Hummingbirds: Fact and Folklore from the Americas

Hummingbirds have fascinated people since ancient times and have inspired native peoples to weave them into folklore. Jeanette larson and Adrienne Yorinks combine hummingbird facts with retellings of hummingbird tales from various peoples of the Americas to give readers an informative and cultural look at these amazing birds. Each folklore story offers a cultural explanation for a specific characteristic of these unique birds.

Books For Children of the World

Presents the life of the founder of the International Youth Library in Munich, Jella Lepman, describing how she was sent by the United States Army to Germany in 1945 to assist German children and decided to build a children’s library.

Snakes!: Strange and Wonderful

Provides a comprehensive look at the world of snakes through a presentation of the many types found around the world–reviewing their similarities, differences, and unique abilities.

My Cold Went On Vacation

Colds travel from person to person, so one little boy imagines all the places his cold might visit after it leaves him. This little cold germ rides the school bus, climbs mountains, sails across the ocean, and visits every continent before it reaches its final destination right across the hall in his sister’s room. Nora Krug’s bright, bold artwork makes for a very colorful travelogue, and Molly Rausch’s funny story of a global expedition also celebrates imaginative thinking.

Scribbling Women

In 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote to his publisher, complaining about the irritating fad of “scribbling women.” Whether they were written by professionals, by women who simply wanted to connect with others, or by those who wanted to leave a record of their lives, those “scribbles” are fascinating, informative, and instructive. Margaret Catchpole was a transported prisoner whose eleven letters provide the earliest record of white settlement in Australia. Writing hundreds of years later, Aboriginal writer Doris Pilkey wrote a novel about another kind of exile in Australia. Young Isabella Beeton, one of twenty-one children and herself the mother of four, managed to write a groundbreaking cookbook before she died at the age of twenty-eight. World traveler and journalist Nelly Bly used her writing to expose terrible injustices. Sei Shonagan left poetry and journal entries that provide a vivid look at the pampered life and intrigues in Japan’s imperial court. Ada Blackjack, sole survivor of a disastrous scientific expedition in the Arctic, fought isolation and fear with her precious Eversharp pencil. Dr. Dang Thuy Tram’s diary, written in a field hospital in the steaming North Vietnamese jungle while American bombs fell, is a heartbreaking record of fear and hope. Many of the women in “Scribbling Women” had eventful lives. They became friends with cannibals, delivered babies, stole horses, and sailed on whaling ships. Others lived quietly, close to home. But each of them illuminated the world through her words.

Gaia Warriors

A book on global warming like no other, merging key concepts with firsthand accounts from people of all ages who have found ways to help. Inspired by the work of outstanding scientist and thinker James Lovelock and written by acclaimed author Nicola Davies, here is a book that takes a clear look at how and why Earth’s climate is changing and the ways we can deal with it.

 

 

Amazing Animals

Did you know that the oldest insect lived more than 350 million years ago? That’s more than 100 million years before the dinosaurs! Did you know that a slug has three noses, an octopus has three hearts, and that an earthworm has no eyes, no nose, no ears, and no lungs, but it has five hearts? By compiling facts that astound her and whet her own curiosity, Margriet Ruurs encourages young readers to observe the natural world around them and to share her sense of wonder and respect for it. A perfect introduction to a host of creatures, many of them endangered.

Sugar Changed the World

When this award-winning husband-and-wife team discovered that they each had sugar in their family history, they were inspired to trace the globe-spanning story of the sweet substance and to seek out the voices of those who led bitter sugar lives. The trail ran like a bright band from religious ceremonies in India to Europe’s Middle Ages, then on to Columbus, who brought the first cane cuttings to the Americas. Sugar was the substance that drove the bloody slave trade and caused the loss of countless lives but it also planted the seeds of revolution that led to freedom in the American colonies, Haiti, and France. With songs, oral histories, maps, and over 80 archival illustrations, here is the story of how one product allows us to see the grand currents of world history in new ways. Time line, source notes, bibliography, index.