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Death himself narrates the World War II-era story of Liesel Meminger from the time she is taken, at age nine, to live in Molching, Germany, with a foster family in a working-class neighborhood of tough kids, acid-tongued mothers, and loving fathers who earn their living by the work of their hands. The child arrives having just stolen her first bookalthough she has not yet learned how to readand her foster father uses it, The Gravediggers...

"Stephen Crane's immortal masterpiece about the nightmare of war was first published in 1895 and brought its young author immediate international fame. Set during the Civil War, it tells of the brutal disillusionment of a young recruit who had dreamed of the thrill and glory of war, only to find himself fleeing the horror of a battlefield. Shame over his cowardice drives him to seek to redeem himself by being wounded -- earning what he calls the "red...

"By 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina, was a shining example of a mixed-race community-a bustling port city with a thriving African American middle class and a government made up of Republicans and Populists, including black alderman, police officers, and magistrates. But across the state-and the South-white supremacist Democrats were working to reverse the advances made by former slaves and their progeny. They were plotting to take back the state legislature...

Hetty "Handful" Grimké, an urban slave in early nineteenth- century Charleston, yearns for life beyond the suffocating walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimké household. The Grimkés daughter Sarah has known from an early age she is meant to do something large in the world, but she is hemmed in by the limits imposed on women. On Sarahs eleventh birthday in 1803, she is given ownership of ten-year-old Handful, who is to be her handmaid....

"The bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility and master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America. In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed...

Since its publication in 2007, A Brief History of the Spanish Language has become the leading introduction to the history of one of the world's most widely spoken languages. Moving from the language's Latin roots to its present-day forms, this concise book offers readers insights into the origin and evolution of Spanish, the historical and cultural changes that shaped it, and its spread around the world. A Brief History of the Spanish Language focuses...

"The never-before-told story of one woman's heroism that changed the course of the Second World War In 1942, the Gestapo sent out an urgent command across France: "She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her." This spy was Virginia Hall, a young American woman--rejected from the foreign service because of her gender and her prosthetic leg--who talked her way into the spy organization dubbed Churchill's "ministry of...

"In 1940, on the eve of the United States' entrance into World War II, Iris James, the postmistress of Franklin, a small town on Cape Cod, does the unthinkable: she doesn't deliver a letter. In London, American radio gal Frankie Bard is working with Edward R. Murrow, reporting on the blitz. One night in a bomb shelter, she meets a doctor from Cape Cod with a letter in his pocket. She vows to deliver the letter when she returns from Germany and France...

It is 1908, and the international tensions are mounting as the world plunges toward war. When a brilliant American battleship gun designer dies in an apparent suicide, the man's grief-stricken daughter turns to the Van Dorn Detective Agency to clear her father's name. Van Dorn puts his chief investigator on the case, and Isaac Bell soon realizes that the clues point to murder. When more suspicious deaths follow, it becomes clear that someone is orchestrating...

Explains the physiology of animals in simple terms.