From 1908 until 1954, Donald Baxter MacMillan spent nearly 50 years exploring the Arctic—longer than anyone else. Growing up near the ocean, and orphaned by 12, MacMillan forged an adventurous life. Mary Morton Cowan focuses on the vital role MacMillan played in Robert Peary's 1908-09 North Pole Expedition, as well as his relationships with explorers Peary, Matthew Henson, and Richard Byrd. She follows his long and distinguished career, including daring adventures, contributions to environmental science and to the cultural understanding of eastern Arctic natives. Working closely with the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum at Bowdoin College, Cowan showcases many MacMillan documents and archival photographs, many MacMillan's own in this winner of the John Burroughs Nature Books for Young Readers Award.

To Danny, Joel (fearless of sharks) and Steve of Daytona Beach, and Raul of Long Beach, surfing is first and foremost. The surfers lives unfold in adventure as well as misadventure and romance. Surfer girls follow the young surfers from beach to beach. Some of them find marriage relationships along the way. These surfers' adventures involve Captain Mac's boat and Raul's airplane as well as surfing. The surfers experience driving through hurricanes after the police are gone from the highways, plane crashes, title waves and boat wrecks and surfing in the wake of storms. They chase the storm's wake to surf the killer surf. They surf around the world and the story climaxes in Palm Beach after Hurricane Floyd moves off the South Florida Coast.

Jethro Hammer by Craig Rice (as Michael Venning) “No one will get you out of your vacation hammock too easily, once you've started. … There are deftly drawn characters, colorful backgrounds and pungent, believable dialogue to round out this Grade-A thriller.”—The New York Times “Breathlessly exciting”—The Chicago Sun-Times From the jacket: Once in a while, because of its eminent readability, a book emerges from the many to take its place at the top of any reader’s list. Jethro Hammer is such a book, embracing all the qualifications of top ranking fiction as well as embodying the spine tingling drama and needling action of the best psychological novel. Will Donahue, blacksmith, was a simple-hearted friendly man who loved children, stray cats, and everything lonely and helpless. It was only natural, when the pale, undernourished baby was found wailing in a church, that Will take him to his home, give him a name (Jethro Hammer), and raise him as one of his own children. After Will’s death, his now fully grown family, selfish to the core, declined to cut Jethro in on the fortune the blacksmith had amassed. The disappearance of Jethro Hammer (which lasted twenty years), his return, his revenge and his death unfold with a dramatic simplicity that well makes felt the embittered strength of the cast off man.

Was it a tragic drunk-driving accident, or something more twisted? “You can never go far wrong with a Dr. Priestley story.” —The New York Times Superintendent King has concluded that the drunk driver with a dead body in his car was only guilty of manslaughter, not intentional murder. But Dr. Lancelot Priestley thinks there’s more to the story—especially considering that the victim’s estate, Pinehurst, has been plagued by burglaries of late. As he applies his usual scientific rigor to the case, Priestley will be drawn into not one crime but many—and some of them date back years—in this classic British mystery.