Part history, part memoir, part statistical analysis, this book tells the remarkable and largely forgotten story of how the baseball hotbed of Canada's northeastern Maritime provinces evolved into "NCAA North" during the 1940s and 1950s. A summer training ground for players from leading U.S. college programs, the region attracted talented players seeking higher salaries than they could get in the American minor league system. Major league organizations came to scout blue-chip prospects. In this competitive environment, only the best were able to crack the rosters of town teams in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Maine. A Quality of Competition Index for various northeast leagues provides major league equivalencies for selected players.

A road race that reflects a century of American running.

Lucile Garrett is just thirteen when she meets Clint Palmer, a charismatic stranger who will forever change her life. The year is 1934, and as the windblown dust of the Great Depression rakes the Oklahoma plains, Palmer offers Lucile and her father, homeless and hungry, the irresistible promise of a better future.But when they follow Palmer to Texas, Lucile's father mysteriously disappears, launching man and girl on an epic journey through the American Southwest: a spree of violence and murder that culminates in one of the most celebrated criminal trials of the era.Based on a true story, Hard Twisted is a chilling tale of survival and redemption, and a young girl's coming of age in a world as cruel as it is beautiful.

Throughout the 1998 baseball season, two names made the headlines more than any others: Mark McGwire, the eventual home run king, and Sammy Sosa, the runner-up in a race that won the hearts of baseball fans worldwide. Yet at the end of the day, it was Sosa who walked away with the National League's MVP award, not McGwire. Why? Because Sosa had dug the dismal 1997 Chicago Cubs out of the cellar not just with his home runs, but also with his spectacular all-around play. Yet Sosa's contributions off the field, both in the States and in his native land, the Dominican Republic, are even more impressive. In this powerful biography of one of the most admired sluggers in baseball, Matt Christopher, the number one sports series for kids, traces Sosa's life from his poverty-stricken childhood-when shining shoes put food on the table-to his professional career. For more information on the Matt Christopher Sports Bio Bookshelf, please see the last pages of this book.

The phenomenally popular compact dictionary has been newly revised and updated—the perfect reference for school, office, and home. Webster’s New World dictionaries have been defining American English for more than fifty years. This perennial bestseller is sure to draw in even more readers with its updated materials—including new biographical, geographical, scientific, and vocabulary entries reflecting our rapidly evolving language. The Webster’s New World Dictionary is ideal for students and adults of all ages.

The Good Diamond A Pacific Northwest Mystery Skye Kathleen Moody United States Fish and Wildlife Agent Venus Diamond tracks a stolen gem across Canada and the United States in this latest installment of Moody's quirky series Reports of two Canadian black bears abandoned in a cage just south of the United States-Canadian border bring Agent Venus Diamond to the scene to discover one bear severely malnourished and the other dead, his stomach slit open. Local authorities quickly deduce that the bears were used as a diversion by drug smugglers, but Venus is skeptical and follows up on lead after lead until all she has to go on is a distinctive diamond ring off a dead informant's hand. The ring leads her to a diamond mine in Northern Canada, where she discovers that a priceless blue diamond had been found and kept secret. Stolen before it could be cut and shown to the world, Venus is now on the trail of a ruth-less smuggler, as one by one he kills those helping him cut, process, and sell the most valuable diamond in the world. The Good Diamond is the seventh winning and suspense-ful entry in Moody's atmospheric environmental mystery series. 'Venus Diamond, the peppy Fish and Wildlife Service agent in Skye Kathleen Moody's energetic mysteries, can be my alter ego.' -Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Skye Kathleen Moody, writer, photographer, and teacher, lives in Seattle where she was born and raised. Mystery 0-312-32415-4 $24.95 / $34.95 Can. 51/2" x 81/4" / 320 pages Hardcover

Pete Garnett hadn’t planned on shooting anybody. But when he spotted the two hardcases threatening a helpless girl, he didn’t have much choice . . . and they fired first. He was just doing what he had to do, and that should have been the end of it. Trouble was, the two had a partner that Pete didn’t see. But the third man saw Pete, all right, and it wouldn’t be long before he tried to get rid of the girl who could identify him and the man who killed his friends.