BEYOND 'ECSTASY'

"MDMA temporarily lowers interpersonal boundaries," said the Harvard doctor. "Hex dissolves them." "The potential for abuse, for mind control, is terrifying," said the Berkeley psychopharmacology professor. Outside, packs of painfully thin kids in hex-sign T-shirts--the "hexies"--quiver and murmur and make their telepathic suicide pacts. Someone is trying to destroy a generation.

Sarah "Sunny" Randall wants to know who. The investigative reporter on the story for New York's Metro Magazine, 5'3," Radcliffe-educated Sunny is clueless in the deadly world of dealers and...

The almost unbelievable, but true story of a teen-age boy's survival and triumph over hardship in a Russian slave labor camp -- ending in a breathtaking escape -- DONBAS has proven appeal for middle- and high school students and has been taught in schools. It's a book that holds kids (and adults) to the last page and gives them a new awareness and appreciation of what they've got -- and what life might one day ask of them. It's a book that puts you in its author's tattered shoes, makes you feel his cold, hunger, and pain, his homesickness and determination to live, and ask yourself: Would I...