Holding her stuffed toy chimpanzee, young Jane Goodall observes nature, reads Tarzan books, and dreams of living in Africa and helping animals. Includes biographical information on the prominent zoologist.

A child prodigy at the piano sprinkles her music with a little jazz. Includes an afterword about the life of the twentieth-century jazz musician, Mary Lou Williams.

A chronicle of the author's hardscrabble childhood in rural western New York State describes the family members, first friendships, and early experiences with death that shaped her literary career.

It's 1985 in a small factory town near Pittsburgh. Eight-year-old Karen's parents are lifelong workers at the Anchor Glass plant, where one Saturday, an employee goes on a shooting spree, killing four supervisors, then himself. This event splits the young girl's life open, and like her mother, she begins to seek comfort in obsessive rituals and superstitions. This beautifully evocative memoir chronicles the next fourteen years, as Karen moves through...

Includes stories that detail Alphabet series heroine Kinsey MIllhone's origins, as well as true tales of the author's past.

British Empire in the vast wilderness of the Ohio Valley. Na?ve and self-absorbed, the twenty-two-year-old officer accidentally ignited the French and Indian Wara conflict that opened colonists to the possibility of an American Revolution. With powerful narrative drive and vivid writing, Young Washington recounts the wilderness trials, controversial battles, and emotional entanglements that transformed Washington from a temperamental striver into...

Louis Braille was just five years old when he lost his sight. He was a clever boy, determined to live like everyone else, and what he wanted more than anything was to be able to read. Even at the school for the blind in Paris, there were no books for him. And so he invented his own alphabet -- a whole new system for writing that could be read by touch. A system so ingenious that it is still used by the blind community today.

A woman of intellect and ambition describes growing up on an Australian ranch, coping with her father's death and her mother's depression, her intellectual awakening at the university, and her path to becoming Smith College's first woman president

Séamas O'Reilly's mother died when he was five, leaving him, his ten (!) brothers and sisters, and their beloved father in their sprawling bungalow in rural Derry. It was the 1990s; the Troubles were a background rumble, but Séamas was more preoccupied with dinosaurs, Star Wars, and the actual location of heaven than the political climate. An instant bestseller in Ireland, Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? is a book about a family of loud, argumentative,...

Captures a child's-eye view, and an adult's fond memories, of a magical time of presents, aunts and uncles, the frozen sea, and in the best of circumstances, newly fallen snow.