"Before there was 'tourism' or 'leisure time;' before souvenir ashtrays became 'camp' and 'kitsch;' before Goofy Golf became an 'attraction' and today's colossal theme parks could even be imagined, there was 'Beautiful Lake of the Ozarks -- Family Vacationland,' where to this day the ashtrays remain devoid of irony. It was here, at Arrowhead Lodge at Lake of the Ozarks, where Bill Geist spent his summers between high school and college working at...

Narrated from several different perspectives, tells the story of the 1956 murder of two teenaged girls in suburban Baltimore, Maryland.

When Alice Waters opened the doors of her "little French restaurant" in Berkeley, California in 1971 at the age of 27, no one ever anticipated the indelible mark it would leave on the culinary landscape—Alice least of all. Fueled in equal parts by naiveté and a relentless pursuit of beauty and pure flavor, she turned her passion project into an iconic institution that redefined American cuisine for generations of chefs and food lovers. In Coming...

"Moving between the present and the past, this is the story of a seemingly grounded girl who's pulled into a lightning-strike romance with an electric-charged boy, and the enormity of the aftermath."--

With her mama recently dead and her pa sight unseen since birth, Amelia is suddenly in charge of her younger brother and sister-- and the family gas station. To keep a competitor at bay and keep her family out of foster care, Melia must come up with a father-- fast. When a hobo rolls out of a passing truck, Melia grabs opportunity by its beard. Can she convince the town that Hiram is her long lost father, and keep the family together until she comes...

In 1983 New York, Michael tries to forget about his father's anger, the pressure of school, and the threat of AIDS by escaping to The Echo, where he dances with abandon and attracts the interest of another boy.

As he tries to teach his new pet snail, Flash, how to do tricks, Albert the mouse learns that patience can be a very good thing when it comes to snails. Introduces position word pairs, including near/far, top/bottom, and on/off.

On April 1, 1945 with the battle of Okinawa beginning, fourteen-year-old native Okinawan Hideki, drafted into the Blood and Iron Student Corps, is handed two grenades and told to go kill American soldiers; small for his age Hideki does not really want to kill anyone, he just wants to find his family, and his struggle across the island will finally bring him face-to-face with Ray, a marine in his very first battle--and the choice he makes then will...

The search for the origin of human language has finally come of age. For centuries, progress in Ur-language research was slow and spasmodic; many scientists came to believe that there was no definitive way to answer its central questions. Then, in the past 20 years, everything changed. Linguist Kenneally shows how linguists, cognitive scientists, animal researchers, biologists, and geneticists have all contributed valuable new insights into language...

When sixteen-year-old Thankful Curtis must leave Bright Island, Maine, for the first time in 1937, she has trouble adjusting to life on the mainland, new people, and "proper schooling," and yearns for her days of farming with her father and sailing.