Title search results
Showing 1 - 20 of 93 items
Papa's mechanical fish
By Candace Fleming, Boris Kulikov. 2013
In the summer of 1851, with encouragement and ideas provided by his family, an inventor builds a working submarine and…
takes his family for a ride. Includes notes about Lodner Phillips, the real inventor on whom the story is based. For grades K-3 and older readers. 2013En busca de Klingsor: Novela (Esenciales)
By Jorge Volpi, Jorge Volpi Escalante. 2008
El matemático Gustav Links relata la historia del teniente Francis P. Bacon, enviado por los aliados en los tribunales de…
Nuremberg para encontrar y llevar a la justicia a Klingsor, un científico atómico nazi. Con su conocimiento de la matemática y la física, Bacon tiene que encontrar el paradero del misterioso Klingsor con poca informaciónOur neighbor is a strange, strange man (Orchard HC Picture Books)
By Inc. Staff Scholastic, Tres Seymour. 1999
Come back to Afghanistan: a California teenager's story
By Said Hyder Akbar, Susan Burton, Said Akbar. 2005
Provides an insider's view of the post-Taliban Afghanistan government. The author describes his father's return to Afghanistan in December 2001,…
as President Hamid Karzai's spokesman and later governor of Kunar province, and his own experiences while spending summers there beginning in 2002. For senior high and older readers. 2005Wild science: amazing encounters between animals and the people who study them
By Martin Kratt, Victoria Miles. 2004
Ten wildlife biologists describe their adventures studying and rescuing a blue whale, marmot, polar bear, sea otter, manatee, silver-haired bat,…
northern gannet, leatherback sea turtle, grizzly bear, and grey wolf. They discuss their career interests, research projects, and facts about the animals. For grades 5-8. 2004The boy who drew birds: a story of John James Audubon / by Jacqueline Davies
By Jacqueline Davies, Melissa Sweet. 2004
Recounts how passionately the young Frenchman who made his home in America loved birds. Describes the numerous drawings and paintings…
he made of birds, their nests, and eggs and reveals the way he determined whether migrating birds return to the same place in the spring. For grades 2-4. 2004Wings of madness: Alberto Santos-Dumont and the invention of flight
By Paul Hoffman. 2003
Author of The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (RC 48056) examines the life and work of Alberto Santos-Dumont (1873-1932), the…
Brazilian-born aeronautical pioneer whose dirigibles captivated Paris. Hoffman highlights Santos-Dumont's aerial accomplishments, role in the race for manned flight, and despair at the destructive power of militarized aircraft during World War I. 2003A group of one
By Rachna Gilmore. 2001
Fifteen-year-old Tara Mehta's life is turned upside down when her grandmother visits from India. Naniji disapproves of the family's Canadian…
lifestyle and feminist mother. But Tara also learns of her heritage and Naniji's involvement in Gandhi's peace movement. Some strong language. For junior and senior high readers. 2001I gave Thomas Edison my sandwich
By Floyd C Moore, Floyd C. Moore, Donna K. Nelson. 1995
It's a very special day for Floyd when the train carrying William Taft, Henry Ford, and Thomas Edison pulls into…
Iron City. Floyd's class goes to greet the important men, and he gets a great spot in the crowd. He is so excited he can barely talk when Thomas Edison speaks to him! Floyd gets a chance to do something nice for Edison, an incident that Floyd remembers for the rest of his life. For grades 2-4Yankees in the land of the gods: Commodore Perry and the opening of Japan
By Peter Booth Wiley. 1990
Before Perry's 1853 expedition, contact between the United States and Japan occurred mainly through shipwrecked sailors, including Americans who stranded…
themselves on Japan's shore to try to enter the self-isolated country. Using newly translated Japanese documents as well as reports from Perry and his crew, Wiley provides both countries' perspectives on the historic encounterMy mastodon
By Barbara Lowell, Antonio Marinoni. 2020
Talking to the enemy: stories
By Avner Mandelman. 2005
Nine stories about the Israeli experience. In "Terror" a father beats the son who fails to stand up for his…
five-year-old brother, thus instilling the precept that, right or wrong, family comes first, even before justice or fear. Strong language and some violence. Sophie Brody Medal. 2005Losing Kei
By Suzanne Kamata. 2007
A young mother fights impossible odds to be reunited with her child in this acutely insightful first novel about an…
intercultural marriage gone terribly wrong.Jill Parker is an American painter living in Japan. Far from the trendy gaijin neighborhoods of downtown Tokyo, she's settled in a remote seaside village where she makes ends meet as a bar hostess. Her world appears to open when she meets Yusuke, a savvy and sensitive art gallery owner who believes in her talent. But their love affair, and subsequent marriage, is doomed to a life of domestic hell, for Yusuke is the chonan, the eldest son, who assumes the role of rigid patriarch in his traditional family while Jill's duty is that of a servile Japanese wife. A daily battle of wills ensues as Jill resists instruction in the proper womanly arts. Even the long-anticipated birth of a son, Kei, fails to unite them. Divorce is the only way out, but in Japan a foreigner has no rights to custody, and Jill must choose between freedom and abandoning her child.Told with tenderness, humor, and an insider's knowledge of contemporary Japan, Losing Kei is the debut novel of an exceptional expatriate voice. Suzanne Kamata's work has appeared in over one hundred publications. She is the editor of The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan and a forthcoming anthology from Beacon Press on parenting children with disabilities. A five-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, she has twice won the Nippon Airways/Wingspan Fiction Contest.Three Generations
By Yu Young-Nan, Yom Sang-Seop. 2005
Touted as one of Korea's most important works of fiction, Three Generations (published in 1931 as a serial in Chosun…
Ilbo) charts the tensions in the Jo family in 1930s Japanese occupied Seoul. Yom's keenly observant eye reveals family tensions withprofound insight. Delving deeply into each character's history and beliefs, he illuminates the diverse pressures and impulses driving each. This Korean classic, often compared to Junichiro Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters, reveals the country's situation under Japanese rule, the traditional Korean familial structure, and the battle between the modern and the traditional. The long-awaited publication of this masterpiece is a vital addition to Korean literature in English.The Penguin's Song
By Marilyn Booth, Hassan Daoud. 2014
"I loved this book when I read it in Arabic. The Penguin's Song is a classic novel of the Lebanese…
civil war."--Rabih Alameddine, author of An Unnecessary Woman"In The Penguin's Song, a city falls, a father dies, two women walk the same road over and over, a boy with a broken body dreams of love. Like Agota Kristof's Notebook Trilogy, this spare yet lyrical parable tells us more about exile, loss and the wearing away of hope than most us want to know. I love this beautiful book."--Rebecca Brown, author of American Romances and The End of Youth"Daoud's novel is an elegiac account of loneliness and separation. . . . This is a haunting story inhabited by the ghosts of past lives and demolished buildings, where desires are left unfulfilled and loneliness sweeps through every soul."--Publishers Weekly"Daoud's claustrophobic novel hauntingly conveys one family's isolation after being relocated during the Lebanese civil war. . . . Daoud's evocation of history as it is experienced is excellent. His characters live through momentous events, but their struggles to survive land them in a kind of purgatory. A novel that defies expectations as it summons up the displacement and dehumanization that can come with war."--Kirkus Reviews" . . . deftly explores how people cope with the aftermath of war and the tremendous struggle of rebuilding not only with bricks and concrete but with heart, hopes, and dreams."--Lisa Rohrbaugh, Leetonia Community P.L., OH, and Library Journal"Nothing about reading Hassan Daoud's novels is easy, but the effort is always rewarded. The complex but mundane beauty of his prose is skillfully rendered in Marilyn Booth's translation, The Penguin's Song, a novel as much about the dreary loneliness of daily life as it is about the Lebanese civil war and its aftermath. Slowly paced, heavy with the burden of waiting, Daoud's text unfolds painstakingly, page after page. The horror of war, the pain of isolation, the longing of unfulfilled desire, and the power of the printed word all shine through in this finely-crafted narrative."--Michelle Hartman, Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill UniversityAs war wreaks havoc on the historic heart of Beirut, tenants of the old city are pushed to the margins and obliged to live on the surrounding hillsides, where it seems they will stay forever, waiting. The dream of return becomes a way of life in the unending time of war."The Penguin" is a physically deformed young man who lives with his aging mother and father in one of the "temporary" buildings. His father spends his days on the balcony of their apartment, looking at the far-off city and pining for his lost way of life. Mother and father both find their purpose each day in worrying about the future for their son, while he spends his time in an erotic fantasy world, centered on a young woman who lives in the apartment below. Poverty and family crisis go hand in hand as the young man struggles with his isolation and unfulfilled sexual longing.Voted "The Best Arabic Novel of the Year" when it was first published, The Penguin's Song is a finely wrought parable of how one can live out an entire life in the dream of returning to another.Mulberry and Peach
By Sau-Ling Wong, Hualing Nieh. 1981
This extraordinary novel tells the story of two women-Mulberry and Peach-who are really one. Mulberry is a young Chinese-American woman…
who has fled the turmoil of postwar China to settle in the United States. Unable to forget the terrors she has witnessed or to resolve the conflicts between her new life and her old, she copes by developing a second personality: the fearless, tough-talking, sexually uninhibited Peach. While Mulberry clings to her cultural and ethical roots, Peach renounces her past to embrace the American way of life with a vengeance. These two women-both in flight-speak to their readers through an innovative narrative structure, combining journal entries, interior dialogue, letters, poetry, and myth. Mulberry's past-mainly her experiences during the Japanese occupation of China and the years of civil war between Communists and Nationalists-haunts the text. Separated from her family, she seeks refuge in the home of wealthy cousins, who try desperately to maintain their rigid traditions as warrign forces close in around Peking and the house is systematically looted. Mulberry escapes downriver in a boat carrying a strange assortiment of refugees. But her escape to Taiwan only brings new terrors: when her new husband is targeted by the police, Mulberry msut go into hiding with him in a tiny attic room. There her young daughterm who cannot remember life "outside", descends into a fantasy world of her own invention and unwittingly ensures her family's doom, Mulberry's journal entires alternate with a series of letters from Peach to "the man from the USA immigration service." Peach has embarked on a cross-country journey in flight from possible deportation. Pregnant and penniless, she lives by her wits while taunting her pursuers and ridiculing her alter ego Mulberry, whom she seeks, finally, to conquer. In Mulberry and Peach Hualing Nieh offers a rare perspective, through the eyes of a young refugee woman, of the upheavals of contemporary China (where the book was banned upon its first publication in 1976). Through her experimental, highly effective narrative, she also presents an unforgettable portrait of the pain of cultural dislocation and the anguish of psychological disintegration.Basti
By Intizar Husain, Asif Farrukhi, Frances W. Pritchett. 1979
An NYRB Classics OriginalBasti is a beautifully written reckoning with the tragic history of Pakistan. Basti means settlement, a common…
place, and Intizar Husain's extraordinary novel begins with a mythic, even mystic, vision of harmony between old and young, man and woman, Muslim and Hindu. Then Zakir, the hero, wakes to the modern world. Crowds gather. Slogans echo. Cities burn. Whether hunkered down with family or furtively meeting to exchange news with friends in cafés, Zakir is alone in a country lost to the politics of loneliness.history. The new country of Pakistan is born, separating him once and for all from the woman he loves, and in a jagged and jarring sequence of scenes we witness a nation and a psyche torn into existence only to be torn apart again and again by political, religious, economic, linguistic, personal, and sexual conflicts--in effect, a world of loneliness. Zakir, whose name means "remember," serves as the historian of this troubled place, while the ties he maintains across the years with old friends--friends who run into one another in cafés and on corners and the odd other places where history takes a time-out--suggest that the possibility of reconciliation is not simply a dream. The characters wait for a sign that minds and hearts may still meet. In the meantime, the dazzling artistry of Basti itself gives us reason to hope against hope.Ben Franklin and the Magic Squares (Step into Reading)
By Richard Walz, Frank Murphy. 2001
A funny, entertaining introduction to Ben Franklin and his many inventions, including the story of how he created the "magic…
square." A magic square is a box of nine numbers arranged so that any line of three numbers adds up to the same number, including on the diagonal! Teachers and kids will love finding out about this popular teaching tool that is still used in elementary schools today!Through the Arc of the Rain Forest
By Karen Tei Yamashita. 1990
Through the Arc of the Rain Forest is a burlesque of comic-strip adventures and apocalyptic portents that stretches familiar truths…
to their logical extreme in a future world that is just recognizable enough to be frightening. In the Author's Note," Karen Tei Yamashita writes that her book is like a Brazilian soap opera called a novela: "the novela's story is completely changeable according to the whims of the public psyche and approval, although most likely, the unhappy find happiness; the bad are punished; true love reigns; a popular actor is saved from death ... an idyll striking innocence, boundless nostalgia and terrible ruthlessness." The stage is a vast, mysterious field of impenetrable plastic in the Brazilian rain forest set against a backdrop of rampant environmental destruction, commercialization, poverty, and religious rapture. Through the Arc of the Rainforest is narrated by a small satellite hovering permanently around the head of an innocent character named Kazumasa. Through no fault of his own, Kazumasa seems to draw strange and significant people into his orbit and to find himself at the center of cataclysmic events that involve carrier pigeons, religious pilgrims, industrial espionage, magic feathers, big money, miracles, epidemics, true love, and the virtual end of the world. This book is simultaneously entertaining and depressing, with all the rollicking pessimism you'd expect of a good soap opera or a good political satire."- Kirsten Backstrom, 500 Great Books by WomenA Matter of Time
By Ritu Menon, Shashi Deshpande. 1999
The New York Times Book Review called Shashi Deshpande's U.S. debut, "austere, philosophical, and rich; a work that . .…
. grows in moral force and pathos." Deshpande's critical acclaim in India--including three top literary prizes--prefigured the wide recognition abroad of this pivotal novel, now available in paperback.One morning, with no warning, Gopal, respected professor, devoted husband, and caring father, walks out on his family for reasons even he cannot articulate. His wife, Sumi, returns with their three daughters to the shelter of the Big House, where her parents live in oppressive silence: they have not spoken to each other in thirty-five years. As the mystery of this long silence is unraveled, a horrifying story of loss and pain is laid bare--a story that seems to be repeating itself in Sumi's life.Set in present-day Karnataka, A Matter of Time explores the intricate relationships within an extended family, encompassing three generations. Images from Hindu religion, myth, and local history intertwine delicately with images of contemporary India as the women face and accept the changes that have suddenly become part of their lives.As the women's secrets and strengths are revealed, so are the complications of family and culture, catching each in turn in the cycles of love, loss, and renewal that become essential to their identity. A Matter of Time reveals the hidden springs of character while painting a nuanced portrait of the difficulties and choices facing women--especially educated, independent women--in India today.Shashi Deshpande is the author of seven novels, including The Binding Vine, forthcoming from The Feminist Press and is one of India's most celebrated writers. Her work has been translated into many languages and broadly anthologized.Ritu Menon, a founder of Kali for Women, India's first feminist publisher, has co-edited three anthologies of writing by Indian women.