When Mike Mulligan and his steam shovel, Mary Ann, lose their jobs to the gasoline, electric, and diesel motor shovels, they go to a little country town where they find that one new job leads to another.

Gertrude LaRue receives funny typewritten and paw-written letters from he dog, Ike, entreating her to let him leave the Igor Brotweiler Canine Academy and come back home.

In this humorous version of the traditional tale, Jack's magic beanstalk produces so many beans that soon everyone in the village is sick of eating them, and mad at Jack, and when he climbs the beanstalk he finds that Mr. Giant is equally fed up with beans--but fortunately Mrs. Giant suggests a solution to their diet problem.

"David, the Magician, loves to perform magic but his favorite trick is not pulling a rabbit out of a hat or finding quarters behind the ears of children. Instead, David knows the magical power of books, which can explore dreams and develop creativity".

Jim's anxieties on his first day of school are happily forgotten when he makes a new friend.

Scaredy Squirrel never leaves his nut tree. It's way too dangerous out there. He could encounter tarantulas, green Martians or killer bees. But in his tree, every day is the same and if danger comes along, he's well-prepared. Scaredy Squirrel's emergency kit includes antibacterial soap, Band-Aids and a parachute.Day after day he watches and waits, and waits and watches, until one day ... his worst nightmare comes true! Scaredy suddenly finds himself...

A tyrannosaurus rex explains that he cannot help it that he is enormous and hungry and is not a vegetarian.

"A collection of harrowing and personal stories by the O. Henry Prize-winning author David Means."

From a Pulitzer Prize winner, a powerful history that reveals how the twin strands of liberty and slavery were joined in the nation's founding. New attention from historians and journalists is raising pointed questions about the founding period: was the American revolution waged to preserve slavery, and was the Constitution a pact with slavery or a landmark in the antislavery movement? Leaders of the founding who called for American liberty are scrutinized...

The Unknown American Revolution plunges us into the swirl of ideology, grievance, outrage, and hope that animated the Revolutionary decades. It tells of the efforts of a wide variety of men and women who stepped forward amidst a discouraging, debilitating, but ultimately successful war to inscribe on the clean slate their ideas for the kind of America they hoped would emerge from the blood-soaked eight-year conflict. Millennialist preachers and enslaved...