Mark Twain was born fully grown, with a cheap cigar clamped between his teeth. So begins Sid Fleischman's ramble-scramble biography of the great American author and wit, who started life in a Missouri village as a barefoot boy named Samuel Clemens. Abandoning a career as a young steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River, Sam took a bumpy stagecoach to the far West. In the gold and silver fields, he expected to get rich quick. Instead, he got poor fast,...

Before he is known as the Babe, George Herman Ruth is just a boy who lives in Baltimore and gets into a lot of trouble. But when he turns seven, his father brings him to the gates of Saint Mary's Industrial School for Boys, and his life is changed forever. At Saint Mary's, he's expected to study hard and follow a lot of rules. But there is one good thing about Saint Mary's: almost every day, George gets to play baseball. Here, under the watchful eye...

"From the James Beard Award-winning author of Poor Man's Feast comes a powerful, heartfelt, and insightful story of one Jewish American's quest for identity in an unkosher world.."--

"Jiordan's family was never quite like everyone else's, with her father's mood swings, her mother's attempts at normalcy, and her two older sisters with a different last name. But on the surface, they fit in. Until the day the FBI came knocking on the door. After that, her father's mood plunged to a dangerous new low. After that, there was an investigation into his business and a sentencing in court. Soon Jiordan's father would have to leave home,...

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

In 1778, ten-year-old Johnny Adams and his father make a dangerous mid-winter voyage from Massachusetts to Paris in hopes of gaining support for the colonies during the American Revolution.

"Debut author Misty Wilson chronicles her seventh-grade experience as the only girl on her town's football team in this empowering graphic memoir about teamwork, friendship, crushes, and touchdowns"--

Through diary entries, reveals the life of Britain's strong-willed and short-tempered Queen Victoria from the age of eight through her twenty-fourth birthday, up to her third wedding anniversary with her beloved Albert in 1843.