The authorized biography of the creator of Middle-earth. In the decades since his death in September 1973, millions have read THE HOBBIT, THE LORD OF THE RINGS, and THE SILMARILLION and become fascinated about the very private man behind the books. Born in South Africa in January 1892, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was orphaned in childhood and brought up in near-poverty. He served in the first World War, surviving the Battle of the Somme, where he lost many of the closest friends he'd ever had.

The Childhood of Famous Americans series, sixty-five years old in 1997, chronicles the early years of famous American men and women in an accessible manner. Each book is faithful in spirit to the values and experiences that influenced the person's development.

The Mighty Child offers an existentialist approach to the theorization and criticism of children’s literature, nuancing the academic claim that children’s literature, specifically defined as ‘didactic’, alienates childhood from adulthood and disempowers its implied child reader. This volume recentres the theoretical debate around the constructions of time and power which characterize conceptions of childhood and adulthood in children’s literature.

This book reads the oeuvre of Toni Morrison — fiction, non-fiction, and other — drawing extensively from her many interviews as well as her primary texts. The author places Morrison in several literary camps, one of them that of public intellectual; another, that of scion within the publishing world. Morrison began with novels that grew naturally from her own childhood in Lorain, Ohio — The Bluest Eye and Sula — but she quickly immersed herself in a myriad of African American lives and often little-known histories.

Education has become dominated by testing, standards, interventions, strategies and political policy. Yet while elements such as these are important, Exploring Education and Childhood contends it is childhood - including its sociology and psychology - that is the vital holistic context for teaching and learning.
Written by a team of specialists who bring both experience of classroom teaching, teacher training, and of rigorous research and scholarship, each chapter examines a topic that is of vital importance to teaching and the work of teachers.