The year is 1909 and Joseph has just immigrated to the United States from Russia. He thinks that life in New York City will be wonderful, but he has not bargained for the challenges of learning English and of resisting the pressures to skip school, steal and fight to earn a place among the boys in his neighbourhood. Just Call Me Joe presents a full picture of life in New York City for the working poor. Anna, Joe's older sister, struggles to cope with the terrible factory conditions of the time. Aunt Sophie must take in boarders to make ends meet. And Joseph must both accept change and remain true to himself in a new city with new challenges.

Introduction This story was inspired by a visit to the Raptor Rehabilitation Center in Sitka, Alaska in 1990. Thanks to the staff there for graciously answering all of my questions. As a retired teacher I have a strong interest in sharing with young people my enthusiasm for natural history and the preservation of our environment and its wildlife. . My characters, Joey and Buddy, are not real people but Valdez is a real city and, of course, the oil spill really did happen in 1989. All characters in the story are fictitious. The Raptor Rehabilitation Center has moved to a bigger and better facility and is now called The Alaska Raptor Center.

Life in New York City in the early twentieth century is tougher than Joseph ever dreamed it would be.

Reading a library book about the old Negro Baseball Leagues and the talented men who played in them gives Joe Joe the strength and self-esteem to do something difficult.

Presents a collection of short stories, including "Call Me Joe," "The Immortal Game," "The Live Coward," and "Then Death Will Come.".

Fifty timeless novels in one collection, plus additional bonus classics: The Oresteia by Aeschylus Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa Little Women by Louisa May Alcott The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri Between Past and Future by Hannah Arendt and Jerome Kohn Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum Around the World in Seventy-Two Days and Other Writings by Nellie Bly The Brontë Sisters by Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anne Brontë Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin The Spy by James Fenimore Cooper Great Expectations by Charles Dickens Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas The Psychopathology of Everyday Life by Sigmund Freud The Iliad by Homer The Odyssey by Homer The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson Niels Lyhne by Jens Peter Jacobsen On the Road: The Original Scroll by Jack Kerouac Tristes Tropiques by Claude Levi-Strauss The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and Other Stories by Jack London The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories by H. P. Lovecraft The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham All My Sons by Arthur Miller The Crucible by Arthur Miller Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe by Fernando Pessoa Twelve Angry Men by Reginald Rose The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights by John Steinbeck East of Eden by John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck The Short Novels of John Steinbeck by John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men and The Moon Is Down by John Steinbeck Dracula by Bram Stoker Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton Three Novels of New York by Edith Wharton Gray When You Are Old by William Butler Yeats We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Poor English hampers ten-year-old Russian Jewish immigrant Joseph Wisotsky after he arrives in 1910 New York City, where he and his seventeen-year-old sister Anna must await the arrival of their parents.