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“The Giving Tree is a sweet story about a relationship between a young boy and a tree. The tree always provides the boy with what he wants: branches on which to swing, shade in which to sit, apples to eat, branches with which to build a home. As the boy grows older he requires more and more of the tree. The tree loves the boy very much and gives him anything he asks for. In the ultimate act of self-sacrifice, the tree lets the boy cut it down so the boy can build a boat in which he can sail. The boy leaves the tree, now a stump. Many years later, the boy, now an old man, returns and the tree says, “I have nothing left to give you.” The boy replies, “I do not need much now, just a quiet place to sit and rest.” The tree then says, “Well, an old tree stump is a good place for sitting and resting. Come boy, sit down and rest.” The boy obliged and the tree was very happy.” This book has been used to teach children the value of giving back to those that guide us as we grow. The humility required to see beyond the needs of ourselves. And the beauty of a best friend, no matter what shape that friend may take. Get multiple copies of The Giving Tree in bulk for your children’s group or book club today!
The two stars have been cast in the movie adaptation as Peeta Mellark and Gale Hawthorne, respectively. They join Jennifer Lawrence in the movie that is about a future, war-ravaged world run by a corrupt government. The books focus on Everdeen, Mellark and Hawthorne, participants in the Hunger Games Tournament. It’s a televised event in which children battle to the death. Lionsgate hopes to make a film series out of what is an outrageously popular series of books. Hutcherson and Hemsworth are both emerging young stars; Hutcherson has featured in, among other films, “The Bridge to Terabithia,” “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” and his breakout supporting role in “The Kids Are All Right,” and will feature later this year in the remake of the 80′s action film “Red Dawn.” Hemsworth played opposite Miley Cyrus in “The Last Song,” and will feature this year in “The Throwback” and “Arabian Nights.” The story synopsis goes like this: “In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. Each year, the districts are forced by the Capitol to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the Hunger Games, a brutal and terrifying fight to the death – televised for all of Panem to see. Survival is second nature for sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who struggles to feed her mother and younger sister by secretly hunting and gathering beyond the fences of District 12. When Katniss steps in to take the place of her sister in the Hunger Games, she knows it may be her death sentence. If she is to survive, she must weigh survival against humanity and life against love.” Read more on The Huffington Post’s website. We will offer the DVDs in bulk when they become available but until then re-read the book to get ready for what has all the makings of a great movie!
Irvine, CA (PRWEB) June 15, 2011
While DiCostanzo is grateful for the recognition, he is even more excited to be planning ways BookPal can begin giving back to the community. His team is working on launching a non-profit arm of BookPal, named BookPal Gives (bookpal.org coming soon). The non-profit will provide book donations to literacy programs, children’s hospitals, schools, and other organizations unable to purchase the books they need. BookPal Gives’ mission is to promote and instill a love of books for children and help organizations that are dealing with financial challenges continue to be able to provide books as part of their community programs. BookPal has directly supported organizations in the past with deeper discounts, free shipping and complementary copies of books, but looks forward to significantly increasing these initiatives under the BookPal Gives umbrella which will allow BookPal to do even more to serve its community and establish a life-long love of reading. The next big project coming down the pipeline in 2011-2012 will be the launch of Skoob Media (skoobmedia.com to be launched soon). This digital content creation arm of the bulk book retailer’s business will take BookPal’s expertise in corporate, education and government book purchasing trends and partner with publishers to create digital content for customers’ use on tablet computers like the iPad. In addition, Skoob Media will develop unique e-book content for tablets. With 25 million iPads sold in just 14 months, and recent announcements by hospitals, airlines, retailers, pharmaceutical companies, etc. who are planning to provide these devices to employees, the need for apps and content sold in bulk and suited for their needs continues to soar. After bringing home multiple Oscars and being nominated in numerous other categories “The Social Network” was the timely hit of the year with its hard hitting dramatization of how the world’s biggest social network, Facebook, came to be. And because of its notoriety and popularity BookPal received a huge order of the DVD recently. You can watch the movie’s trailers here.
Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay adapts Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires. Sorkin makes a cameo appearance as an unimpressed advertiser. Neither founder Mark Zuckerberg nor any other member of Facebook was involved with the project, although Eduardo Saverin was a consultant for Mezrich. The film was released in the United States by Columbia Pictures on October 1, 2010.” The film received widespread acclaim, with critics praising it for its editing, acting, score and screenplay. The Social Network appeared on 78 critics’ top 10 list for 2010; of those critics 22 had the film in their number one spot. Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers said “The Social Network is the movie of the year. But Fincher and Sorkin triumph by taking it further. Lacing their scathing wit with an aching sadness, they define the dark irony of the past decade.” It received eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director (David Fincher), and Best Actor (Jesse Eisenberg), and won three for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score, and Best Film Editing. It also won the Best Motion Picture – Drama Golden Globe at the 68th Golden Globe Awards on January 16, 2011. The film also won the awards for Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Original Score, making it the film with the most wins of the night.” Grab the DVD in bulk here at Book-Pal.com and share it with friends and co-workers who are still trying to catch up to the ever-evolving social media craze. Book-Pal.com continues to make upgrades and improvements and this week we launched a cool new blog feed on our home page that is animated with the latest BookPal blog news and information. This way you can preview the story on our home page before clicking through to check out the blog. And don’t forget- every post has a “share” button so you can distribute your favorite posts to Facebook or Twitter friends or even just email it over.
Another nifty improvement you will notice soon is that our blog has a fresh look and new style that matches our main website. This has been a long coming project and we are excited to share the fruits of our efforts. THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS by Rebecca Skloot
Excerpt: “After Henrietta Lacks’s death, HeLa went viral, so to speak, becoming the godmother of virology and then biotech, benefiting practically anyone who’s ever taken a pill stronger than aspirin. Scientists have grown some 50 million metric tons of her cells, and you can get some for yourself simply by calling an 800 number. HeLa has helped build thousands of careers, not to mention more than 60,000 scientific studies, with nearly 10 more being published every day, revealing the secrets of everything from aging and cancer to mosquito mating and the cellular effects of working in sewers. HeLa is so outrageously robust that if one cell lands in a petri dish, it proceeds to take over. And so, like any good celebrity, HeLa had a scandal: In 1966 it became clear that HeLa had contaminated hundreds of cell lines, destroying research as far away as Russia. By 1973, when Lacks’s children were shocked to learn that their mother’s cells were still alive, HeLa had already been to outer space. During the eight months that Lacks herself was dying of cancer, the HeLa cells so thoroughly eclipsed her that a lab assistant at her autopsy glanced at her painted red toes and thought: “Oh jeez, she’s a real person. . . . I started imagining her sitting in her bathroom painting those toenails, and it hit me for the first time that those cells we’d been working with all this time and sending all over the world, they came from a live woman. I’d never thought of it that way.” From the NY Times Review: In “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” Rebecca Skloot introduces us to the “real live woman,” the children who survived her, and the interplay of race, poverty, science and one of the most important medical discoveries of the last 100 years. Skloot narrates the science lucidly, tracks the racial politics of medicine thoughtfully and tells the Lacks family’s often painful history with grace. She also confronts the spookiness of the cells themselves, intrepidly crossing into the spiritual plane on which the family has come to understand their mother’s continued presence in the world. Science writing is often just about “the facts.” Skloot’s book, her first, is far deeper, braver and more wonderful. Skloot traces the family’s emotional ordeal, the changing ethics and law around tissue collections, and the inadvertently careless journalists and researchers who violated the family’s privacy by publishing everything from Henrietta’s medical records to the family’s genetic information. She tacks between the perspective of the scientists and the family evenly and fairly, arriving at a paradox described by Henrietta’s daughter Deborah. “Truth be told, I can’t get mad at science, because it help people live, and I’d be a mess without it. I’m a walking drugstore! . . . But I won’t lie, I would like some health insurance so I don’t got to pay all that money every month for drugs my mother’s cells probably helped make.” In 1999 the RAND Corporation estimated that American labs alone held more than 307 million tissue samples from some 178 million people. Not only is the question of payment for profitable tissues unresolved, Skloot notes, but it’s still not necessary to obtain consent to store cells and tissue taken in diagnostic procedures and then use the samples for research. In 2001, an Austrian researcher at Johns Hopkins named Christoph Lengauer invited the Lacks family to his lab. When Deborah and her brother visited, he led them to the basement, where they “saw” their mother for the first time, warming frozen test tubes of HeLa in their hands and watching as a cell divided into two under a microscope while Lengauer explained his work. Deborah pressed a cold vial to her lips. “You’re famous,” she whispered. “Just nobody knows it.”
 From “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” Henrietta and David Lacks, circa 1945.
Laura Hillenbrand, the best-selling author of “Seabiscuit: An American Legend,” is known for her exuberant storytelling and dynamic characters. Her newest book, “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption,” is a riveting tale of the life of an athlete and war hero, Louis Zamperini. Every day more than 700 veterans of World War II die, and with each one goes a story, or dozens of them. Laura Hillenbrand reached Louis Zamperini just in the nick of time — he was in his mid-80s when she found him, and 93 now— and it’s an excellent thing, for his is surely one of the most extraordinary war stories of all. As the story goes, the 26-year-old Zamperini went down over the Pacific in late May 1943. Afterwards, he clung to life on a flimsy raft for nearly seven weeks as he waited to die or be saved. After traveling nearly 2,000 miles they ended up in a Japanese prison camp where they were forced to work for the next two years. His story is a testament to the courage and ingenuity of America’s greatest war heroes, and without this captivating book many of these tales would be lost. More amazingly is that throughout the creation of this novel, Hillenbrand suffered with a debilitating disease. Her ability to transport her readers to another time and place is all the more remarkable in light of the fact that she is largely homebound, largely incapacitated by Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, or C.F.S. The illness, a devastating and little understood disorder, is characterized by overwhelming fatigue and various nonspecific symptoms like muscle pain, memory problems, sore throat, swollen lymph nodes, achy joints and difficulty getting restful sleep.
Unbroken is available in bulk quantities of 25 or more right now on Book-Pal.com!
BookPal has teamed up with Blue Cross to help with their pre-natal initiative to educate and inform expectant parents by offering them free pre-natal books to jump start their education. The current program is offering What to Expect the First Year and What to Expect When You Are Expecting which has been coined “the pregnancy bible” for new and expectant mothers seeking advice on a variety of topics. The book covers not only gestational stages and your growing child’s development but a variety of health issues.
These books are an excellent tool and guide for new parents and they are an important supplement to the educational classes that expectant parents can take at their local hospitals and clinics. Although many of the topics covered, such as emergency situations or illnesses, may never come up for you- it’s always a great education to know what to look for and how to treat many of the common ailments that babies go through. The authors have taken years to refine the research and information in the book and it has gone through several reprints to date so you know the data is time tested and Mom approved!
If you happen to browse through the May 2011 issue of the OC Metro, Orange County’s premier business and lifestyle magazine, and flip to page 41 you may notice a familiar face to the BookPal family. Our own founder and President, Tony DiCostanzo made the list, sliding in at a young 38! This list honors community business leaders who have accomplished extraordinary acumen in business and have brought their entrepreneurship to the Orange County community.
Tony will be attending a special party later this month to celebrate the honorees so check back because we will post pictures of the event and share all the juicy details! We are so proud of Tony and his continued commitment to the growth and success of BookPal. As our family of clients and employees grows, he continues to be grateful for their support and dedication to the BookPal promise which is to deliver bulk books at unprecedented selection and value to clients worldwide. Cheers to Tony and thanks for your support and continued patronage of Book-Pal.com! First5LA.org, a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing resources together to help parents raise healthy kids in Los Angeles has selected BookPal to be its bulk book retailer of choice. This on-going contract will provide hundreds of books to various First 5 initiatives over the next several months.
We’re excited to continue working with First 5 LA as they continue on their mission to helping children and families throughout LA. |
Another great novel, “
BookPal, LLC a worldwide supplier of bulk books had the honor of its President, Tony DiCostanzo, being named as an OC Metro 
The movie has gotten so large in fact, much like Facebook itself, that Wikipedia has an entire entry chronicling the background of the movie. “The Social Network is a 2010 drama film about the founding of the social networking website Facebook and the resulting lawsuits. The film was directed by David Fincher and features a cast including Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Brenda Song, Armie Hammer, Max Minghella, Rashida Jones, Joseph Mazzello, and Rooney Mara.
This is a common Freshman read in schools nationwide but what’s not so common is this storyline. The story follows the average life of Henrietta Lack’s as her cervical cells, taken during a diagnostic procedure- she had cervical cancer- became famous for their uncanny ability to reproduce rapidly and in traditionally uninhabitable environments. The cells were originally removed during a 
After a stunning review recently in the NY Times, 
And, What to Expect the First Year covers the baby basics including feeding and sleeping schedules, developmental milestones, learning the signs and symptoms of different illnesses and how to treat them and other parenting advice from doctors and experts.
It all started a few months ago after working with First 5 Monterey County on two large customized book orders, we thought we would be a good fit for other First 5 programs. After reviewing our qualifications and our selection of titles on child care that we thought might fit with their program they picked BookPal to continue with a contract. Their first request for children’s books was for books with a dental care/tooth theme. We provided a list of recommended titles and First 5 LA placed an order for 100 copies of a Scholastic title called “Brush, Brush, Brush!” We were able to offer free shipping on this title.
