Edgar Dewitt is the new kid in town. Moving from Alabama to Mount Lanier, Washington has been quite the change, and Edgar quickly realizes making new friends won't be as easy as he thought. On his first day in town, he meets one of Mount Lanier’s best: the incorrigible Chris Weedy, who’s as bright as a sack of socks and as mean as you can get. One day while exploring the woods behind his new house, Edgar discovers something mysterious: an old abandoned cabin. But the real magic happens when he finds something even more magnificent inside the cabin itself: a dark and ominous hole. After studying the hole for a few days, Edgar musters his courage and jumps in feet first. It takes him straight through the center of the earth to a tiny island in the middle of the Indian ocean, and Edgar knows he’s stumbled upon something ancient. Something secret--a seemingly impossible way to journey to the other side of the world. For the next several weeks, the island becomes a sanctuary where Edgar can escape Chris Weedy’s cruel taunting and his parents’ constant questions. But a sudden, nearby wildfire threatens to engulf the town in flames and take Edgar’s volunteer firefighter father along with it. Edgar must act fast and decide between saving his new town or keeping his newly found safe haven.

The American Film Institute Catalog has won great praise for its comprehensiveness, reliability, and utility. These volumes are an essential purchase for every library, and individual researchers will also find them indispensable. This newest AFI volume contains over 4,300 entries for feature-length films produced in the United States in the 1940s. The decade was an important and transitional one for filmmakers. Societal changes from the war years were reflected in films, and in the late 1940s the rise of television, the Hollywood blacklist, and the breakup of studio-owned theater chains greatly affected the number and types of films produced. Among films newly viewed for the book are such well-known classics as Citizen Kane, The Best Years of Our Lives, and Casablanca, along with less heralded films such as Fighting Men of the Plains and The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler. Entries include complete cast and crew credits, extensive plot summaries, and notes and sources for further study. A large accompanying volume provides access to the films through nine separate indexes, including personal and corporate names, subjects, and genres.