What would possess a grandmother to murder her two-year-old granddaughter? The Legend of Nance Dude presents all the known facts surrounding Roberta Putnams grizzly murder and the arrest, trial, and subsequent conviction of her grandmother, Nancy Ann Kerley, also known as Nance Dude.

One cold February morning in 1913, a 64-year-old woman known as Nance Dude led her granddaughter, Roberta Putnam, out of their home in western North Carolina and up the side of a mountain. She returned without the child later that day. What could drive an old woman to murder her granddaughter? Maurice Stanley has reconstructed the sad, dark story of Nance Dude from newspaper articles, court and prison records, and talks with mountain people who either remember Nance's crime or learned of it from their elders.

This new text brings the traditional material of introductory logic (critical thinking, informal and modern symbolic logic) to bear on present day issues - terrorism, abortion, the death penalty, ABM treaty, stem cell research - essays and editorials found in the New York Times, USA Today, Miami Herald, and other major newspapers and news magazines from all over the United States. This original format engages students in applying logic and critical thinking to important issues. They learn not only the techniques of introductory logic but will achieve a much deeper understanding of the great controversies that we face.

Moonshiner's Daughter is the early life story of a young girl raised in the some of the most remote, backwoods parts of Haywood County, North Carolina, deep in the heart of the Great Smoky Mountains. Her father, an ardent moonshiner when he wasn't in prison, and her mother, often showing mental illness from an earlier brain injury, raised their four children in some of the grimmest circumstances that you will ever read about. Mary Judith Messer eventually escaped her extreme living conditions by going to live with a family as their mother's helper near Washington, DC. She then moved to New York City to live with her older sister who had run away from a forced marriage. The memoir Moonshiner's Daughter is told through the eyes and words of a barely educated child and teenager yet their meaning and descriptions are clear as a mountain stream. She changed the names of most people and places to protect her still living family members. Authors Robert Morgan & Ron Rash give recommendations.

On October 1, 1993, Polly Klaas, 13, was kidnapped from a slumber party in her own home in Petaluma, California. After two months of an intensive blitz and manhunt, the police caught Richard Allen Davis, who led them to her murdered body. The trial of Davis is set to begin on June 1, 1995. Includes 16 pages of photos.

In this wry and exhilarating coming-of-age story, a prizewinning poet poignantly looks back at his adolescent surfing years. As a disenchanted, unemployed English professor, Thad Ziolkowski decides one day to sneak away from his temp job in Manhattan and catch a wave off a dingy Queens shoreline. In the meager cold waves, he contemplates how he could have possibly become a semidepressed, chain-smoking, aimless man when, for a few shining years of his boyhood, he was invincible. His lapsed love affair with the ocean begins amid the late-sixties counterculture in coastal Florida. After his parents’ divorce, nine-year-old Thad escapes from his difficult family—notably a new brooding and explosive stepfather—by heading for the thrilling, uncharted waters of the local beach. In the embrace of the surf, he is able to stay offshore for years, until his life is upended once again, this time by a double tragedy that deposits him at a crossroads between a life in the waves and a life on land. Lyrical and disarmingly funny, On a Wave is a glorious portrait of youth that reminds readers of Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life and Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time. “A sharp, self-conscious portrait of the artist as a young grommet.” —The New Yorker

"A brilliant, witty, and altogether satisfying book." — New York Times Book Review The classic work on the development of human language by the world’s leading expert on language and the mind In The Language Instinct, the world's expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. This edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since The Language Instinct was first published.