Mildred Armstrong Kalish's Little Heathens is a compelling memoir of her hardscrabble life on an Iowa farm during the 1930s. With no electricity or indoor plumbing and with little heat or money on the farm, Mildred learns to find joy in the priceless blessings of life.

In 1952 Vermont, ten-year-old Blue decides to set out in the middle of her town's sesquicentennial celebration to find the mother who abandoned her as a baby, but a series of events reminds her that she already has everything she needs.

During the Great Depression, fifteen-year-old Amish girl Hannah and her family move from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to a homestead in North Dakota, hoping to make a fresh start, but face harsh realities and nearly starve until Hannah takes matters into her own hands, going into town to look for a job, leaving her little time to contemplate her feelings for her neighbor.

Autumn of 1986 in the Ozarks finds eleven-year-old April Grace adjusting to middle school, coping with her mother's difficult pregnancy, helping Isabel with the church play, and trying to figure out why the new boy at school will not leave her alone.

Born into the middle of World War II, Gary Paulsen's turbulent childhood provided plenty of subject matter for his bestselling novels, and the librarians in his life gave him the inspiration and support to explore the world through books. As a soldier himself, his storytelling technique developed, and for the first time he shares his own.

"On a winter day in 1910, at a train station in Ohio, two girls wait in the cold with their mother to begin a new life in the West. Tommy, the eldest, feels responsible for her sister, and in the years to come, as their mother campaigns for women's suffrage and teaches in one-room schoolhouses across Montana, she takes care of Katherine: trapping animals, begging, keeping house, cooking, while her sister goes to school. But as soon as Katherine graduates,...

"Hamish DeLuca and Regina "Reggie" Van Buren have a new case--and this one brings the war in Europe dangerously close to home"-- 1940. Errol Parker, the leading base stealer in the Boston farm leagues, hires Hamish and Reggie to investigate what the Boston police shove off as a series of harmless pranks. Errol believes these are hate crimes linked to the outbreak of war in Europe, and he's afraid for his life. Hamish and Reggie quickly find themselves...

"Since its publication nearly 70 years ago, George Orwell's 1984 has been regarded as one of the most influential novels of the modern age. Politicians have testified to its influence on their intellectual identities, rock musicians have made records about it, TV viewers watch a reality show named for it, and a White House spokesperson tells of 'alternative facts.' The world we live in is often described as an Orwellian one, awash in inescapable surveillance...

"In this course, we will explore Mesopotamian societies from the Neolithic era (c. 9,000 B.C.) to the defeat of the great Persian Empire at Gaugamela by Alexander the Great (331 B.C.) The study will take us from the world of international diplomacy with powerful neighbors in Egypt, Syria, and Anatolia to the mundane issues of daily life, such as providing food for the family, curing disease, and settling legal disputes. It examines archaeological...

"Christine O'Brien remembers growing up in NYC's famous Dakota apartment with her powerful father, her beautiful mother, and a food obsession that consumed her. Hunger comes in many forms. A person can crave a steak in the same way that she can crave a perfect family life. In her memoir, Crave: A Memoir of Food and Longing, Christine O'Brien tells the story of her own cravings. It's a story of growing up in a family with a successful, but explosive...