An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century & the First World War. The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, NY, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. Almost magically, the line between fantasy & historical fact, between real & imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J.P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud & Emiliano Zapata slip in & out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family & other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler & a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.

    Dynasty recounts this golden age of baseball, when DiMaggio, Mantle, and Maris were in their heyday. 8-page photo insert.

    One day while he's up there reading, he meets Wingman, the most wonderful hero a boy could have. Wingman has a cape, gray feathers, and armor, but best of all, he's Chinese.

    Arnold Barton has contributed to Letters from the Promised Land: Swedes in America, 1840–1914 as an author. H. Arnold Barton, professor of history at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, is the author of The Search for Ancestors: A Swedish-American Family Saga, and Scandinavia in the Revolutionary Era, 1760–1815.