Moral Combat Tormented Hope

When Hannah was a little girl, she was full of love. But she was born into a volatile family of drunks where sexual abuse, keeping secrets, and worse were the norm. In spite of all that, she felt an intense desire to survive and escape. Even though she suffered physical and emotional attacks, Hannah picked herself up every time and braced for the next outburst of family violence. She wanted nothing more than to leave her family to find love and kindness. However, she could not escape the darkness, and she'd try to kill herself in the third grade. The only thing she could see in her future was incest, beatings, and more attacks from the people she loved the most. At nine years old-at the brink of slipping into a downward spiral-she heard a voice that told her, "Write down your story. It is your inheritance." She listened to that voice. Join Hannah on her journey from her birth to age ten as she learns the difference between good and evil in the first book of Moral Combat.

When Hannah was a little girl, she was full of love. But she was born into a volatile family of drunks where sexual abuse, keeping secrets, and worse were the norm. In spite of all that, she felt an intense desire to survive and escape. Even though she suffered physical and emotional attacks, Hannah picked herself up every time and braced for the next outburst of family violence. She wanted nothing more than to leave her family to find love and kindness. However, she could not escape the darkness, and she'd try to kill herself in the third grade. The only thing she could see in her future was incest, beatings, and more attacks from the people she loved the most. At nine years old-at the brink of slipping into a downward spiral-she heard a voice that told her, "Write down your story. It is your inheritance." She listened to that voice. Join Hannah on her journey from her birth to age ten as she learns the difference between good and evil in the first book of Moral Combat.

The true key to all the perplexities of the human condition, Rousseau boldly claims, is the “natural goodness of man.” It is also the key to his own notoriously contradictory writings, which, he insists, are actually the disassembled parts of a rigorous philosophical system rooted in that fundamental principle. What if this problematic claim—so often repeated, but as often dismissed—were resolutely followed and explored? Arthur M. Melzer adopts this approach in The Natural Goodness of Man. The first two parts of the book restore the original, revolutionary significance of this now time-worn principle and examine the arguments Rousseau offers in proof of it. The final section unfolds and explains Rousseau’s programmatic thought, especially the Social Contract, as a precise solution to the human problem as redefined by the principle of natural goodness. The result is a systematic reconstruction of Rousseau’s philosophy that discloses with unparalleled clarity both the complex weave of his argument and the majestic unity of his vision. Melzer persuasively resolves one after another of the famous Rousseauian paradoxes–enlarging, in the process, our understanding of modern philosophy and politics. Engagingly and lucidly written, The Natural Goodness of Man will be of interest to general as well as scholarly readers.

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel that follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre. Tony Webster thought he left his past behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.

March 1945 World War II may be ending, but for nineteen-year-old pilot Henry Forester the conflict still rages. Shot down behind enemy lines in France, Henry endured a dangerous trek to freedom, relying on the heroism of civilians and Resistance fighters to stay alive. But back home in Virginia, Henry is still reliving air battles with Hitler's Luftwaffe and his torture by the Gestapo. Mostly, Henry can't stop worrying about the safety of those who helped him escape—especially one French boy, Pierre, who, because of Henry, may have lost everything. When Henry returns to France to find Pierre, he is stunned by the brutal after-math of combat: starvation, cities shattered by Allied bombing, and the shocking return of concentration camp survivors. Amid the rubble of war, Henry must begin a daring search for a lost boy—plus a fight to regain his own internal peace and the trust of the girl he loves. L. M. Elliott's sequel to Under a War-Torn Sky is an astonishing account of surviving the fallout from war.