The Diary of a Rambunctious Black Child is told through a riveting diary from the perspective of a ten-year-old boy named Cory Carroll. Cory has a fantastic sense of humor and pokies fun at life. His best friend is his diary. At times he feels invisibility and contentious toward his racist fifth grade teacher questioning her cruelty and intolerance against black children in her classroom. Cory doesn’t know the true meaning of words like racist, bigotry or prejudice. He only heard of those words through Passing. They are foreign to him like ice is to hell. His mother tries shielding him from the wicked realities of those words. His mom decides to take the family south for summer vacation. There, Cory enters a world he’s not accustoms to. He is exposed to the harsh truths of having brown skin in the south. He experienced some of these realities in the north, but not as cold, harsh and cruel in the south. Hatred, jealousy, lies, deceit, sexuality, rape, witchcraft, secrets, suicide, and murder are realities he must come to terms with. Cory learns their true meanings quickly and has reservations about life in the south. He uses his only tools listening and watching, developing his own analytical conclusions. He experiences lessons far beyond his capacity and expectations. Cory will cherish and carry these lessons throughout his life.

Mixing prose and poetry, ancient traditions and modern sensibilities, this brilliant, profane, and poignant coming-of-age story is a masterpiece of Native American literature At a Thanksgiving party held in a Bureau of Indian Affairs gymnasium, the elders of the Meskwaki Settlement in central Iowa sip coffee while the teenagers plot their escape. Edgar Bearchild and Ted Facepaint, too broke to join their friends for a night of drinking in a nearby farm town, decide to attend a ceremonial gathering of the Well-Off Man Church, a tribal sect with hallucinogenic practices. After partaking of the congregation’s sacred star medicine, Edgar receives a prophetic vision and comes to a newfound understanding of his people’s past and present that will ultimately reshape the course of his life. Set against the backdrop of the tumultuous 1960s, Black Eagle Child is the story of Edgar’s passage from boyhood to manhood, from his youthful misadventures with Ted, to his year at prestigious liberal arts college in California, to his return to Iowa and success as a poet. Deftly crossing genre boundaries and weaving together a multitude of tones and images—from grief to humor, grape Jell-O to supernatural strobe lights—it is also an unforgettable portrait of what it means to be a Native American in the modern world.

HARRY LIVINGSTONE was a small town doctor from Listowel, Ontario when he felt the pull of patriotism that led him to volunteer in the First World War. In 1917, Livingstone found himself embarking on a strange journey that took him to China, where he would inspect,and ultimately travel back to Canada with, men who became known as the Chinese Labour Corps. Once in Canada, the Chinese under Livingstone's care travelled across Canada in secret trains bound for Halifax. All news about the trains and the men was censored. On board crowded ships, the men crossed the U-boat-infested Atlantic. They were then put to work to keep the war machine in motion — digging trenches, hauling supplies, repairing military vehicles, and the grisly job of cleaning up the battlefields. About 300,000 Chinese labourers were recruited by the British,French, and Russian allies during the First World War. Nearly 84,000 of them passed through Canada on their way to France. Livingstone and other officers kept diaries and journals, and wrote letters home telling of their experiences with the Chinese. From these first-person accounts as well as historical records and from rare letters written by Chinese labourers themselves, author Dan Black offers for the first time a full account of Canadians and the Chinese Labour Corps — a story that had mostly been unknown until now.

When her five-year-old son passed the rigorous entrance exams to one of Japan's top private elementary schools, Makihara, a single mother, thought they were on their way. Taro would wear the historic dark blue uniform and learn alongside other little Einsteins while she basked in the glory of his high achievements with the other perfect moms. Together they would climb the rungs into the country's successful elite. But it didn't turn out that way. Taro had other things in mind.While set in Japan, their struggles in the school's hyper-competitive environment mirror those faced by parents here in the US and raise the same questions about the best way to educate a child—especially one that doesn’t quite fit the mold. Public or private? Competitive or nurturing? Standardized or individualized. Helicopter parenting or free-range? Amid this frenzied debate, how does one find balance and maintain a healthy parent-child relationship? Dear Diary Boy is an intensely personal, heartwarming, and heartbreaking chronicle of one mother and child's experience in a prestigious private Tokyo school. It's a tale that will resonate with all parents as we try to answer the age-old questions of how best to educate our children and what, truly, is in their best interests versus what is in our own.

Inside the Great House explores the nature of family life and kinship in planter households of the Chesapeake during the eighteenth century—a pivotal era in the history of the American family. Drawing on a wide assortment of personal documents—among them wills, inventories, diaries, family letters, memoirs, and autobiographies—as well as on the insights of such disciplines as psychology, demography, and anthropology, Daniel Blake Smith examines family values and behavior in a plantation society. Focusing on the emotional texture of the household, he probes deeply into personal values and relationships within the family and the surrounding circle of kin. Childrearing practices, male-female relationships, attitudes toward courtship and marriage, father-son ties, the character and influence of kinship, familial responses to illness and death, and the importance of inheritance—all receive extended treatment. A striking pattern of change emerges from this mosaic of life in the colonial South. What had once been a patriarchal, authoritarian, and emotionally restrained family environment altered profoundly during the latter half of the eighteenth century. The personal documents cited by Smith clearly point to the development after 1750 of a more intimate, child-centered family life characterized by close emotional bonds and by growing autonomy—especially for sons—in matters of marriage and career choice. Well-to-do planter families inculcated in their children a strong measure of selfconfidence and independence, as well as an abiding affection for their family society. Smith shows that Americans in the North as well as in the South were developing an altered view of the family and the world beyond it—a perspective which emphasized a warm and autonomous existence. This fascinating study will convince its readers that the history of the American family is intimately connected with the dramatic changes in the lives of these planter families of the eighteenth-century Chesapeake.

Abandoned by her father, her and her brother, Darius, soon learn that they are descendants of a long line of Egyptian gods and goddesses who have passed down a phenomenal power forcing them to neglect their normal lives leading them on a journey to find answers, rebuild family bonds, and save their family from a evil descendant who wants to harvest their power for himself. Janay, her family, and friends all learn that life often throws you hurdles that can be overcome through faith, resilience, and team work.

Anne Frank and Martin Luther King Jr. were born the same year a world apart. Both faced ugly prejudices and violence, which both answered with words of love and faith in humanity. This is the story of their parallel journeys to find hope in darkness and to follow their dreams.

A critically acclaimed nature writer explores the citizen scientist movement through the lens of entomological field research in the American Southwest. Award-winning nature writer Sharman Apt Russell felt pressed by the current environmental crisis to pick up her pen yet again. Encouraged by the phenomenon of citizen science, she decided to turn her attention to the Western red-bellied tiger beetle, an insect found widely around the world and near her home in the Gila River Valley of New Mexico. In a lyrical, often humorous voice, Russell shares her journey across a wild, rural landscape tracking this little-known species, an insect she calls “charismatic,” “elegant,” and “fierce.” What she finds is renewed optimism in mysteries still left to be explored, that despite the challenges of climate change, there is a growing diversity of ways ordinary people can contribute to the research needs of scientists today in the name of environmental activism. Offering readers a glimpse into the pioneering field of citizen science, Diary of a Citizen Scientist documents one woman’s transformation from a feeling of powerlessness to engaged hopefulness. Winner of the John Burroughs Medal and the WILLA Literary Award for Best Creative Nonfiction Named one of the top ten best nature books of 2014 by GrrlScientist in The Guardian

One sparkling summer day, Jill Abramson brought home a nine-week-old golden retriever named Scout. Over the following year, as she and her husband raised their adorable new puppy, Abramson wrote a hugely popular column for The New York Times's website about the joys and challenges of training this rambunctious addition to their family. Dog-lovers from across the country inundated her with emails and letters, and the photos they sent in of their own dogs became the most visited photo album on the Times's site in 2009. Now, Abramson has gone far beyond the material in her column and written a detailed and deeply personal account of Scout's first year. Part memoir, part manual, part investigative report, The Puppy Diaries continues Abramson's intrepid reporting on all things canine. Along the way, she weighs in on such issues as breeders or shelters, adoption or rescue, raw diet or vegan, pack-leader gurus like Cesar Millan or positive-reinforcement advocates like Karen Pryor. What should you expect when a new puppy enters your life? With utterly winning stories and a wealth of practical information, The Puppy Diaries provides an essential road map for navigating the first year of your dog's life.