Readers tag along with young Rose and her father as she takes her very first trip to a big city. Traveling from her small hometown by train, Rose is constantly surprised and thrilled to see new sights, such as tall skyscrapers, crowds of people, and lots of traffic. Other new experiences include a trip to a museum and an acrobatic show in the park. The adorable, colorful illustrations are sure to attract young readers and listeners alike. Readers will share Rose's excitement during her first trip to the city.

Readers tag along with young Rose and her father as she takes her very first trip to a big city. Traveling from her small hometown by train, Rose is constantly surprised and thrilled to see new sights, such as tall skyscrapers, crowds of people, and lots of traffic. Other new experiences include a trip to a museum and an acrobatic show in the park. The adorable, colorful illustrations are sure to attract young readers and listeners alike. Readers will share Rose's excitement during her first trip to the city.

Autobiography of an Extraterrestrial: A Guide to Self-Realization and Ascension by a Woman who came to Earth with a Mission of Love and BrotherhoodOmnec Onec came here to Earth from the Astral Plane of Planet Venus. She came as a child, in a physical body, in a spaceship. She arrived in 1955 and was raised by an Earth family. In her autobiography, Omnec explains the history, culture, and spiritual teachings of the Venusians, who have lived on the Astral Plane for a very long time and who are part of our ancestry. She tells us about her first years of life, which were spent on Venus, and about her Venusian Family. She explains why and how she came to Earth, and the mission that she was to fulfill. As a sister planet to Earth, Venus had already gone through a transformation to a higher consciousness and frequency, similar to what the Earth and many people are now experiencing. Venus at one time had a physical society on its surface as well, Omnec reveals, and in the course of its evolution ascended to a higher plane. The History of Venus, as described by Omnec, and the spirituality of the Venusians, are a Gift of Pure Love. By applying Omnecs teachings, we learn how Transformation into expanded consciousness and ascension into Higher realms can be mastered by people on Earth, in accordance with the Universal Laws of the Supreme Diety. This book is the authorized re-publication of the original version, as written by Omnec Onec in the late 1960s and as first published in the U.S.A in 1991 by Lt. Col. Ret. Wendelle C. Stevens.

Thirty leading China experts—ranging from Perry Link, Andrew Nathan and Jonathan Mirsky to W. J. F. Jenner, Lois Wheeler Snow and Morton Abramowitz—recount their first visits to China, recalling their initial observations and impressions. Most first traveled to China when it was still closed to the world, or was just beginning to open. Their subsequent opinions, writings and policies have shaped the Western relationship with China for more than a generation. This is essential reading for those who want to understand the evolution of Western attitudes toward modern China. At the same time, this collection provides a vivid, personal window onto a fascinating period in Chinese history. “To collect the stories of first encounters with China was a brilliant idea. Not only do we get the benefit of many fascinating insights (and hindsights) from a range of foreigners and overseas Chinese, but these deftly edited views from the outside make up one great story: the history of Communist China. More than a history of one damned thing happening after another, however, this is a history of perceptions, lies, myths and revelations, as much about China as her rulers wish it to be seen, as about those who chose to see China, more and sometimes less clearly, over the last half century.” —Ian Buruma, author of Bad Elements “The opening of China to the world, and then of the world to China, is one of modern history’s most consequential stories. That story is told in a fresh, innovative fashion in this insightful collection of personal experiences related by a distinguished collection of historians, diplomats, journalists, political writers and others who ventured behind the Bamboo Curtain early on. Leading the way are disillusioned leftists stunned by the horrors of the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s Great Leap Forward that they discover. They gradually give way to knowing observers of a tumultuous society determined to become once again a world power. Their accounts form an impressionistic vision of epochal change taking place on the gallop.” —Jim Hoagland, contributing editor, The Washington Post “This is a wistful and absorbing volume, and a fitting remembrance for all of us who once thought that China was going to be easy to study.” —Jonathan Spence, author of The Search for Modern China

A collection of the best travel writing pieces published in American periodicals during 2011.

Ask the average American anywhere in the country to answer the association question "Staten Island" and you get "Ferry" in immediate response. what is regularly billed as "America's favorite boatride"- not least because a round trip still costs an astonishing twenty-five cents- is the last public survivor of New York Harbor's once immense fleet of those doughty double-ended ferryboats. Dozens of ferryboats in a myriad of liveries crossed the harbor's waterways as recently as one generation ago Most have vanished as though they never were, leaving in their ghostly wakes only fading memories and a few gorgeously restored ferry terminals. The handsomest of these terminals, on the New Jersey side of the Hudson, is probably the one dubbed by Christopher Morley the Piazza San Lackawanna. Over and Back captures definatively nearly two centuries of ferryboating in New York Harbor, by a master narrator of the history of transportation in America. In stories, charts, maps, photographs, diagrams, route lists, fleet rosters, and in the histories of some four hundred ferryboats, Brian J. Cudahy captures the whole tale as concisely as one could hope. The transportation expert, the ferry buff, the model builder, the urban historian: each will find grist for his or her mill. The photographs capture a highly significant footnote in America's past and present; the colored illustrations preserve some of the stylish rigs in which the owners garbed their boats, despite coal soot, oil smudge, and urban grime. Fully a third of the book comprises the most complete statistical compilation that the nation's public and private archives permit. The data show, among other things, that some of the former workhorses of New York Harbor are filling utilitarian or social roles elsewhere in the United States and overseas, and that the newest boats in the harbor began life along the Gulf of Mexico and in New England.