Detective Pete Escobedo is on the hunt for the arsonist of the Los Angeles Public Library. The heated search takes him back to the barrio of his youth, where he soon discovers that the arsonist he has been tracking may also have been responsible for several grisly arson murders in Southern California. The criminalÕs trail moves dangerously close to his old friend Sylvia, an unorthodox firefighter, and finally to Carmen, the woman he loves. This riveting suspense thriller based on the unsolved April 29, 1986, arson of the historic Los Angeles Central Library takes the reader on a high-speed chase into the turbulent barrios of Los Angeles, the race-conscious offices in the Los Angeles Police Department and the mind of the firefighters who risk their lives daily.

The Dolphin Law is a mythology. It tells the story of the bonding of a woman and a dolphin mother in time of crisis. It is about a mothers love and the willingness to do whatever is needed to protect her child. It is a short story that is a gripping adventure for young children, a lesson to teens about what it means to grow up, and a call to all humans to accept our responsibility to care for our magnificent oceans and all sea life that composes three fourths of the surface of our planet. We are definitely not alone and it will take all of us to survive. The question is - Are dolphins the humans of the sea, or are humans the dolphins of the land? As the old Hawaiian greeting says, Aloha, May we share the breath of love and welcome.

When you swim with Dolphins in the wild, they uplift your spirit, heal you in ways you had never thought possible, and leave a lasting impression on you that you will treasure forever. In this book, Olivia recounts her personal and professional adventure in Australia with the Dolphins. She describes the different methods she has used to study what she calls the Dolphin Within, that uplifting effect wild Dolphins have on humans. As a Neuroscientist, she studied human brainwaves, but also human heart rhythm before and after Dolphins encounters. She has found scientific evidences of and possible explanations for changes in human mind, body and spirit after such experiences. Reaching your Dolphin Within could free yourself of fears, phobias, addictions, grief, depression and more. Could the Dolphins be Doctors of our Soul? Could the Dolphins show us a way to speed up our evolution and live in a world of peace, love and respect for the planet?

Celebrating the wealth of quality multicultural literature recently published for children and young adults, this valuable resource examines the fiction, oral tradition, and poetry from four major ethnic groups in the United States. Each of these genres is considered in turn for the literature dealing with African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native-American Indians. Taking up where their earlier volume This Land is Our Land left off, Helbig and Perkins have teamed up once again to identify and expertly evaluate more than 500 multicultural books published from 1994 through 1999. Both considered authorities in the field of children's literature, the two of them personally selected, read, and evaluated all the books included here. Their insightful annotations help readers carefully consider both literary standards such as plot development, characterization, and style, as well as cultural values as they are represented in these cited works. Each entry also indicates the suggested age and grade level appropriateness of the work. With the proliferation and ever increasing popularity of multicultural literature for children and young adults, this sensitively written volume will serve as an invaluable collection development tool. Teachers, as well as librarians, will find the comprehensiveness and organization of this bibliography helpful as a guide in selecting appropriate materials for classroom use. Even students will find this book easy to use, with its five indexes identifying works by title, writer, illustrator, grade level, and subject. Public libraries and school media centers will find much use for Many Peoples, One Land.

Popular fiction, with its capacity for diversion, can mask important cultural observations within a framework that is often overlooked in the academic world. Works thought to be merely "escapist" can often be more seriously mined for revelations regarding the worlds they portray, especially those of the disenfranchised. As detective fiction has slowly earned critical respect, more authors from minority groups have chosen it as their medium. Chicana/o authors, previously reluctant to write in an underestimated genre that might further marginalize them, have only entered the world of detective fiction in the past two decades. In this book, the first comprehensive study of Chicano/a detective fiction, Ralph E. Rodriguez examines the recent contributions to the genre by writers such as Rudolfo Anaya, Lucha Corpi, Rolando Hinojosa, Michael Nava, and Manuel Ramos. Their works reveal the struggles of Chicanas/os with feminism, homosexuality, familia, masculinity, mysticism, the nationalist subject, and U.S.-Mexico border relations. He maintains that their novels register crucial new discourses of identity, politics, and cultural citizenship that cannot be understood apart from the historical instability following the demise of the nationalist politics of the Chicana/o movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In contrast to that time, when Chicanas/os sought a unified Chicano identity in order to effect social change, the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s have seen a disengagement from these nationalist politics and a new trend toward a heterogeneous sense of self. The detective novel and its traditional focus on questions of knowledge and identity turned out to be the perfect medium in which to examine this new self.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1876.