Feed your brain while you feed your face! How do you keep kids from gnawing off the table legs while they wait for the meals? Easy! You feed their brains. Each tear-off sheet in this 36-page placemat pad is filled with brain-building activities: puzzles, mazes, brainteasers, jokes, quotes, weird facts, tabletop experiments, and noodle-while-you-doodle activities. And since it's from that master of reading mayhem, Uncle John, every page of Scrambled Brains has been engineered to turn young eaters into readers! (Psst! Scrambled Brains can feed young brains in classrooms, too!) Each Feed Your Brain placemat pad has its own wacky theme. What will kids find to engage their hungry minds in Scrambled Brains? *Eat This Crossword *Why Mice Taste Nice, *Brain Farts Trivia *Bird Doodles *Mustard Splat Maze, and *How to turn a banana into a tasty banana slug! They'll also find jokes, fascinating factoids, riddles, and quotes guaranteed to amaze and annoy table companions of all ages!

Feed your brain while you feed your face! How do you keep kids from gnawing off the table legs while they wait for the meals? Easy! You feed their brains. Each tear-off sheet in this 36-page placemat pad is filled with brain-building activities: puzzles, mazes, brainteasers, jokes, quotes, weird facts, tabletop experiments, and noodle-while-you-doodle activities. And since it’s from that master of reading mayhem, Uncle John, every page of Riddle Me Timbers! has been engineered to turn young eaters into readers! (Psst! Riddle Me Timbers! can feed young brains in classrooms, too!) Each Feed Your Brain placemat pad has its own wacky theme. Here’s a look at what kids will find to engage their hungry minds in Riddle Me Timbers! * Ship Shape Puzzler, * Yo Ho Ho! Quiz, * Polly-Wanna-Doku (Sudoku with pictures!), * Pirate Search, * Off the Deep End Riddles, and * Battling behemoths whose barf is worth more than gold! They’ll also find jokes, fascinating factoids, riddles, and quotes guaranteed to amaze and annoy table companions of all ages!

"A funny, marvelously readable portrait of one of the most brilliant and eccentric men in history." --The Seattle Times Paul Erdos was an amazing and prolific mathematician whose life as a world-wandering numerical nomad was legendary. He published almost 1500 scholarly papers before his death in 1996, and he probably thought more about math problems than anyone in history. Like a traveling salesman offering his thoughts as wares, Erdos would show up on the doorstep of one mathematician or another and announce, "My brain is open." After working through a problem, he'd move on to the next place, the next solution. Hoffman's book, like Sylvia Nasar's biography of John Nash, A Beautiful Mind, reveals a genius's life that transcended the merely quirky. But Erdos's brand of madness was joyful, unlike Nash's despairing schizophrenia. Erdos never tried to dilute his obsessive passion for numbers with ordinary emotional interactions, thus avoiding hurting the people around him, as Nash did. Oliver Sacks writes of Erdos: "A mathematical genius of the first order, Paul Erdos was totally obsessed with his subject--he thought and wrote mathematics for nineteen hours a day until the day he died. He traveled constantly, living out of a plastic bag, and had no interest in food, sex, companionship, art--all that is usually indispensable to a human life." The Man Who Loved Only Numbers is easy to love, despite his strangeness. It's hard not to have affection for someone who referred to children as "epsilons," from the Greek letter used to represent small quantities in mathematics; a man whose epitaph for himself read, "Finally I am becoming stupider no more"; and whose only really necessary tool to do his work was a quiet and open mind. Hoffman, who followed and spoke with Erdos over the last 10 years of his life, introduces us to an undeniably odd, yet pure and joyful, man who loved numbers more than he loved God--whom he referred to as SF, for Supreme Fascist. He was often misunderstood, and he certainly annoyed people sometimes, but Paul Erdos is no doubt missed. --Therese Littleton

The "wisest and most captivating novel" (Boston Globe) from the author of the bestselling The Valley of Amazement and the new memoir Where the Past Begins Set in San Francisco and in a remote village of Southwestern China, Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses is a tale of American assumptions shaken by Chinese ghosts and broadened with hope. In 1962, five-year-old Olivia meets the half-sister she never knew existed, eighteen-year-old Kwan from China, who sees ghosts with her "yin eyes." Decades later, Olivia describes her complicated relationship with her sister and her failing marriage, as Kwan reveals her story, sweeping the reader into the splendor and violence of mid-nineteenth century China. With her characteristic wisdom, grace, and humor, Tan conjures up a story of the inheritance of love, its secrets and senses, its illusions and truths.

Out of the Girls' Room and into the Night is a spirited, offbeat collection of stories, elongated riffs on that thing we call ...love. All manner of love stories: thwarted love stories, imaginary love stories, love stories offhand and obsessive, philosophical love stories, erudite and amusing love stories. “People don't meet because they both like Burmese food,” says one character, “or because someone's sister has a friend who's single and new in town, or because Billy's nose happened to crook just slightly to the left at an angle that made me want to weep...People don't fall in love with each other ...they just fall into love.” Everyone does it: women of fierce independence, men of thin character, rambling Deadheads, gay teenage girls, despondent Peace Corps volunteers, anorexic Broadway theatre dancers, the eager, the grieving, the uncommunicative. Even the confused do it. And they don't just fall in love with each other—they fall in love with certain moments and familiar places, with things as ephemeral as gestures and as evanescent as sunlight. Quirky, real, idealistic, deluded, bohemian, and true, these are people who can—and often do—fall in love with a pair of ears, August afternoons, saucers of vitamins, New Age carpenters, and dead bumblebees. And if there's something they can teach us, it's how to conceive of alternative worlds and the terror and the exhilaration of venturing outside the confines of the lives we know and making our way into a dark, glittering unknown.

Few people have been in the unique position of being able to observe and record the dramatic changes that have taken place in the islands of Fiji over the past 80 years than fourth-generation citizen, Daryl Tarte. He writes emotively, in great detail, about his personal experience of growing up on a remote island during the colonial era, when races were segregated, and white people lived an elite existence. Following independence, he has been personally involved with many of the key economic, political and social activities that have evolved and enabled the nation to progress during the 20th century. These include the sugar industry, tourism, commerce and industry, religion, the media, women and of course, the coups. His observations into the complexities of leadership in these areas of national development are fascinating and perceptive. Much of the story is told through the eyes of the many people of all races with whom he has interacted. Fiji is made up of over 300 unique islands. Tarte has been to many of them, and in a final chapter he gives an insightful commentary of how different they all are.

"In the Fall of 2010 I gave an assignment in my Appalachian Literature class at Berea College, telling my students to write their own version of "Where I'm From" poem based on the writing prompt and poem by George Ella Lyon, one of the preeminent Appalachian poets. I was so impressed by the results of the assignment that I felt the poems needed to be preserved in a bound document. Thus, this little book. These students completely captured the complexities of this region and their poems contain all the joys and sorrows of living in Appalachia. I am proud that they were my students and I am very proud that together we produced this record of contemporary Appalachian Life" -- Silas House