This adventurous work records Robert Edison Fulton's solo round-the-world tour on a two-cylinder Douglas motorcycle between July, 1932 and December, 1933. First published in 1937.

Barnes & Noble "Discover Great New Writers" Seasonal PickAn American's life-or-death adventure to the salt mines of the Sahara Desert

First published in 1963, James A. Michener’s gripping chronicle of the social and political landscape of Afghanistan is more relevant now than ever. Combining fact with riveting adventure and intrigue, Michener follows a military man tasked, in the years after World War II, with a dangerous assignment: finding and returning a young American woman living in Afghanistan to her distraught family after she suddenly and mysteriously disappears. A timeless tale of love and emotional drama set against the backdrop of one of the most important countries in the world today, Caravans captures the tension of the postwar period, the sweep of Afghanistan’s remarkable history, and the inescapable allure of the past. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from James A. Michener's Hawaii. Praise for Caravans “Brilliant . . . an extraordinary novel . . . The old nomadic trails across the mountains spring into existence.”—The New York Times “Romantic and adventurous . . . [Michener] has a wonderful empathy for the wild and free and an understanding of the reasons behind the kind of cruelty that goes with it.”—Newsday “Michener has done for Afghanistan what . . . his first [book] did for the South Pacific.”—The New York Herald Tribune

Abdallah Azzam, the Palestinian cleric who led the mobilization of Arab fighters to Afghanistan in the 1980s, played a crucial role in the internationalization of the jihadi movement. Killed in mysterious circumstances in 1989 in Peshawar, Pakistan, he remains one of the most influential jihadi ideologues of all time. Here, in the first in-depth biography of Azzam, Thomas Hegghammer explains how Azzam came to play this role and why jihadism went global at this particular time. It traces Azzam's extraordinary life journey from a West Bank village to the battlefields of Afghanistan, telling the story of a man who knew all the leading Islamists of his time and frequented presidents, CIA agents, and Cat Stevens the pop star. It is, however, also a story of displacement, exclusion, and repression that suggests that jihadism went global for fundamentally local reasons.

(Ages 5-8) You live in Tibet in 1696. Your parents say you're not old enough to go on the long caravan to India, through the Himalayan mountains of Nepal. You know the trip could be dangerous (bandits, bad weather, rock falls), but it would be the journey of a lifetime.

An urgent and eloquent account of a boy traveling in a caravan from his beloved homeland of El Salvador to the US border. This novel in verse is a powerful first-person account of Misael Martínez, a Salvadoran boy whose family joins the caravan heading north to the United States. We learn all the different reasons why people feel the need to leave — the hope that lies behind their decision, but also the terrible sadness of leaving home. We learn about how far and hard the trip is, but also about the kindness of those along the way. Finally, once the caravan arrives in Tijuana, Misael and those around him are relieved. They think they have arrived at the goal of the trip — to enter the United States. But then tear gas, hateful demonstrations, force and fear descend on these vulnerable people. The border is closed. The book ends with Misael dreaming of El Salvador. This beautiful and timely story is written in simple but poetic verse by Jorge Argueta, the award-winning author of Somos como las nubes / We Are Like the Clouds. Award-winning Mexican illustrator Manuel Monroy illuminates Misael’s journey. An author’s note is included, along with a map showing the caravan’s route. Key Text Features author’s note map illustrations Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.4.3 Describe in depth a character, setting, or event in a story or drama, drawing on specific details in the text (e.g., a character's thoughts, words, or actions).

Many Americans remember Senator Sam Ervin (1896-1985) as the affable, Bible-quoting, old country lawyer who chaired the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973. Ervin's stories from down home in North Carolina, his reciting literary passages ranging from Shakespeare to Aesop's fables, and his earnest lectures in defense of civil liberties and constitutional government contributed to the downfall of President Nixon and earned Senator Ervin a reputation as "the last of the founding fathers." Yet for most of his twenty years in the Senate, Ervin applied these same rhetorical devices to a very different purpose. Between 1954 and 1974, he was Jim Crow's most talented legal defender as the South's constitutional expert during the congressional debates on civil rights. The paradox of the senator's opposition to civil rights and defense of civil liberties lies at the heart of this biography of Sam Ervin. Drawing on newly opened archival material, Karl Campbell illuminates the character of the man and the historical forces that shaped him. The senator's distrust of centralized power, Campbell argues, helps explain his ironic reputation as a foe of civil rights and a champion of civil liberties. Campbell demonstrates that the Watergate scandal represented the culmination of an escalating series of clashes between the imperial presidency of Richard Nixon and a congressional counterattack led by Senator Ervin. The issue central to that struggle, as well as to many of the other crusades in Ervin's life, remains a key question of the American experience today--how to exercise legitimate government power while protecting essential individual freedoms.