Eleven-year-old Clay must find a home on the streets of New York City in this award-winning, heartbreakingly honest novel. He was eleven years old, and he had never felt so alone in his life. Clay Garrity lived a normal life until his father lost his job and abandoned the family. Now his pregnant mother has deserted him too, leaving Clay alone in a welfare hotel with a jar of peanut butter and half a loaf of bread. Fearing being placed in foster care, Clay runs away. Alone in the city, Clay wanders down streets with boarded-up buildings and through dark alleys, until he comes to a small triangular park that looks like an island in a stream. In the light of a street lamp, he sees cardboard boxes, blankets, bundles—and people. Some are lying on benches, others inside boxes. Two of the men, Calvin and Buddy, offer to share their shelter, and Clay is grateful to have a place to stay during the bitter November cold. Before long, Calvin, Buddy, and Clay form a family amid the threatening dangers and despair of the streets. Clay knows that leaving the streets and going into foster care means that he may never see his parents again. But if he stays, he may not survive at all. An ALA Best Book for Young Adults, this acclaimed novel offers an intensely moving and candid look at the all-too-real lives of homeless teens.

Fox Island has had as wide a variety of names as inhabitants over its long and diverse history. The island was named for American lieutenant John L. Fox, who was with the 1841 Wilkes Expedition. However, it was first known as Bu Teu by the Native Americans who used the island for burials and potlatches, and it was later named Rosario by the Spanish in the 1770s. It served as a temporary Native American reservation after the Indian War of 1856, and later supported a large dogfish processing business and, from 1884 to 1910, a brick-manufacturing company. The island's 1890s community of Sylvan contained a school, a store, a dock, a vacation lodge, and a waterfront church. In 1954, a bridge replaced the ferry to Fox Island. Today the U.S. Navy has an acoustic laboratory on the island, and two large church buildings have been built. Perhaps the most famous resident of the island was Washington's first female governor, Dixy Lee Ray.

The story of the world's largest, longest, and best financed scientific expedition of all time, triumphantly successful, gruesomely tragic, and never before fully told The immense 18th-century scientific journey, variously known as the Second Kamchatka Expedition or the Great Northern Expedition, from St. Petersburg across Siberia to the coast of North America, involved over 3,000 people and cost Peter the Great over one-sixth of his empire's annual revenue. Until now recorded only in academic works, this 10-year venture, led by the legendary Danish captain Vitus Bering and including scientists, artists, mariners, soldiers, and laborers, discovered Alaska, opened the Pacific fur trade, and led to fame, shipwreck, and "one of the most tragic and ghastly trials of suffering in the annals of maritime and arctic history.

A fifty-year-old secret had lain dormant ...forgotten and covered over by years of quiet activity in the sleepy community of Fox Island, Washington. Adventurers Tony and Price Shadowbrook have uncovered the truth and face a dilemma: should they say nothing and allow the lie to live on? Or speak up and risk destroying the lives of innocent people?

Native only to the California Channel Islands, the island fox is the smallest canid in North America. Populations on four of the islands were threatened to extinction in the 1990s due to human-mediated predation and disease. This is the first account of the natural history and ecology of the island fox, illustrating both the vulnerability of island ecosystems and the efficacy of cooperative conservation measures. It explains in detail the intense conservation actions required to recover fox populations, such as captive breeding and reintroduction, and large-scale ecosystem manipulation. These actions were successful due in large part to extraordinary collaboration among the scientists, managers and public advocates involved in the recovery effort. The book also examines the role of some aspects of island fox biology, characteristic of the 'island syndrome', in facilitating their recovery, including high productivity and an apparent adaptation to periodic genetic bottlenecks.