Joanne Mattern

"Introduces the tools chefs use in their work"--Provided by publisher.

"Describes Gila monsters, including what they look like, where they live, some of their behaviors, how they reproduce, and how they fit in the world"--

Describes what is known about the physical characteristics, behavior, habitat, and life cycle of this small, bird-like dinosaur.

Explores the life and career of Coretta Scott King, from her childhood in Alabama, through her work with the civil rights movement, to her continuing efforts on behalf of the underprivileged.

"Simple text and photographs present geckos, how they look, where they live, and what they do"--Provided by publisher.

Sam Houston was one of the most colorful and legendary figures of American history. During his life he held an astonishing range of high positions: governor of two states (Tennessee and Texas), congressman (Tennessee), senator (Texas), and president of the Republic of Texas for most of its period of independence. He was an ardent expansionist who helped to make "manifest destiny" a reality, and more than any other individual, he was responsible for Texas's entry into the. United States. But Houston was a complex man whose life was marked by failures and despair. He had a lifelong alcohol problem, which probably caused the rapid dissolution of his first marriage, a scandal that forced him to resign the governorship of Tennessee. Following that disgrace, Houston fled into Indian Territory and oblivion. After years of wandering in the wilderness, he came to Texas and political rebirth. Houston's military fame, forged in the War of 1812. Brought him to the attention of his commanding general, Andrew Jackson, who made Houston his protege and nurtured Houston's military and political career. In Texas, Houston's fellow settlers, determined to break free from Mexico, chose him to command the Texas Army. After a series of tactical retreats, Houston won a decisive victory at San Jacinto, crushing the army of Mexican General Santa Anna and guaranteeing Texas's independence. But even Houston's own officers. Quarreled over his victory and how much credit Houston deserved for it. As governor of Texas in 1861, Houston, fiercely pro-Union, refused to swear allegiance to the Confederacy when Texas joined the new Southern nation, and he was forced from office. He died in 1863, a bloody war raging as he had predicted it would following secession. This is a vivid and exciting biography of one of the giants of nineteenth-century America.

As is so often the case with Charles Dickens's writing, characters and situations from his 1837-39 novel Oliver Twist seem to have found life apart from the text: little Oliver's asking for "more," Bumble's pomposity, Fagin's treachery, and the Artful Dodger's shenanigans have become standard literary and cultural reference points. Generations of readers have found different elements to savor - from the melodramatic alternation between sentimentality and terror to the fairy-tale plot to the cast of remarkable characters. And of course there's the novel's social implications: Dickens pointedly maintained in his preface to the book's 1841 edition that Oliver Twist was important precisely because of its realistic, uncompromising account of the harshness and cruelty of life in early Victorian England. In this engaging study of Dickens's sccond book (it initially appeared as a magazine serial), Richard J.^ Dunn uses the author's admission that he put his "whole heart and soul" into the novel's writing to explore the connections between Dickens's own adversity - having to work under wretched conditions in a blacking factory as a boy - and the dire and often life-threatening situations the bastard child Oliver must endure before, as Dickens put it, "trimumphing at last." Taking a controversial and timely subject - England's poor laws, whose debates in Parliament he covered as a court reporter - and a child as his hero, Dickens, Dunn contends, drew together two worlds: the destitute London slums that served as a breeding ground for criminal activity and the innocent world we associate with childhood. Dunn points out that Oliver's "progress" from dark world to light shows, almost paradoxically, that these worlds are linked and will always coexist, however secure one may feel in the latter.^ The colorful array of characters that either help along or hinder Oliver's progress Dunn analyzes in detail, but to the book's most controversial character, the sinister yet only-all-too-human Fagin, he devotes an entire chapter. Dunn observes that Oliver, though the novel's "hero," in many ways functions as a blank sheet of paper on which the impressions of Dickens's richly drawn personalities, particularly Fagin, are cast. Such characters, Dunn notes, provide us wide the clues to the wholeness of thought to which Oliver aspires. Dunn underscores the importance of the George Cruikshank drawings that accompanied the serialized Oliver Twist, considering these visual renderings (four of which are reprodueed here) as more of a collaborative than a purely illustrative effort. And to round out this lively study, Dunn examines the myriad stage and screen adaptations of Oliver Twist, which found new life in Oliver!, the Academy Award-winning film of the 1960s.

Describes the physical characteristics, habits, and natural environment of the huge plant-eating apatosaurus and discusses theories on why it became extinct.

Text and pictures introduce the history, geography, people, and culture of the United Kingdom.