The first story, Ice Dragon Rising, explains how three young men sacrificed their own lives to create the Ice Dragon to save their world from a terrible War Lord. Broken for two thousand years, the next episode begins in 2012. The Reluctant Hero tells of Henry Barton-Jones, now ready but reluctant to take up the fight. Almost blinded by a rainstorm lashing deserted streets, he collides with Charlotte Masterson. She is wandering forlorn and desperate to free herself from Ricardo Bettencourt, a notorious and psychopathic but brilliant villain and drug baron. Henry connects with his old CIA partner, and together they fight Ricardos global blackmail scheme as it begins to go wrong with threatening and catastrophic consequences. In Tango Dragon and the Asteroid, Henry finds an innocent tango school in Toulouse is a cover for a private combat-training school. Ricardo still wants to kill Charlotte but then changes his mind. In a psychopathic mind game, Ricardo deviously binds Henry and Charlotte into another grotesque but daring blackmail scheme to bleed $380 billion from the worlds governments and walk away scot free.

This thriller Tango Dragon and the Asteroid, volume III in the Henry Barton-Jones, Ice Dragon Force series, tells an exciting tale of love, passion, revenge, intrigue, and Carlotte's heroism as it chronicles Henry Barton-Jones transformation from a British secret agent into a different form of fighting evil. This time he has the help of a long forgotten force on the edge of re-emerging to once again protect the world. Hardly able to catch his breath after being put out to grass on early retirement, he finds this new job a particular challenge with no one to guide him. Barton-Jones struggles in Reluctant Hero Volume II, to understand exactly what this supernatural capability is that he has had forced upon him. Henry was an over the hill, burnt-out, washed up agent of the British secret service but now he discovers a new lease of life with an Ace card up his sleeve like none other. His new career is equally dangerous but now the rules have changed and he picks up a number of professional special government agents who become his support team to fight the good fight but this time with more than just guns and special effects on their side. Charlotte Masterson is the talented, ravishingly beautiful superstar fashion model traumatized by deeply emotional problems from her teens. Her gift of genes and destiny leads her into the word of fashion. Though successful this wakes up an anger in her for revenge that leads her to being accepted as a British Government experiment for women's equal opportunities training with the SAS commando regiment. Charlotte's strange destiny turns out to be all important in her predestined encounter with Henry. It is she who guides him in his dreams explaining the 6,000 year old Ice Dragon Force heritage that has been completing its development within his DNA programming through his life. Charlotte's past catches up with her the day of her honeymoon when she re-encounters her SAS Sergeant Major trainer and the scourge of her military training. Henry realises his problem was not burnout but his inherited Ice Dragon Force genes going through their final stage of evolution in order for him to become the new Ice Dragon Master. Charlotte becomes far more important to Henry than just his guiding angel. Tango Dragon and the Asteroid follows on from Henry's first encounter with Ricardo Bettencourt, the world's number one most wanted terrorist. Ricardo is a Brazilian diplomat who for decades under this diplomatic disguise had fooled Interpol, and all the world's national police forces and secret agencies. It is Charlotte who intrigues Ricardo to ensnare her for himself, but in doing so he runs up against Henry Barton-Jones even so, it is Charlotte who exacts her mind bending revenge on Ricardo. Ricardo is a nuclear scientist by training, he has a brilliant mind but is also ruthless and cunning to the extreme. Although he depends greatly on his cousin policeman for his intelligence information, his ability to sniff out people in high or important positions with something serious to hide enables him access to classified information that is critical to him achieving the seemingly impossible acts of violance. This cat and mouse game where the advantage unexpectedly switches sides takes Henry, Charlotte and their support team into ever greater depths of intrigue and detective work to get ahead of and turn the tables on the ever evasive Ricardo.

About the Ice Dragon Series of books. The lost Ice Dragon legend explains how the Ice Dragon force field was created to save the lives of peaceful people and outlying hamlets, villages and towns from central Europe all the way across Asia to the Yellow sea, from a war lord intent on destroying everything in his path. The spirit of the Ice Dragon force must have a human master to bridge the gap between energy and the material world. This Master's legacy had passed from father to son in the continued struggle for stability and justice over 4,000 years before it was broken. The Phoenix twins, the guardians of the Ice Dragon energy created a new master over the following two thousand years. Without warning Henry Barton-Jones retired British government special agent dramatically discovers he is the new Ice Dragon master when the Phoenix twins decided he was ready. Ultimate Suspicion is the latest episode of Henry's continuing discovery of the Ice Dragon energy also how Charlotte and his two grown daughters Jessica and Samantha fit into Dragon power. His growing understanding of his families own strengths and support help in the continued fight to stop his arch opponent Ricardo Bettencourt from destroying an entire city and thousands of lives as he plans his revenge for Henry's and Charlottes intervention is his efforts to blackmail the worlds governments for three hundred and eighty billion dollars.

This valuable reference guide provides suggestions of picture books set in more than 70 countries in each continent of the world, along with standards-based activities. Reading the World with Picture Books presents an exhaustive collection of booktalk options with picture books that are set in the major countries of each continent. Hundreds of children's books with an international flavor are organized by continent and then by country, and suggested activities accompany the titles, encouraging students to interpret information related to historical or geographic concepts and use problem-solving skills. Activities range from those appropriate for beginners to experienced researchers/writers. All call for high-level thinking and most provide opportunities to respond in creative ways. In addition, all of the activities are keyed to selected national standards in language arts and social studies. The picture books suggested are not only excellent choices to capture a booktalk audience's attention and educate young readers about world culture, but also to demonstrate how human beings have adapted to the various environments of the world.

Jones, Barry Owen (1932– ). Australian politician, writer and lawyer, born in Geelong. Educated at Melbourne University, he was a public servant, high school teacher, television and radio performer, university lecturer and lawyer before serving as a Labor MP in the Victorian Parliament 1972–77 and the Australian House of Representatives 1977–98. He took a leading role in reviving the Australian film industry, abolishing the death penalty in Australia, and was the first politician to raise public awareness of global warming, the ‘post-industrial’ society, the IT revolution, biotechnology, the rise of ‘the Third Age’ and the need to preserve Antarctica as a wilderness. In the Hawke Government, he was Minister for Science 1983–90, Prices and Consumer Affairs 1987, Small Business 1987–90 and Customs 1988–90. He became a member of the Executive Board of UNESCO, Paris 1991–95 and National President of the Australian Labor Party 1992–2000, 2005–06. He was Deputy Chairman of the Constitutional Convention 1998. His books include Decades of Decision 1860– (1965), Joseph II (1968), Age of Apocalypse (1975), and he edited The Penalty is Death (1968). Sleepers, Wake!: Technology and the Future of Work was published by Oxford University Press in 1982, became a bestseller and has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Swedish and braille. The fourth edition was published in 1995. Knowledge Courage Leadership, a collection of speeches and essays, appeared in 2016.

Ali Smith melds the tale and the essay into a magical hybrid form, a song of praise to the power of stories in our lives In February 2012, the novelist Ali Smith delivered the Weidenfeld lectures on European comparative literature at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. Her lectures took the shape of this set of discursive stories. Refusing to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form, Artful is narrated by a character who is haunted—literally—by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature. A hypnotic dialogue unfolds, a duet between and a meditation on art and storytelling, a book about love, grief, memory, and revitalization. Smith’s heady powers as a fiction writer harmonize with her keen perceptions as a reader and critic to form a living thing that reminds us that life and art are never separate. Artful is a book about the things art can do, the things art is full of, and the quicksilver nature of all artfulness. It glances off artists and writers from Michelangelo through Dickens, then all the way past postmodernity, exploring every form, from ancient cave painting to 1960s cinema musicals. This kaleidoscope opens up new, inventive, elastic insights—on the relation of aesthetic form to the human mind, the ways we build our minds from stories, the bridges art builds between us. Artful is a celebration of literature’s worth in and to the world and a meaningful contribution to that worth in itself. There has never been a book quite like it.