This New York Times bestselling account of books parachuted to soldiers during WWII is a "cultural history that does much to explain modern America" ( USA Today).When America entered World War II in 1941, we faced an enemy that had banned and burned 100 million books. Outraged librarians launched a campaign to send free books to American troops, gathering 20 million hardcover donations. Two years later, the War Department and the publishing industr...

When America entered World War II in 1941, we faced an enemy that had banned and burned over 100 million books and caused fearful citizens to hide or destroy many more.Outraged librarians launched a campaign to send free books to American troops and gathered twenty million hardcover donations. In 1943 the War Department and the publishing industry stepped in with an extraordinary program: 120 million small, lightweight paperbacks for troops to carry in their pocket...

The untold story of Ray Trautman, the Greatest Generation's librarian, who made reading central to the Allied fight in World War II and transformed the role of books in American life. Though unknown to most readers, no one made a greater contribution to reading habits in America than Ray Trautman. Growing up in the rural Midwest, Trautman looked to reading as a way of exploring the world--as both escape and enlightenment--and yet, as with many Americans, discovered that wi...

Though unknown to most readers, no one made a greater contribution to reading habits in America than Ray Trautman. Growing up in the rural Midwest, Trautman looked to reading as a way of exploring the world and yet, discovered that with no community library and limited funds finding books was a challenge. This sparked in him a lifelong passion to build libraries and ensure free access to books for all. After working his way through college, Trautman became an independent bookseller, and th...

The Myth of Ephraim Tutt explores the true and previously untold story behind one of the most elaborate literary hoaxes in American history.Arthur Train was a Harvard-educated and well-respected attorney. He was also a best-selling author. Train’s greatest literary creation was the character Ephraim Tutt, a public-spirited attorney and champion of justice.Guided by compassion and a strong moral compass, Ephraim Tutt commanded a loyal following among general readers and law...

I am Gracie Gardener is the first book in the Gracie Gardener series. This book is an introduction to Gracie and her grandmother and offers a peek into the endearing and touching relationship they have with one another. Throughout this book Gracie tries to figure out what she likes to do by testing out all of the different things that her friends like to do. Eventually she finds that the thing she enjoys most was right under her nose the whole time.

Significant Food is a collaborative work of textual analysis and criticism that chews on the role and prominence of food in American literature. The volume offers close readings of many well-known, and some less well-known, examples of American writing, as studied through the food culture sensibilities of a well-stocked cupboard of contributors who offer their analyses for public consumption.Editors Jeff Birkenstein and Robert C. Hauhart find that literary criticism has fo...

"Every child's way of being can open doors to wisdom, compassion, and human connection. We need only to listen."This is among the conclusions that the authors, one of whom is an experienced foster parent and the other a professor of developmental psychology, draw as a result of working with a diverse range of children and families. Inspired by their relationships with families in crisis, the authors began to rethink the traditional foster care models and developed an innovative pra...

From New York Times bestselling author Molly Guptill Manning comes The War of Words, the captivating story of how American troops in World War II wielded pens to tell their own stories as they made history.At a time when civilian periodicals faced strict censorship, US Army Chief of Staff George Marshall won the support of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to create an expansive troop-newspaper program. Both Marshall and FDR recognized that ther...

Contemporary capabilities-based approaches to social justice, inspired by the Aristotelian emphasis on human well-being, have tended to separate and even oppose identity-based or recognitive justice from resource-based or redistributive justice. This book demonstrates that such a divorce risks further polarizing capable members of the political community from disabled or vulnerable members.In order to prevent this danger of legitimizing the growing stratification between rich and p...

With its uncanny night howls, unrivaled ingenuity, and amazing resilience, the coyote is the stuff of legends. In Indian folktales it often appears as a deceptive trickster or a sly genius. But legends don’t come close to capturing the incredible survival story of the coyote. As soon as Americans—especially white Americans—began ranching and herding in the West, they began working to destroy the coyote. Despite campaigns of annihilation employing poisons, gases, helicopters, and engineered...

The White Witch, Aslan, fauns and talking beasts, centaurs and epic battles between good and evil -- these have become a part of our collective imagination through the classic volumes of The Chronicles of Narnia. Yet who was the man who created this world? This audio book attempts to unearth the making of the first Narnian, C. S. Lewis himself.One of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably the most influential religious writer of his day, Lewis was also an Oxf...