Title search results
Showing 41 - 60 of 306 items
Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan: the true story of how the iconic superhero battled the men of hate
By Rick Bowers, National Geographic Kids. 2012
Discusses creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's Jewish upbringing during the Great Depression and its influence on the development of…
their superhero, Superman. Covers the rise of the KKK and the emergence of the radio show, The Adventures of Superman. For junior and senior high and older readers. 2012The science of Philip Pullman's His dark materials
By John Gribbin, Mary Gribbin. 2005
Relates the mystery and magic in Pullman's trilogy, beginning with The Golden Compass (DB 44343, BR 13276), to real-world scientific…
concepts. Covers topics from cosmology to string theory to explain such objects as Will's subtle knife and Mary Malone's amber spyglass. For junior and senior high readers. 2003Dark dreams: the story of Stephen King (World Writers Ser.)
By Nancy Whitelaw. 2006
Biography of award-winning horror writer. Discusses King's difficult childhood in Maine, a setting for many of his stories, as well…
as his adolescence, college years, marriage, and eventual success. Describes King's struggles with censorship, fame, and the creative process. For senior high readers. 2006A kick in the head: An Everyday Guide To Poetic Forms
By Chris Raschka, Paul B. Janeczko. 2005
A guide to twenty-nine poetic forms including haiku, limerick, roundel, sonnet, elegy, and ballad. Provides examples with narrative explanations of…
each form from simple rhyme schemes--couplet, tercet, quatrain--to more-complex combinations like the pantoum. For grades 5-8 and older readers. 2005Caught by the sea: my life on boats
By Gary Paulsen. 2001
Author of Hatchet (BR 11525) relates how falling in love with the ocean at age seven evolved into a later…
love for sailing. Describes boats he has owned, his adventures up and down the Pacific Coast, and surviving a killer storm. For grades 6-9 and older readers. 2001Reflections of a peacemaker: a portrait through heartsongs
By Jeni Stepanek, Mattie J. T. Stepanek. 2005
Final collection of works by the young poet who succumbed to an incurable disease at age thirteen. His mother selected…
some two hundred poems to create a window into Mattie's life, mind, and spirit. Sequel to Hope through Heartsongs (RC 54063, BR 14065). For grades 3-6 and older readers. 2005Invincible Louisa: the story of the author of Little women
By Cornelia Meigs. 1968
A vivid portrait of Little Women (BR 11778) author Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888), who based the story of Meg, Jo,…
Beth, and Amy on her own family: her hardworking mother, idealistic father, and three sisters. For grades 4-7 and older readers. Newbery Medal. 1933Hope Leslie, or, Early times in the Massachusetts: Or, Early Times In The Massachusetts (American Women Writers Ser.)
By Catharine Maria Sedgwick. 1987
Set in seventeenth-century New England, Hope Leslie portrays early American life and celebrates the role of women in history. At…
the heart of the story is a cross-cultural friendship between Hope-Leslie, a spirited thinker in a repressive Puritan society and Magawisca, the passionate daughter of a Pequot chief. It challenges the conventional view of Indians, tackles interracial marriage and claims for women their rightful place in history. Adult. UnratedBuilding an orchestra of hope: how Favio Chávez taught children to make music from trash
By Carmen Oliver. 2022
When a children's orchestra in Cateura, Paraguay, grows to have more students than instruments, music teacher Favio Chávez works with…
a brilliant local carpenter to create instruments out of garbage from the local landfill. For grades K-3Monstrous Progeny: A History of the Frankenstein Narratives
By Lester D. Friedman, Allison B. Kavey. 2016
Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein is its own type of monster mythos that will not die, a corpus whose parts…
keep getting harvested to animate new artistic creations. What makes this tale so adaptable and so resilient that, nearly 200 years later, it remains vitally relevant in a culture radically different from the one that spawned its birth? Monstrous Progeny takes readers on a fascinating exploration of the Frankenstein family tree, tracing the literary and intellectual roots of Shelley's novel from the sixteenth century and analyzing the evolution of the book's figures and themes into modern productions that range from children's cartoons to pornography. Along the way, media scholar Lester D. Friedman and historian Allison B. Kavey examine the adaptation and evolution of Victor Frankenstein and his monster across different genres and in different eras. In doing so, they demonstrate how Shelley's tale and its characters continue to provide crucial reference points for current debates about bioethics, artificial intelligence, cyborg lifeforms, and the limits of scientific progress. Blending an extensive historical overview with a detailed analysis of key texts, the authors reveal how the Frankenstein legacy arose from a series of fluid intellectual contexts and continues to pulsate through an extraordinary body of media products. Both thought-provoking and entertaining, Monstrous Progeny offers a lively look at an undying and significant cultural phenomenon.A Brief History of Manga: The Essential Pocket Guide To The Japanese Pop Culture Phenomenon
By Helen Mccarthy. 1982
Manga is more than a genre in the comics field: it is a vital creative medium in its own right,…
with hundreds of millions of readers worldwide, a host of graphic styles, and a rich history now spanning seven decades. Now for the first time, that history is told by an award-winning expert in the field. Covering topics from Akira to Mazinger Z, this book is fully illustrated throughout, and photos of key creators accompany accessible sidebars and timelines. The text is chronological, telling the story of Manga from its early-20th-century origins to its global dominance. Timelines relate key publications to events in Japanese and World history, and frequent sidebars give short biographies of key creative figures. Answering the key questions of any fan - where did my favourite manga come from, and what should I read next? - this book will open doors to neophytes and experts alike. Fans of manga and anime will: - discover the stories behind their favorite manga creator - be inspired by the history of the medium and its genre - find new manga to read and fall in love withA thoroughly revised and updated edition of Thomas C. Foster's classic guide--a lively and entertaining introduction to literature and literary…
basics, including symbols, themes, and contexts--that shows you how to make your everyday reading experience more rewarding and enjoyable.While many books can be enjoyed for their basic stories, there are often deeper literary meanings interwoven in these texts. How to Read Literature Like a Professor helps us to discover those hidden truths by looking at literature with the eyes--and the literary codes--of the ultimate professional reader: the college professor.What does it mean when a literary hero travels along a dusty road? When he hands a drink to his companion? When he's drenched in a sudden rain shower? Ranging from major themes to literary models, narrative devices, and form, Thomas C. Foster provides us with a broad overview of literature--a world where a road leads to a quest, a shared meal may signify a communion, and rain, whether cleansing or destructive, is never just a shower--and shows us how to make our reading experience more enriching, satisfying, and fun.This revised edition includes new chapters, a new preface, and a new epilogue, and incorporates updated teaching points that Foster has developed over the past decade.Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction
By Pamela Robertson Wojcik. 2016
In our current era of helicopter parenting and stranger danger, an unaccompanied child wandering through the city might commonly be…
viewed as a victim of abuse and neglect. However, from the early twentieth century to the present day, countless books and films have portrayed the solitary exploration of urban spaces as a source of empowerment and delight for children. Fantasies of Neglect explains how this trope of the self-sufficient, mobile urban child originated and considers why it persists, even as it goes against the grain of social reality. Drawing from a wide range of films, children's books, adult novels, and sociological texts, Pamela Robertson Wojcik investigates how cities have simultaneously been demonized as dangerous spaces unfit for children and romanticized as wondrous playgrounds that foster a kid's independence and imagination. Charting the development of free-range urban child characters from Little Orphan Annie to Harriet the Spy to Hugo Cabret, and from Shirley Temple to the Dead End Kids, she considers the ongoing dialogue between these fictional representations and shifting discourses on the freedom and neglect of children. While tracking the general concerns Americans have expressed regarding the abstract figure of the child, the book also examines the varied attitudes toward specific types of urban children--girls and boys, blacks and whites, rich kids and poor ones, loners and neighborhood gangs. Through this diverse selection of sources, Fantasies of Neglect presents a nuanced chronicle of how notions of American urbanism and American childhood have grown up together.Borrowed Voices: Writing and Racial Ventriloquism in the Jewish American Imagination
By Jennifer Glaser. 2016
In the decades following World War II, many American Jews sought to downplay their difference, as a means of assimilating…
into Middle America. Yet a significant minority, including many prominent Jewish writers and intellectuals, clung to their ethnic difference, using it to register dissent with the status quo and act as spokespeople for non-white America. In this provocative book, Jennifer Glaser examines how racial ventriloquism became a hallmark of Jewish-American fiction, as Jewish writers asserted that their own ethnicity enabled them to speak for other minorities. Rather than simply condemning this racial ventriloquism as a form of cultural appropriation or commending it as an act of empathic imagination, Borrowed Voices offers a nuanced analysis of the technique, judiciously assessing both its limitations and its potential benefits. Glaser considers how the practice of racial ventriloquism has changed over time, examining the books of many well-known writers, including Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, Michael Chabon, Saul Bellow, and many others. Bringing Jewish studies into conversation with critical race theory, Glaser also opens up a dialogue between Jewish-American literature and other forms of media, including films, magazines, and graphic novels. Moreover, she demonstrates how Jewish-American fiction can help us understand the larger anxieties about ethnic identity, authenticity, and authorial voice that emerged in the wake of the civil rights movement.The Cambridge Companion To Beckett
By John Pilling. 1994
The world fame of Samuel Beckett is due to a combination of high academic esteem and immense popularity. An innovator…
in prose fiction to rival Joyce, his plays have been the most influential in modern theatre history. As an author in both English and French and a writer for the page and the stage, Beckett has been the focus for specialist treatment in each of his many guises, but there have been few attempts to provide a conspectus view. This book provides thirteen introductory essays on every aspect of Beckett's work, some paying particular attention to his most famous plays (e. g. Waiting for Godot and Endgame) and his prose fictions (e. g. the 'trilogy' and Murphy). Other essays tackle his radio and television drama, his theatre directing and his poetry, followed by more general issues such as Beckett's bilingualism and his relationship to the philosophers. Reference material is provided at the front and back of the book.i before e (except after c)
By Parkinson Judy. 2011
Here is an amusing collection of ingenious mnemonics devised to help us learn and understand hundreds of important fact as…
children and can continue to resonate with us as adults. Featuring all the mnemonics you?ll ever need to know, this fun little book will bring back all the simple, easy-to-remember rhymes from your childhood?once learned, fix the information in the brain forever?such as learning to count by reciting ?One, Two, buckle my shoe, Three, Four, knock at the door.? Packed with clever verses, engaging acronyms, curious?and sometimes hilarious?sayings that can be used to solve a problem or cap an argument. Take a trip back to the classroom, and rediscover the assortment of practical memory aids covering a range of different subjects, including spelling, time, mathematics, history, general trivia, and much more. The information is organized in short snippets by category such as: * Geographically Speaking: Remember North East South West by reciting Never Eat Slimy Worms or Naughty Elephants Squirt Water. * Time and the Calendar: ?Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November; All the rest have 31 excepting February alone; And that has 28 days clear; With 29 in each leap year? * Think of a Number: Know the Roman numerals by remembering ?I Value Xylophones Like Cows Dig Milk? * World History: ?In fourteen hundred, ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, And found this land, land of the Free, beloved by you, beloved by me? The clever verses, engaging acronyms, curious sayings are endless. Guaranteed to amuse and inform, here is a perfect gift for any language lover?complete with a To/From gift plate.Shakespeare
By Andi Diehn. 2016
"Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” Teenagers have been sighing an approximation of these words for centuries, ever since William…
Shakespeare had Juliet utter them from her balcony in one of the most popular plays of all time, Romeo and Juliet. Tales of love, loss, rebellion, rivalry--before there was Twilight, Warm Bodies, and The Lion King, there was Shakespeare. The characters, language, imagery, and plot elements of many books and movies that appear on bookshelves and in cinemas today are directly influenced by the plays of the Bard. In Shakespeare: Investigate the Bard’s Influence on Today’s World, readers discover links between the books, movies, and music they listen to today and the words that were written and acted out more than 400 years ago. Readers deconstruct Shakespearean themes, imagery, language, and meaning by finding familiar ground on which to gain literary insight. Through hands-on projects such as coding a video game based on one of Shakespeare’s plays to rewriting a scene in the text language of emoji, readers find compelling avenues into the dramatic, sometimes intimidating language, leaving them well-equipped to tackle any major text in the academic years to come.A Hero Of Our Time
By Vladimir Nabokov, Dmitri Nabokov, Mikhail Lermontov. 1958
A brilliant new translation of a perennial favorite of Russian Literature The first major Russian novel, A Hero of Our…
Time was both lauded and reviled upon publication. Its dissipated hero, twenty-five-year-old Pechorin, is a beautiful and magnetic but nihilistic young army officer, bored by life and indifferent to his many sexual conquests. Chronicling his unforgettable adventures in the Caucasus involving brigands, smugglers, soldiers, rivals, and lovers, this classic tale of alienation influenced Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov in Lermontov's own century, and finds its modern-day counterparts in Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, the novels of Chuck Palahniuk, and the films and plays of Neil LaBute.Ed vs. Yummy Fur
By Brian Evenson, Tom Kaczynski. 2014
Brian Evenson delves deeply into the pages of Chester Brown's (Louis Riel, Paying for It) seminal comic book Yummy Fur.…
Brian's comics archaeology excavates the discarded fragments of Brown's masterpiece Ed The Happy Clown, examines the never re-printed adaptions of the Gospels, and meditates on the pleasures of reading serialized pamphlet comic books. The book also features a brand new interview with Chester Brown shining a new spotlight on this important work.Brian Evenson is the multiple award winning author of several books of fiction. His work has been translated into many languages. He lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University's Literary Arts Program.Southwest Asia: The Transpacific Geographies of Chicana/o Literature
By Jayson Gonzales Sae-Saue. 2016
Chicana/o literature is justly acclaimed for the ways it voices opposition to the dominant Anglo culture, speaking for communities ignored…
by mainstream American media. Yet the world depicted in these texts is not solely inhabited by Anglos and Chicanos; as this groundbreaking new book shows, Asian characters are cast in peripheral but nonetheless pivotal roles. Southwest Asia investigates why key Chicana/o writers, including Américo Paredes, Rolando Hinojosa, Oscar Acosta, Miguel Méndez, and Virginia Grise, from the 1950s to the present day, have persistently referenced Asian people and places in the course of articulating their political ideas. Jayson Gonzales Sae-Saue takes our conception of Chicana/o literature as a transnational movement in a new direction, showing that it is not only interested in North-South migrations within the Americas, but is also deeply engaged with East-West interactions across the Pacific. He also raises serious concerns about how these texts invariably marginalize their Asian characters, suggesting that darker legacies of imperialism and exclusion might lurk beneath their utopian visions of a Chicana/o nation. Southwest Asia provides a fresh take on the Chicana/o literary canon, analyzing how these writers have depicted everything from interracial romances to the wars Americans fought in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. As it examines novels, plays, poems, and short stories, the book makes a compelling case that Chicana/o writers have long been at the forefront of theorizing U.S.-Asian relations.