"The year is 1950, and in a small town on Cape Cod twenty-six-year-old librarian Peggy Cort feels like love and life have stood her up. Until the day James Carlson Sweatt'the "over-tall" eleven-year-old boy who's the talk of the town'walks into her library and changes her life forever. Two misfits whose lonely paths cross at the circulation desk, Peggy and James are odd candidates for friendship, but nevertheless they soon find their lives entwined in ways that neither one could have predicted. In James, Peggy discovers the one person who's ever really understood her, and as he grows - six foot five at age twelve, then seven feet, then eight - so does her heart and their most singular romance"--Back cover
Ken Follett’s magnificent historical epic begins as five interrelated families move through the momentous dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for women’s suffrage. A thirteen-year-old Welsh boy enters a man’s world in the mining pits. . . . An American law student rejected in love finds a surprising new career in Woodrow Wilson’s White House. . . . A housekeeper for the aristocratic Fitzherberts takes a fateful step above her station, while Lady Maud Fitzherbert herself crosses deep into forbidden territory when she falls in love with a German spy. . . . And two orphaned Russian brothers embark on radically different paths when their plan to emigrate to America falls afoul of war, conscription, and revolution. From the dirt and danger of a coal mine to the glittering chandeliers of a palace, from the corridors of power to the bedrooms of the mighty, Fall of Giants takes us into the inextricably entangled fates of five families—and into a century that we thought we knew, but that now will never seem the same again. . . .
A narrative of pioneer hardship and heroism on the boundless Dakota prairie, as a Norwegian-American immigrant family passed through Ellis Island and worked to eke out a living in America's midwest.
This inspiring picture book retells the story of Nobel Peace Prize nominee Greta Thunberg—the Swedish teenager who has led a global movement to raise awareness about the world’s climate crisis—using allegory to make this important topic accessible to young children. Greta is a little girl who lives in a beautiful forest threatened by Giants. When the Giants first came to the forest, they chopped down trees to make houses. Then they chopped down more trees and made even bigger homes. The houses grew into towns and the towns grew into cities, until now there is hardly any forest left. Greta knows she has to help the animals who live in the forest, but how? Luckily, Greta has an idea… A section at the back explains that, in reality, the fight against the “giants” isn’t over and explains how you can help Greta in her fight. This book has been printed sustainably in the US on 100% recycled paper. By buying a copy of this book, you are making a donation of 3% of the cover price to 350.org.
"The felling and transporting of behemoth New England oak and white pine trees, destined to become masts of 18th-century British ships, is gracefully recounted in this elegant picture book."--"School Library Journal, " starred review. An ALA Notable Children's Book, "Booklist" Youth Nonfiction Top of the List, "School Library Journal" Best Book, NCSS-CBC Notable Children's Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies. Illustrations.
"This book is made of the stories told by the Northern folk,-the people who live in the land of the midnight sun, where summer is green and pleasant, but winter is a terrible time of cold and gloom; where rocky mountains tower like huge giants, over whose heads thunder rolls and crashes, and under whose feet are mines of precious metals."--p.1-2.
Once there was a baby in the house - and to that baby, Mum and Dad and Jill and John and Uncle Tom were giants. But little by little, that baby grew up - until she became a giant too. This book explores the stages of life and development.
The untold story of Babe Ruth's Yankees, John McGraw's Giants, and the extraordinary baseball season of 1923. Before the 27 World Series titles -- before Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, and Derek Jeter -- the Yankees were New York's shadow franchise. They hadn't won a championship, and they didn't even have their own field, renting the Polo Grounds from their cross-town rivals the New York Giants. In 1921 and 1922, they lost to the Giants when it mattered most: in October. But in 1923, the Yankees played their first season on their own field, the newly-built, state of the art baseball palace in the Bronx called "the Yankee Stadium." The stadium was a gamble, erected in relative outerborough obscurity, and Babe Ruth was coming off the most disappointing season of his career, a season that saw his struggles on and off the field threaten his standing as a bona fide superstar. It only took Ruth two at-bats to signal a new era. He stepped up to the plate in the 1923 season opener and cracked a home run to deep right field, the first homer in his park, and a sign of what lay ahead. It was the initial blow in a season that saw the new stadium christened "The House That Ruth Built," signaled the triumph of the power game, and established the Yankees as New York's -- and the sport's -- team to beat. From that first home run of 1923 to the storybook World Series matchup that pitted the Yankees against their nemesis from across the Harlem River -- one so acrimonious that John McGraw forced his Giants to get to the Bronx in uniform rather than suit up at the Stadium -- Robert Weintraub vividly illuminates the singular year that built a classic stadium, catalyzed a franchise, cemented Ruth's legend, and forever changed the sport of baseball.
“McCracken mixes the proper amount of lunacy with exactly the right amount of sorrow. The blend is reminiscent of such late-20th-century treasures as The Accidental Tourist, The World According to Garp, or A Confederacy of Dunces.”—Denver Post The year is 1950, and in a small town on Cape Cod twenty-six-year-old librarian Peggy Cort feels like love and life have stood her up. Until the day James Carlson Sweatt– the “over-tall” eleven-year-old boy who’s the talk of the town–walks into her library and changes her life forever. Two misfits whose lonely paths cross at the circulation desk, Peggy and James are odd candidates for friendship, but nevertheless they soon find their lives entwined in ways that neither one could have predicted. In James, Peggy discovers the one person who’s ever really understood her, and as he grows– six foot five at age twelve, then seven feet, then eight–so does her heart and their most singular romance. Praise for The Giant's House “Remarkable . . . McCracken has wit and subtlety to burn, as well as an uncanny ability to tap into the sadness that runs through the center of her characters’ worlds. This book is so lovely that, when you’re reading, you’ll want to sleep with it under your pillow.”—Salon A true marvel . . . thoroughly enjoyable from its unlikely beginning to its bittersweet end. . . McCracken knows all kinds of subtle, enticing secrets of the heart and conveys them in silky, transparent language.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Lovely . . . a tribute to the quiet passion of people trapped in isolation.”—Los Angeles Times “Fascinating . . . The reader finds herself entangled, body and soul, in this tender and endlessly strange novel, which is in all senses a hymn to human growth gone haywire and to a love so big it can’t hold its own magnificent limbs upright.”—Elle “Such is the incantatory power of McCracken’s eccentric tale that by its close we are completely in the grip of its strangely conceived ardor. . . . McCracken is as original a writer as they come. . . . I fell in love.”—Daphne Merkin, The New Yorker
