In 1964, Melody learns that leadership can be difficult when she tries to fix up her neighborhood playground but then gets to help her brother by singing on a recording in a real Motown studio.

In 1964, ten-year-old African American singer Melody Ellison decides to fix up her Detroit neighborhood playground and plant a garden, but when her friends put her in charge, Melody finds out just how hard it can be to lead.

In 1964, ten-year-old African American singer Melody Ellison decides to fix up her Detroit neighborhood playground and plant a garden, but when her friends put her in charge, Melody finds out just how hard it can be to lead.

The Israeli army invaded Ramallah in March 2002. A tank stood at the end of Raja Shehadeh's road; Israeli soldiers patrolled from the roof toops. Four soldiers took over his brother's apartment and then used him as a human shield as they went through the building, while his wife tried to keep her composure for the sake of their frightened childred, ages four and six. This is an account of what it is like to be under seige: the terror, the frustrations, the humiliations, and the rage. How do you pass your time when you are imprisoned in your own home? What do you do when you cannot cross the neighborhood to help your sick mother? Shehadeh's recent memoir, Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine, was the first book by a Palestinian writer to chronicle a life of displacement on the West Bank from 1967 to the present. It received international acclaim and was a finalist for the 2002 Lionel Gelber Prize. When the Birds Stopped Singing is a book of the moment, a chronicle of life today as lived by ordinary Palestinians throughout the West Bank and Gaza in the grip of the most stringent Israeli security measures in years. And yet it is also an enduring document, at once literary and of great political import, that should serve as a cautionary tale for today's and future generations.

In 1964 Detroit, nine-year-old Melody pursues her singing dreams unti a tragic event in Birmingham, Alabama, shakes her confidence.

Elvis Presley and his two faithful sidekicks tore up Texas highways, crisscrossing the state, always late for their next high school hop, car dealership opening, or Lion's Club fund raiser.

In a forgotten nook of Cambridge a little shop stands where thousands of sheets of beautiful paper and hundreds of exquisite pens wait for the next person who, with Clara Cohen's help, will express the love, despair and desire they feel to correspondents alive, estranged or dead. Clara knows better thanmost the power a letter can have to turn a person's life around, so when she discovers a cache of wartime love letters, she follows them on the start of on a profound journey of her own.