Braxton Hickman is required to write his autobiography for his senior English project. What he reveals during his childhood in 1960s eastern North Carolina is a revelation of a secret he has kept for five years, a revelation that is poignant and shocking. He explains how he had to come to terms with an event that changed his life forever.

Braxton Hickman is required to write his autobiography for his senior English project. What he reveals during his childhood in 1960s eastern North Carolina is a revelation of a secret he has kept for five years, a revelation that is poignant and shocking. He explains how he had to come to terms with an event that changed his life forever.

Little River is a coming of age story about a young boy called Bean and his little brother Jack. It takes place in the sixties in a small rural community, set among the gleaming white cotton fields of northeast Arkansas. The story begins with the two young lads’ obvious isolation from the world outside, as they learn to create their own adventures in the only place they really know, their farm. The boys’ desire to have a close relationship with their dad is hindered by his demanding job of overseeing the sharecroppers. The patient Mom is a comforting force, taking care of the family, while being trapped in her own isolated world. When family tensions mount as the surrounding farms begin to fail, the father takes a downward spiral path of turning to alcohol. Losing his job and with the family to the breaking point, they move close by to Little River with hope of a new start in town. There, Bean discovers a whole new world with new friends. Forming an adventurous band of misfits, they build a magnificent treehouse, while the family's struggles worsen. As a bright future begins to fade, the dusty trail of failure slowly catches up. Doubts, rumors and unbearable tragedy ensues, but the strong bonds of family, love and friendship give them the means to survive. They become a shining example of overcoming life’s most arduous hardships.

This is the first book by a founding member of Little River Band: the first Australian band to achieve a gold album in the US. 'Every Day of My Life' tells the remarkable tale of how Beeb Birtles, David Briggs, Graeham Goble, George McArdle, Derek Pellicci and Glenn Shorrock conquered the world - and then lost their band. The book also documents how a young Dutch boy named Gerard Bertelkamp arrived in Adelaide, unable to speak English, and ended up in not one but two major bands: Zoot (with Darryl Cotton and Rick Springfield) and Little River Band (with Glenn Shorrock and later John Farnham). As the title suggests, Every Day of My Life is an intensely personal journey. Beeb Birtles might have lost his band but he discovered many other things along the way. LRB's hits include 'Reminiscing', 'Help Is On Its Way', 'Lonesome Loser', 'The Night Owls', 'It's a Long Way There', 'Cool Change', 'Happy Anniversary', 'Lady', 'Curiosity (Killed the Cat)', 'Witchery', and 'Every Day of My Life'. Due to a bizarre copyright case, Beeb Birtles can no longer make music as Little River Band. But he can tell their incredible story - and his own incredible story.

Except for a massacre of five hundred settlers by renegade Creek Indians in the early 1800s, not much bad had happened during two centuries in Little River, Alabama, an obscure Lost Colony in the swampy woodlands of To Kill a Mockingbird country. "We're stuck down here being poor together" is how one native described the hamlet of about two hundred people, half black and half white. But in 1997, racial violence hit Little River like a thunderclap. A young black man was killed while trying to break into a white family's trailer at night, a beloved white store owner was nearly bludgeoned to death by a black ex-convict, and finally a marauding band of white kids torched a black church and vandalized another during a drunken wilding soon after a Ku Klux Klan rally. The Ballad of Little River is a narrative of that fateful year, an anatomy of one of the many church arsons across the South in the late 1990s. It is also much more -- a biography of a place that seemed, on the cusp of the millennium, stuck in another time. When veteran journalist Paul Hemphill, the son of an Alabama truck driver who has written extensively on the blue-collar South, moved into Little River, he discovered the flip side of what the natives like to call "God's country": a dot on the map far from the mainstream of American life, a forlorn cluster of poverty and ignorance and dead-end jobs in the dark, snake-infested forests, a world that time forgot. Living alongside the citizens of Little River, Hemphill discovered a stew of characters right out of fiction -- "Peanut" Ferguson, "Doll" Boone, "Hoss" Mack, Joe Dees, Murray January, a Klansman named "Brother Phil," and his stripper wife known as "Wild Child" -- swirling into a maelstrom of insufferable heat, malicious gossip, ancient grudges, and unresolved racial animosities. His story of how their lives intertwined serves, as well, as a chilling cautionary tale about the price that must be paid for living in virtual isolation during a time of unprecedented growth in America. God's country is in deep trouble.

As the seasons change, a river in Alaska reveals its remarkable biodiversity. A great web of life is presented--the river and its shores sustain an astonishing variety of plants and animals. The river is home: salmon fry and rainbow trout live in it, plankton drifts in its current. The river is food: bears and bald eagles catch salmon, big fish chase little fish, tree roots absorb the river water. This evocative nonfiction picture book follows a year in the life of this Alaskan river. The lyrical text and lush paintings introduce young readers to the sights and sounds of the river and its inhabitants and are rich in details certain to fascinate ecologists of all ages.