Children can be inordinately cruel to one another, in all cultures around the world. In this book, a young Japanese girl named Michi must leave her aunt, her only known relative, to work with a seamstress, Mistress Shinyo. Michi soon... Read More

These days it may seem like rabbits have a better chance than humans of ever landing on Mars, so perhaps the title of this fanciful children’s book isn’t all that preposterous. It’s also just the kind of silly story destined to... Read More

More than forty years have passed since environmentalist Rachel Carson warned the world of the threat DDT posed to the bird world in her groundbreaking work Silent Spring. Her warnings were heard, but who is listening now to the calls of... Read More

In 1963, President Kennedy reflected that Alabama Governor George Wallace and the Ku Klux Klan aided the civil rights movement. The Klan’s brutality led to federal laws that aimed to protect all citizens from bombings, beatings, and... Read More

This book would make a wonderful movie. A true story of madness and murder aboard an American whaler in 1841, it summons such maritime classics as Mutiny on the Bounty, Billy Budd, and Moby Dick-indeed, Herman Melville himself was aboard... Read More

The Civil War blew away almost all the sources of social status and pride for aristocratic Southern belles. Few young women were as resourceful as Scarlett O’Hara in using grit and charm to build a new life for themselves. Instead,... Read More

The author tells a harrowing story of being held in several Japanese prison camps in Java for three years and seven months during World War II. Rentz was the chief radio operator aboard a B-17 bomber when it was shot down by Japanese... Read More

As every woman past puberty knows (and sadly, increasingly before puberty as well), when it comes to breast development, size really does matter. Even if a woman is content with the shape, width, and breadth of her bosom, it’s likely... Read More