Who is John Shaft? John Shaft is a private eye. John Shaft is a black man made of muscle and ice, and he has no prejudices. John Shaft will kill anyone... black or white. When the cloistered daughter of Harlem's crime boss discovers the true nature of her father's work, she runs off to be as bad as Dad. By the time she disappears, she's into sex, liquor, dope, and a few other scenes. Now, Big Daddy wants Shaft to get his baby back. The tough, take-no-guff detective goes to work... and the Mafia, the Black militants, the NYPD, and City Hall go to work on him. The original and unabridged Shaft novel by Ernest Tidyman, the 1970 tour de force of hardboiled crime fiction that introduced an unsuspecting world to a cultural icon.

Venerated for millennia by three faiths, torn by irreconcilable conflict, conquered, rebuilt, and mourned for again and again, Jerusalem is a sacred city whose very sacredness has engendered terrible tragedy. In this fascinating volume, Karen Armstrong, author of the highly praised A History of God, traces the history of how Jews, Christians, and Muslims have all laid claim to Jerusalem as their holy place, and how three radically different concepts of holiness have shaped and scarred the city for thousands of years. Armstrong unfolds a complex story of spiritual upheaval and political transformation--from King David's capital to an administrative outpost of the Roman Empire, from the cosmopolitan city sanctified by Christ to the spiritual center conquered and glorified by Muslims, from the gleaming prize of European Crusaders to the bullet-ridden symbol of the present-day Arab-Israeli conflict. Written with grace and clarity, the product of years of meticulous research, Jerusalem combines the pageant of history with the profundity of searching spiritual analysis. Like Karen Armstrong's A History of God, Jerusalem is a book for the ages. BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Karen Armstrong's Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life.

The year is 999 A.D. Christians in Europe are preparing themselves for the arrival of the Messiah at the millennium and religious fervour is in the air. Sailing from the North African port of Tangier to a small, distant town called Paris are a Jewish merchant, Ben Attar, his two beloved wives and his Arab partner, Abu Lutfi. They have come for a meeting with their third partner the widower, Raphael Abulafia who has been forced to turn his back on their previous trading partnership because of his new wife's distrust of the dual marriage of Ben Attar. The latter turns this annual trading voyage into a personal quest to legitimise his second wife, restore his honour and, equally important, to show others the richness and humanity in his way of life. A confrontation ensues between people of different cultures whose ways of living and loving are so different, and yet who are of the same religion, believe in the same God and in the same morality. Thus we enter a profound human drama whose moral conflicts of fidelity and desire resonate deeply with our times. A. B. Yehoshua has imaginatively recreated a medieval world with its merchant trade in great depth and sensuous detail. His evocation of one man's love is lyrical, erotic even, and A Journey to the End of the Millennium will rank with the best of Yehoshua's work.

Manchild in the Promised Landis indeed one of the most remarkable autobiographies of our time. This thinly fictionalized account of Claude Brown's childhood as a hardened, streetwise criminal trying to survive the toughest streets of Harlem has been heralded as the definitive account of everyday life for the first generation of African Americans raised in the Northern ghettos of the 1940s and 1950s. When the book was first published in 1965, it was praised for its realistic portrayal of Harlem - the children, young people, hardworking parents; the hustlers, drug dealers, prostitutes, and numbers runners; the police; the violence, sex, and humour. The book continues to resonate generations later, not only because of its fierce and dignified anger, not only because the struggles of urban youth are as deeply felt today as they were in Brown's time, but also because the book is affirmative and inspiring. Here is the story about the one who "made it," the boy who kept landing on his feet and became a man.

Inside the hidden world of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn's Crown Heights--a close-knit but divided community. On a cold night in December, the members of a Hasidic anti-crime patrol called the Shomrim are summoned to a yeshiva dormitory in Crown Heights. There to break up a brawl, the Shomrim instead find themselves embroiled in a religious schism which has split the community and turned roommate against roommate, neighbor against neighbor. At the center of the storm is Aron Hershkop, the owner of an auto-repair business and the leader of the Shomrim. Hershkop watches as the NYPD builds a criminal case against his brothers and friends, apparently with the help of several local residents, who have taken the rare step of forgoing a ruling from the local rabbinical council. Soon, both sides are squaring off in a Brooklyn criminal court, with the Shomrim facing gang assault charges and decades in prison. What conflict could run so deep it left both sides airing their dirty laundry so publicly? This compelling story takes you to the deepest corners of a normally hidden world. Features fast-paced writing and a true story with surprising twists, personal conflicts, and a tense trial Offers a glimpse in a normally sheltered and private community many see, but few know much about. Centers on an unusual man facing a universal conflict: do you do what’s simple and expedient, or do you do follow our heart, your tradition, and your faith?