Joshua kicks his football into a building site and discovers a secret tunnel. It leads through pitch darkness under the Wall and into forbidden territory, where a boy like him shouldn't stray. When Joshua emerges into the light of the other side, his world is turned upside down - with kindness, terror and violence, and a debt he can never repay.

Accompanied by enchanting artwork, this brilliant collection of more than 100 poems from the legendary author celebrates childhood, showing just how wonderful it is to be a kid.

On a sweltering day in August 1942, Frankie Washburn returns to his family's rustic Minnesota resort for one last visit before he joins the war as a bombardier, headed for the darkened skies over Europe. Awaiting him at the Pines are those he's about to leave behind: his hovering mother; the distant father to whom he's been a disappointment; the Indian caretaker who's been more of a father to him than his own; and Billy, the childhood friend who over the years has become something much more intimate. But before the homecoming can be celebrated, the search for a German soldier, escaped from the POW camp across the river, explodes in a shocking act of violence, with consequences that will reverberate years into the future for all of them and that will shape how each of them makes sense of their lives.

How does a child acquire language, and what may facilitate this learning? To carry out his investigations, Bruner went to the child's own setting for learning rather than observing children in a contrived video laboratory. For Bruner, language is learned by using it. Central to its use are what he calls "formats," scriptlike interactions between mother and child, in short, play and games. What goes on in games as rudimentary as peekaboo or hide and seek can tell us much about language acquisition. But what aids the aspirant speaker in his attempt to use language? To answer this, the author postulates the existence of a Language Acquisition Support System that frames the interactions between adult and child in such a way as to allow the child to master the basic but necessary steps in learning to talk. It underlies the fine tuning involved in orderly language learning and allows the child to proceed from learning how to refer to objects to learning to make a request of another human being. - Back cover.

"This book considers the development of science fiction for children and teens between 1950 and 2010, exploring why it differs from science fiction aimed at adults. In a broader sense, this examination of 400 texts sheds light on changing attitudes toward children and teenagers, toward science education, and toward the authors' expectations and sociological views of their audience"--Provided by publisher.

In a series of funny, touching, unabashed and uninhibited vignettes, Levenson--aided and abetted by the incomparable Whitney Darrow, Jr.--quotes the lovely, innocent logic of little people as they express their views of the big people's world. (dust cover).

Takes a comprehensive Darwinian interpretation of human development. Looking at the entire range of human evolutionary history, Konner tells the story of how cross-cultural and universal characteristics of our growth from infancy to adolescence became rooted in genetically inherited characteristics of the human brain--From publisher description.

The author relates the remarkable story of his pianist mother and her sister, child prodigies who escaped certain death when the Nazis invaded Ukraine, adopted new identities, and came under the protection of a Nazi commander who heard them play.

"A down-to-earth, inspiring book about the American promise fulfilled." -President Bill Clinton "Fascinating . . . . Made me wish I had been born in the Bronx." -Barbara Walters A touching and provocative collection of memories that evoke the history of one of America's most influential boroughs-the Bronx-through some of its many success stories The vivid oral histories in Arlene Alda's Just Kids from the Bronx reveal what it was like to grow up in the place that bred the influencers in just about every field of endeavor. The Bronx is where Michael Kay, the New York Yankees' play-by-play broadcaster, first experienced baseball; where J. Crew's CEO Millard ("Mickey") Drexler found his ambition; where Neil deGrasse Tyson and Dava Sobel fell in love with science; and where local music making inspired singer-songwriter Dion DiMucci and hip-hop's Grandmaster Melle Mel. The parks, the pickup games, the tough and tender mothers, the politics, the gangs, the food-for people who grew up in the Bronx, childhood recollections are fresh. Arlene Alda's own Bronx memories were a jumping-off point from which to reminisce with a nun, a police officer, an urban planner, and with Al Pacino, Carl Reiner, Colin Powell, Maira Kalman, Bobby Bonilla, Mary Higgins Clark, and many other leading artists, athletes, scientists, and entrepreneurs-experiences spanning six decades of Bronx living. Alda then arranged these pieces of the past, from looking for violets along the banks of the Bronx River to the wake-up calls from teachers who recognized potential, into one great collective story, a filmlike portrait of the Bronx from the early twentieth century until today.

Peter Pan, Jacqueline Rose contends, forces us to question what it is we are doing in the endless production and dissemination of children's fiction. In a preface, written for this edition, Rose considers some of Peter Pan's new guises and their implications. From Spielberg's Hook, to the lesbian production of the play at the London Drill Hall in 1991, to debates in the English House of Lords, to a newly claimed status as the icon of transvestite culture, Peter Pan continues to demonstrate its bizarre renewability as a cultural fetish of our times.

In this landmark book, sociologist Viviana Zelizer traces the emergence of the modern child, at once economically "useless" and emotionally "priceless," from the late 1800s to the 1930s. Having established laws removing many children from the marketplace, turn-of-the-century America was discovering new, sentimental criteria to determine a child's monetary worth. The heightened emotional status of children resulted, for example, in the legal justification of children's life insurance policies and in large damages awarded by courts to their parents in the event of death. A vivid account of changing attitudes toward children, this book dramatically illustrates the limits of economic views of life that ignore the pervasive role of social, cultural, emotional, and moral factors in our marketplace world.

Since the 1960s a radical change has occurred in the way American society treats children and in the behavior of children themselves. In this provocative examination of childhood today, Marie Winn argues that adults have abandoned their traditional role of protectors of childhood innocence and, moreover, have encouraged early involvement in adult concerns. The disintegration of family life (due in part of divorce and to the return of women to the work force); the emphasis on sex in boos, films, and on television; and society's casual acceptance of "recreational" drugs have all contributed to the emergence of a generation of cynical, prematurely "sophisticated" children. -- Cover, page [4]

"The fairy tale is arguably one of the most important cultural and social influences on children's lives. But until the first publication of Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, little attention had been paid to the ways in which the writers and collectors of tales used traditional forms and genres in order to shape children's lives -- their behavior, values, and relationship to society. As Jack Zipes convincingly shows in this classic work, fairy tales have always been a powerful discourse, capable of being used to shape or destabilize attitudes and behavior within culture. How and why did certain authors try to influence children or social images of children? How were fairy tales shaped by the changes in European society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Zipes examines famous writers of fairy tales such as Charles Perrault, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen and L.Frank Baum and considers the extraordinary impact of Walt Disney on the genre as a fairy tale filmmaker." --BarnesandNoble.com.

"Lays out the connections between conscious nutrition for families and spiritually oriented parenting including health advice and easy, child-friendly vegan recipes"--

"'The grave we dug for my brother Little remained empty even after we filled it back in. And nobody was going to admit it.' So begins Little, first published by Graywolf Press in 1995 when David Treuer was just twenty-four. The narrative unfolds to reveal the deeply entwined stories of the three generations of Little's family, including Stan, a veteran of the Vietnam War who believes Little is his son; Duke and Ellis, the twins who built the first house in Poverty after losing their community to smallpox and influenza; Jeannette, the matriarch who loved both Duke and Ellis and who walked hundreds of miles to reunite with them. Each of these characters carries a piece of the mystery of Little's short life. With rhythmic and unadorned prose, Treuer uncovers in even the most frost-hardened ground the resilience and humor of life in Poverty. From the unbearable cruelty of the institutions that systematically unraveled Native communities at the turn of the century, to the hard and hallow emptiness of a child's grave, Treuer has orchestrated a moving account of kinship and survival. In his new introduction, Treuer, now among the foremost writers of his generation, reflects on the germ of this novel and how it fits into his lasting body of work centered on Native life. More than a quarter of a century later, Little proves as vital and moving as ever"--

Once her parents are off to bed, Poesy excitedly awaits the monsters that creep into her room. With the knowledge she's gained from her trusty Monster Book and a few of her favorite toys, Poesy easily fends off a werewolf, a vampire, and much more.

Jack Zipes develops a social history of the fairy tale and shows how educated writers purposefully appropriated the oral folk tale in the eighteenth century and made it into a discourse about mores, values, and manners.