Straus Farrar

A spirited group biography that explores the origins of the most iconic words in American history, and the remarkable transatlantic context from which they emerged. The most famous phrase in American history once looked quite different. "The preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness" was how Thomas Jefferson put it in the first draft of the Declaration, before the first ampersand was scratched out, along with "the preservation of."...

Mattie Knight loved to make things ranging from a foot warmer for her mother or toys for her older brothers. Or, when she was 12, a metal guard to prevent shuttles from shooting off looms and hurting workers. Later, Mattie invented a machine that could cut and glue the square-bottomed paper bags we still use today. Meet the woman known as "the Lady Edison."

"The year is 1929 and Bobot is just another migrant worker in rural California. Or rather, a migrant worker with a law degree from the Philippines reduced to manual labor in America. Bobot, like so many other young Filipinos, finds himself bunking in the fields picking fruit by day. When his cousin writes claiming to have spotted his estranged wife in nearby San Francisco, he swipes a co-worker's favorite nightclub suit and heads to the big city to...

Describes the life and work of the courageous man who changed the way people saw the galaxy, by offering objective evidence that the earth was not the fixed center of the universe. In every age there are courageous people who break with tradition to explore new ideas and challenge accepted truths. Galileo Galilei was just such a man--a genius--and the first to turn the telescope to the skies to map the heavens. In doing so, he offered objective evidence...

"Jed -- young, gay, black, out of rehab and out of prospects in his hometown of Chicago -- flees to the city of his fantasies, a museum of Modernism and decadence: Berlin. The paradise that tyranny created, the subsidized city isolated behind the Berlin Wall, is where he's chosen to become the figure that he so admires, the black American expatriate. Newly sober and nostalgic for the Weimar days of Isherwood and Auden, Jed arrives to chase boys and...

"This work focuses on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture."--Back of book

When twelve-year-old Raymond and his pup Rosie are abandoned by his family, he uses his wilderness skills to survive in the woods, but as winter comes, he realizes his wits are not enough, and that perhaps it is time he starts trusting others with his secret.

Obsessively following the edicts of the Girl Scouts Handbook in spite of her lack of a troop, young Rory longs to escape the Reno trailer park where she lives with her bartender mother.

It's nearly Christmas in California. María and her little brother, Juan, are headed south to the border with Mexico to visit their grandmother. They are excited to celebrate Las Posadas with her, honoring Mary and Joseph's journey to the inn at Bethlehem. María has knitted Abuela a scarf, and Juan has drawn her a picture. But when Juan's gift won't fit through the tiny spaces in the border fence - barely big enough for little fingers to touch...

In 1869, a woman whose "can-do" attitude had shaped her life was instrumental in making Wyoming the first state to allow women to vote, then became the first woman to hold public office in the United States.