History Childhood

Babita Sharma was raised in a corner shop in Reading and over the counter watched a changing world, from the clientele to the products to the politics of the day. Along with the skills to mop a floor perfectly and stack a shelf, she gained a unique insight into a changing world - and an institution that, despite the creep of supermarkets, online shopping and delivery, has found a way to evolve and survive. The Corner Shop is the remarkable human story of these little institutions that have changed the course of our history.

In his first major work of fiction in more than a decade, Norman Mailer offers what may be his consummate literary endeavor: he has set out to explore the evil of Adolf Hitler. The narrator, a mysterious SS man who is later revealed to be an exceptional presence, takes the young Adolf from birth through his adolescence. En route, reavealing portraits are offered of Hitler's father and mother, sisters, and brothers.

From the acclaimed Modern Library Chronicles comes an exploration of a promising theory that when put to practice wreaked havoc on the world. An expert on communism, Richard Pipes follows the history of the Soviet Union from the 1917 revolution to the Cold War, and finally, to its deterioration and collapse.

Britain's most esteemed scholar of 16th and 17th century literature, Frank Kermode is also a noted author and professor. In this Modern Library Chronicle, he uses the context of the Elizabethan Era to link each of Shakespeare's plays to their probable years of creation. By portraying the bard's England in terms of its society, economy, and arts, Kermode provides an invaluable guide to understanding Shakespeare?s works.

School is out in the summer of 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee. For Frances Robinson, a 15-year-old daydreamer with a crush on her teacher, John T. Scopes, summer vacation promises tennis and Coca-Colas from her father's drug store. But when Frances' father, the school board chairman, has Scopes arrested for teaching evolution, the sleepiest place on earth becomes a hotbed for famous thinkers, including H.L. Mencken, Clarence Darrow, and William Jennings Bryan.

It's the year 1910 in Pownal, Vermont. At 12, Grace and her best friend, Arthur, must leave school and go to work on the looms in the mill. Together they write a secret letter to the Child Labor Board about underage children working in their town, and a few weeks later a man with a camera shows up. It is the famous reformer Lewis Hine, undercover, collecting evidence for the Child Labor Board.

As a five-year-old boy, Pao Lor joined thousands of Hmong who fled for their lives through the jungles of Laos in the aftermath of war. After a difficult and perilous journey that neither of his parents survived, he reached the safety of Thailand, but the young refugee boy’s challenges were only just beginning.

The year is 1939. As war breaks out across Europe, nine-year-old Susie and her older sister Gyll are dispatched to Africa by their mother. Alone on the dusty continent, the sisters find little sympathy in their new guardians, and little to like about their new way of life: patched-up clothes, a 6 o'clock bedtime (a particular indignity), and regular obsessive cleanliness rituals. Their continued presence a nuisance, and overwhelmed by fear of doing the wrong thing, Susie and Gyll seek an ally in Mavis.

Poland suffered terribly under the Nazis. By the end of the war, six million had been killed. On 1 August 1944 Andrew Borowiec, a 15-year-old volunteer in the Resistance, lobbed a grenade from a Warsaw apartment block onto some German soldiers below – he felt he had come of age. Over that summer Andrew faced danger at every moment. Wounded the day after his 16th birthday, he was captured as he lay in a makeshift cellar hospital. Here he learned a lesson: there were decent Germans as well as bad.

Hiding from a cadaverous stalker in 1046 England, Thorston races to unleash the magical charms from the diabolical Book Without Words. Suddenly, with success almost in his grasp, he slumps to the floor, muttering cryptic words. Newbery Award-winning author Avi adds this jewel to his many literary gems.

"We live so far in the backwoods, we have to pump sunshine through hollow logs," young Susanette's daddy says, when asked where the Howell family lives. Their cracker house, which has never been slapped by a loaded paintbrush, sits on a small tobacco farm near the Suwannee River in North Florida, 18 miles from the small town of Live Oak - a town that was, at the turn of the 19th century, the fifth largest town in Florida and the largest inland city in the state.

For American children raised exclusively in wartime - that is, a Cold War containing monolithic communism turned hot in the jungles of Southeast Asia - and the first to grow up with televised combat, Vietnam was predominately a mediated experience. Walter Cronkite was the voice of the conflict, and grim, nightly statistics the most recognizable feature. But as involvement grew, Vietnam affected numerous changes in child life, comparable to the childhood impact of previous conflicts - chiefly the Civil War and World War II - whose intensity and duration also dominated American culture.

The first British major success of World War II was when the Royal Navy forced the preying pocket battleship, Graf Spee, to scuttle at sea. Hitler had ordered a blockade of the British Isles and for some months German U-boats and warships caused havoc among allied merchant shipping carrying vital supplies.

In The Genius of Judy, her remarkable story is revealed as never before, beginning with her as a mother of two searching for purpose outside of her home in 1960s suburban New Jersey. The books she wrote starred regular children with genuine thoughts and problems. But behind those deceptively simple tales, Blume explored the pillars of the growing women’s rights movement, in which girls and women were entitled to careers, bodily autonomy, fulfilling relationships, and even sexual pleasure.

This is the story of Mary and her friends and a garden which had been locked away for 10 years.

Every schoolchild knows the story of how Pocahontas saved the life of Captain John Smith, but that's not the whole story. The Native American princess Pocahontas was born near the end of the sixteenth century as the daughter of Powhatan, chief of the Powhatan confederacy. It was Pocahontas, known as Matoaka by her clan, who interceded on behalf of John Smith in 1608 and then persuaded her father to bring food to the starving colonists at Jamestown.

This book argues that the structure of public education is a key factor in the failure of America's public education system to fulfill the intellectual, civic, and moral aims for which it was created. The book challenges the philosophical basis for the traditional common school model and defends the educational pluralism that most liberal democracies enjoy. Berner provides a unique theoretical pathway that is neither libertarian nor state-focused and a pragmatic pathway that avoids the winner-takes-all approach of many contemporary debates about education.

Merilee leads a Very Ordered Existence: V.O.E. for short. She does not have time for Biswick O'Connor. She does not have time for Miss Veraleen Holliday. He with his annoying factoids and runny nose; she with her shining white shoes as big as sailboats. Both of them strangers who, like the hot desert wind that brings only bad news, blow into town and change everything.

In 1947 Tilly’s grandmother bought an island. Its name is Småhølmene and it sits just off the coast of Norway. At first sight, the island seems bare, hardly more than a collection of rocks rising determinedly out of the water. Glittering and bittersweet, Island Summers lovingly portrays three generations of women and the island that became so irrevocably part of their lives. Now Mor-mor’s great-grandchildren are taking their turn, enjoying endless summers on Småhølmene, continuing the story that was begun over 50 years ago.

In his first book for young adults, best-selling author Walter Mosley deftly weaves historical and speculative fiction into a powerful narrative about the nature of freedom.