This is one of the most popular books among our staff recently.

Still Alice is a compelling debut novel about a 50-year-old woman's sudden descent into early onset Alzheimer's disease, written by first-time author Lisa Genova, who holds a Ph. D in neuroscience from Harvard University.

Alice Howland, happily married with three grown children and a house on the Cape, is a celebrated Harvard professor at the height of her career when she notices a forgetfulness creeping into her life. As confusion starts to cloud her thinking and her memory begins to fail her, she receives a devastating diagnosis: early onset Alzheimer's disease. Fiercely independent, Alice struggles to maintain her lifestyle and live in the moment, even as her sense of self is being stripped away. In turns heartbreaking, inspiring and terrifying, Still Alice captures in remarkable detail what's it's like to literally lose your mind...

We often read stories to our staff at meeting or on retreats, and this book has been a regular guest.

"Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time," writes Rachel Naomi Remen in her introduction to Kitchen Table Wisdom. "It is the way wisdom gets passed along. The stuff that helps us live a life worth remembering." Remen, a physician, therapist, professor of medicine, and long-term survivor of chronic illness, is also a down-home storyteller. Reading this collection of real-life parables feels like a late-night kitchen session with a best friend, munching on leftovers while listening to the good-as-gossip stories of everyday heroes and archetype villains. Every story guides us like a life compass, showing us what's good and lasting about ourselves as well as humanity.

This book has been very influential in our Hallmark volunteer efforts in Guatemala.

In 1993 a mountaineer named Greg Mortenson drifted into an impoverished Pakistani village in the Karakoram mountains, after a failed attempt to climb K2.  Moved by the inhabitants' kindness, he promised to return and build a school.  Three Cups of Tea is the story of that promise and its extraordinary outcome.  Over the next decade Mortenson built not just one but fifty-five schools - especially for girls - in the forbidding terrain that gave birth to the Taliban.  His story is at once a riveting adventure and a testament to the power of the humanitarian spirit.

Henri Nouwen's experiences in Guatemala have shaped our perspectives greatly.  This is an amazing story of his journey there.