In Chasing Blue, Sasha and her horse, Charm, have proven that they’re worthy competitors for the elite Canterwood Crest equestrian team. Things are definitely looking up . . . until Sasha finds out who her riding partner for the semester is: her archnemesis, Queen Bee Heather. Not. Good. And when Heather starts spending a little too much QT with Sasha’s almost-boyfriend, Jacob, the partnership is put to the ultimate test. The tension builds in Behind the Bit when Sasha and her team are accepted to a prestigious horse clinic. Can Sasha and Callie work together when it counts?
Chasing Vermeer joins the Scholastic Gold line, which features award-winning and beloved novels. Includes exclusive bonus content!When a book of unexplainable occurences brings Petra and Calder together, strange things start to happen: Seemingly unrelated events connect; an eccentric old woman seeks their company; an invaluable Vermeer painting disappears. Before they know it, the two find themselves at the center of an international art scandal, where no one is spared from suspicion. As Petra and Calder are drawn clue by clue into a mysterious labyrinth, they must draw on their powers of intuition, their problem solving skills, and their knowledge of Vermeer. Can they decipher a crime that has stumped even the FBI?
Chasing the Blues explores the roots of the blues---the music birthed in the Mississippi Delta by African Americans who fashioned a new form of musical expression grounded in their shared experience of brutal oppression. They used the power of music to survive that oppression, creating a simple-in-structure, emotionally complex form that transformed and upended culture and became the bedrock of popular song. Tracing the music back to its geographical and cultural origins in the Delta is key to understanding how the blues were shaped. Over time, the Delta blues have touched virtually every form of popular music (rock and roll, soul, R&B, country-western, gospel), creating the soundscape of our lives. What makes this book unique? Fathoming how the music flowed from living and working conditions in the heart of the Deep South; appreciating how life-changing events like the Flood of 1927 sparked a mass migration away from plantation life, spreading the blues to the cities in the North and becoming the soundtrack to the civil rights movement; how blues musicians interacted, "cross-fertilizing" their music by learning, influencing, and imitating each other. The habits of travel are shifting, and there is more interest and a larger market for diving deep into destinations closer to home. Interest in Black history and culture and the role Black Americans played in shaping America is at an all-time high. By appreciating the roots of this most American style of music, readers will have a richer experience listening to songs and visiting blues' holy and sacred sites.
A Christmas wedding in Colorado? A two-week celebration with family and friends? Who does that? Photojournalist Reagan Bryant has just returned from six month stint in Afghanistan. Haunted by the tragedy that ended her last assignment, she’s searching for some peace—something to end the guilt and chase the trauma away. Two weeks at the resort hotel owned by her future sister-in-law’s father seems like the perfect escape. Shelby Sutton doesn’t trust women. They always seem more interested in her father’s money than in her. But at her sister’s request, she vows to make friends with Reagan, a woman whose sad and haunted eyes are nearly impossible to ignore.
As cash-strapped metropolitan newspapers struggle to maintain their traditional influence and quality reporting, large national and international outlets have pivoted to serving readers who can and will choose to pay for news, skewing coverage toward a wealthy, white, and liberal audience. Amid rampant inequality and distrust, media outlets have become more out of touch with the democracy they purport to serve. How did journalism end up in such a predicament, and what are the prospects for achieving a more equitable future? In News for the Rich, White, and Blue, Nikki Usher recasts the challenges facing journalism in terms of place, power, and inequality. Drawing on more than a decade of field research, she illuminates how journalists decide what becomes news and how news organizations strategize about the future. Usher shows how newsrooms remain places of power, largely white institutions growing more elite as journalists confront a shrinking job market. She details how Google, Facebook, and the digital-advertising ecosystem have wreaked havoc on the economic model for quality journalism, leaving local news to suffer. Usher also highlights how the handful of likely survivors—well-funded media outlets such as the New York Times—increasingly appeal to a global, “placeless” reader. News for the Rich, White, and Blue concludes with a series of provocative recommendations to reimagine journalism to ensure its resiliency and its ability to speak to a diverse set of issues and readers.
In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville his journey to America, traveling from New York to the frontier city of Flint, Michigan, down the Ohio River Valley and into Mississippi, then turning east through the Old South and concluding in Washington, D.C. His journey spawned the classic Democracy in America, the book that defined "equality of opportunity" as the wellspring national character. At the end of the twentieth century, journalist David Cohen made that same journey, with one new destination—the frontier of Silicon Valley in California. Chasing the Red, White, and Blue is his account: a thought-provoking inquiry into the lives of Americans today. Talking with people at every level of society—from Manhattan real estate brokers and Washington lobbyists to supermarket clerks and illegal aliens—Cohen finds equality elusive and the poor increasingly adrift from American society. But he also finds hope alive in the most unexpected of places. Just as Democracy in America took the measure of our young republic, Chasing the Red, White, and Blue portrays a much-changed America on the cusp of a new millennium: still united by our passion for democracy, yet divided by our prejudices.
Someone To Crawl Back To is a novel-in-stories, a collection of hearts in search of what theyOCOve always wanted or what theyOCOve eternally lost. Set in small town South Carolina, those hearts belong to wrecker drivers, drive-thru fast food workers, college professors, bartenders, insurance and mobile homes salesmen. Their common ground is The Paradise Lounge. The death of a marriage, Joshua and Rene ServeranceOCOs, forms the spine of the book, but included in this small community of seekers are George Scarborough and his softball-playing wife; Evander Baker, who helps his sister bury a bag of chocolate chip cookies near the septic line; and Warren Oxendine, whose wife buys a vibrator at a yard sale. Structured more like a Robert Altman film than a traditional novel, reading Someone To Crawl Back To is like going to The Paradise Lounge for a drink, slipping inside a patronOCOs skin, going home with that person, then coming back to The Paradise and leaving with another sojourner of love. This book is also available in print. You can order it through your bookstore. Boson Books also offers the play Necessary Evils by Phillip Gardner. For an author bio and photo, reviews, and a reading sample, visit bosonbooks.com."
The new exchange student means serious competition for Lauren and her friends—because at Canterwood Crest, only one rider can be at the top. Rankings on Canterwood’s intermediate team are falling into place—in Lauren’s favor. Then blond, beautiful foreign exchange student Carina arrives. The new girl puts on a million-watt smile, but it doesn’t dazzle LT. Carina is out to show Canterwood students just how riders from her home country of Sweden take the arena. And with a local show on the horizon, Carina’s especially ready to impress—which means Lauren and her friends better be especially ready to represent, because Carina’s in place to steal the spotlight.
