A captivating and immersive near-future fantasy adventure set against a backdrop of the Australian landscape. How far will a mother go to save her child? In a world where humanity is confined to climate-controlled domes, Outdwellers, Anna and Gardner must make it across the New Desert to find treatment for their daughter who is about to undergo her very first Change. Faulk Parker is trying to stop them. He has never missed a target, but this family is proving his most challenging yet. From a vast landscape to the glittering confines of the city, Faulk, Anna and Gardner become more than hunter and hunted, and find themselves challenged to question their own most deeply held truths. Order and wildness are on a collision course, and time for Anna and her family is fast running out...

David explores the ground-sky relationship between the pyramids of Egypt and the stars of Orion and ponders its global reach and significance. Packed with diagrams, maps, and astronomical charts, this useful guidebook decodes the ancient mysteries of the Pueblo Indian world.

"I was made in His image," Mark Twain once said, "but have never been mistaken for Him." God may have made Mark Twain in His image, but Twain frequently remade himself by adopting divine personae as part of his literary burlesque. Readers were delighted, rather than fooled, when Twain adopted the image of religious vocation throughout his writing career: Theologian, Missionary, Priest, Preacher, Prophet, Saint, Brother Twain, Holy Samuel, the Bishop of New Jersey, and of course, the Reverend Mark Twain. Joe B. Fulton has not written a study of Samuel Langhorne Clemens's religious beliefs, but rather one about Twain's use of theological form and content in a number of his works-some well-known, others not so widely read. Twain adopted such religious personae to burlesque the religious literary genres associated with those vocations. He wrote catechisms, prophecies, psalms, and creeds, all in the theological tradition, but with a comic twist. Twain even wrote a burlesque life of Christ that has the son of God sporting blue jeans and cowboy boots. With his distinctive comic genius, Twain entered the religious dialogue of his time, employing the genres of belief as his vehicle for criticizing church and society. Twain's burlesques of religious form and content reveal a writer fully engaged with the religious ferment of his day. Works like The Innocents Abroad, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, Roughing It, and What Is Man? are the productions of a writer skilled at adopting and adapting established literary and religious forms for his own purposes. Twain is sometimes viewed as a haphazard writer, but in The Reverend Mark Twain, Fulton demonstrates how carefully Twain studied established literary and theological genres to entertain-and criticize-his society. Book jacket.

I haven't done anything with my life. . . . I need to do something . . . like Mom and Dad and Hank do all the time. And I need to do it now. Meet 12-year-old Kat—short for Katharine. She thinks she has two weeks to do something worthy of being adopted by her wonderful foster family. But cancer, medicine, and the older kids at Starlight Animal Rescue make it difficult for Kat to really help out around the farm. On top of that, she's just started junior high and has to work on a project with the most popular—and demanding—girl in her class. When Kat accepts the role of “cat shrink” for her classmates' pets, could her success . . . or failure . . . be more than she can handle? Starlight Animal Rescue: Where problem horses are trained and loved, where abandoned dogs become heroes, where stray cats become loyal companions. And where people with nowhere to fit in find a place to belong.

Prepare to meet some curious creatures and sniff out fun facts wrapped in feathers and fur. Dust off your imagination as you walk beside living fossils. Pussyfoot across desert sands. Explore the part some animals play in a seasonal holiday's history and see the impact of man on nature through a leopard's eyes.