It's a cool, damp night, and a wriggling worm searches for food in a garden. Before the sun rises, it returns to its home in the soil. Tiny hairs on the worm's skin grab the dirt to help the crawler move forward. As the worm squirms underground, its long body breaks up the soil and creates tunnels. Welcome to the worm's hole! Clear text, colorful photos, and diagrams will engage young readers as they explore the habitat, physical characteristics, diet, and behavior of these curious creatures. Age-appropriate activities and critical-thinking questions give readers an opportunity to make observations and gain valuable insights.

Demonstrates how an unconscious fear of death motivates nearly all human goals, behaviors, and cultures, examining the role of mortality awareness in prompting social unrest and war.

An introduction to the lowly earthworm, which--though thought of as gross--is one of the most important animals on the earth.

A kindergarten-level introduction to worms, covering their growth process, behaviors, the ground they call home, and such defining features as their bands.

From Queen Latifa to Count Basie, Madonna to Monk, Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music traces popular music back to its roots in jazz, blues, country, and gospel through the rise in rock 'n' roll and the emergence of heavy metal, punk, and rap. Yet despite the vigor and balance of these musical origins, Martha Bayles argues, something has gone seriously wrong, both with the sound of popular music and the sensibility it expresses. Bayles defends the tough, affirmative spirit of Afro-American music against the strain of artistic modernism she calls 'perverse.' She describes how perverse modernism was grafted onto popular music in the late 1960s, and argues that the result has been a cult of brutality and obscenity that is profoundly anti-musical. Unlike other recent critics of popular music, Bayles does not blame the problem on commerce. She argues that culture shapes the market and not the other way around. Finding censorship of popular music "both a practical and a constitutional impossibility," Bayles insists that "an informed shift in public tastes may be our only hope of reversing the current malignant mood."

Wonderful Worms encourages an appreciation for the small creatures of the earth by explaining the vital role that earthworms play in the planet's ecosystem. The book also contains informative charts and cross-section illustrations of the worm's underground environment.