After thirty years spent scratching together a middle-class life out of a dirt-poor childhood, Joe Bageant moved back to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia, where he realized that his family and neighbors were the very people who carried George W. Bush to victory. That was ironic, because Winchester, like countless American small towns, is fast becoming the bedrock of a permanent underclass. Two in five of the people in his old neighborhood do not...

The tradition, spirit, and technique with dozens of project ideas.

Provides a generous sampling of art and craft ideas, songs, and action rhymes, designed to help veteran librarians refresh and enliven ongoing programs, while providing novice storytime planners what they need to get started.

Once a hotshot investigative reporter, middle-aged Jack Tagger now bangs out obituaries for a South Florida daily. When Jimmy Stoma, the infamous front man of Jimmy and the Slut Puppies, dies in a diving "accident, " Jack uses clues from the singer's own music to unravel the mystery and resurrect his career in the process.

A riveting tale of the weather's most vicious monster--the supercell tornado--that recreates the origins of meteorology, and the quirky, pioneering, weather-obsessed scientists who helped change America.

In this collection, CBS News anchor Couric calls upon leaders and visionaries in the fields of politics, entertainment, sports, philanthropy, the arts, and business, all of whom share heartfelt insights about success and fulfillment. Includes contributions by Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton, Chelsea Handler, Malcolm Gladwell, Steve Martin, Helen Mirren, and dozens of others.

A definitive biographical resource provides up-to-date, authoritative portraits of some six hundred noteworthy African Americans representing a wide variety of fields of endeavor, including slaves and abolitionists, writers, politicians, artists, business leaders, musicians, performers, athletes, journalists, and other historical figures. African American Lives offers up-to-date, authoritative biographies of some 600 noteworthy African Americans....

From her youthful days as a vicious nerd to her tour of duty on Saturday Night Live; from her passionately halfhearted pursuit of physical beauty to her life as a mother eating things off the floor; from her one-sided college romance to her nearly fatal honeymoon, comedian Tina Fey reveals all, and proves that you're no one until someone calls you bossy.

"Ambitious Brew, the first-ever history of American beer, tells an epic story of American ingenuity and the beverage that became a national standard. Not always America's drink of choice, beer finally took its top spot in the nation's glasses when a wave of German immigrants arrived in the mid-nineteenth century and settled in to re-create the beloved biergartens they had left behind. Fifty years later, the American-style lager beer they invented...

A thriller on the international movement of dirty money. Its protagonist is an American lawyer who skips the country with $90 million belonging to crooks. They catch up with him in Brazil, torture him, but he does not know where the money is, his lawyer girlfriend is circulating it around the globe. Extradited to the U.S. to face various charges he is going to use the money to get off.