The Christmas story and the origin of many holiday traditions are thoroughly detailed in the text of S is for Star: A Christmas Alphabet. The first Christmas cards were printed and sold in the United States by a German immigrant in 1874. Long ago, eating pie was believed to bring good luck, and during the holidays they were baked in an oblong shape to look like a manger. The message of Christmas is a message to all the world and is beautifully conveyed and illustrated in S is for Star. Our tradition of gift-giving is based on the Wise Men's visit to Baby Jesus. Nearly every country has its own gift-giving traditions. In Great Britain, children eagerly await Father Christmas. In France, he is called Pere Noël. In Italy, Befana brings presents, and German and Austrian children wait for a visit from the Christkindl. Celebrate these and many other traditions of the holiday season with S is for Star: A Christmas Alphabet.

A 12-year-old slave on a gigantic, traveling "wagon city" joins forces with a new--and magical--slave, and as they plan their escape they encounter mystery, enchantment, and deadly monsters while their one chance for freedom draws ever nearer.

Son of the Morning Star is the nonfiction account of General Custer from the great American novelist Evan S. Connell. Custer's Last Stand is among the most enduring events in American history--more than one hundred years after the fact, books continue to be written and people continue to argue about even the most basic details surrounding the Little Bighorn. Evan S. Connell, whom Joyce Carol Oates has described as "one of our most interesting and intelligent American writers," wrote what continues to be the most reliable--and compulsively readable--account of the subject. Connell makes good use of his meticulous research and novelist's eye for the story and detail to re-create the heroism, foolishness, and savagery of this crucial chapter in the history of the West.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Approximation and Online Algorithms, WAOA 2011, held in Saarbrücken, Germany, in September 2011. The 21 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 48 submissions. The volume also contains an extended abstract of the invited talk of Prof. Klaus Jansen. The Workshop on Approximation and Online Algorithms focuses on the design and analysis of algorithms for online and computationally hard problems. Both kinds of problems have a large number of applications in a wide variety of fields. Topics of interest for WAOA 2011 were: algorithmic game theory, approximation classes, coloring and partitioning, competitive analysis, computational finance, cuts and connectivity, geometric problems, inapproximability results, mechanism design, network design, packing and covering, paradigms for design and analysis of approximation and online algorithms, parameterized complexity, randomization techniques and scheduling problems.