"To hold this range of beliefs in the palm of your hand is as fine, as grounding, as it was hearing them first on the radio. Heartfelt, deeply cherished beliefs, doctrines for living (yet none of them doctrinaire). Ideas and ideals that nourish. You can see it in their faces, in the photos in this book. And read it in their words. I'm so proud that NPR helped carry this Edward R. Murrow tradition into a new century. And so glad to have it in print, to encounter again and again."—Susan Stamberg, special correspondent, National Public Radio

"In the second collection derived from the extraordinarily popular and influential National Public Radio program This I Believe, pithy, personal, and stealthily affecting essays grapple with life's big questions from myriad perspectives and with refreshingly positive energy . . . Infused with gratitude and hope, these declarations are at once grounding and uplifting."—Booklist

"[Michaels] describes in eloquent detail how the liberal pursuit of social and economic equality was sidetracked by the pursuit of 'diversity.'"—Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune

"Remember, this is a little kid, not even 10 years old, all alone. Hatred, by now, is the only thing that sustains him, hatred for his father, who so brutally double-crossed him, hatred for the Arabs, who he presumes are responsible for this war. There's no glamour here, no pitched battles, only unimaginable misery. Finally, after about two years in the camp, he's recruited into the SPLA, and his real troubles begin. He's beaten and tortured in every possible fashion . . . When he finally does get to kill a few Arabs, he feels no sense of triumph, just sadness. They're human, too, it seems. A couple of miracles happen . . . we know there is a happy ending; otherwise, there wouldn't be this book. Jal becomes a believing Christian and gospel singer. He sets up an organization to help lost boys, but he's  . . . often tired and sad and lonely, but in War Child he succeeds in making this crazy war and all its ramifications utterly grounded, specific and real . . . You'll come away from this book loving Emmanuel Jal."—Carolyn See, The Washington Post Book World

"Childers makes clear that she made the journey at considerable emotional cost . . . It's that complicated awareness, a sense of loss mingled with a feeling of triumph, that makes Welfare Brat stick in the mind."—Columbus Dispatch

"Poet's novels tend to be finely wrought, pretty failures—or worse. Ron Rash, a justly admired poet, is an exhilarating exception, and his third book-length work of fiction, The World Made Straight, marks him as a major Southern writer . . . Rash is too fine and knowing a writer to allow even a hint of folkloric sentimentality to intrude. His fiction inhabits a territory of great beauty and few material consolations . . . The World Made Straight is his most ambitious novel . . . Rash's skill as a storyteller, allows this novel to succeed as an intellectually satisfying work of suspense . . . The World Made Straight reminds us of the sort of compelling literature a brave artist can fashion from the shards of experience.  It is less the literature of post-apocalyptic landscape than it is one in which life, searching for reconciliation, continuously recapitulates the apocalypse in ways both social and personal."—Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times