Today is a very nice day. There has never been a day so nice as this, except for maybe yesterday. Join Vernon and his friends Skunk and Porcupine on a series of three enchanting adventures entitled Waiting, Fishing, and Gardening, as they comb the forest floor for trinkets and go fishing in their own unconventional way.

Drawing from the newly catalogued Washington papers at the University of Virginia, the author paints a full portrait of Washington's life and career in the context of eighteenth-century America, richly detailing his private life and illustrating the ways in which it influenced his public persona. When Washington died in 1799, Ellis tells us, he was eulogized as "first in the hearts of his countrymen." Since then, however, his image has been chiseled...

"Washington's End begins where most biographies of George Washington leave off, with the first president exiting office after eight years and entering what would become the most bewildering stage of his life. Embittered by partisan criticism and eager to return to his farm, Washington assumed a role for which there was no precedent at a time when the kings across the ocean yielded their crowns only upon losing their heads. In a different sense, Washington...

The definitive account of the disastrous siege at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, featuring never-before-seen documents, photographs, and interviews, from former investigative reporter Jeff Guinn, bestselling author of Manson and The Road to Jonestown. For the first time in thirty years, more than a dozen former ATF agents who participated in the initial February 28, 1993, raid speak on the record about the poor decisions of their commanders...

Interwoven with accounts of Thoreau's daily life (he did not live as a recluse but received visitors and almost daily walked into Concord) are meditations on human existence, society, government and other topics, expressed with clear-headed wisdom and remarkable beauty of style.

Wife of an Englishman, friend of Queen Victoria, honored guest of American presidents, lavish and generous hostess to world-famous figures, prisoner of the Americans on charges of treason--these were aspects of her role as the last of Hawaii's monarchs. "The history of America's fiftieth state is by no means less absorbing than that of any of the other forty-nine--and in no way less dramatic. No matter in what form it is set down--in native Hawaiian...

Relatively unknown in his own lifetime, Gerard Manley Hopkins is the now accredited as the author of some of the finest and most complex poems in the English language. As a Victorian poet, Roman Catholic convert, and Jesuit priest, Hopkins pioneered a revolutionary form of meter he termed "sprung rhythm" in his first major work, "The Wreck of the Deutschland." This poem, like most of Hopkins' work, reflects both his belief in the doctrine that human...

Marcus Annius Verus was born in Rome, A.D. 121, and assumed the name of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, by which he is known to history, on his adoption by the Emperor T. Aurelius Antoninus. M. Aurelius was educated by the orator Fronto, but turned aside from rhetoric to the study of the Stoic philosophy, of which he was the last distinguished representative. The "Meditations," which he wrote in Greek, are among the most noteworthy expressions of this...

Cosh boy: A gang of teenage delinguents, led by Roy, is earning money by mugging women on the streets of London. The police catch up with them and at their hearing, the judge sentences them to a youth club to reform their ways. The boys use the club as the base for their growing operation. Time is my enemy: Radley is a small-time crook, believed to be dead, who returns to his wife after a long absence to find her remarried to a wealthy publisher....

"Sailing down the river that would later bear his captain's name, explorer Robert Juet described the Hudson River Valley in 1609 as a "drowned land" submerged by a "great lake of water." Over the next two centuries, this drowned landscape would be the site of a truly historic flowering of art, literature, architecture, innovation, and revolutionary fervor--drawing comparisons to another fertile cultural haven built around a mighty river in Western...