MJ Peart

Horatio Alger, Jr. (1832-1899) wrote over 100 ‘rags-to-riches’ novels, often about teenage boys forced by circumstances to earn their own living selling newspapers, blacking boots, carrying luggage, or tending store. Alger’s heroes are honest, temperate, generous, and brave, good in a fight and ready to protect a weaker boy from a bully. Alger stresses work, study, and thrift as ways to escape poverty. Alger’s villains, on the other hand, are usually dishonest, sometimes alcoholic or brutal.

Horatio Alger, Jr. (1832-1899) wrote over 100 ‘rags-to-riches’ novels, often about teenage boys forced by circumstances to earn their own living selling newspapers, blacking boots, carrying luggage, or tending store. (Surprisingly, Tom is a girl.) Alger’s heroes are honest, temperate, generous, and brave, good in a fight and ready to protect a weaker boy from a bully. Alger stresses work, study, and thrift as ways to escape poverty.

A classic thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Crichton, Sphere is a bravura demonstration of what he does better than anyone: riveting storytelling that combines frighteningly plausible, cutting-edge science and technology with pulse-pounding action and serious chills.

In a ruined and toxic landscape, a community exists in a giant silo underground, hundreds of stories deep. There, men and women live in a society full of regulations they believe are meant to protect them. Sheriff Holston, who has unwaveringly upheld the silo’s rules for years, unexpectedly breaks the greatest taboo of all: He asks to go outside.