Does the early bird really catch the worm, or end up healthy, wealthy, and wise? Can some people really exist on just a few hours' sleep a night? Does everybody dream? Do fish dream? How did people cope before alarm clocks and caffeine? And is anybody getting enough sleep? Even though we will devote a third of our lives to sleep, we still know remarkably little about its origins and purpose. Paul Martin's Counting Sheep answers these questions and more in this illuminating work of popular science. Even the wonders of yawning, the perils of sleepwalking, and the strange ubiquity of nocturnal erections are explained in full. To sleep, to dream: Counting Sheep reflects the centrality of these activities to our lives and can help readers respect, understand, and extract more pleasure from that delicious time when they're lost to the world.
Counting sheep is supposed to help you sleep—but a room full of yaks, alpacas, and llamas would keep anyone awake in this counting book with a comical twist. Winner of the Mathical Book Prize! A glass of warm milk, reading, working on her knitting—nothing can help Clarissa get to sleep. When even counting sheep doesn't help her doze off, she tried pairs of alpacas instead. Two, four, six . . . then llamas by fives . . . then yaks by tens! But no one could sleep with a room full of bouncing, bleating, shedding animals. Determined to unravel her problem so she can get some sleep, Clarissa counts back down until she's all alone, and she can finally get some rest. Introducing addition and subtraction by ones, twos, fives, and tens, Sheep Won't Sleep is part bedtime story, part math practice— and the hilarious illustrations of spotted, striped, and plaid animals are sure to appeal to imaginative readers of all ages.
Bradley Compton is a child of the system. Due to his single mother’s death in childbirth at a very early age, Bradley is raised by his spiteful grandmother. Denied love and happiness as a child, he over-compensates himself when he reaches the age of maturity. Nothing can stop Bradley. He becomes a man of greed, selfishness, cunning, deceit, and murderous intent. Bradley arrives in Chicago, Illinois where he meets Millie Noland. She has what Bradley desires. Millie comes from a background of shame and humiliation, carrying dark secrets deep in her heart that she never would want revealed, not even to her family. She is no match for Bradley as he involves her in a web of M’s. In the meantime, Madrid, Millie’s son born in her painful past, finds his mother after years of searching. Will Madrid help Millie out of the tangled web of murder and mystery?
One cold dark night when Sam can't sleep, her mum suggests that she counts some sheep. But how can she count them when one of the sheep can't jump over the fence? Join Sam and her flock in this frolicking, rhyming farmyard tale as they try to help little Sheep find a way over the fence.
Sheep are the thread that runs through the history of the English countryside. Our fortunes were once founded on sheep, and this book tells a story of wool and money and history, of merchants and farmers and shepherds, of English yeomen and how they got their freedom, and above all, of the soil. Sheep have helped define our culture and topography, impacting on everything from accent and idiom, architecture, roads and waterways, to social progression and wealth. With his eye for the idiosyncratic, Philip meets the native breeds that thrive in this country; he tells stories about each breed, meets their shepherds and owners, learns about their past - and confronts the present realities of sheep farming. Along the way, Philip meets the people of the countryside and their many professions: the mole-catchers, the stick-makers, the tobacco-twisters and clog-wrights. He explores this artisan heritage as he re-discovers the countryside, and finds a lifestyle parallel to modern existence, struggling to remain unchanged - and at its heart, always sheep.
Destination: Unknown Kristine had one suitcase and no room for excess baggage as she traveled through Norway—especially not for a modern-day Viking like Lars Bronstad. But even a genuine Viking with pillage on his mind would have been easier to cope with than this man who was determined to melt her cynical attitude toward togetherness. She'd even gone so far as to toss his car keys. But nothing could stop a man who'd found the woman of his dreams, and with each stolen caress, each conquered embrace, Lars knew the ice was melting….
In the middle of the night, somewhere in Oklahoma—or is it Missouri?—a bus hurtles down an anonymous American highway. Its passengers, among them two children traveling on their own, a retired salesman, an unwed teenage mother, an unemployed chemist, and the driver who ferries and broods over all of them, are in the middle of their journeys. Soon, two of the passengers will be lost, and then the bus itself will lose its way. The open road and, before that, the open frontier have long been part of the American romance, cherished features of the nation's traditional vision of itself. In her latest novel, A. G. Mojtabai stands this tradition on its head. Instead of the expansive thrust into unknown territory, the camaraderie of the open road, adventure, and the joys of vagabondage, we witness constriction, isolation, and fear. Instead of freedom, we find people fleeing from coast to coast in search of home and the ever-beckoning, ever-retreating promise of a better life. Richly drawn, evocative, and thought-provoking, All That Road Going is a challenging new departure from the road novel canon.