A young man travels on a one-way ticket to South East Asia in search of freedom and everything that comes with it. That way he’ll really learn what makes him tick.

What do Emily Dickinson, slave revolts, Babylonian Kings, and Monticello all have in common? A solar eclipse. Whether it was deciding on the location of a grand home (or castle), inspiring poetry, timing battles and revolts, or planning expeditions, eclipses have inspired fear and fascination. Solar eclipses allowed Ptolemy to determine the length of the Mediterranean and helped Einstein establish his General Theory of Relativity. Preliterate societies recorded eclipses on turtle shells found in "The Wastes of Yin" and on the Mayan "Dresden Codex." Eclipses were later instrumental in the creation of longitude and allowed Hubble to understand the expansion of the Universe (and disprove another theory of Einstein's in the process). John Dvorak, the acclaimed author of Earthquake Storms and The Last Volcano, examines this amazing phenomena and reveals the humanism behind the science. With insightful detail and vividly accessible prose, he provides explanations as to how and why eclipses occur—as well as insight into the eclipse of 2017, which was visible across North America.

Janet Morris' masterpiece of historical fiction vividly recreates the life of Suppiluliumas, greatest of the Hittite kings and contemporary of the Aten rulership in Egypt, who tells his own story firmly based in his own writings brought forward from newly translated tablets bearing his seal of authorship. I, the Sun is literally a personal account of an age told for the ages.

From the Newbery Honor–winning author of Genesis Begins Again comes a shimmering picture book that shines the light on Zora Neale Hurston, the extraordinary writer and storycatcher extraordinaire who changed the face of American literature. Zora was a girl who hankered for tales like bees for honey. Now, her mama always told her that if she wanted something, “to jump at de sun”, because even though you might not land quite that high, at least you’d get off the ground. So Zora jumped from place to place, from the porch of the general store where she listened to folktales, to Howard University, to Harlem. And everywhere she jumped, she shined sunlight on the tales most people hadn’t been bothered to listen to until Zora. The tales no one had written down until Zora. Tales on a whole culture of literature overlooked…until Zora. Until Zora jumped.

"The multiple, vivid colors of scarlet macaws and their ability to mimic human speech are key reasons they were and are significant to the Native peoples of the southwestern U.S. and northwest New Mexico. Although the birds' natural habitat is the tropical forests of Mexico and Central America, they were present at multiple archaeological sites in the region. Leading experts in southwestern archaeology explore the reasons why"--

The Finnish author of Troll: A Love Story delivers a work of “scathing satire . . . that sits somewhere between Margaret Atwood and Kurt Vonnegut” (NPR). The Core of the Sun further cements Finlandia Award–winning author Johanna Sinisalo’s reputation as a master of literary speculative fiction and of her country’s unique take on it, dubbed “Finnish weird.” In an alternative historical present, The Eusistocratic Republic of Finland has bred a new human sub-species of receptive, submissive women, called eloi, for sex and procreation, while intelligent, independent women are relegated to menial labor and sterilized so that they do not carry on their “defective” line. Vanna, raised as an eloi but secretly intelligent, needs money to find her sister, who has disappeared. Vanna forms a friendship with a man named Jare, and they become involved in buying and selling a stimulant known to the Health Authority to be extremely dangerous: chili peppers. Then Jare comes across a strange religious cult in possession of the Core of the Sun, a chili so hot that it is rumored to cause hallucinations—a temptation so enticing that it just might divert the addicted Vanna from her quest . . . “A chilling tale reminiscent of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale . . . A fascinating story centered on gender politics.” —The Washington Post

The classic, award-winning novel, made famous by Steven Spielberg's film, tells of a young boy's struggle to survive World War II in China. Jim is separated from his parents in a world at war. To survive, he must find a strength greater than all the events that surround him. Shanghai, 1941 -- a city aflame from the fateful torch of Pearl Harbor. In streets full of chaos and corpses, a young British boy searches in vain for his parents. Imprisoned in a Japanese concentration camp, he is witness to the fierce white flash of Nagasaki, as the bomb bellows the end of the war...and the dawn of a blighted world. Ballard's enduring novel of war and deprivation, internment camps and death marches, and starvation and survival is an honest coming-of-age tale set in a world thrown utterly out of joint.

"A powerful, revealing story of hope, love, justice, and the power of reading by a man who spent thirty years on death row for a crime he didn't commit"--

Sun exposure is essential for human life and health. This book meticulously explains why, and cites over 1,200 scientific references in support of the premise that sun deprivation is killing us.

I See the Sun in the USA follows Stella, a young girl from Los Angeles, who is helping her mother make a video about diversity and families living in the United States. They visit Mount Rushmore, a National Park in South Dakota, where Stella meets several children from different parts of the country. They each tell her about their lives and Stella imagines what their days are like.