Northern Uganda on the eve of the millennium: The daughter of American missionaries and a local teenage girl steal into a darkened church to seal their love in a secret, makeshift wedding ceremony. But when the surrounding war zone encroaches on their fragile union, they cannot escape its reach. Confronting the religious and cultural roots of intolerance, Cardboard Piano explores violence and its aftermath, as well as the human capacity for hatred, forgiveness, and love.

When Debbie tries to interest Tina in playing the piano by creating a cardboard keyboard, they find not only does it not have the same appeal but also that they do not need to share everything to be best friends.

A Heritage of Faith shows the legacy of faith handed down through families. Many incidents in the lives of the author and her family are told as she and her husband served Southern Baptist churches, preaching and working to bring people to a saving relationship with Jesus. The book shows how God can come into a person's life and change an entire family. It shows how God used a man to go to churches that were dying and help them to begin to love and grow again. It also outlines many of the methods he used as he pastored twelve Baptist churches in Missouri, Texas, and Florida to accomplish that purpose. Many of the people they met are showcased in these sometimes hilarious, sometimes poignant stories. Christian families are not immune to worldly influences, as is shown in the chapter that tells how the author and her husband learned that one of their sons is gay. Neither are Christian families immune to great sorrow, as is shown in the chapter about one of their daughters who experienced infertility for many years. A Heritage of Faith has stories of many hilarious things that happened in the author's family and in their churches, as well as some serious decisions made by people they met along the way. The author shows how a world-wise man and a naive girl put their lives together and have served churches for fifty-five years.

The volume also contains late essays on growing up in Houston, writing from life, and illness and recovery."--Jacket.

This best-selling tale of exploration and belonging, which won the Waterstones Childrens Book Prize 2016, Illustrated Book Category, is now available in board book.

The remarkable life and times of Hi Babit Now at ninety-three, author Hi Babit tells the story of his life from birth until present. His autobiographical book, The Flying Piano Roll Man, recounts his experiences mostly as a piano roll maker, a pilot, and an inventor. The Flying Piano Roll Man divides the author’s life into four time spans: 1917–1930, 1931–1940, 1941–1945, and 1946 – to the present time. In three different chapters, the author also highlights his piano-roll years, his flying years, and his invention ideas. In detailed description, this volume narrates the author’s experience with his first piano teacher, his first job, and other work experiences that molded him into the person he is today. A person who wears multiple hats, the author has composed music, written songs, written lyrics for songs, made the master arrangements for piano rolls, done artwork when he was young, written articles for magazines, had a photo business, had a leather craft business, had a nail head business for clothing, was a clothing cutter in the garment line, learned flying and became a land-sea-glider pilot with a commercial rating, tunes pianos every day, rehearses shows and conducts them, played with many bands and in many restaurants, and so much more. These interesting facts will engross readers in this book. As an added incentive to buy this book, there are many original musical compositions that were done by Hi Babit, which are located at the end of the book in the Appendix.

A sweeping, kaleidoscopic, and passionate novel that presents a stunning series of flashes — scenes, moods, dreams, and weather— as the narrator wanders through Lima. Published in 1928 to great acclaim when its author was just twenty years old, The Cardboard House is sweeping, kaleidoscopic, and passionate. The novel presents a stunning series of flashes — scenes, moods, dreams, and weather— as the narrator wanders through Barranco (then an exclusive seaside resort outside Lima). In one beautiful, radical passage after another, he skips from reveries of first loves, South Pole explorations, and ocean tides, to precise and unashamed notations of class and of race: an Indian woman “with her hard,shiny, damp head of hair—a mud carving,” to a gringo gobbling “synthetic milk,canned meat, hard liquor.” Adán’s own aristocratic family was in financial freefall at the time, and, as the translator notes, The Cardboard House is as “subversive now as when it was written: Adán’s uncompromising poetic vision and the trueness and poetry of his voice constitute a heroic act against cultural colonialism.”

William Goyen was a writer of startling originality and deep artistic commitment whose work attracted an international audience and the praise of such luminaries as Northrop Frye, Truman Capote, Gaston Bachelard, and Joyce Carol Oates. His subject was the land and language of his native East Texas; his desire, to preserve the narrative music through which he came to know his world. Goyen sought to transform the cherished details of his lost boyhood landscape into lasting, mythic forms. Cut off from his native soil and considering himself an "orphan," Goyen brought modernist alienation and experimentation to Texas materials. The result was a body of work both sophisticated and handmade—and a voice at once inimitable and unmistakable. It Starts with Trouble is the first complete account of Goyen's life and work. It uncovers the sources of his personal and artistic development, from his early years in Trinity, Texas, through his adolescence and college experience in Houston; his Navy service during World War II; and the subsequent growth of his writing career, which saw the publication of five novels, including The House of Breath, nonfiction works such as A Book of Jesus, several short story collections and plays, and a book of poetry. It explores Goyen's relationships with such legendary figures as Frieda Lawrence, Katherine Anne Porter, Stephen Spender, Anaïs Nin, and Carson McCullers. No other twentieth-century writer attempted so intimate a connection with his readers, and no other writer of his era worked so passionately to recover the spiritual in an age of disabling irony. Goyen's life and work are a testament to the redemptive power of storytelling and the absolute necessity of narrative art.

Makeology introduces the emerging landscape of the Maker Movement and its connection to interest-driven learning. While the movement is fueled in part by new tools, technologies, and online communities available to today’s makers, its simultaneous emphasis on engaging the world through design and sharing with others harkens back to early educational predecessors including Froebel, Dewey, Montessori, and Papert. Makerspaces as Learning Environments (Volume 1) focuses on making in a variety of educational ecosystems, spanning nursery schools, K-12 environments, higher education, museums, and after-school spaces. Each chapter closes with a set of practical takeaways for educators, researchers, and parents.

Josie White, a young girl, who through no fault of her own, is born biracial into a world where intolerance, prejudice, cruelty. and a heartless humanity rule. Despite the many obstacles in her path and through her mothers faith, hard work, dedication, and devotion, Josie survives growing up a lonely, friendless, child who is treated harshly and cruelly by her peers. Josie, like her mother, has been gifted with a beautiful voice and a love of music. Josie is about to realize her dream (as well as her mothers) when, as a young woman on her own and miles away from her hometown, she is pursuing her future and her hope of singing opera in the great Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. When Josie finally finds herself on the brink of fame and a new life Fate steps in and tragedy ensues.