Everyone knows how important it is to read with children. But how can you continue your child's learning experience and enjoyment of a story once you close the book? In her engaging new book, Peggy Kaye shows parents and teachers how to play learning games based on classic children's books. Games with Books features 14 picture books, from Harold and the Purple Crayon to Bluesberries for Sal and 14 chapter books, from Winnie the Pooh to Charlotte's Web. For each book, Kaye provides a summary and then offers three to four games that will keep kids entertained while they are practicing valuable reading, writing and math skills. The games require few materials and can easily be played both in home and at school. They cover a wide skill and age range. In addition to her creative and fun approach to learning, Kaye offers a wonderful bonus in her new book: a selective list of great children's books that no reader -- young or old -- will want to miss.
The story of the region, told by an intrepid journalistMany dire predictions followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, but nowhere have they materialized as dramatically as in the Caucasus: insurrection, civil wars, ethnic conflicts, economic disintegration, and up to two million refugees. Moreover, in the 1990s Russia twice went to war in the Caucasus, and suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of a nation so tiny that it could fit into a single district of Moscow.What is it about the Caucasus that makes the region so restless, so unpredictable, so imbued with heroism but also with fanaticism and pain? In Highlanders, Yo'av Karny offers a better understanding of a region described as a "museum of civilizations," where breathtaking landscapes join with an astounding human diversity. Karny has spent many months among members of some of the smallest ethnic groups on earth, all of them living in the grim shadow of an unhappy empire. But his book is a journey not only to a geographic region but also to darker sides of the human soul, where courage vies with senseless vindictiveness; where honor and duty require people to share the present with long-dead ancestors, some real, some imaginary; and where an ancient way of life is drawing to an end under the combined weight of modernity and intolerance.
A vivid portrayal of the great Italian philosopher - now in paperbackIn Niccolò's Smile, Maurizio Viroli brings to life the fascinating writer who was the founder of modern political thought. Niccolò Machiavelli's works on the theory and practice of statecraft are classics, but Viroli sugggests that his greatest accomplishment is his robust philosophy of life -- his deep beliefs about how one should conduct oneself as a modern citizen in a republic, as a responsible family member, as a good person. On these subjects Machiavelli wrote no books: the text of his philosophy is his life itself, a life that was filled with paradox, uncertainty, and tragic drama.
A comprehensive study of the Eastern slave trade by an eminent British scholarA companion volume to The Black Diaspora, this groundbreaking work tells the fascinating and horrifying story of the Islamic slave trade. Islam's Black Slaves documents a centuries-old institution that still survives, and traces the business of slavery and its repercussions from Islam's inception in the seventh century, through its history in China, India, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Libya, and Spain, and on to Sudan and Mauritania, where, even today, slaves continue to be sold. Ronald Segal reveals for the first time the numbers involved in this trade--as many millions as were transported to the Americas--and explores the differences between the traffic in the East and the West.Islam's Black Slaves also examines the continued denial of the very existence of this sector of the black diaspora, although it survives today in significant numbers; and in an illuminating conclusion, Segal addresses the appeal of Islam to African-American communities, and the perplexing refusal of Black Muslim leaders to acknowledge black slavery and oppression in present-day Mauritania and Sudan.A fitting companion to Segal's previous work, Islam's Black Slaves is a fascinating account of an often unacknowledged tradition, and a riveting cross-cultural commentary.
Winner of the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry.A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2000.The first warning passing through Thebes--As small a soundAs a housefly alighting from PersiaAnd stamping its foot on a moundWhere the palace once was;As small a moth chewing threadIn the tyrant's robe;As small as the cresting of redIn the rim of an injured eye; as smallAs the sound of a human conceivedA compelling, lyric telling of the story of Oedipus, and of "what happens outside the play," in the experience of the god who is its presiding oracle: Apollo, the god of poetry, music, and healing. Given the task of setting the Sophocles text to music, the god is woven reluctantly into its world of riddles, unanswered questions, partially disclosed objects, and ambiguous second-hand reports--a world where the gods, as much as humans, are subject to the binding claims of fate and necessity.Gjertrud Schnackenberg draws upon ancient fragments and allusions to Oedipus and upon folk-tales about the origin of the Greek alphabet to present a vision of the tragedy's essential unknowableness, where the destinies of gods and humans secretly mingle in the unfolding of time, and where Zeus's laws, which suffuse the great tragedy's world, are as invisible and as inviolable as physical laws.
Why has a nation founded upon precepts of freedom and universal humanity continually produced, through its preoccupation with race, a divided and constrained populace? Scott Malcomson's search for an answer took him across the country--to the Cherokee Nation, an all-black town, and a white supremacist enclave in Oklahoma--back though the tangled red-white-and-black history of America from colonial times onward, and to his own childhood in racially fractured Oakland, California. By not only recounting our shared tragicomedy of race but helping us to own it--even to embrace it--this important book offers us a way at last to move beyond it.
Goethe's classic, enlivened by Randall Jarrell's fine translation and Peter Sís's dark, dreamy illustrationsRandall Jarrell's translation of Faust is one of his most important achievements. In 1957 he inscribed Goethe's motto on the first page of his notebook--"Ohne Hast aber ohne Rast" ("Without haste but without rest")--and from then until his death in 1965 he worked on the masterpiece of his "own favorite daemon, dear good great Goethe." His intent was to make the German poetry free, unrhymed poetry in English. He all but finished the job before he died, and the few lines that remained untouched--"Gretchen's Room"--were rendered into English by Robert Lowell.This elegant new edition features numerous beautiful line drawings and jacket lettering by the renowned Czech artist Peter Sís, author of the award-winning books Starry Messenger: Galileo Galilei and Tibet: Through the Red Box.
"One of the most original seductions in recent fiction... a novel of immensely tender feeling." -The New York Review of BooksTed Mooney's first novel Easy Travel to Other Planets endures as a cult classic known for its opening scene describing a woman having sex with a dolphin. Winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and a finalist for the National Book Award, Mooney's inventive novel was also named to the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels list.
"Riveting--Kusz's gifts as a writer, her original voice and sparkling perceptions, give this memoir the literary precision of a novel."--Los Angeles TimesWhen she was six years old, Natalie Kusz left Los Angeles with her family and headed north to Alaska on a classic quest for freedom, a house on the land, and a more wholesome way of living. Here is hery and survival in an unforgiving environment. "Riveting. . . ."--Los Angeles Times. Serial rights to McCall's and Harper's.
"It is with particular interest... that we greet the publication of New Islands, a slim book of evocative, haunting stories by Maria Luisa Bombal, a Chilean writer whose creative period was basically confined to the 1930's and 40's and whose work, although small in volume, was rich in its effects, anticipating the magic realism found in so much of today's Latin American fiction." - The New York Times
Bertrand Russell was one of the greatest logicians since Aristotle, and one of the most important philosophers of the past two hundred years. In this thorough examination, Alan Ryan tells the story of Russell's "other life" as social critic, polemical journalist, antiwar activist, sage and gadfly, dissenting from Russell's insistence that there was no connection between his philosophical interests and his political allegiances. Taking readers on an entertaining journey through a career that included two spells in jail, Ryan discusses Russell's most visible campaigns-against traditional religion, against the First World War, against nuclear weapons, and against the Vietnam War, as well as his lifelong defence of liberalism in education, politics, and relations between the sexes. Throughout he emphasizes the high spirits, the aristocratic fearlessness, and the wonderful combination of wit and intelligence that Russell brought to his political writing and actions. The result is a stimulating reconsideration of one of the great intellectual radicals of our time, a remarkable man who refused to grow old, calm down, and become respectable.
The letters of Anton Chekhov, like those of Flaubert, are astonishing in their immense range and in their literary quality. Beginning in 1885, when he was twenty-five, and ending with his death less than twenty years later, the correspondence testifies to an extraordinary career. Chekhov was not only a writer but a critic, a doctor, a traveler, a devoted lover and brother. He brings his passions and his immense talent to every subject. As witty and observant as his great plays and stories, Chekhov's letters exemplify his artistry and humanity.In 1890, though already suffering from tuberculosis, he traveled to the prison colonies of Siberia and Sakhalin Island. His descriptions of that arduous journey are sharp, humorous, vividly detailed. Sympathy and a quick dramatic eye characterize his portraits of the people of the Russian countryside.Chekhov speaks with eloquence and determination in his defense of Emile Zola during the Dreyfus affair (a stand which cost him one of his closest friendships), in his vigorous criticisms of the various productions of his plays -- especially the famous stagings by Konstantin Stanislavski --and in all his dealings with the other writers and critics of the Russian literary and theatrical world. In these letters this public and private man reveals his compassion and vulnerability as he records the vicissitudes of his family life, his love for the actress Olga Knipper (whom he eventually married), and the tragic breakdown of his health.
By the end of Gregory Martin's unsentimental but affecting memoir, only thirty-one people live in remote Mountain City, Nevada, and none of them are children. The town's abandoned mines are testimony to the cycle of promise, exploitation, abandonment, and attrition that has been the repeated story of the West. Yet the comings and goings at Tremewan's, the general store Martin's family has run for more than forty years, reveal a remarkably vibrant community that includes salty widows, Native Americans from a nearby reservation, and a number of Martin's deeply idiosyncratic Basque-descended relatives. Martin observes them as they persist in a difficult but rewarding existence and celebrates, with neither pity nor regret, the large and small dramas of their lives and their stubborn attachment to a place that seems likely to disappear in his lifetime.
An acclaimed journalist and novelist explores the legacy and future of American liberalism through the history of his family's politically active historyGeorge Packer's maternal grandfather, George Huddleston, was a populist congressman from Alabama in the early part of the century-an agrarian liberal in the Jacksonian mold who opposed the New Deal. Packer's father was a Kennedy-era liberal, a law professor and dean at Stanford whose convictions were sorely-and ultimately fatally-tested in the campus upheavals of the 1960s. The inheritor of two sometimes conflicting strains of the great American liberal tradition, Packer discusses the testing of ideals in the lives of his father and grandfather and his own struggle to understand the place of the progressive tradition in our currently polarized political climate. Searching, engrossing, and persuasive, Blood of the Liberals is an original, intimate examination of the meaning of politics in American lives.
Thirty-three years-old and recently divorced, Renée Néré has begun a new life on her own, supporting herself as a music-hall artist. Maxime, a rich and idle bachelor, intrudes on her independent existence and offers his love and the comforts of marriage. A provincial tour puts distance between them and enables Renée, in a moving series of leters and meditations, to resolve alone the struggle between her need to be loved and her need to have a life and work of her own.
A magnum opus from our finest interpreter of The BardThe true biography of Shakespeare--and the only one we need to care about--is in his plays. Frank Kermode, Britain's most distinguished scholar of sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century literature, has been thinking about Shakespeare's plays all his life. This book is a distillation of that lifetime of thinking.The finest tragedies written in English were all composed in the first decade of the seventeenth century, and it is generally accepted that the best ones were Shakespeare's. Their language is often difficult, and it must have been hard even for contemporaries to understand. How did this language develop? How did it happen that Shakespeare's audience could appreciate Hamlet at the beginning of the decade and Coriolanus near the end of it?In this long-awaited work, Kermode argues that something extraordinary started to happen to Shakespeare's language at a date close to 1600, and he sets out to explore the nature and consequences of the dynamic transformation that followed. For it is in the magnificent, suggestive power of the poetic language itself that audiences have always found meaning and value. The originality of Kermode's argument, the elegance and humor of his prose, and the intelligence of his discussion make this a landmark in Shakespearean studies.
How a new American identity was forged by immigration and expansion a century ago.In Barbarian Virtues, Matthew Frye Jacobson offers a keenly argued and persuasive history of the close relationship between immigration and America's newly expansionist ambitions at the turn of the twentieth century. Jacobson draws upon political documents, novels, travelogues, academic treatises, and art as he recasts American political life. In so doing, he shows how today's attitudes about "Americanism" -- from Border Watch to the Gulf War -- were set in this crucial period, when the dynamics of industrialization rapidly accelerated the rate at which Americans were coming in contact with foreign peoples.
A great poet's freshest, most provocative book.He dreams at the center of a closed system,Like the prison system, or a system of love,Where folktale, recipe, and household customRefer back to the maze that they are of.--from "A System: PCP, or Angel Dust" Taste and appetite are contraposed in Boss Cupid, the twelfth book of poems by the quintessential San Francisco poet, who is also the quintessential craftsman and quintessentially a love poet, though not of quintessential love.Variations on how we are ruled by our desires, these poems make a startling and eloquent gloss on wanton want, moving freely from the story of King David and Bathsheba to Arthur Rimbaud's diet to the tastes of Jeffrey Dahmer. As warm and intelligent as it is ribald and cunning, this collection of Thom Gunn's is his richest yet.
When friends die, one's own credentials change: one becomes a survivor. Graham Greene has already had biographers, one of whom has served him mightily. Yet I hope that there is room for the remembrance of a friend who knew him-not wisely, perhaps, but fairly well-on an island that was "not his kind of place," but where he came season after season, year after year; and where he, too, will be subsumed into the capacious story.For millennia the cliffs of Capri have sheltered pleasure-seekers and refugees alike, among them the emperors Augustus and Tiberius, Henry James, Rilke, and Lenin, and hosts of artists, eccentrics, and outcasts. Here in the 1960s Graham Greene became friends with Shirley Hazzard and her husband, the writer Francis Steegmuller; their friendship lasted until Greene's death in 1991. In Greene on Capri, Hazzard uses their ever volatile intimacy as a prism through which to illuminate Greene's mercurial character, his work and talk, and the extraordinary literary culture that long thrived on this ravishing, enchanted island.
One long poem and an eclectic mix of short poems from the Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian playwright, novelist, poet, and polemical essayist Wole Soyinka.Wole Soyinka is one of Africa's outstanding writers. He is already well known in the United States as a playwright; two of his plays, The Trials of Brother Jero and Kongi's Harvest, were produced off-Broadway in New York. A number of his plays and a novel have been published but so far only a handful of his poems have appeared in anthologies and journals. This collection consists of a long poem and a number of shorter ones. Idanre, the long one, was written especially for the Commonwealth (British) Arts Festival (1965) and is a creation myth of Ogun, the Yoruba God of Iron. The other poems range from a meditation on the news of the October Massacres in Northern Nigeria (1966) to a wry lament "To My First White Hairs" and the love poem "Psalm."
A darkly comic look at love and addiction by the author of Amy's ViewWhen struggling poet, reformed alcoholic, and devout Alcoholics Anonymous adherent Paul Peplow interviews the wildly successful, reclusive, and notoriously prickly entrepreneur Victor Quinn, he is in no way prepared for what is to follow. Victor is not only familiar with Paul's obscurely published work but can quote from it liberally; he is also somehow aware of Paul's battle with alcoholism and, without solicitation, Victor challenges Paul with his own confrontational thoughts on addiction, the true meaning of recovery, and what he sees as AA's hidden aga. Victor then concludes their bizarre encounter by offering Paul a job decorating the legend of his fast-growing Internet business. Yet as surreal as all this is, Paul is even less prepared to deal with Victor's seductive wife, Elsa, also a former alcoholic, but one who continues to drink and tempts Paul in ways that rattle him to his very core. Bound to incite discussion and controversy, My Zinc Bed is among David Hare's finest and most insightful plays -- a compelling work which boldly explores the extent to which one person can control the lives of those around him.
Little Lava is a farm on the west coast of Iceland. No roads lead to it; the way lies across a lagoon flooded twice a day by the tide. A lava field borders the farm. From the house, views give onto mountains, volcanoes, rugged coast, and the pure Icelandic sky. In Summer at Little Lava, Charles Fergus tells how he fixed up an abandoned house on the farm and spent a summer there with his wife and their young son-living day to day in great simplicity, without heat, electricity, running water, or other conveniences. Inspired by Henry Beston's classic book, The Outermost House-about a year Beston spent living in a cottage on Cape Cod-Fergus sought a place at the outer limits of civilization, and on the coast of Iceland he found it. As it happened, there was a sudden death in his family-the cruel, pointless murder of his mother at her home in Pennsylvania; and so, in the twilit open spaces of Iceland, Fergus confronted his grief, in the midst of the country's abundant wildlife and distinctive geology, its history and mythology. The little house on the coast became a refuge as he sought to recover himself and the meaning of his life. "Little Lava was a place where I could pass the days in peace," he tells us, "where I could take the first steps into a future that, I hoped, would not be so dimmed with grief and pain." Summer at Little Lava is a wise and vigilant book. It touches on Iceland and Icelanders, birds and nature, tragedy and personal loss; in strong, resonant prose, it evokes the strange and compelling landscape of Iceland.
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