As soon as Molly arrives at her aunt and uncle's ranch in rural Washington, things start to go very wrong. Her cousin hates her on sight. Her aunt falls into a mysterious coma. Then, left alone on the huge property, Molly and her cousin discover an intruder lurking in the barn! Armed and desperate, he drags them to the top of a nearby mountain--and triggers an avalanche with a gunshot. Can they make it down the mountain alive?

Peg Kehret, who told of her childhood battle with polio in Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio, now shares the story of her writing career. It began at the age of ten when she wrote and sold the Dog Newspaper. The paper was supposed to feature the tales of local dogs, but mostly it was about her own dog, B.J. After four issues, it folded. But Peg learned a valuable lesson: If she wanted people to read what she wrote, she had to write something interesting. Peg went on to write radio commercials, prize-winning contest entries, magazine articles, plays, and adult nonfiction books before she discovered her true voice as a writer in books for young people.

It was a cold yet breathtakingly beautiful day in January 1995 when Mike Couillard, a United States Air Force officer on assignment in Turkey, took his son Matthew skiing. As they rode the T-bar to the magnificent peaks of the 7,300-foot-high Kartalkaya Mountain, there was nothing to foretell the nightmare that was to come.It was the middle of the afternoon when they reached the top and, although it had started to snow, they still had time to ski. An experienced skier, Mike made note of his surroundings and kept the overhead line in sight as they glided downward. But suddenly the snow fell harder, visibility decreased, hidden rocks sent them plunging into the snow, and dense stands of pine trees forced them off the trail. Desperately, they looked for the lift line - or anything familiar - and saw nothing but white. They were lost.In the days that followed, Mike and his son desperately fought cold and hunger, while U.S. and Turkish teams were conducting a massive search and the story was making headlines throughout the world. But as hope for survival dwindled, their family and friends could do nothing but pray. Mike a Matt also asked for God's help, as Mike made the most difficult decision of his life - on that could mean death or salvation.

Read the adventure of a lifetime in Devil's Mountain: An Allen Ross Novel. For Professor Allen Ross, today is the last day of his book tour. The day is quiet and he is preparing to return home for a much needed rest. But before he leaves, an old friend pays the professor a visit, offering him the opportunity of a lifetime to find a legendary beast. At first the professor is reluctant to take the offer, but when he is told that a woman from his past needs him, he agrees. Everything seems normal on the assignment, until members of his team go missing deep in the mountains of Northern California. Suddenly it becomes a race to survive the night. About the Author: John Riley lives in Salinas, California, where he is writing the next Allen Ross adventure. Publisher's website: http: //SBPRA.com/JohnRile

For approximately eight months during 1931-1932, anthropologist Margaret Mead lived with and studied the Mountain Arapesh-a segment of the population of the East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea. She found a culture based on simplicity, sensitivity, and cooperation. In contrast to the aggressive Arapesh who lived on the plains, both the men and the women of the mountain settlements were found to be, in Mead's word, maternal. The Mountain Arapesh exhibited qualities that many might consider feminine: they were, in general, passive, affectionate, and peaceloving. Though Mead partially explains the male's "femininity" as being due to the type of nourishment available to the Arapesh, she maintains social conditioning to be a factor in the type of lifestyle led by both sexes. Mead's study encapsulates all aspects of the Arapesh culture. She discusses betrothal and marriage customs, sexuality, gender roles, diet, religion, arts, agriculture, and rites of passage. In possibly a portent for the breakdown of traditional roles and beliefs in the latter part of the twentieth century, Mead discusses the purpose of rites of passage in maintaining societal values and social control. Mead also discovered that both male and female parents took an active role in raising their children. Furthermore, it was found that there were few conflicts over property: the Arapesh, having no concept of land ownership, maintained a peaceful existence with each other. In his new introduction to The Mountain Arapesh, Paul B. Roscoe assesses the importance of Mead's work in light of modern anthropological and ethnographic research, as well as how it fits into her own canon of writings. Roscoe discusses findings he culled from a trip to Papua New Guinea in 1991 to clarify some ambiguities in Mead's work. His travels also served to help reconstruct what had happened to the Arapesh since Mead's historic visit in the early 1930s. Margaret Mead (1901-1978) was associated with the American Museum of Natural History in New York for over fifty years, becoming Curator of Ethnology in 1964. She taught at Columbia University and the New School for Social Research as well as a number of other universities. Among her many books is Continuities in Cultural Evolution, available from Transaction Publishers. Paul B. Roscoe is professor of anthropology at the University of Maine. He is a frequent contributor to anthropology journals, including American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, and Current Anthropology, and is co-editor (with Nancy Lutkehaus) of Gender Rituals: Female Initiation in Melanesia. The 1992 recipient of the Royal Anthropological Institute's Curl Essay Prize, he has an archival specialization in ancient Polynesia.

Out of the gallows, into the gunfire . . . Afast, furious Western from the USA Today bestselling author. They're hanging Billy Ray Cabot in Cloverdale, Nevada on Friday. Or so they think. Thursday brings Smoke Jensen to town. In another life, Billy Ray was almost kin to Smoke, and guilty or not, Smoke will blast Cloverdale sky high if that's what it takes to set his old friend free. By midnight, Smoke and Billy Ray are riding hell-for-leather out of Cloverdale, and into a war between cunning railroad robbers and the organization sworn to stop them. Billy Ray was working for the railroads until he was betrayed. Now, both men are pursued by deadly enemies on either side of the law. For a former mountain man who's tried to make a peaceful life back in Colorado, there's only one way back home: He's going on the attack. And this attack won't stop until the bitterest, bloodiest end . . .

Provides a description of how America's munitions reached U.S. and Allied troops and how Ordnance soldiers stored, maintained, supplied, and salvaged materiel in the major theaters of operations.

Twelve-year-old Molly's visit to her aunt and uncle's llama ranch in the state of Washington leads her into unexpected danger and suspense.

"Should appeal to all rugged individualists who dream of escape to the forest."—The New York Times Book Review Sam Gribley is terribly unhappy living in New York City with his family, so he runs away to the Catskill Mountains to live in the woods—all by himself. With only a penknife, a ball of cord, forty dollars, and some flint and steel, he intends to survive on his own. Sam learns about courage, danger, and independence during his year in the wilderness, a year that changes his life forever. “An extraordinary book . . . It will be read year after year.” —The Horn Book

Is there anything new to say about Thomas Jefferson and slavery? The answer is a resounding yes. Master of the Mountain, Henry Wiencek's eloquent, persuasive book—based on new information coming from archaeological work at Monticello and on hitherto overlooked or disregarded evidence in Jefferson's papers—opens up a huge, poorly understood dimension of Jefferson's world. We must, Wiencek suggests, follow the money. So far, historians have offered only easy irony or paradox to explain this extraordinary Founding Father who was an emancipationist in his youth and then recoiled from his own inspiring rhetoric and equivocated about slavery; who enjoyed his renown as a revolutionary leader yet kept some of his own children as slaves. But Wiencek's Jefferson is a man of business and public affairs who makes a success of his debt-ridden plantation thanks to what he calls the "silent profits" gained from his slaves—and thanks to a skewed moral universe that he and thousands of others readily inhabited. We see Jefferson taking out a slave-equity line of credit with a Dutch bank to finance the building of Monticello and deftly creating smoke screens when visitors are dismayed by his apparent endorsement of a system they thought he'd vowed to overturn. It is not a pretty story. Slave boys are whipped to make them work in the nail factory at Monticello that pays Jefferson's grocery bills. Parents are divided from children—in his ledgers they are recast as money—while he composes theories that obscure the dynamics of what some of his friends call "a vile commerce." Many people of Jefferson's time saw a catastrophe coming and tried to stop it, but not Jefferson. The pursuit of happiness had been badly distorted, and an oligarchy was getting very rich. Is this the quintessential American story?