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  KaBOOM! - How One Man Built a...

  Darell Hammond

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  In 1995, Darell Hammond read an article in the Washington Post about an unthinkable tragedy: Two young children suffocated in a car on a hot summer day in southeast Washington, D.C. The story indicated that the children had nowhere to play; in the absence of a playground, they had climbed into an abandoned car. Reading the article fueled Hammond's sense of injustice, and his life's mission came into focus. Hammond founded KaBOOM!, a national nonprofit that provides communities with tools, resources, and guidance to build and renovate playgrounds and playspaces.In some of the toughest and poorest neighborhoods in North America, 2,000 barren spaces have been transformed by KaBOOM! and more than a million volunteers and community members into kid-designed, fun, and imaginative places to play. This is the story of a man with a vision, a man who believes that play is the best natural resource in a creative economy and that kids need more of it. Play is not a luxury but a necessity for their lives. Through hard work, commitment, and the conviction that access to a safe play environment is the fundamental right of all children, Hammond built an organization that has touched the lives of countless children and families. Hammond's story demonstrates how one idealist can change the world-and how small, civic-minded steps create a ripple effect that can transform communities and eventually the world at large.

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  Resistance - A Frenchwoman's...

  Agnes Humbert, Barbara Mellor

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  Agnès Humbert was an art historian in Paris during the German occupation in 1940. Though she might well have weathered the oppressive regime, Humbert was stirred to action by the atrocities she witnessed. In an act of astonishing bravery, she joined forces with several colleagues to form an organized resistance-very likely the first such group to fight back against the occupation. (In fact, their newsletter, Résistance, gave the French Resistance its name.)In the throes of their struggle for freedom, the members of Humbert's group were betrayed to the Gestapo; Humbert herself was imprisoned. In immediate, electrifying detail, Humbert describes her time in prison; her deportation to Germany, where for more than two years she endured a string of brutal labor camps; and the horror of discovering that seven of her friends were executed by a firing squad. But through the direst of conditions and ill health in the labor camps, Humbert retains hope for herself, for her friends, and for humanity.Originally published in France in 1946, the book was soon forgotten and is now translated into English for the first time. Résistance is more than a firsthand account of wartime France; it is the work of a brave, witty, and forceful woman, a true believer who refused to go quietly.

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  A Luminous Future - Growing up...

  Teodor Flonta

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  The story of the young Teodor unravels on the background of the drama that his family and his country lived in the terrible days of the 1950s in a Stalinist Romania. While the Western countries were engaged in post-war reconstruction, the communist regime, imposed on Romanians by the Soviet Union, was committed to depriving its citizens of the most elementary freedoms and reducing an entire people to starvation. 
  The regime threatens to eliminate the Flonta family, declaring Pavel, Teodor's father, an "enemy of the people." As a consequence, he is arrested, imprisoned and tortured. When the wave of persecution reaches its climax, Pavel is forced to live in hiding. A job Pavel learned in his youth saves him: the Russians, who extract uranium in the Carpathians for their atomic bomb, hire him. There, at the mine, the long arm of the Securitate, the Romanian secret police, cannot reach him. 
  As in communism children were made to suffer for the “sins” the secret police invented for their parents, Teodor goes through a lot of strife while growing up; he is expelled from high school and prevented to undertake studies at the faculty of his choice. 
  The fall of communism will find Teodor 'at the end of the world', in Tasmania, while his father will be involved in the recovery of the land that the totalitarian regime had confiscated from him decades earlier.

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  Eight Men Out - The Black Sox...

  Eliot Asinof

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  A “vividly, excitingly written” classic of baseball history: “The most thorough investigation of the Black Sox scandal on record” (Chicago Tribune). 
   
  It was “the most gigantic sporting swindle in the history of America”—the 1919 fix of the World Series and attempted cover-up. Eliot Asinof has reconstructed the entire scene-by-scene story of the fantastic scandal in which eight Chicago White Sox players arranged with the nation’s leading gamblers to throw the Series in Cincinnati. Mr. Asinof vividly describes the tense meetings, the hitches in the conniving, the actual plays in which the Series was thrown, the Grand Jury indictment, and the famous 1921 trial. Moving behind the scenes, he perceptively examines the motives and backgrounds of the players and the conditions that made the improbable fix all too possible. 
   
  Here, too, is a graphic picture of the American underworld that managed the fix, the deeply shocked newspapermen who uncovered the story, and the war-exhausted nation that turned with relief and pride to the Series, only to be rocked by the scandal. Far more than a superbly told baseball story, this is a compelling slice of American history in the aftermath of World War I and at the cusp of the Roaring Twenties. 
   
  “Dramatic detail . . . an admirable journalistic feat.” —The New York Times 
   
  “As thrilling as a cops and robbers tome.” —The Boston Globe

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  Hitchhiker - Stories from the...

  Bob Thompson

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  In this unique memoir, the adventuresome author combines stories of rural Kentucky and restless travel with tall tales of other worlds and bygone eras. Bob Thompson discovered his passion for storytelling on the front porch of his Granny's country store in McCracken County, Kentucky. Absorbing the tales and traditions he learned there, he kept them close as he went out in search of stories and life experiences of his own. In Hitchhiker, Thompson offers readers homegrown tales that interweave ghosts of the past with real and imagined worlds far beyond his grandmother’s porch. The stories progress from Bob’s Tom Sawyer-esque childhood in Western Kentucky through his restless wanderings as a hitchhiking hippie to his adulthood as an unrepentant adventurer following the footsteps of Hemingway and the Lost Generation across Europe. This collection brings together coming-of-age tales, family stories of bygone eras, and even true accounts of unsolved murders and mysteries. Hitchhiker is Huckleberry Finn meets The Twilight Zone, with just a taste of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

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  Supreme Sacrifice - A Small...

  Walter Reid, Gordon Masterton,...

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  A unique book that follows the story of World War I through the lives and deaths of seventy-two soldiers in one small Scottish village.   The war memorial in the Scottish village of Bridge of Weir lists seventy-two men who died during the First World War. Their deaths occurred in almost every theater of the war. They were awarded very few medals, and their military careers were not remarkable—except in the important respect that they, like countless other peaceful civilians, answered their country’s call in its time of need.   This book follows the lives of these sons of Bridge of Weir, not just as soldiers, sailors, and airmen, but as husbands, fathers, sons, brothers, and members of a small community that felt their loss intensely. At the same time, it also paints a larger picture of the war, of the politicians and generals and military campaigns that shaped it. The brave men of Bridge of Weir knew little of the wider context—their experience was of the smaller histories in which they fought and died. Readers of this book will understand what the seventy-two never knew: why and how the war that claimed their lives was fought.

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