convicted sex offender in need of a favor attempts to blackmail Van Buren in return for his silence. Van Buren must decide between his political career and the duty of the office he has sworn to uphold. With the clock ticking, Van Buren has a week to seek out his boyhood friends and search his soul while he sorts out three decades of deceit he helped create. Favorite Sons is a wonderful, suspenseful novel with nuanced, memorable characters and unpredictable plot twists.

Do family, faith--and fame--go together? In this captivating novel from award-winning author Tiffany L. Warren, two brothers reach for the stars, but are they prepared for a fall'. . . They're handsome, smart, and musically gifted. Brothers Camden and Blaine Drake have put their talents together and founded a gospel group. The quieter one, Camden is the songwriter, while charismatic Blaine is the performer. At first, their Bishop father is against the idea--until Blaine, his favorite, wows the congregation with his performance at a church revival. Sure enough, once the bishop witnesses their effect on the crowd he wants them there every Sunday. But he may have set the stage for trouble. . . As the group's popularity grows, so do the groupies--and promiscuous Blaine is more than happy to share his love. Gigs across the country, meetings with music execs, a chance to sign with a major label, and a sexy new band member bring new connections--and dangerous new temptations. Soon, a slew of rumors and a shocking betrayal threaten to destroy the group--and the brothers' relationship. But one event is going to rock their world forever. Do they have enough faith, forgiveness, and brotherly love left to find harmony once more'...

A thirty year veteran clinical psychologist describes in intimate detail how being the favorite child can confer both great advantages and significant emotional handicaps. Also illuminating for young parents seeking the best way to rear their children.

"Drawing on a longitudinal study of Jewish children in the United States, this book presents Jewish children's learning about Israel as a rich case for understanding how children develop ideas and beliefs about self, community, nation, and world over the course of elementary school"--

Thriller with terrorism, governmental cover-ups and intrigue.

In this second volume of Wallner's Pierce biography, President Pierce faces unscrupulous and corrupt politicians, comically inept diplomats, violent adventurers, fanatical reformers, fraud, and speculation within an increasingly divided and contentious nation. But the president never lost faith in the American people.

In this new biography, Maurer explores the troubled life of one of America's most prolific and idiosyncratic artists.

Imagine that you could really understand the Bible...that you could read, analyze, and discuss the book of Genesis not as a compositional mystery, a cultural relic, or a linguistic puzzle palace, or even as religious doctrine, but as a philosophical classic, precisely in the same way that a truth-seeking reader would study Plato or Nietzsche. Imagine that you could be led in your study by one of America's preeminent intellectuals and that he would help you to an understanding of the book that is deeper than you'd ever dreamed possible, that he would reveal line by line, verse by verse the incredible riches of this illuminating text -- one of the very few that actually deserve to be called seminal. Imagine that you could get, from Genesis, the beginning of wisdom. The Beginning of Wisdom is a hugely learned book that, like Genesis itself, falls naturally into two sections. The first shows how the universal history described in the first eleven chapters of Genesis, from creation to the tower of Babel, conveys, in the words of Leon Kass, "a coherent anthropology" -- a general teaching about human nature -- that "rivals anything produced by the great philosophers." Serving also as a mirror for the reader's self-discovery, these stories offer profound insights into the problematic character of human reason, speech, freedom, sexual desire, the love of the beautiful, pride, shame, anger, guilt, and death. Something as seemingly innocuous as the monotonous recounting of the ten generations from Adam to Noah yields a powerful lesson in the way in which humanity encounters its own mortality. In the story of the tower of Babel are deep understandings of the ambiguous power of speech, reason, and the arts; the hazards of unity and aloneness; the meaning of the city and its quest for self-sufficiency; and man's desire for fame, immortality, and apotheosis -- and the disasters these necessarily cause. Against this background of human failure, Part Two of The Beginning of Wisdom explores the struggles to launch a new human way, informed by the special Abrahamic covenant with the divine, that might address the problems and avoid the disasters of humankind's natural propensities. Close, eloquent, and brilliant readings of the lives and educations of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jacob's sons reveal eternal wisdom about marriage, parenting, brotherhood, education, justice, political and moral leadership, and of course the ultimate question: How to live a good life? Connecting the two "parts" is the book's overarching philosophical and pedagogical structure: how understanding the dangers and accepting the limits of human powers can open the door to a superior way of life, not only for a solitary man of virtue but for an entire community -- a life devoted to righteousness and holiness. This extraordinary book finally shows Genesis as a coherent whole, beginning with the creation of the natural world and ending with the creation of a nation that hearkens to the awe-inspiring summons to godliness. A unique and ambitious commentary, a remarkably readable literary exegesis and philosophical companion, The Beginning of Wisdom is one of the most important books in decades on perhaps the most important -- and surely the most frequently read -- book of all time.