Chronicles a female preacher's personal odyssey of faith and the tensions of her religious life, a conflict that leads her to leave the church in order to maintain her relationship with God. After nine years serving on the staff of a big urban church in Atlanta, Barbara Brown Taylor arrives in rural Clarkesville, Georgia (population 1,500), following her dream to become the pastor of her own small congregation. The adjustment from city life to country...

Where do human societies come from? The drive to answer this question took on a new urgency in the nineteenth century, when a generation of archaeologists began to look beyond the bible for the origins of different cultures and civilizations. A child of the San Francisco Gold Rush whose mother was born in Mexico City, Zelia Nuttall threw herself into the study of Aztec customs and cosmology, eager to use the tools of the emerging science of anthropology...

Darrin Bell was 6 when his mother told him he couldn't have a realistic water gun. She feared for his safety, that police tend to think of little Black boys as older and less innocent than they really are. Bell examines how The Talk shaped intimate and public moments from childhood to adulthood. While coming of age in Los Angeles, Bell becomes painfully aware of being regarded as dangerous by white teachers, neighbors, and police officers and thus...