Nonfiction

Nonfiction genre

The London Jungle Book

The book is a visual travelogue that both mimics and subverts the typical colonial encounter. With radical innocence and great sophistication, Bhajju brings the signs of the Gond forest to bear on the city, turning London into an exotic jungle, a clever beastiary. The London Underground becomes a sinuous snake, Big Ben transforms into a rooster crowing the time, and an airplane — the first Bhajju ever encountered — is compared to an elephant miraculously flying through the air. It is rare to encounter a truly original vision that is capable of startling us into reexamining familiar sights. By breathing the ancient spirit of wonder back into the act of travel, The London Jungle Book does just that.

See the review at WOW Review, Volume VII, Issue 4

Barbarians!

The ancient Romans used the word barbarian to describe people who were coarse, rude, or even just foreign. Over time the word has also come to connote bloodthirsty cruelty. But were the Goths, the Huns, the Vikings, and the Mongols as barbaric as we’ve been led to believe? In dynamic, detailed spreads that young readers will pore over, this book explores how these nomadic warriors lived, worshipped, and celebrated. Their wandering armies brought together Europe and Asia through trade and conquest and, in doing so, changed the world forever.

Just So Stories

The second volume includes “The Beginning of the Armadilloes,” “How the First Letter Was Written,” “How the Alphabet Was Made,” The Crab That Played with the Sea,” “The Cat That Walked by Himself” and “The Butterfly That Stamped.” The first edition of Just So Stories was published in Great Britain in 1902, along with black-and-white illustrations by Kipling himself. The stories have remained in print ever since, delighting young readers in many countries. This new edition, published more than 110 years after the original, has been edited to remove a few references now understood to be offensive.

Before Columbus: The Americas Of 1491

This study of Native American societies is adapted for younger readers from Charles C. Mann’s best-selling 1491. Turning conventional wisdom on its head, the book argues that the people of North and South America lived in enormous cities, raised pyramids hundreds of years before the Egyptians did, engineered corn, and farmed the rain forests.

If

Some things are so huge or so old that it’s hard to wrap your mind around them. But what if we took these big, hard-to-imagine objects and events and compared them to things we can see, feel and touch? Instantly, we’d see our world in a whole new way. So begins this endlessly intriguing guide to better understanding all those really big ideas and numbers children come across on a regular basis.

Imagining Geronimo

His face has appeared on T-shirts, postage stamps, jigsaw puzzles, posters and an Andy Warhol print. A celebrity and a tourist attraction who attended three World’s Fairs and rode in President Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade, he is a character in such classic westerns as Stagecoach and Broken Arrow. His name was used in the daring military operation that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, and rumors about the location of his skull at a Yale University club have circulated for a century. These are just a few of the ways that the Apache shaman and war leader known to Anglo-Americans as Geronimo has remained alive in the mainstream American imagination and beyond.

One Step At A Time

One Step at a Time continues the true story of Last Airlift: A Vietnamese Orphan’s Rescue from War. Tuyet, recently rescued from war-torn Vietnam, is settling into her new adoptive family. But before she can even learn to speak their language, she must undergo a frightening surgery to correct her polio-damaged leg.

Last Airlift

Last Airlift is the true story of one girl’s escape from war-torn Vietnam. School Library Journal said, “The author tells Tuyet’s story with respect and dignity, introducing readers to a brave girl caught up in the turbulent times of her country, her fears of leaving what she knew, and the joy of finding a new life.”