People build structures such as bridges, dams, tunnels, and skyscrapers when they need to solve a problem. Find out how engineers design these structures to be stable and strong enough to hold up against water, weather, and natural disasters. A code inside the back of this book gives you access to the Student Discovery Lab at www.crabtreeplus.com/be-an-engineer, The animated videos and online games make learning about the engineering design process fun! Book jacket.

Learn about the steps in the engineering design process and see how different types of bridges suit different types of obstacles.

Nelson Mandela is dead and his dream of a rainbow nation in South Africa is fading. Twenty years after the fall of apartheid the white Afrikaner minority fears cultural extinction. How far are they prepared to go to survive as a people? Kajsa Norman's book traces the war for control of South Africa, its people, and its history, over a series of December 16ths, from the Battle of Blood River in 1838 to its commemoration in 2011. Weaving between the past and the present, the book highlights how years of fear, nationalism, and social engineering have left the modern Afrikaner struggling for identity and relevance. Norman spends time with residents of the breakaway republic of Orania, where a thousand Afrikaners are working to construct a white-African utopia. Citing their desire to preserve their language and traditions, they have sequestered themselves in an isolated part of the arid Karoo region. Here, they can still dictate the rules and create a homeland with its own flag, currency and ideology. For a Europe that faces growing nationalism, their story is more relevant than ever. How do people react when they believe their cultural identity is under threat? Bridge Over Blood River's haunting and subversive evocation of South Africa's racial politics provides some unsettling answers.

Wartime intrigue spans the lives of three women—past and present—in this emotional novel from the acclaimed author of The Last Year of the War. February, 1946. World War Two is over, but the recovery from the most intimate of its horrors has only just begun for Annaliese Lange, a German ballerina desperate to escape her past, and Simone Deveraux, the wronged daughter of a French Résistance spy. Now the two women are joining hundreds of other European war brides aboard the renowned RMS Queen Mary to cross the Atlantic and be reunited with their American husbands. Their new lives in the United States brightly beckon until their tightly-held secrets are laid bare in their shared stateroom. When the voyage ends at New York Harbor, only one of them will disembark... Present day. Facing a crossroads in her own life, Brette Caslake visits the famously haunted Queen Mary at the request of an old friend. What she finds will set her on a course to solve a seventy-year-old tragedy that will draw her into the heartaches and triumphs of the courageous war brides—and will ultimately lead her to reconsider what she has to sacrifice to achieve her own deepest longings. CONVERSATION GUIDE INCLUDED

"Created to support NGSS, the Be An Engineer! series explains how different structures are designed by engineers to solve problems. Each title takes readers through the steps of the engineering design process to explain how an everyday structure is designed to overcome physical obstacles to meet peoples' needs. Real-world examples, vibrant photographs, and fact boxes reinforce learning, and readers design and create their own model structures. A link printed inside each book gives readers access to Crabtree Plus, a secure website with supplemental digital content, including engaging simulations and interactive activities that reinforce and extend key series' concepts."--

"A great stone bridge built three centuries ago in the heart of the Balkans ... stands witness to the countless lives played out upon it" and to the sufferings of the people of Bosnia.--Cover.