Miles Away From Home

Although Miles the dog gets into lots of trouble while at the beach with his family, he finally finds a way to make it the best vacation ever.

From a debut voice comes a quirky and completely fresh story of young love and loss that explores gender nonconformity and the spectrum of sexual preference in an authentic way.

Created by hyperspace heartthrob Anthony Montgomery (Star Trek: Enterprise), and co-written by Brandon Easton (WB's new Thundercats series), Miles Away is an epic action adventure about Maxwell Miles, a shy, teenage orphan with super-photographic reflexes. Max's already odd life goes beyond Twilight Zone territory when he encounters alien refugees who involve him in an interstellar war connected to his family's dark past! Aided by remarkable companions, young Max battles evil entities on two worlds: Future Earth and Ro-Twyla!

How is it that, half a century after Brown v. Board of Education, educational opportunities remain so unequal for black and white students, not to mention poor and wealthy ones? In his important new book, Five Miles Away, A World Apart, James E. Ryan answers this question by tracing the fortunes of two schools in Richmond, Virginia--one in the city and the other in the suburbs. Ryan shows how court rulings in the 1970s, limiting the scope of desegregation, laid the groundwork for the sharp disparities between urban and suburban public schools that persist to this day. The Supreme Court, in accord with the wishes of the Nixon administration, allowed the suburbs to lock nonresidents out of their school systems. City schools, whose student bodies were becoming increasingly poor and black, simply received more funding, a measure that has proven largely ineffective, while the independence (and superiority) of suburban schools remained sacrosanct. Weaving together court opinions, social science research, and compelling interviews with students, teachers, and principals, Ryan explains why all the major education reforms since the 1970s--including school finance litigation, school choice, and the No Child Left Behind Act--have failed to bridge the gap between urban and suburban schools and have unintentionally entrenched segregation by race and class. As long as that segregation continues, Ryan forcefully argues, so too will educational inequality. Ryan closes by suggesting innovative ways to promote school integration, which would take advantage of unprecedented demographic shifts and an embrace of diversity among young adults. Exhaustively researched and elegantly written by one of the nation's leading education law scholars, Five Miles Away, A World Apart ties together, like no other book, a half-century's worth of education law and politics into a coherent, if disturbing, whole. It will be of interest to anyone who has ever wondered why our schools are so unequal and whether there is anything to be done about it.

Alan Sakowitz, a whistleblower of a Madoff-like Ponzi scheme masterminded by Scott Rothstein, fraudster extraordinaire, tells of the story of his decision to turn in Rothstein regardless of the possible dangerous ramifications of such a decision. The saga of Rothstein's rise and fall which included a Warren Yacht, two Bugattis, Governor Crist, the former Versace mansion, The Eagles, and even the murder of a law partner, is the stuff that Hollywood movies are made from. Instead of the mere accounting of such a scandal, Sakowitz uses the Rothstein scheme as a cautionary tale in stark contrast to the stories of humble, ethical individuals living within Sakowitz's neighborhood in North Miami Beach, Florida, Sakowitz's neighbors are people who have spent their lives trying to assist others, not line their pockets, and through these stories Sakowitz creates a sharp dichotomy between the greed, of a Rothstein and its mainstream culture of consumption and the charity, kindness and selflessness of a principle-oriented community. Indeed, Sakowitz speaks to the symptoms of a culture that could create a Scott Rothstein, and, though acknowledging that the easy way out is not simple to dismiss, offers remedies to the growing ills of our entitlement society. The answer, Sakowitz says, lies in thinking first of others, and how one's actions should benefit the lives of friends, not one's short-term gratifications.

Twin sisters Kelsey and Michelle Maxfield look identical -- but they couldn't be more different. Kelsey is the captain of the dance team and loves her cute college boyfriend, Davis. Michelle is a free-spirited artist and flits from one guy to the next, the latest a soldier recently deployed to Afghanistan. Despite their differences, Kelsey and Michelle can't live without each other--until, in an instant, everything changes. When Michelle dies in a car crash, Kelsey is left without her other half. As the only one who knows about her sister's boyfriend, Peter, Kelsey takes it upon herself to find him and tell him what happened to Michelle. But when she finally connects with Peter online, he thinks that Kelsey is Michelle and says that seeing her is the one thing keeping him alive. Caught up in the moment, Kelsey can't bear to break his heart with the truth, so she lets Peter believe that she is Michelle. Kelsey keeps up the act, pretending to be her sister, and soon she can't deny that she's falling, hard, for the one boy she shouldn't want. Lara Avery delivers a breathtaking story of love and loss that is guaranteed to sweep you off your feet.

Because business is slow for retired homicide detective Campbell Young's new enterprise, A-1 Investigative Consultants, he decides to take a break — a horse-playing vacation to Florida. No sooner are his plans made, however, than his old friend Priam Harvey approaches him with a complex problem: a young Caribbean jazz musician has been found dead in a Toronto hotel room, his body surrounded by the paraphernalia of voodoo. Harvey, whose connection to the victim is revealed to be more than casual, persuades Young to put aside his Racing Form and pick up the trail of the killer. Young's pursuit takes him all the way from the nightclubs of New York to the Pine Barrens of New Jersey and the backwater bars of Grand Bahama Island before the possibility presents itself that the murderer might actually be right in his own backyard.