homes and haunts

Poet Maya Angelou chronicles her early life, focusing on her childhood in 1930s rural Arkansas, including her rape at the age of five, her subsequent years of muteness, and the strength she gained from her grandmother and Mrs. Bertha Flowers, a respected African-American woman in her town.

For a rugged outdoor man and his family, life in northern Minnesota is a wild experience involving wolves, deer, and the sled dogs that make their way of life possible. Includes an account of the author's first Iditarod, a dogsled race across Alaska.

Historian Scott Nelson introduces children to the life of the real John Henry, drawing on songs, poems, and stories to describe the man behind the legendary African-American hero.

Colin Beavan provides an account of his experiences trying to live everyday life in New York City with his wife and young daughter while making zero net impact on the environment--an experiment that meant no elevators, no subways, no air-conditioning, no toilet paper, and other deprivations.

Focuses on this American author's connection with steamboats on the Mississippi River while also presenting a history of the craft.

American children's author Jane Kurtz presents a guide to her works, discussing her childhood in Ethiopia, her writing influences, and the inspirations for her books.

Mary-Ann Tirone Smith chronicles her French-Italian family's struggle to survive in a housing project in Hartford, Connecticut, in the years following World War II.

Presents a 150th anniversary edition of Henry David Thoreau's 1854 text in which he offers his philosophy of life and observations of nature gleaned over the course of two years of solitary living in a cabin on Walden Pond, and includes color photographs of Walden Pond and the surrounding woods.

Discusses how Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt's lives were influenced by their summer home on Campobello Island.

Autobiography of the former high-ranking Black Panther who hijacked a plane in 1969 to take him to Cuba, where he has lived ever since, in order to avoid charges from a shootout with San Francisco police.