Describing and defining a new American religious sect--the neo-agnostics--Gallagher takes the reader on a tour of the different outlets for the spiritually curious.

The author, an Italian, moved to Kenya with her husband and son when she was 25, and had a daughter there. When her husband died, she carried on alone, managing a 90,000-acre ranch and creating a wildlife refuge.

PI Lorraine "Rainie" Conner is the victim, not the sleuth, in this harrowing thriller, the fourth in which she appears. Troubled by recurring nightmares, a depressed Rainie goes for a drive in the middle of the night--only to be kidnapped from her car. As Rainie fights for her freedom and her life, her estranged husband/love of her life, ex-FBI profiler Quincy, and his daughter, FBI agent Kimberly, desperately search for clues to Rainie's whereabouts and the identity of her kidnapper.

Bill Gates draws on his own experiences as chairman of Microsoft and offers his best insights into how companies can become successful. He advocates that companies develop what he calls "digital nervous systems"--a way of using computers to maximize the flow of information for profit, and provides examples from companies he thinks have done things well (and not so well).

Dickens's heavily autobiographical novel describing a young man's rise in the world is a classic coming-of-age story. David Copperfield, the narrator, is orphaned at a tender age and raised first by his brutal stepfather (who halts his schooling and sends him to work in a factory--as did Dickens's own father), then by a kindly aunt. He trains for a career in law, but eventually becomes a writer. An ill-advised marriage brings him considerable unhappiness, but not long after his wife's death he is reunited with his childhood sweetheart. A sprawling portrait of life in Victorian England, DAVID COPPERFIELD is perhaps Dickens's most popular work, and it contains many of the characters--Mr. Micawber, Uriah Heep, Betsey Trotwood, Steerforth, and Little Emily--who gave Dickens his reputation as the finest literary portraitist of his age.

An account of the lives of four generations of Cuban women, written by a journalist for "Vogue" and "Mirabella". The central figure, Naty Revuelta, grew up within the privileged precincts of Battista's inner circle yet became enamored of Fidel Castro and his revolution and--to the horror of her conservative mother--bore him a daughter. A "New York Times" Notable Book for 1998.

Gleick, a former science writer for the New York Times, examines chaos theory, which attempts to find patterns amid natural randomness. In CHAOS, the author tracks various experiments in a variety of scientific fields as the chance that once governed life gives way to complex schedules, tracking the origins of a typhoon back to a hummingbird in Central Park.