You've seen your own blood, when you have a cut or a scrape. You can see the veins in your wrist, and you've seen the scab that forms as a cut heals. But do you know what blood does for you? Without blood, you couldn't play, or grow, or learn. That's because just about every part of your body needs blood, from your muscles to your bones to your brain. How does your body use blood? Read and find out!

This vividly rendered Civil War history presents “a lively guided tour of Washington during the 24 hours or so around Lincoln’s swearing-in” (Adam Goodheart, Washington Post). By March 4, 1865, the Civil War had left intractable wounds on the nation. Tens of thousands crowded Washington’s Capitol grounds that day to see Abraham Lincoln take the oath for a second term—and witness what was perhaps the greatest inaugural address in American history. Lincoln stunned the nation by arguing that both sides had been wrong, and that the war’s unimaginable horrors might have been God’s just verdict on the national sin of slavery. In Every Drop of Blood, Edward Achorn reveals the nation’s capital on that momentous day—with its mud, sewage, and saloons, its prostitutes, spies, reporters, social-climbing spouses and power-hungry politicians. Swirling around the complex figure of Lincoln, a host of characters are brought to life, from grievously wounded Union colonel Selden Connor to the embarrassingly drunk new vice president, Andrew Johnson, to poet-journalist Walt Whitman; from soldiers’ advocate Clara Barton and African American leader Frederick Douglass to conflicted actor John Wilkes Booth. In indelible scenes, Achorn captures the frenzy and division in the nation’s capital at this crucial moment in America’s history. His story offers new understanding of our great national crisis, and echoes down the decades to resonate in our own time.

This book is the outgrowth of one of J. Stephen Funk’s major injury lawsuits, one in the 1970s, where the dishonesty and a “conspiracy of silence” by the medical profession supported a negligent doctor’s efforts to maintain his exalted and privileged place in society. In real life, he exposed the doctor’s duplicity for all to see, and provided an orphaned child just legal compensation for the loss of her young and innocent mother. In “Last Drop of Blood,” the heartless and amoral doctor, his wife and her father will stop at nothing to conceal the truth. The widowed husband and a courageous, young nurse provide the help a relentless attorney needs to expose the conspiracy. Through twists and turns, the unexpected ending reveals itself to be more just and satisfying than predictable.

A bold and original retelling of the story of race in America Why has a nation founded upon precepts of freedom and universal humanity continually produced, through its preoccupation with race, a divided and constrained populace? This question is the starting point for Scott Malcomson's riveting and deeply researched account, which amplifies history with memoir and reportage. From the beginning, Malcomson shows, a nation obsessed with invention began to create a new idea of race, investing it with unprecedented moral and social meaning. A succession of visionaries and opportunists, self-promoters and would-be reformers carried on the process, helping to define "black," "white," and "Indian" in opposition to one another, and in service to the aspirations and anxieties of each era. But the people who had to live within those definitions found them constraining. They sought to escape the limits of race imposed by escaping from other races or by controlling, confining, eliminating, or absorbing them, in a sad, absurd parade of events. Such efforts have never truly succeeded, yet their legacy haunts us, as we unhappily re-enact the drama of separatism in our schools, workplaces, and communities. By not only recounting the shared American tragicomedy of race but helping us to own, even to embrace it, this important book offers us a way at last to move beyond it.

As the director of the Department of the Army's Central Identification Laboratory, Robert Dean "Kel" McKelvey has made a career solving some of the country's most complex identification cases. The CIL is responsible for identifying all U.S. war dead from battlefields old and new around the world. The caseload is endless, the endgame invaluable. Kel's work -- the examination of a bone or bone fragment -- may bring blessed closure to thousands of military families and loved ones left behind. But after fifteen years at the CIL, Kel is fast approaching emotional meltdown. And that's when he encounters his thorniest case yet: the recovery of Jimmie Carl Trimble, a soldier from Arkansas who died a hero's death during the Vietnam War. When a rare DNA sequence turns up at both the Army and FBI labs, it points to the unthinkable: a link between Trimble and a forty-year-old unsolved racial killing in the Arkansas delta. Partnered uneasily with the volatile FBI Special Agent Michael Levine, Kel must peel back decades of silence to reveal a complex web of stolen identity, betrayal, patriotism, collusion, and lies. Taking readers deep inside the fascinating world of military and civilian forensic science, One Drop of Blood is a pitch-perfect thriller by a talented new author who knows the terrain better than anyone.

A vivid portrayal of the Civil War. Johnny, fourteen, convinces his mother to let him join a wagon train carrying food to Confederate soldiers. He has been brought up to believe that all blacks are stupid; thus, when captured by a black Union soldier who insists that Johnny teach him to read, he deliberately tricks him. The boy is surprised the soldier saves him from imprisonment and their relationship grows throughout the book.