Easy-to-read text and full-color photographs depict the physical characteristics, habitat, and life cycle of seals.

Iyana Smith never expected to meet a man like Commander Thayne Austin—let alone get pregnant with his baby. One night of passion together should never have had consequences, but it did. Not wanting serious ties to a career military man, she decides to keep her pregnancy a secret. Unfortunately, things don’t go as she plans, and when Thayne finds out, he proposes marriage. Iyana turns him down flat. Duty was not enough to build a marriage on, and Iyana refuses to be any man's ball and chain. Yet how can she deny her baby a father? And how much longer can she refute her strong attraction to the man who threatens to penetrate the wall of defense she’s built around her heart? For one wonderful night, Navy SEAL Thayne Austin allowed his quest for passion to overrule his typical stalwart rationale. Then he has to leave to attend a required training. Returning four months later, he’s surprised to find Iyana pregnant with his child. Even though marriage and children aren’t in his immediate plans, no way is he going to allow his child to grow up without a father.

Introduces seal pups and describes some of the different kinds of seal and sea lion and their pups and what the pups do as they grow up.

In a world no longer blessed with virtue, there remains a place among the moving icebergs, cradled between the twilight of dreams, yet hidden from the nightmare of man. It is a sanctuary that has miraculously clung to its innocence, a faraway place, a place called SEALSSONG. A dying girl is about to find out that there are more things in life to fear than death itself. Born with gifts beyond that of natural reasoning, young Emma finds herself spirited away by an evil relative desperately seeking out her angelic powers in order to fulfill a most diabolical prophecy. Her aunt Decara, a tear-stealing villainess on a dastardly quest to find a sacred teardrop housed inside a purple stone, possessing enormous powers, will first have to find one orphaned baby seal named Miracle, who must learn to survive in a fantastic world confronting deadly seal hunters and the bloodshed they bring. For it is he who now inherits the powerful, tear, and it is he whom Emma soon comes to realize—that she must kill!

Blues Book of the Year —Living Blues Association of Recorded Sound Collections Awards for Excellence Best Historical Research in Recorded Blues, Gospel, Soul, or R&B–Certificate of Merit (2018) 2023 Blues Hall of Fame Inductee - Classic of Blues Literature category With this volume, Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff complete their groundbreaking trilogy on the development of African American popular music. Fortified by decades of research, the authors bring to life the performers, entrepreneurs, critics, venues, and institutions that were most crucial to the emergence of the blues in black southern vaudeville theaters; the shadowy prehistory and early development of the blues is illuminated, detailed, and given substance. At the end of the nineteenth century, vaudeville began to replace minstrelsy as America’s favorite form of stage entertainment. Segregation necessitated the creation of discrete African American vaudeville theaters. When these venues first gained popularity, ragtime coon songs were the standard fare. Insular black southern theaters provided a safe haven, where coon songs underwent rehabilitation and blues songs suitable for the professional stage were formulated. The process was energized by dynamic interaction between the performers and their racially-exclusive audience. The first blues star of black vaudeville was Butler “String Beans” May, a blackface comedian from Montgomery, Alabama. Before his bizarre, senseless death in 1917, String Beans was recognized as the “blues master piano player of the world.” His musical legacy, elusive and previously unacknowledged, is preserved in the repertoire of country blues singer-guitarists and pianists of the race recording era. While male blues singers remained tethered to the role of blackface comedian, female “coon shouters” acquired a more dignified aura in the emergent persona of the “blues queen.” Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and most of their contemporaries came through this portal; while others, such as forgotten blues heroine Ora Criswell and her protégé Trixie Smith, ingeniously reconfigured the blackface mask for their own subversive purposes. In 1921 black vaudeville activity was effectively nationalized by the Theater Owners Booking Association (T.O.B.A.). In collaboration with the emergent race record industry, T.O.B.A. theaters featured touring companies headed by blues queens with records to sell. By this time the blues had moved beyond the confines of entertainment for an exclusively black audience. Small-time black vaudeville became something it had never been before—a gateway to big-time white vaudeville circuits, burlesque wheels, and fancy metropolitan cabarets. While the 1920s was the most glamorous and remunerative period of vaudeville blues, the prior decade was arguably even more creative, having witnessed the emergence, popularization, and early development of the original blues on the African American vaudeville stage.

Navy SEAL Jack Singer has a woman he can’t forget. They were attracted to each other at first sight and spent the night together, but she disappeared in the wee hours of the following morning. He did his best to find her, but she was nowhere to be found. But then a postcard he receives one day reveals all. He learns that his mystery woman delivered his baby and now she’s raising it secretly. Infuriated, Jack visits her and demands that they get married.