The car in this story is fast and fun, and your child's first steps in reading can be just the same when you share this book at home or school. The book can be used in a number of ways to help young readers build confidence. Grown-ups can begin by reading the illustrated words at the edge of each left-hand page with the child. Have fun trying to spot the same terms within the story itself. Finally, all the illustrated words can be found at the end of the book, so the child can enjoy checking all the phrases that you can now read together!.

These fourteen funny stories tell the tale of a beleaguered boyhood down home where the dogs still run loose. As a boy growing up in the tiny backwater town of Forty-Five, South Carolina (where everybody is pretty much one beer short of a six-pack), all Mendal Dawes wants is out. It's not just his hometown that's hopeless. Mendal's father is just as bad. Embarrassing his son to death nearly every day, Mr. Dawes is a parenting guide's bad example. He buries stuff in the backyard—fake toxic barrels, imitation Burma Shave signs (BIRD ON A WIRE, BIRD ON A PERCH, FLY TOWARD HEAVEN, FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH), yardstick collections. He calls Mendal "Fuzznuts" and makes him recite Marx and Durkheim daily and befriend a classmate rumored to have head lice. Mendal Dawes is a boy itching to get out of town, to take the high road and leave the South and his dingbat dad far behind—just like those car-chasing dogs. But bottom line, this funky, sometimes outrageous, and always very human tale is really about how Mendal discovers that neither he nor the dogs actually want to catch a ride, that the hand that has fed them has a lot more to offer. On the way to watching that light dawn, we also get to watch the Dawes's precarious relationship with a place whose "gene pool [is] so shallow that it wouldn't take a Dr. Scholl's insert to keep one's soles dry." To be consistently funny is a great gift. To be funny and cynical and empathetic all at the same time is George Singleton's special gift, put brilliantly into play in this new collection.

The PAW Patrol is ready to save the day in this awesome book that combines storytime with windup driving action! Kids can watch the PAW Patrol gang drive along four tracks on the foldout panel! In these two action-packed rescue stories, Adventure Bay needs help from the PAW Patrol…and you! To join in, just wind up Chase’s mini vehicle and set it on the roads of this book’s foldout panel. Find out who has been chewing through the wooden barn at the farm then be a hero and help search for the Mayor’s lost pet. Who is on the case? You and Chase

The speed, the thrill, the adrenaline. Afton Reese is a photographer addicted to racing. Nothing and no one has ever stood between her and her career, until she meets racing phenomenon Christian Manning. Their relationship sends her life into a tailspin and Afton soon finds herself fighting to stay in control of her emotions and her career. Can she let go of her past and take charge of her future or will she lose everything?

The papers comprising Vol. I and Vol. II were prepared for and presented at the International Conference on Information Networking 2002 (ICOIN 2002), which was held from January 30 to February 1, 2002 at Cheju Island, Korea. It was organized by the KISS (Korean Information Science Society) SIGIN in Korea, IPSJ SIG DPE (Distributed Processing Systems) in Japan, the ITRI (Industrial Technology Research Institute), and National Taiwan University in Taiwan. The papers were selected through two steps, refereeing and presentation review. We selected for the theme of the conference the motto “One World of Information Networking”. We did this because we believe that networking will transform the world into one zone, in spite of different ages, countries and societies. Networking is in the main stream of everyday life and affects directly millions of people around the world. We are in an era of tremendous excitement for professionals working in many aspects of the converging networking, information retailing, entertainment, and publishing companies. Ubiquitous communication and computing technologies are changing the world. Online communities, e commerce, e service, and distance learning are a few of the consequences of these technologies, and advanced networking will develop new applications and technologies with global impact. The goal is the creation of a world wide distributed computing system that connects people and appliances through wireless and high bandwidth wired channels with a backbone of computers that serve as databases and object servers. Thus, Vol.