Accompanied by quirky line drawings by Spanish illustrator Erica Salcedo, this is a gently humorous and remarkably informative nature-adventure story about an unlikely pointy-nosed hero with big dreams and an even bigger heart. After he nearly drowns in a parking-lot puddle, Dinnn Needles is fearful of many things, including flying. When his four hundred siblings swarm off without him, he finds time to dream —about family stories, a lost brother, adventure in The Wild and, above all, how to be cool. At school in an abandoned air-conditioner, Dinnn learns about the deadly Pondhawk dragonfly and other dangers that lie beyond his home under a drive-in theater screen. But Dinnn never really takes to city life. Lonely and left out, he is filled with an unexplained longing. He sips spilled cola from abandoned pop cans, but it is not as tasty as flower nectar. He tries to make friends with the local street mosquitoes, but that just lands him in a sewer filled with spiders and water snakes. He hears about the red mini-van that brought his parents together and wonders about his extended family in the country. He even finds a great black jacket in a roadside ditch, but it doesn’t make him cool. And then one day, as fate would have it, the red mini-van reappears, giving Dinnn a chance to visit to his relatives in The Wild, where new perils await an inexperienced city mosquito — being struck by a raindrop, zapped by a porch light or snapped up by a hungry fish at dusk. But in the end Dinnn discovers that being cool is a matter of what you do, especially for one’s friends and family, including two new brothers. Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.3.3 Describe characters in a story (e.g., their traits, motivations, or feelings) and explain how their actions contribute to the sequence of events

"The ... story of identical twin brothers who escape El Salvador's violence to build new lives in California-- fighting to survive, to stay, and to belong ... journalist Lauren Markham follows the seventeen-year-old Flores twins as they make their harrowing journey across the Rio Grande and the Texas desert, into the hands of immigration authorities, and from there to their estranged older brother's custody in Oakland, CA. Soon these unaccompanied minors are navigating a new school in a new language, working to pay down their mounting coyote debt, and facing their day in immigration court, while also encountering the triumphs and pitfalls of life as American teenagers-- girls, grades, Facebook --with only each other for support"--Provided by publisher.

"Among the Night People" by Clara Dillingham Pierson. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

The brothers, Peter and Andrew Amonovitch, are fraternal twin brothers, age 14 when the story begins. They are called out of school, informed that their mother is facing death after falling or being pushed down the basement stairs by their alcoholic father. On her deathbed their mother pleads with Andrew to watch over his defiant aggressive brother. Andrew agrees to fulfill her plea. This proves a formidable task. Andrew tells the story of his enduring challenge to uphold the commitment to his mother.

When author Peddar Panga was young, his parents and grandparents shared animal stories with him. Sometimes funny, sometimes sad, these entertaining fables always came with lessons illustrating the universal truths of life. Tales of the Mirrors gathers fifty such tales, rewritten with a modern audience in mind. Discover the dangers of living solely for your career in "The Royal Hyena Guard," where a hyena becomes so concerned with defending his pack's territory that he hurts those closest to him. Meet a raccoon carpenter on a campaign to cure work accidents-and a charismatic crab who fools a colony of ants. Similar in tone to Aesop's fables and the stories of Jean de La Fontaine, Panga's stories explore personal discipline, security, the pursuit of happiness, mastery of fear, and healing. Most of all, they celebrate the enduring power of love. Let Panga's tales sweep you away to a world where animals talk, feel, and act like humans. In doing so, they mirror the best and worst in ourselves, offering a chance to learn more about who we are and how we should act.

The surprising true story of how the course of human history was redirected, time and again, by the pesky mosquito.

The #1 New York Times bestseller from David McCullough, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize—the dramatic story-behind-the-story about the courageous brothers who taught the world how to fly—Wilbur and Orville Wright. On a winter day in 1903, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, two brothers—bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio—changed history. But it would take the world some time to believe that the age of flight had begun, with the first powered machine carrying a pilot. Orville and Wilbur Wright were men of exceptional courage and determination, and of far-ranging intellectual interests and ceaseless curiosity. When they worked together, no problem seemed to be insurmountable. Wilbur was unquestionably a genius. Orville had such mechanical ingenuity as few had ever seen. That they had no more than a public high school education and little money never stopped them in their mission to take to the air. Nothing did, not even the self-evident reality that every time they took off, they risked being killed. In this “enjoyable, fast-paced tale” (The Economist), master historian David McCullough “shows as never before how two Ohio boys from a remarkable family taught the world to fly” (The Washington Post) and “captures the marvel of what the Wrights accomplished” (The Wall Street Journal). He draws on the extensive Wright family papers to profile not only the brothers but their sister, Katharine, without whom things might well have gone differently for them. Essential reading, this is “a story of timeless importance, told with uncommon empathy and fluency…about what might be the most astonishing feat mankind has ever accomplished…The Wright Brothers soars” (The New York Times Book Review).

**The instant New York Times bestseller.** *An international bestseller.* Finalist for the Lane Anderson Award Finalist for the RBC Taylor Award “Hugely impressive, a major work.”—NPR A pioneering and groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction that offers a dramatic new perspective on the history of humankind, showing how through millennia, the mosquito has been the single most powerful force in determining humanity’s fate Why was gin and tonic the cocktail of choice for British colonists in India and Africa? What does Starbucks have to thank for its global domination? What has protected the lives of popes for millennia? Why did Scotland surrender its sovereignty to England? What was George Washington's secret weapon during the American Revolution? The answer to all these questions, and many more, is the mosquito. Across our planet since the dawn of humankind, this nefarious pest, roughly the size and weight of a grape seed, has been at the frontlines of history as the grim reaper, the harvester of human populations, and the ultimate agent of historical change. As the mosquito transformed the landscapes of civilization, humans were unwittingly required to respond to its piercing impact and universal projection of power. The mosquito has determined the fates of empires and nations, razed and crippled economies, and decided the outcome of pivotal wars, killing nearly half of humanity along the way. She (only females bite) has dispatched an estimated 52 billion people from a total of 108 billion throughout our relatively brief existence. As the greatest purveyor of extermination we have ever known, she has played a greater role in shaping our human story than any other living thing with which we share our global village. Imagine for a moment a world without deadly mosquitoes, or any mosquitoes, for that matter? Our history and the world we know, or think we know, would be completely unrecognizable. Driven by surprising insights and fast-paced storytelling, The Mosquito is the extraordinary untold story of the mosquito’s reign through human history and her indelible impact on our modern world order.

The Brothers Grim examines the inner workings of the Coens' body of work, discussing a movie in terms of its primary themes, social and political contexts, narrative techniques, influences, relationship to their other films, and the Coens' referential modus operandi that retreads cinema, literature, history, philosophy, and art to amplify their films' themes.