For nearly a decade Marc Aronson ran an imprint dedicated to international and multicultural literature for teens. He was known in the industry for publishing "edgy" books, and for his commitment to bringing the experiences of non-dominant authors and illustrators to the world. Yet in the summer of 2001 he wrote an essay that argued against awards, such as the Pure Belpre and Coretta Scott King prizes, for which you must be a member of a given ethnic group to win. Not surprisingly, his article was very controversial; and the author and publisher Andrea Davis Pinkney who had created an imprint specifically designed to be of, by, and for African Americans, published a thoughtful reply. Here, in Beyond the Pale , Aronson explains the passionate convictions that led him to write his essay, and outlines objections made by others; then reprints the original alongside Pinkney's response. As Aronson prepared a formal response to his critics, the attacks of September 11th took place. This tragedy simultaneously made a squabble among authors seem petty, and the issues around art, society, and cultural diversity all the more important. Throughout 2001 and 2002, Aronson wrote essays in which he weighed out how art, history, and books for younger readers could respond to the altered world. As in his previous collection, Exploding the Myths, the Truth About Teenagers and Reading , he exposes the mythologies and false beliefs that distort our understanding of books and their readers. Provocative and informative, this collection of essays will challenge those who know children's literature well to think in new ways, while linking the debates within that industry to the wider intellectual currents of our time.

At sixteen Bridget is pregnant--and her boyfriend has dumped her for another girl. She's trying to envision a future for her baby. But as she sifts through the many paths and the many people who want to parent her child, she can't help but feel that there is no right decision. Fifteen years later: Ivy knows that she is now the same age Bridget was when she placed Ivy for adoption. She knows that Bridget was the one who named her. When Ivy goes in search of Bridget--of her own history--will the risks outweigh the benefits of knowing where she comes from and why her birth mother chose to walk away?

Relates the fictional adventures of Nesthäkchen, German girl, during the social and economic upheavals in Weimar Germany just after World War I. This volume describes Annemarie's college days, courtship and marriage.

Who killed Boris Dukov? One night in the middle of a performance, the handsom dancer crumples to the floor, dear-poisoned. Donna and Abbey are determined to find out. They are shot at and warned on phone.

Surveyor, fur-trader and explorer, David Thompson was the first European to descend the Columbia River from its source to its mouth. A partner in the North West Company, Thompson explored western Canada exhaustively, and the maps he produced became the basis for many future maps of the region. Thompson first came to Canada in 1784 as a clerk for the Hudson's Bay Company. He spent several years gaining knowledge of the fur trade, making extensive expeditions and learning the ways of the aboriginal peoples. After learning the use of sextant, chronometer, telescope, compass and nautical almanac, surveying became his primary interest. He explored new territory whenever possible, keeping detailed journals of his bearings and weather conditions, and charted all of his journeys.

When sixteen-year-old Kate, an aspiring playright, moves from New Jersey to attend high school in the South, she becomes embroiled in a controversy to remove the school's Confederate flag symbol.

When her father steals a rare rose from a florist shop, Isabel is pressed into employment there as payment to the hideously deformed owner.

Nearly four years after leaving Vienna to escape the Nazis, Stephie Steiner, now sixteen, and her sister Nellie, eleven, are still living in Sweden, worrying about their parents and striving to succeed in school, and at odds with each other despite their mutual love.

Does the American Dream still exist when nearly 30 million Americans live in families in which workers find a paycheck and poverty in the same envelope? Just as Michael Harrington's The Other America shocked the nation with its disclosure of poverty in the 1960s, John E. Schwarz and Thomas J. Volgy's The Forgotten Americans exposes the breadth of poverty that exists today among responsible, hardworking Americans. At the end of the prosperous 1980s, the number of Americans living in working-poor families equaled the combined populations of the nation's 25 largest cities. Contrary to conventional wisdom, this situation is not largely confined to minorities, women, the undereducated or young adults. It is commonplace for workers from nearly all segments of society to be employed in low-paying jobs even during good economic times. The Forgotten Americans reveals the betrayal of the hopes and expectations of these industrious people through broad-based factual evidence and the real-life stories of individual families. Their hardship has been ignored at enormous cost to them and the country. Numerous problems at the forefront of national debate--welfare dependency, crime, and the inadequate performance of many American school children--are closely connected to the existence of working poverty on a large scale. Unless corrective action is taken, the country risks the creation of a deeply fractured society arising from the despair of millions of employed people who have discovered that practicing the work ethic yields little reward. The problem is staggering and often misunderstood by politicians, the media, and the public. Once Schwarz and Volgy have outlined the implications of this social and economic tragedy, they propose effective solutions that require simple changes to existing policies--solutions that are politically feasible and can be accomplished without new taxes.

The republication of From Generation to Generation -almost half a century after its first appearance in 1956-constitutes a good occasion for a look at the way in which problems of youth and generations developed in contemporary societies. In this brilliant, pioneering effort, different approaches in the social sciences to the analysis of these issues receive close scrutiny. Eisenstadt reexamines these issues by including in this edition several new chapters on this theme. New to this edition are essays on "The Archetypal Patterns of Youth;" "Intellectual Rebellion and Generation Conflict;" and "Youth, Generation Consciousness and Historical Change." All of these articles shift emphasis from the structural-institutional analysis presented in the original edition of From Generation to Generation to the importance of cultural definitions of youth and generations in radically different societies. In a new introduction, "Sociological Analysis and Youth Rebellion," Eisenstadt undertakes a historical as well as analytical treatment of young people. He reviews decades of alienation of the young, the rebellion of students, and more generally, intergenerational conflict. His major finding is that youth groups tend to arise in those societies whose integrative principles are set aside from family and kinship relations. His work now considers recent dynamic specifics of youth culture as they relate to existing theory, the social and political policies of institutional entrepreneurs as they attempt to bring youth back into the fold of adult society, and the impact on society of the ideology of rebellion. The author states that with the young, any given situation of change opens up a variety of possibilities for development of new types of institutional, organizational, and behavioral patterns. Hence, in the crystallization of institutional frameworks a crucial part is played by those people who evince a special capacity to set up broad orientations to propound new norms and to articulate new goals. The same, of course, applies to the analysis of age groups and youth activities, which Eisenstadt undertakes in this classic work. Professor S. N. Eisenstadt teaches at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is frequently a visiting professor at American universities. He is the author of The Political Systems of Empires , which won the 1964 McIver Award, and which has been published by Transaction in a new paperback edition.

Here is a book of spiritual adventure. From the miracle at the Red Sea to the miracle of waking up this morning, this intriguing book introduces young people to a way of spiritual thinking to last a lifetime. Kushner, whose award-winning books have brought spirituality to life for countless adults, here reveals the essence of Judaism in a way kids can understand and enjoy. Easy to read and imaginatively illustrated by the author, The Book of Miracles helps young people make--and treasure--the connections between religion, spirituality and everyday life. For parents to read to their children, for children to read to their parents, The Book of Miracles encourages kids' awareness of their own spirituality, and shows young people how to use Judaism as a foundation on which to build their lives.

"In August 1970, David Biale, a 21-year-old American Jewish student, arrived at Kibbutz Kfar Ruppin in Israel's Bet She'an Valley as a volunteer. There, he met Rachel Korati, nine days shy of her eighteenth birthday. They began an intense dialogue about how a secular Jew might be Jewish and what the role of Israel and kibbutz ought to be in modern Jewish life. They also found a common language in the counter-culture of the 1960s to which both were drawn. Upon David's return to university studies in Berkeley and Rachel's first steps into independent adulthood - living in a town near Tel Aviv and working as a youth movement counselor -- the two commenced a correspondence in which they continued their intellectual and ideological discussions from the summer, engaging Jewish sources on the one hand, and contemporary events on the other. Gradually, the letters became more intimate and so began an epistolary romance, which one might associate more with the nineteenth century and which would be inconceivable in today's world of texting and email. Over the next two years, the correspondence continued, often on a daily basis. Twice, David's plans to come to Israel were dashed. The two struggled to hold onto a relationship composed primarily of written words. In the fall of 1971, Rachel was drafted into the Israeli Army and David had his own brush with the American draft in the last phase of the Vietnam War. Aerograms Across the Ocean: A Love Story in Letters opens a rare window into the lives and thoughts of two passionate young people, trying to find their identities and life trajectories in the tumultuous early 1970s. By turns philosophical and playful, poetic and prosaic, idealistic and uncertain, pensive and erotic, this jointly-written memoir is a coming-of-age story in Israel after the Six Day War and in America in the shadow of the Vietnam War. The book is organized around the 258 letters the authors exchanged, a correspondence that takes readers back into a different age, half a century ago." --

"Where is God?" "What does God look like?" "How does God make things happen?" With little hands, and big hands. With young hands and old hands, With your hands." Mixing sparks of curiosity and spiritual imagination, this wondrous book lights children's creativity and shows how God is with us every day, in every way. It is a vibrant invitation to children and their adults to explore--together--what, where, and how God is in our lives. Multicultural, Nondenominational, Nonsectarian; Endorsed by Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish Religious Leaders

A hilarious guide to masculinity and self-destruction. Fifty years have passed since the death of Ernest Hemingway, history's ultimate man, and young males today-obsessed with Facebook, Twitter, and Nintendo-know nothing about his legendary brand of rugged, alcoholic masculinity. They cannot skin a fish, dominate a battlefield, or transform majestic creatures of the Southern Hemisphere into piano keyboards.With chapters such as "For Whom the Beer Flows," "Death in the Afternoon... Lunch is Served," and "The Old Man and the See You in Hell," former Esquire editor Marty Beckerman demonstrates how millions of technology-addled eunuchs-brainwashed by PETA and Alcoholics Anonymous-can learn from Papa's glorious example: drunken, unshaven, meat-devouring, wife-divorcing, and suicide-committing.The Heming Way is a difficult path, and not for the weak, but truth is manlier than fiction.

In this "wonderfully entertaining" novel, a famous domestic diva finds her perfect life falling to pieces (Candace Bushnell, author of Sex and the City ). She's the goddess of hearth and home, America's millionaire media maven of domesticity, Connecticut's most dazzling hostess, and everything in her world is perfect--except that Maggie Darling's picture-book life has suddenly gone off the rails. Amid the extravagant trappings of a Christmas Eve bash, she spies her swinish stockbroker husband slipping out of a powder room moments after his creamy young colleague. The ensuing matrimonial meltdown launches Maggie on a year of romance and misadventure, starting with an ill-fated fling with a British rock star-turned-movie-actor. Back home, a sniper is loose on the Merritt Parkway and a gang known as the Businessman's Lunch Posse is terrorizing patrons of Manhattan's four-star restaurants. Meanwhile, Maggie's son Hooper drops out of college and falls into the company of the sinister gangsta rap group Chill Az Def. As calamity piles on catastrophe, even Maggie Darling's legendary organizational skills may not be able to restore civilization as we wish we knew it . . . "Deliciously funny." -- Publishers Weekly

A Past Without Shadow examines 50 years of German children's books in which the darkest horrors of the Third Reich have routinely remained hidden. The horrors of the Third Reich are systematically screened and filtered, allowing the darker, bleaker parts of history to escape illumination. Here Zohar Shavit explores 345 German books for children describing the Third Reich and the Holocaust, and finds a shocking distortion of the past: a recurrent narrative which suggests that the Germans themselves had no hand in the suffering inflicted on the Jews. These books, Shavit argues, have created the false historical lesson that the real victims of Hitler's crimes were the German people themselves. First published to great acclaim in Hebrew and now available in English, this book is a wake-up call for anyone concerned about German children's literature and its responsibility to past and future.

Sixteen-year-old Jenna wants to dance - not just in dance class or in her bedroom, but professionally, in London, under the eyes of the best teachers in the world. But a fatal accident blows her family and Cornish life apart and, guilty and grief-stricken, she puts all her plans on hold. Until a chance meeting with someone who was there with her that tragic afternoon. Who is he, and how can he help her? Will Jenna find the courage and determination to follow her dreams?

A history of American involvement in the Vietnam War, including a discussion of the antiwar movement in the United States.