One of School Library Journal's Best Fiction Books of 2011 Some secrets are better left buried; some secrets are so frightening they might make angels weep and the devil crow. Thought provoking as well as intensely scary, Marcus Sedgwick's White Crow unfolds in three voices. There's Rebecca, who has come to a small, seaside village to spend the summer, and there's Ferelith, who offers to show Rebecca the secrets of the town...but at a price. Finally, there's a priest whose descent into darkness illuminates the girls' frightening story. White Crow is as beautifully written as it is horrifically gripping. This title has Common Core connections.

Rudolf Nureyev, one of the most iconic dancers of the twentieth century, had it all: beauty, genius, charm, passion, and sex appeal. No other dancer of our time has generated the same excitement, for both men and women, on or off the stage. In this superb biography, Julie Kavanagh deftly brings us through the professional and personal milestones of Nureyev's life and career: his education at the Kirov school in Leningrad; his controversial defection from the USSR in 1961; his long-time affair with the Danish dancer Erik Bruhn; his legendary partnership with Margot Fonteyn at the Royal Ballet in London. We see his fiery collaborations with almost all the major living choreographers including Ashton, Balanchine, Robbins, Graham, and Taylor. And we see Nureyev as he reinvigorated the Paris Ballet Opera in the early 1980s before his death from AIDS complications in 1993. Nureyev: The Life is the most intimate, revealing, and dramatic picture we have ever had of this dazzling, complex figure.

White southerners recognized that the perpetuation of segregation required whites of all ages to uphold a strict social order -- especially the young members of the next generation. White children rested at the core of the system of segregation between 1890 and 1939 because their participation was crucial to ensuring the future of white supremacy. Their socialization in the segregated South offers an examination of white supremacy from the inside, showcasing the culture's efforts to preserve itself by teaching its beliefs to the next generation. In Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South, author Kristina DuRocher reveals how white adults in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continually reinforced race and gender roles to maintain white supremacy. DuRocher examines the practices, mores, and traditions that trained white children to fear, dehumanize, and disdain their black neighbors. Raising Racists combines an analysis of the remembered experiences of a racist society, how that society influenced children, and, most important, how racial violence and brutality shaped growing up in the early-twentieth-century South.

Based on material from the newly opened Russian archives, this is the first biography of Nicholas Mikhailovich Romanov (1859-1919), the only intellectual in the Russian Imperial Family. This unique study provides insight into the last six decades of tsarist Russia through the experiences of the odd ball member of the clan. An historian and a biologist, the Grand Duke made major contributions in both these fields. A political liberal, he fought tirelessly for reform from within the system. His reformist views made him a pariah within his own family, and contemporary recognition of his accomplishments came more from abroad than at home. Entering the military, as all Romanovs did, the Grand Duke eventually became hostile toward it and was in fact the only family member ever to formally leave military service. He received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Berlin and Moscow and even won election to the French Academy—one of only two Russians to do so. As the political situation in Russia worsened, he urged the tsar to implement reforms, and he even participated in discussions of a palace coup. Exiled to Vologda after the Communist seizure of power, he was later imprisoned by the police and shot in January 1919.

Examines the role of spiritualism in American cultural history.

The summer of 1898 is filled with ups and downs for 11-year-old Moses. He's growing apart from his best friend, his superstitious Boo-Nanny butts heads constantly with his pragmatic, educated father, and his mother is reeling from the discovery of a family secret. Yet there are good times, too. He's teaching his grandmother how to read. For the first time she's sharing stories about her life as a slave. And his father and his friends are finally getting the respect and positions of power they've earned in the Wilmington, North Carolina, community. But not everyone is happy with the political changes at play and some will do anything, including a violent plot against the government, to maintain the status quo. One generation away from slavery, a thriving African American community—enfranchised and emancipated—suddenly and violently loses its freedom in turn-of-the-century North Carolina when a group of local politicians stages the only successful coup d'etat in US history.