Akron Public Library

"A survey of how, over the past 4,000 years, religious leaders, poets, painters, and ordinary people have visualized Hell--its location, architecture, furnishings, purpose, and inhabitants."--inside cover.

In 1995, George Paxton, an American tombstone carver, wants to purchase a suit that will save its wearer from nuclear holocaust, and when he finally buys it, he survives, only to be saved by an alien race from Antarctica and put on trial with six other survivors for his failure to stop the nuclear arms race.

Keith B. Richburg was an experienced and respected reporter who had paid his dues covering urban neighborhoods in Washington D.C. and won praise for his coverage of Southeast Asia. But nothing prepared him for the personal odyssey that he would embark upon when he was assigned to cover Africa. In this powerful book, Richburg takes the reader on an extraordinary journey that sweeps from Somalia to Rwanda to Zaire and finally to South Africa. He shows...

In this mesmerizing first novel, a young American graduate student abandons her research deep in the Australian rain forest to investigate her professor's mysterious disappearance. Annabel Mendelssohn has an unusual but oddly satisfying life - studying spectacled fruit bats in the rain forest of Australia. She spends her free time discovering waterfalls and e-mailing her sister, Alice, who has settled for the more domesticated science of grant administration....

"Winner of the 1947 Pulitzer Prize, All the King's Men is one of the most famous and widely read works in American fiction. Its original publication by Harcourt catapulted author Robert Penn Warren to fame and made the novel a bestseller for many seasons. Set in the 1930s, it traces the rise and fall of demagogue Willie [Stark] Talos, a fictional Southern politician who resembles the real-life Huey "Kingfish" Long of Louisiana. Talos begins his career...

Plagued with unpleasant memories of his mother's death, shy Gerard Freeman is obsessed with the manuscript of a century-old ghost story written by his great-grandmother and entrusted to his care.

This exuberant group portrait of four extraordinary writers—Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, and Edna Ferber—mixes literary scholarship, social history, and gossip to evoke an era that continues to intrigue and captivate listeners.

"Fans of mysteries featuring literary figures as crime-solvers will thoroughly enjoy this series." -Booklist It's 1927, and "the Ferber season on Broadway" is about to begin. The musical adaptation of Show Boat by Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern opens on December 27, and The Royal Family, her comedy of manners written with George Kaufman, opens the following night. But despite the excitement, author Edna Ferber misses both opening nights. She has...