Tootsie Barron was born in North Jersey, Jersey City, and she now calls South Jersey (just outside of "The Queen," Atlantic City) her home. She has two grown children and is widowed. Since her last Papillon, Wiseguy, crossed over the rainbow bridge, she lives in a world of mostly silence and her words. When she needs a break from them, she closes her eyes and remembers everything good. "As always, I wish you all that Heaven allows."

The Colorado River Plateau is home to two of the best-known landscapes in the world: Rainbow Bridge in southern Utah and Monument Valley on the Utah-Arizona border. Twentieth-century popular culture made these places icons of the American West, and advertising continues to exploit their significance today. In Rainbow Bridge to Monument Valley, Thomas J. Harvey artfully tells how Navajos and Anglo-Americans created fabrics of meaning out of this stunning desert landscape, space that western novelist Zane Grey called “the storehouse of unlived years,” where a rugged, more authentic life beckoned. Harvey explores the different ways in which the two societies imbued the landscape with deep cultural significance. Navajos long ago incorporated Rainbow Bridge into the complex origin story that embodies their religion and worldview. In the early 1900s, archaeologists crossed paths with Grey in the Rainbow Bridge area. Grey, credited with making the modern western novel popular, sought freedom from the contemporary world and reimagined the landscape for his own purposes. In the process, Harvey shows, Grey erased most of the Navajo inhabitants. This view of the landscape culminated in filmmaker John Ford’s use of Monument Valley as the setting for his epic mid-twentieth-century Westerns. Harvey extends the story into the late twentieth century when environmentalists sought to set aside Rainbow Bridge as a symbolic remnant of nature untainted by modernization. Tourists continue to flock to Monument Valley and Rainbow Bridge, as they have for a century, but the landscapes are most familiar today because of their appearances in advertising. Monument Valley has been used to sell perfume, beer, and sport utility vehicles. Encompassing the history of the Navajo, archaeology, literature, film, environmentalism, and tourism, Rainbow Bridge to Monument Valley explores how these rock formations, Navajo sacred spaces still, have become embedded in the modern identity of the American West—and of the nation itself.

Venerated as god and goddess, feared as demon and pestilence, trusted as battle omen, and used as a proving ground for optical theories, the rainbow's image is woven into the fabric of our past and present. From antiquity to the nineteenth century, the rainbow has played a vital role in both inspiring and testing new ideas about the physical world. Although scientists today understand the rainbow's underlying optics fairly well, its subtle variability in nature has yet to be fully explained. Throughout history the rainbow has been seen primarily as a symbol&—of peace, covenant, or divine sanction&—rather than as a natural phenomenon. Lee and Fraser discuss the role the rainbow has played in societies throughout the ages, contrasting its guises as a sign of optimism, bearer of Greek gods' messages of war and retribution, and a symbol of the Judeo-Christian bridge to the divine. The authors traverse the bridges between the rainbow's various roles as they explore its scientific, artistic, and folkloric visions. This unique book, exploring the rainbow from the perspectives of atmospheric optics, art history, color theory, and mythology, will inspire readers to gaze at the rainbow anew. For more information on The Rainbow Bridge, visit: &

In October 2002, WHO of the United Nations listed China’s Great Leap Forward, the two world wars and Stalin’s purge movement as the three most disastrous events of mankind in the 20th century. Rainbow Bridge reflects the chaotic years of the “Three Red Banners” pursued by the Communist Party of China (CPC). The “Three Red Banners,” namely, the CPC’s General Line for Socialist Construction, the Great Leap Forward and the people’s communes, focally representing the radical economic line of the CPC in late 1950s to early 1960s. This line had pushed the Chinese national economy to the verge of collapse. The novel exposes the shaping, the complete process and the disastrous consequences of the “Three Red Banners” with the “Great Leap Forward” as the main episode, through continuing describing Simon Chan’s experience and his relations with the people of various strata around him. It faithfully depicts the unprecedented nation-wide great famine caused by the “Three Red Banners” in an all-round way. The great famine, which leads to the death of more than thirty millions of people, lasts for as long as three years. The genuine friendship between Simon and Phoenix fostered through weal and woe during that time, their subtle relations and the tragedy in which Phoenix, this innocent, artless and beautiful country girl, drowns herself in the Rainbow River as a protest against the ultra-Leftist line, are an exceptionally sad and touching story of the Great Leap Forward. The novel gives authentic and detailed descriptions of all these things. Rainbow Bridge is the first and the only novel that exclusively gives a vivid, authentic and all-round narration of the Great Leap Forward movement so far.

­The Pit Bull Wizard: Volume One: Animals of Asgard By: Brenda Sugar Merlin is an adopted Pit Bull that discovers he has magical powers. He enrolls in a secret training school for animal wizards in hopes of using his newfound powers to find his missing Pit Bull family. In the school for magical animals, Merlin makes new friends and enemies. He takes a variety of classes – from telekinesis to human relations – and is challenged to become part of the Celestial Animalympics team. During his journey, he and his two best canine friends uncover the many human-created evils that animals are forced to endure, leading to a climactic confrontation with the Pit Bull-hating humans who have captured Merlin’s brother that ultimately leads to a clue to his mother.