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Lucas Stephens is a Canadian-born, bright, young entrepreneur, who makes his fortune in Chicago as a successful pharmaceutical executive. During a business trip to China he is wrongfully accused of drug trafficking and imprisoned in a brutal penitentiary. While in his cold cell Lucas discovers the gift of supernatural healing. He returns to Chicago where he quits his highly paid position and begins to fulfill his new-found passion for healing people. He teams up with a skeptical theologian and a down-and-out street person and together they explore this healing phenomenon while being hotly pursued and scrutinized by a pragmatic female reporter with whom Lucas shares a dark past. Lucas begins to heal thousands of people as he struggles to cope with his new found fame. But he must contend with his former boss who becomes psychotically enraged that Lucas' success is unexpectedly creating the financial demise of his pharmaceutical company. It's a skillfully spun drama that combines global high-finance and the curious world of divine healing. Packed with unpredictable events, and loaded with intrigue, The Chicago Healer will keep you guessing, and is bound to capture the imagination of readers everywhere-especially those with an interest in miracles. The title was awarded the Best New Canadian Author Award in 2003. Paul H. Boge is a practicing professional engineer and the writer of numerous film reviews, book reviews and articles. The Chicago Healer, his first novel, won the Best New Canadian Author Award which was presented by Castle Quay Books and Essence Publishing at the 2003 Word Guild Conference in Guelph, Ontario. Paul has been active in public speaking and inner city rescue work and has also taught at an orphanage in Kenya.

A collection of poems, songs, fingerplay, and activities celebrating each month and season of the year, using nature as its major focus.

The photobook that defined a generation: 69 black-and-white photographs in Cindy Sherman's seminal cinematic style, made between 1977 and 1980

Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, a series of 69 black-and-white photographs created between 1977 and 1980, is widely seen as one of the most original and influential achievements in recent art. Witty, provocative and searching, this lively catalogue of female roles inspired by the movies crystallizes widespread concerns in our culture, examining the ways we shape our personal identities and the role of the mass media in our lives. Sherman began making these pictures in 1977 when she was 23 years old. The first six were an experiment: fan-magazine glimpses into the life (or roles) of an imaginary blond actress, played by Sherman herself. The photographs look like movie stills--or perhaps publicity pix--purporting to catch the blond bombshell in unguarded moments at home. The protagonist is shown preening in the kitchen and lounging in the bedroom. Onto something big, Sherman tried other characters in other roles: the chic starlet at her seaside hideaway, the luscious librarian, the domesticated sex kitten, the hot-blooded woman of the people, the ice-cold sophisticate and a can-can line of other stereotypes. She eventually completed the series in 1980. She stopped, she has explained, when she ran out of clichés.

Other artists had drawn upon popular culture but Sherman's strategy was new. For her the pop-culture image was not a subject (as it had been for Walker Evans) or raw material (as it had been for Andy Warhol) but a whole artistic vocabulary, ready-made. Her film stills look and function just like the real ones--those 8 x 10 glossies designed to lure us into a drama we find all the more compelling because we know it isn't real. In the Untitled Film Stills there are no Cleopatras, no ladies on trains, no women of a certain age. There are, of course, no men. The 69 solitary heroines map a particular constellation of fictional femininity that took hold in postwar America--the period of Sherman's youth and the starting point for our contemporary mythology. In finding a form for her own sensibility, Sherman touched a sensitive nerve in the culture at large. Although most of the characters are invented, we sense right away that we already know them. That twinge of instant recognition is what makes the series tick and it arises from Cindy Sherman's uncanny poise. There is no wink at the viewer, no open irony, no camp.

In 1995, The Museum of Modern Art purchased the series from the artist, preserving the work in its entirety. This book marks the first time that the complete series will be published as a unified work, with Sherman herself arranging the pictures in sequence.

What colors do you see in nature - the green of a fern, the brown of a desert, the gray of a lifeless tree? Look closer. You'll find more than meets the eye. Is that a white flower, or a star that fell in the forest? Is that an orange sunset, or a piece of fruit that's ripe for eating? Is that a blue sky, or the slate on which a bird writes? In thirteen memorable poems, Jane Yolen takes you on a whimsical journey through Mother Nature's glorious landscape. Using Jason Stemple's dazzling photographs as a backdrop, Ms. Yolen paints her own vivid pictures that are both real and imagined.

More than 200 tales by the Brothers Grimm."

A general reference book on the history and structure of the government of the United States - its major institutions and agencies, the election process, and the creation and passing of laws and taxes. It is aimed at students and general readers who want to make sense of the complexities of the US political system.

Few lives have left so vivid an impression upon a native environment as that of James Whitcomb Riley, the Hoosier Poet. His folksy, down-home rhymes are still enormously popular in his native state and beyond. This publication brings back into print the complete Riley repertoire of more than 1,000 poems, including such all-time favorites as Little Orphant Annie (far and away the best-loved of all Riley characters), The Raggedy Man, Our Hired Girl, A Barefoot Boy, The Bumblebee, Granny, and When the Frost Is on the Punkin.
It is said that Indiana's best-known poet did not portray but invented the typical Hoosier. Applying imaginative skill, Riley altered and adapted the people around him to suit his purpose. As Jeannette Covert Nolan once put it, the figure who emerged was a mellow, humorous rustic, a quaint, bucolic philosopher, unlettered but gifted with an earthy shrewdness, a peasant wisdom, a heart of gold, speaking a drawling, hybrid tongue, a dubious dialect as yet unidentified by any philologist.
In his heyday Riley was famous all over the world. Though often called a children's poet, he actually wrote about children for adults, delighting in emotional reminders of an irretrievable past--perhaps one that never quite existed. Throughout his life Riley looked back wistfully and sentimentally upon his childhood days, turning the longings and unfulfilled dreams of youth into verse. So celebrated was he in Indiana that in many public elementary schools, students were required to memorize and recite one of his poems every week for admiring audiences of visiting parents.

If I Knew What Poets Know
If I knew what poets know, Did I know what poets do, If I knew what poets know,
Would I write a rhyme Would I sing a song, I would find a theme
Of the buds that never blow Sadder than the pigeon's coo Sweeter than the placid flow
In the summer-time? When the days are long? Of the fairest dream:
Would I sing of golden seeds Where I found a heart in pain, I would sing of love that lives
Springing up in ironweeds? I would make it glad again; On the errors it forgives:
And of rain-drop turned to snow, And the false should be the true, And the world would better grow
If I knew what poets know? Did I know what poets do. If I knew what poets know.
--James Whitcomb Riley

A witty satire of the expat experience in rural Europe and antidote to every 'wish-you-were-here' travel memoir, this novel is entertainment in its purest form.

Gerald Samper is all about the good life. On his own private hilltop in idyllic Tuscany, he is living his own brand of la bella vita working as a ghostwriter for celebrities. He wiles away his free time concocting outrageous dishes with the distinctive liqueur gifted to the area's new arrivals. But it's not long before his little slice of paradise is shattered by the arrival of an eccentric neighbor.

Marta is a composer on the run from 'Voynovia, ' a crime-riddled Eastern European nation to which she owes her distinctive accent. With her nocturnal helicopter visits and habitual piano-playing, it's not long before the two clash and become embroiled in an absurd turf war. The battle compels each side to devise increasingly strange retaliations: a back-and-forth which features such delicacies as Gerald's batch of Garlic and Fernet Branca Ice Cream and Marta's parody of her neighbor's terrible singing for a film score she's composing.

With each ridiculous misunderstanding, the two are brought into ever closer and ever more disastrous proximity. In their earnest attempts to narrate their side of the story it quickly becomes apparent how unreliable they both really are. An adroit, charming and bitingly funny comedy of manners for anyone who finds humor in the idiosyncrasies of human behavior.