"Cathleen Young's characters will forever have a place in my heart." --Holly Goldberg Sloan, author of Counting by 7s Former best friends compete to see who can grow the biggest pumpkin and win the annual giant pumpkin race on the lake. A great pick for fans of Half a Chance and Gertie's Leap to Greatness. At the end of every summer, Madeline Island hosts its famous pumpkin race. All summer, adults and kids across the island grow giant, thousand-pound pumpkins, then hollow one out and paddle in it across the lake to the cheers of the entire town. Twelve-year-old Billie loves to win; she has a bulletin board overflowing with first-prize ribbons. Her best friend Sam doesn't care much about winning, or at least Billie didn't think so until last summer's race, when his pumpkin crashed into hers as she was about to cross the finish line and he won. This summer, Billie is determined to get revenge by growing the best and biggest pumpkin and beating Sam in the race. It's a tricky science to grow pumpkins, since weather, bugs, and critters can wipe out a crop. Then a surprise visit from a long-lost relative shakes things up, and Billie begins to see her family, and her bond with Sam, in a new way.

“A book about young men transformed by war, written by a veteran whose dazzling literary gifts gripped my attention from the first page to the last.” —The Wall Street Journal “Friedman’s sober and striking new memoir . . . [is] on a par with Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried -- its Israeli analog.” —The New York Times Book Review It was just one small hilltop in a small, unnamed war in the late 1990s, but it would send out ripples that are still felt worldwide today. The hill, in Lebanon, was called the Pumpkin; flowers was the military code word for “casualties.” Award-winning writer Matti Friedman re-creates the harrowing experience of a band of young Israeli soldiers charged with holding this remote outpost, a task that would change them forever, wound the country in ways large and small, and foreshadow the unwinnable conflicts the United States would soon confront in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. Pumpkinflowers is a reckoning by one of those young soldiers now grown into a remarkable writer. Part memoir, part reportage, part history, Friedman’s powerful narrative captures the birth of today’s chaotic Middle East and the rise of a twenty-first-century type of war in which there is never a clear victor and media images can be as important as the battle itself. Raw and beautifully rendered, Pumpkinflowers will take its place among classic war narratives by George Orwell, Philip Caputo, and Tim O’Brien. It is an unflinching look at the way we conduct war today.

When Canadian soldier Fred Doucette went to Bosnia-Herzegovina as a peacekeeper in 1995, he had a premonition that this tour of duty would be different from anything he had previously experienced. And it was. Doucette's tour quickly became an impossible task that took a huge toll on both the residents and his fellow peacekeepers. Trapped in thier beloved city, thousands of Sarajevans, perished, and yet, Doucette found a home in the midst of this hell. Billeted with a Bosnian family, he was offered a window into a Sarajevo that few outsiders saw. When the war ended, Doucette returned to Canada to face another battle, this one characterized by nightmares and brutal flashbacks. Traumatized, he had to face himself, his family, and his army once again, but now there was no turning away, no diversion in another foreign posting. Empty Casing is the riveting story of the making and unmaking of a soldier, and the growth of a man.

For decades, a great number of Americans saw Alger Hiss as an innocent victim of McCarthyism--a distinguished diplomat railroaded by an ambitious Richard Nixon. And even as the case against Hiss grew over time, his dignified demeanor helped create an aura of innocence that outshone the facts in many minds. Now G. Edward White deftly draws together the countless details of Hiss's life--from his upper middle-class childhood in Baltimore and his brilliant success at Harvard to his later career as a self-made martyr to McCarthyism--to paint a fascinating portrait of a man whose life was devoted to perpetuating a lie. White catalogs the evidence that proved Hiss's guilt, from Whittaker Chambers's famous testimony, to copies of State Department documents typed on Hiss's typewriter, to Allen Weinstein's groundbreaking investigation in the 1970s. The author then explores the central conundrums of Hiss's life: Why did this talented lawyer become a Communist and a Soviet spy? Why did he devote so much of his life to an extensive public campaign to deny his espionage? And how, without producing any new evidence, did he convince many people that he was innocent? White offers a compelling analysis of Hiss's behavior in the face of growing evidence of his guilt, revealing how this behavior fit into an ongoing pattern of denial and duplicity in his life. The story of Alger Hiss is in part a reflection of Cold War America--a time of ideological passions, partisan battles, and secret lives. It is also a story that transcends a particular historical era--a story about individuals who choose to engage in espionage for foreign powers and the secret worlds they choose to conceal. In White's skilled hands, the life of Alger Hiss comes to illuminate both of those themes.

Lesser Civil Wars: Civilians Defining War and the Memory of War is an edited volume that surveys three hundred years of the Memory of war and the Will to war in the greater Ohio River Valley and Great Lakes region. Military theorists from von Clausewitz, to Dingiswayo and Chandragupta, calculated the Will of their own soldiers and of the enemy’s soldiers. Sometimes the Will is assigned an erroneously low strength, as Abraham Lincoln learned quickly at the onset of the United States Civil War. In this volume, we examine the civilian production of the national Will to fight future wars through the least civil war – each individual’s war to remember or to forget – and no armistice or accord brings this internal battle to an end. This is not a book about the atrocities committed during war. This is a book about the very nature of the Will-Memory-Will cycle, where the Memory of war continues for generations until a new war requires the resurrection of the Will. As these essays show, sometimes it only takes a few individuals to prosecute these Memory wars with rules of engagement that do not necessarily include civil behavior. By focusing on microhistories from a specific region and by bracketing the US Civil War with an essay about a century prior to it and essays about the century following it, we are able to demonstrate the power and energy of the incubating stage of Memory in the Will-Memory-Will cycle. In the greater Ohio River Valley and Great Lakes region, ordinary civilians controlled and incubated the memories of the Iroquois Wars, the French and Indian/Sevens’ Years War (1756–1763), the American Revolution (1776–1783) and the War of 1812, and they converted Memory into the Will to fight the US Civil War and the Vietnam War. In these chapters, we present micro-wars between civilians over control of the Will of a nation. They are, indeed, lesser civil wars.