Thirteen-year-old Salamanca Tree Hiddle's mother has disappeared. While tracing her steps on a car trip from Ohio to Idaho with her grandparents, Salamanca tells a story to pass the time about a friend named Phoebe Winterbottom whose mother vanished and who received secret messages after her disappearance. One of them read, "Don't judge a man until you have walked two moons in his moccasins." Despite her father's warning that she is "fishing in the air," Salamanca hopes to bring her home. By drawing strength from her Native American ancestry, she is able to face the truth about her mother.
Walk Two Moons won the 1995 Newbery Medal. Reading level: ages 9-12
On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages
This book presents waste as an aesthetic category that introduces an arsy-versy world where detritus is precious. This aesthetic is applied in the second part to etymology, poking through the "paternal dungheaps" of words, and tracing their origins not to Eden but to Babel, puns, and word play. Finally, in the case of Roland the Farter, who performed annually a jump, whistle, and fart before the king of England, we encounter the resistance of the past to historical rationalization. Roland moons at us across the centuries, deflating our attempts to become one flesh with the past, and placing laughter at the heart of knowing.
Winner of the 1980 United Daily Literature Competition, this novel about love, betrayal, family life, and the power of tradition in small-town Taiwan was an instant bestseller when first published in Taiwan. At once a bittersweet romance and a vividly detailed portrait of life in a southern Taiwanese coastal town in the 1970s, A Thousand Moons on a Thousand Rivers captures the intimacy of agricultural life in the midst of an increasingly industrialized society. At the heart of the story is Zhenguan, a sensitive young woman whose coming of age is influenced by new experiences in the city, the wisdom of her elders, and her strong, unique identity.
Provides information about the planets in the solar system, listing facts about planet sizes, names, orbits, moons, and composition, and discussing how the planets are observed and studied.
Readers will learn the basics of the eigth planet from the sun, including Neptune's most interesting features, its position in the solar system, its composition and atmospheric conditions, its moons, and how scientists have learned about it over time. Color photos and diagrams enhance understanding of the text.
