Unexpectedly suspenseful, but written with all the fluency and dark humor of Tom Perrotta's The Wishbones and Joe College, Little Children exposes the adult dramas unfolding amidst the swingsets and slides of an ordinary American playground. Tom Perrotta's thirty-ish parents of young children are a varied and surprising bunch. There's Todd, the handsome stay-at-home dad dubbed "The Prom King" by the moms of the playground; Sarah, a lapsed feminist with a bisexual past, who seems to have stumbled into a traditional marriage; Richard, Sarah's husband, who has found himself more and more involved with a fantasy life on the internet than with the flesh and blood in his own house; and Mary Ann, who thinks she has it all figured out, down to scheduling a weekly roll in the hay with her husband, every Tuesday at 9pm. They all raise their kids in the kind of sleepy American suburb where nothing ever seems to happen--at least until one eventful summer, when a convicted child molester moves back to town, and two restless parents begin an affair that goes further than either of them could have imagined. Perrotta received Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations for best screenplay for the film adaptation of Little Children, which was directed by Todd Field and starred Kate Winslet and Jennifer Connelly.

In this affecting and innovative global history—starting with the European children who fled the perils of World War II and ending with the Central American children who arrive every day at the U.S. southern border—Anita Casavantes Bradford traces the evolution of American policy toward unaccompanied children. At first a series of ad hoc Cold War–era initiatives, such policy grew into a more broadly conceived set of programs that claim universal humanitarian goals. But the cold reality is that decisions about which endangered minors are allowed entry to the United States have always been and continue to be driven primarily by a "geopolitics of compassion" that imagines these children essentially as tools of political statecraft. Even after the creation of the Unaccompanied Refugee Minors program in 1980, the federal government has failed to see migrant children as individual rights-bearing subjects. The claims of these children, especially those who are poor, nonwhite, and non-Christian, continue to be evaluated not in terms of their unique circumstances but rather in terms of broader implications for migratory flows from their homelands. This book urgently demonstrates that U.S. policy must evolve in order to ameliorate the desperate needs of unaccompanied children.

An Amazon Charts bestseller. When a family camping trip takes a dark turn, how far will one mother go to keep her family safe? Struggling with working-mother guilt, Marlene Greene hopes a camping trip in the forest will provide quality time with her three young children--until they see fires in the distance, columns of smoke distorting the sweeping view. Overnight, all communication with the outside world is lost. Knowing something terrible has happened, Marlene suspects that the isolation of the remote campsite is all that's protecting her family. But the arrival of a lost boy reveals they are not alone in the woods, and as the unfolding disaster ravages the land, more youngsters seek refuge under her wing. The lives of her own children aren't the only ones at stake. When their sanctuary is threatened, Marlene faces the mother of all dilemmas: Should she save her own kids or try to save them all?

On October 16, 1991, the badly decomposed body of 11-year-old Melissa Moody was found in the woods near Boswell, Oaklahoma. She had been raped and murdered by her uncle, Jesse James Cummings. Only when one of his wives--herself a victim of his abuse--found the strength to turn against him do police get the evidence they need to put him on death row. Includes 12 pages of photos.

The New York Times bestselling author of The Monogram Murders and Woman with a Secret returns with a sharp, captivating, and expertly plotted tale of psychological suspense. All Beth has to do is drive her son to his soccer game, watch him play, and then return home. Just because she knows her ex-best friend lives near the field, that doesn’t mean she has to drive past her house and try to catch a glimpse of her. Why would Beth do that and risk dredging up painful memories? She hasn’t seen Flora for twelve years. She doesn’t want to see her today—or ever again. But she can’t resist. She parks outside the open gates of Newnham House, watches from across the road as Flora arrives and calls to her children Thomas and Emily to get out of the car. Except . . . There’s something terribly wrong. Flora looks the same, only older. Twelve years ago, Thomas and Emily were five and three years old. Today, they look precisely as they did then. They are Thomas and Emily without a doubt, but they haven’t changed at all. They are no taller, no older. Why haven’t they grown? How is it possible that they haven’t grown up?

The Abstinence Teacher illuminates the powerful emotions that run beneath the placid surface of modern American family life, and explores the complicated spiritual and sexual lives of ordinary people. It is elegantly and simply written, characterized by the distinctive mix of satire and compassion that has become Tom Perrotta's trademark. Stonewood Heights is the perfect place to raise children: it's got good schools, solid values and a healthy real estate market. Parents in the town are involved in their children's lives, and often in other children's lives, too—coaching sports, driving carpool, focusing on enriching experiences. Ruth Ramsey is the high school human sexuality teacher whose openness is not appreciated by all her students—or their parents. Her daughter's soccer coach is Tim Mason, a former stoner and rocker whose response to hitting rock bottom was to reach out and be saved. Tim's introduction of Christianity on the playing field horrifies Ruth, while his evangelical church sees a useful target in the loose-lipped sex ed teacher. But when these two adversaries in a small-town culture war actually talk to each other, a surprising friendship begins to develop. "Perrotta is that rare combination: a satirist with heart....Those who haven't curled up on the couch with this writer's books are missing a very great pleasure."—Seattle Times "Tom Perrotta is a truth-telling, unshowy chronicler of modern-day America."—The NewYork Times Book Review (in a front-page review)

A posthumously published collection of Arthur C. Gackley's most questionable parody-driven book covers.

Originally approved as a master of laws thesis by a respected Canadian university, this book tackles one of the most compelling issues of our time—the crime of genocide—and whether in fact it can be said to have occurred in relation to the many Original Nations on Great Turtle Island now claimed by a state called Canada. It has been hailed as groundbreaking by many Indigenous and other scholars engaged with this issue, impacting not just Canada but states worldwide where entrapped Indigenous nations face absorption by a dominating colonial state. Starblanket unpacks Canada’s role in the removal of cultural genocide from the Genocide Convention, though the disappearance of an Original Nation by forced assimilation was regarded by many states as equally genocidal as destruction by slaughter. Did Canada seek to tailor the definition of genocide to escape its own crimes which were then even ongoing? The crime of genocide, to be held as such under current international law, must address the complicated issue of mens rea (not just the commission of a crime, but the specific intent to do so). This book permits readers to make a judgment on whether or not this was the case. Starblanket examines how genocide was operationalized in Canada, focused primarily on breaking the intergenerational transmission of culture from parents to children. Seeking to absorb the new generations into a different cultural identity—English-speaking, Christian, Anglo-Saxon, termed Canadian—Canada seized children from their parents, and oversaw and enforced the stripping of their cultural beliefs, languages and traditions, replacing them by those still in process of being established by the emerging Canadian state.

Up until the late sixties in Ireland, thousands of young children were sent to what were called industrial schools, financed by the Department of Education, and operated by various religious orders of the Catholic Church. Popular belief held that these schools were orphanages or detention centers, when in reality most of the children ended up at the schools because their parents were too poor to care for them. Mary Raftery's award-winning three-part TV series on the industrial schools, States of Fear, shocked Ireland when broadcast on RTE in 1999, prompting an unprecedented response in Ireland-hundreds of people phoned RTE, spoke on radio stations and wrote to newspapers to share their own memories of their local industrial schools. Pages of newsprint were devoted to the issues raised by the series, and on the 11th of May, the airdate of the final segment of the trilogy, the Taoiseach issued an historic apology on behalf of the state to the victims of child abuse within the system. Now, together with Dr. Eoin O'Sullivan, Raftery delves even further into this horrifying chapter of Irish life, revealing for the first time new information from official Department of Education files not accessible during the making of the documentaries. It contains much new material, including startling research showing a level of awareness of child sexual abuse going back over sixty years, particularly within the Christian Brothers. The dissection of these official records, detailing sexual abuse, starvation, physical abuse, and neglect, together with extensive testimony from those who grew up in industrial schools convey both the extraordinary levels of cruelty and suffering experienced by these children, and their tremendous courage and resilience in surviving the often savage