Beyond The Burrow

This adventurous picture book is just right for toddlers who may be reluctant to embrace new experiences. Rabbit loves staying close to home where it is warm and safe and cozy. After all, the outside has things with feathers and scales and horns and hooves! It's certainly better—and safer—for a rabbit to stick to what she knows best: home sweet home. But when rabbit spots a particularly juicy carrot just outside of her comfort zone, she tumbles into a whole new world she wasn't expecting! Author-illustrator Jennifer Meserve has created a reassuring tale of exploration that will inspire boldness and curiosity. Paired with soft, colorful illustrations, this beautiful picture book also features a community of endearing animals and important social emotional learning themes of friendship, kindness, and bravery.

A JUNIOR LIBRARY GUILD GOLD STANDARD SELECTION! With the adventure of Avi’s Poppy series and the heart of A Wolf Called Wander, this charming and exciting middle grade adventure follows one mouse’s journey to save his baby brother from a sinister evil. There are rules every mouse must follow if they’re to survive in the forest. Tobin knows these guidelines by heart. After all, with one younger sibling, another on the way, and a best friend with a penchant for trouble-making, he needs to be prepared for anything. But one stormy night, Tobin’s safe burrow is invaded by monstrous arachnids, and his baby brother stolen away. To save him, Tobin will have to do something he’s never done before: break the rules. Drawing inspiration from the author’s work as a natural science documentarian, Journey Beyond the Burrow is as alive as the forest floor, where nature is unpredictable, occasionally frightening, and inspirational all the same. Includes a black-and-white illustrated front piece.

This book explores what it means to live a purposeful life and outlines the benefits associated with purpose across different life domains. It also demonstrates that purpose in life is not reducible to constructs such as happiness, well-being, or identity development. The importance of having a sense of purpose in life is attracting renewed attention in both scientific and social arenas. Mounting evidence from intricately designed experiments and large-scale studies reveals how pursuing a purpose can make a person happier, healthier, and even lengthen their lifespan. However, existing texts on purpose have said little on why having has these effects, how it may influence our ability to navigate diverse environments, or how best to consider the construct from a multidisciplinary approach that moves beyond psychology. Recognizing this gap in the literature, this book provides multidisciplinary perspectives on the topic of purpose, and examines what we can do as researchers, interventionists, and society as a whole to imbue purposefulness in the lives of people across the lifespan. It includes contributions from key figures on topics such as identity, health, youth programs and youth purpose, diversity, aging and work.

It's a warm spring morning in the desert. A large pink and black lizard crawls slowly from its burrow. The hungry reptile is leaving its underground home to search for a meal of eggs. If the gila monster is successful, it will eat a huge breakfast then return to its burrow and not emerge again for several months! Filled with information perfectly suited to the abilities and interests of its young audience, this colorful, fact-filled volume gives readers a chance not only to learn, but also to develop their powers of observation and critical thinking. Activities, such as describing the gila monster to a friend and discussing critical thinking questions, give readers a chance to gain insights beyond the facts and figures. From taking a peek as baby gila monsters hatch from their eggs, to seeing the animal use its tongue to smell for food, this book makes learning about the habits and habitat of these secretive creatures an enjoyable, satisfying experience.

It was all part of man's greatest adventure--landing men on the Moon and sending a rover to Mars, finally seeing the edge of the universe and the birth of stars, and launching planetary explorers across the solar system to Neptune and beyond. The ancient dream of breaking gravity's hold and taking to space became a reality only because of the intense cold-war rivalry between the superpowers, with towering geniuses like Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolyov shelving dreams of space travel and instead developing rockets for ballistic missiles and space spectaculars. Now that Russian archives are open and thousands of formerly top-secret U.S. documents are declassified, an often startling new picture of the space age emerges: the frantic effort by the Soviet Union to beat the United States to the Moon was doomed from the beginning by gross inefficiency and by infighting so treacherous that Winston Churchill likened it to "dogs fighting under a carpet"; there was more than science behind the United States' suggestion that satellites be launched during the International Geophysical Year, and in one crucial respect, Sputnik was a godsend to Washington; the hundred-odd German V-2s that provided the vital start to the U.S. missile and space programs legally belonged to the Soviet Union and were spirited to the United States in a derring-do operation worthy of a spy thriller; despite NASA's claim that it was a civilian agency, it had an intimate relationship with the military at the outset and still does--a distinction the Soviet Union never pretended to make; constant efforts to portray astronauts and cosmonauts as "Boy Scouts" were often contradicted by reality; the Apollo missions to the Moon may have been an unexcelled political triumph and feat of exploration, but they also created a headache for the space agency that lingers to this day. This New Ocean is based on 175 interviews with Russian and American scientists and engineers; on archival documents, including formerly top-secret National Intelligence Estimates and spy satellite pictures; and on nearly three decades of reporting. The impressive result is this fascinating story--the first comprehensive account--of the space age. Here are the strategists and war planners; engineers and scientists; politicians and industrialists; astronauts and cosmonauts; science fiction writers and journalists; and plain, ordinary, unabashed dreamers who wanted to transcend gravity's shackles for the ultimate ride. The story is written from the perspective of a witness who was present at the beginning and who has seen the conclusion of the first space age and the start of the second.

Welcome to NestleBurrow, a tiny woodland village filled with kind and loving folks, busy living life deep in the secluded northern woods. For the villagers of the Burrow, life is real, but not all that complicated. Folks in the village are known for who they are, what they do, and how they value one another. The NestleBurrow Chronicles is a running conversation about people, their reactions to life’s adventures, and whimsical situations they encounter. Readers join Tommy Racoon and his friends as they learn the lessons of everyday life, like making and keeping friends, being kind and supportive, and tackling challenging projects. The animals of the Burrow aren’t afraid of stepping in when they have to be brave, or making something right when it’s been put wrong. They know how to get along with all kinds of folks, no matter how different they may be.

To what extent, and in what manner, do storytelling practices accommodate nonhuman subjects and their modalities of experience, and how can contemporary narrative study shed light on interspecies interactions and entanglements? In Narratology beyond the Human, David Herman addresses these questions through a cross-disciplinary approach to post-Darwinian narratives concerned with animals and human-animal relationships. Herman considers the enabling and constraining effects of different narrative media, examining a range of fictional and nonfictional texts disseminated in print, comics and graphic novels, and film. In focusing on techniques such as the use of animal narrators, alternation between human and nonhuman perspectives, the embedding of stories within stories, and others, the book explores how specific strategies for portraying nonhuman agents both emerge from and contribute to broader attitudes toward animal life. Herman argues that existing frameworks for narrative inquiry must be modified to take into account how stories are interwoven with cultural ontologies, or understandings of what sorts of beings populate the world and how they relate to humans. Showing how questions of narrative bear on ideas of species difference and assumptions about animal minds, Narratology beyond the Human underscores our inextricable interconnectedness with other forms of creatural life and suggests that stories can be used to resituate imaginaries of human action in a more-than-human world.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Russian conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov was a galvanizing figure in Moscow's underground art community, ultimately gaining international prominence as the “leader” of a band of artists known as the Moscow Conceptual Circle. Throughout this time, he created texts that he would distribute among his friends, and by the late 1990s his written production amounted to hundreds of pages. Devoted to themes that range from the “cosmism” of pre-Revolutionary Russian modernism to the philosophical implications of Moscow’s garbage, Kabakov’s handmade booklets were typed out on paper, then stapled or sewn together using rough butcher paper for their covers. Among these writings are faux Socialist Realist verses, theoretical explorations, art historical analyses, accompaniments to installation projects, and transcripts of dialogues between the artist and literary theorists, critics, journalists, and other artists. This volume offers for the first time in English the most significant texts written by Kabakov. The writings have been expressly selected for this English-language volume and there exists no equivalent work in any language.