After a toad lands on his head as he leaves his house one morning, Leo is determined to find out where it has come from and why. Together with his friend Rosa, he needs to come up with some answers before the angry residents of Upper Dab take matters into their own hands and the toads become toast! A brilliantly quirky comedy caper with a diverse and inclusive cast of characters.

Near the end of World War II and after, a small-town Nebraska youth, Jimmy Kugler, drew more than a hundred double-sided sheets of comic strip stories. Over half of these six-panel tales retold the Pacific War as fought by “Frogs” and “Toads,” humanoid creatures brutally committed to a kill-or-be-killed struggle. The history of American youth depends primarily on adult reminiscences of their own childhoods, adult testimony to the lives of youth around them, or surmises based on at best a few creative artifacts. The survival then of such a large collection of adolescent comic strips from America’s small-town Midwest is remarkable. Michael Kugler reproduces the never-before-published comics of his father’s adolescent imagination as a microhistory of American youth in that formative era. Also included in Into the Jungle! A Boy's Comic Strip History of World War II are the likely comic book models for these stories and inspiration from news coverage in newspapers, radio, movies, and newsreels. Kugler emphasizes how US propaganda intended to inspire patriotic support for the war gave this young artist a license for his imagined violence. In a context of progressive American educational reform, these violent comic stories, often in settings modeled on the artist’s small Nebraska town, suggests a form of adolescent rebellion against moral conventions consistent with comic art’s reputation for “outsider” or countercultural expressions. Kugler also argues that these comics provide evidence for the transition in American taste from war stories to the horror comics of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Kugler’s thorough analysis of his father’s adolescent art explains how a small-town boy from the plains distilled the popular culture of his day for an imagined war he could fight on his audacious, even shocking terms.

Inside this book, meet 12 insects that take disgusting eating habits to a whole new level. From dung beetles slurping up elephant poop soup to tiny creatures that could be feasting on your body right now, every page is packed with truly unbelievable facts. Perfect for reluctant readers, these books deliver life sciences in the creepiest, yuckiest way possible!

The #1 menace for computer systems worldwide, network hacking can result in mysterious server crashes, data loss, and other problems that are not only costly to fix but difficult to recognize. Author John Chirillo knows how these can be prevented, and in this book he brings to the table the perspective of someone who has been invited to break into the networks of many Fortune 1000 companies in order to evaluate their security policies and conduct security audits. He gets inside every detail of the hacker's world, including how hackers exploit security holes in private and public networks and how network hacking tools work. As a huge value-add, the author is including the first release of a powerful software hack attack tool that can be configured to meet individual customer needs.

A new supplement from Ranger Games for the Dice & Glory game system containing specialist character classes drawn from Asian and middle-eastern history and lore. This book is a great resource for both Players and Game Masters wishing to introduce some eastern flavor into their game!

timeless

In the past fifteen years there has been considerable interest in neural circuits that initiate behavior patterns. For many types of behaviors, this involves decision-making circuits whose primary elements are neither purely sensory nor motor, but represent a higher order of neural pro cessing. Of the large number of studies on such systems, analyses of startle circuits compose a major portion, and have been carried out on systems found throughout the animal kingdom. Startle has been an im portant model because of the reliability of the behavioral act for laboratory study and the accessibility of the underlying neural circuitry. However, probably because of the breadth of the subject, this material has never been reviewed in a comprehensive way that presents the elements com mon to startle circuits in the different animal systems in which they occur. This book presents a diversity of approaches based on a broad back ground of animal groups ranging from the earliest nervous systems in cnidarians to the most recently evolved and advanced in mammals. The behaviors themselves are all short latency, fast motor acts, when consid ered on the time scale of the organism, and involve avoidance or evasion, although in some cases we do not yet completely understand their natural role. These behaviors occur in response to stimuli that have sudden or unexpected onset.

The story of the First and Ninth U.S. Armies from the first crossings of the German border in September 1944 to the enemy's counteroffensive in the Ardennes in December, including the reduction of Aachen, Huertgen Forest, and Operation MARKET-GARDEN in Holland.