Once there was a boy named Leonard who loved to sing and to act. His parents were immigrants who felt like aliens in America, and certainly didn't understand Leonard's drive to perform. "Learn to play the accordion," his father told him. "Actors starve, but at least musicians can eke out a living." But Leonard reached for the stars... and caught them. He moved to Hollywood, where he took acting lessons, and drove a taxi and took every role he could get. He worked hard, learned his lines, showed up on time, and studied his craft. Until one day he was offered the role of an alien science officer on a new TV show called Star Trek. Leonard knew what it felt like to be an alien. But did he want the role?

Once there was a child without a friend. Ben-Zion's father insisted that his son speak only Hebrew, considered by some as the language of angels. But in the 1880s, the Jewish people who lived in Jerusalem spoke Yiddish or the languages of the places where they grew up. Hebrew hadn't been in everyday use for more than two thousand years, and adults said it could never be revived.

The biography of Lipman Pike, a power hitting pre-1900 baseball player who once outran a racehorse, told in picture book format.

Descriptions of different animals highlight the numbers from one to ten and their multiples of ten, such as a sloth having three toes while a centipede has thirty feet.

With his father gunned down in a petty robbery and his aunt haunted by the threats of the Gestapo, Richard Michelson's experiences growing up in Brooklyn were far from ordinary, yet they remain all too common--too much a part of ongoing violence--to be dismissed as merely private events, safely past. In Counting to Six Million he writes out memory, anxiety, and grief, worry over his wife and children, and the recurring clashes between love and cruelty that test wisdom with suffering, day after day.