"Nico doesn't have to join the Army to see the world--that's what younger brother Luis tries to show by painting a mural in the neighborhood alley. But Nico is deployed and his small brother paints the world in the alleyway to hold on to him"--

Luis wishes Nico wasn't leaving for the Army. To show Nico he doesn't need to go, Luis begins a mural on the alleyway wall. Their house, the river, the Parque de las Ardillas—it's the world, all right there. Won't Nico miss Mami's sweet flan? What about their baseball games in the street? But as Luis awaits his brother's return from duty, his own world expands as well, through swooping paint and the help of their bustling Dominican neighborhood.

The World Is a Book, Indeed chronicles in eleven rich personal essays the ongoing quest of award-winning writer Peter LaSalle to embark on offbeat, often startlingly revelatory literary travel. LaSalle spends a summer roaming the lesser-known quarters of Paris, haunted by the writing of the French surrealists. In Hanoi, he meets for beers with the editors—two military men—of the Army Literature and Arts Magazine while investigating Vietnam’s acknowledged great modern novel, Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War. Other pieces find LaSalle on a strange nighttime drive through the streets of sprawling São Paulo in search of landmarks associated with Brazilian modernist poetry, bouncing around Africa to interview writers there when very young, exploring Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges's memorable stay in Texas, and traveling to Istanbul, Lisbon, Tunis, and elsewhere, as he considers major writers amid the settings that produced their works. Deeply felt and replete with insight into literature and life itself, even capable of evoking valid mind leaps in its innovative approaches, this is a collection for readers who love books and want to learn more about the places they originated, presented by a well-traveled guide with an intimate voice and a gift for the essay form.

Florida Book Awards, Bronze Medal for General Nonfiction International Latino Book Awards, First Place, Best History Book (English) Scholarly and popular attention tends to focus heavily on Cuba’s recent history. Key to the New World is the first comprehensive history of early colonial Cuba written in English, and fills the gap in our knowledge of the island before 1700.

An introduction to the pioneering ideas of a leading contributor to modern electrical engineering includes coverage of such topics as his rivalry with Thomas Edison, his innovations in the field of alternating current and his history-changing role in the development of such inventions as remote controls, fluorescent lights and cell phones.

The friendship between an old man and his cat, both of whom like potato soup, is strained after he goes fishing without her.

Tells a story of a graffiti artist, Mr. Mendoza, who goes about the Mexican village of Rosario creating masterpieces that reflect the social ills of the city. One day his paintbrush creates a miraculous event that no one in Rosario ever forgets.