Why do word puzzles fascinate us? How do they help develop problem-solving skills? How do they teach us about geography, literature, sports, and popular culture? How are they an international language? Jonathan Berkowitz offers a brief history of wordplay, with insights into puzzles and the brain. He offers tips on how to solve puzzles and explains the educational value of puzzles. Challenges in the form of rebuses, anagrams, codes and cryptograms, crosswords, and wordplay with numbers supply even more fun! The Whirl of Words is a unique, rich, and intriguing tour of a wide variety of word puzzles certain to stimulate a brain work-out.

What’s heaven to seven-year-old Andre Agassi? To never play tennis again. Yet his father has other plans. Mike Agassi was born in Iran, where Allied soldiers gave him a racket after the war and introduced him to the game. He shaves without soap or cream, boxed in the Olympics, and speaks five languages. The sixth is tennis. And his greatest dream is for his son to become number one in the world. A selection from the acclaimed autobiography Open, this is the tumultuous first confrontation between father and son, between the lines of the court: a searching portrait of Agassi before fame and success.

What is this World? What kind of place is it? “The round kind. The spinning kind. The moist kind. The inhabited kind. The kind with flamingos (real and artificial). The kind where water in the sky turns into beautifully symmetrical crystal flakes sculpted by artists unable to stop themselves (in both design and quantity). The kind of place with tiny, powerfully jawed mites assigned to the carpets to eat my dead skin as it flakes off . . . The kind with people who kill and people who love and people who do both . . . This world is beautiful but badly broken. “I love it as it is, because it is a story, and it isn’t stuck in one place. It is full of conflict and darkness like every good story, a world of surprises and questions to explore. And there’s someone behind it; there are uncomfortable answers to the hows and whys and whats. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Through Him were all things made . . . Welcome to His poem. His play. His novel. Let the pages flick your thumbs.”

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A celebration of the adventurous spirit of childhood, this irresistible rhyming tale follows Wren, a wild and wonderful girl who leads you through her day. Children will relate to Wren's desire for balance, speed, mud, and small critters. The delightful illustrations give you a peek into Wren's vibrant and free world.

A woman’s true account of eighteen years as a Soviet prisoner: “Not even Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich matches it.”—The New York Times Book Review In the late 1930s, Eugenia Ginzburg was a wife and mother, a schoolteacher and writer, and a longtime loyal Communist Party member. But like millions of others during Stalin’s reign of terror, she was arrested—on trumped-up charges of being a Trotskyist terrorist counter-revolutionary—and sentenced to prison. With sharp detail and an indefatigable spirit, Ginzburg recounts her arrest and the eighteen harrowing years she endured in Soviet prisons and labor camps, including two in solitary confinement. Her memoir is “a compelling personal narrative of survival” (The New York Times Book Review)—and one of the most important documents of Stalin’s brutal regime. “Deeply significant…intensely personal and passionately felt.”—Time “Probably the best account that has ever been published of…the prison and camp empire of the Stalin era.”—Book World Translated by Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward

Three children whirl back in time through an enchanted potter's wheel into the reality of evacuation in 1940s Britain. Connie, her brother Charlie-Mouse, and school pest Malcolm are drawn into dangers on the homefront and towards a military operations secret that will save their home. Suggested level: primary, intermediate.