This entertaining guide is presented in an easy-to-understand format, covering topics on everything from the winemaking process, wine vocabulary, and red wine versus white wine, to tasting and selecting wines for any occasion. With a helpful glossary and brief topic-by-topic chapters, this accessible, snobbery-free guide is the perfect companion for purchasing wines and navigating your way skillfully at parties, dinners, wine tastings, wine shops, and more. Learn how to:Understand the origins of wine and the process of making it Know and speak the language of wine with terms like tannins, oaks, residual sugar, dry, medium- and full-bodied, and more Properly taste and drink wines   Choose wines to complement foods Save money by making choices that suit your palate

    Now this new edition of The Read-Aloud Handbook imparts the benefits, rewards, and importance of reading aloud to children of a new generation. Supported by delightful anecdotes as well as the latest research, The Read-Aloud Handbook offers proven techniques and strategies—and the reasoning behind them—for helping children discover the pleasures of reading and setting them on the road to becoming lifelong readers.

     Whether it is Plato's lost city of Atlantis, a technological advanced utopia that sank into the ocean "in a single day and night of misfortune"; the colony of Roanoke, whose early American settlers were swallowed up in the wild forest lands of the unexplored continent, or the Ancient American Explorers, who managed to arrive to the New World 2,000 years before Columbus, the disappearance of these societies is as cryptic as it is implausible. This book will look at cultures of the 10 greatest lost civilizations in history. Some were millenia ahead their neighbors, such as the Indus Valley Civilization, which had better city planning in 3,000 B.C. than any European capital in the 18th century. Others left behind baffling mysteries, such as the Anasazi, whose cliff-dwelling houses were so inaccessible that every member of society would have to be an expert-level rock climber. It will also at explanations as to how massive societies that lasted for centuries can disappear without a trace. Did the builders of the pyramids handy craftsmen whose method of transporting massive stones are still unexplainable simply disappear or were they part of an advanced alien race, as conspiracy theorists assert? Was the Kingdom of Aksum really the keeper of the Ark of the Covenant, and did this lead to their downfall? Whatever the nature of their disappearance, these lost civilizations offer many lessons for us today -- even the greatest of societies can disappear, and that includes us.

    In all the current highly publicized debates about creationism and its descendant "intelligent design," there is an element of the controversy that is rarely mentioned—the "evidence," the empirical truth of evolution by natural selection. Even Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, while extolling the beauty of evolution and examining case studies, have not focused on the evidence itself. Yet the proof is vast, varied, and magnificent, drawn from many different fields of science. Scientists are observing species splitting into two and are finding more and more fossils capturing change in the past—dinosaurs that have sprouted feathers, fish that have grown limbs. Why Evolution Is True weaves together the many threads of modern work in genetics, paleontology, geology, molecular biology, and anatomy that demonstrate the "indelible stamp" of the processes first proposed by Darwin. In crisp, lucid prose accessible to a wide audience, Why Evolution Is True dispels common misunderstandings and fears about evolution and clearly confirms that this amazing process of change has been firmly established as a scientific truth.

    

    The truth is that the solutions have been available for a long time -- in the writings of our Founding Fathers -- carefully set forth in this timely book.In The 5000 Year Leap: A Miracle That Changed the World, Discover the 28 Principles of Freedom our Founding Fathers said must be understood and perpetuated by every people who desire peace, prosperity, and freedom. Learn how adherence to these beliefs during the past 200 years has brought about more progress than was made in the previous 5000 years. These 28 Principles include The Genius of Natural Law, Virtuous and Moral Leaders, Equal Rights--Not Equal Things, and Avoiding the Burden of Debt. Published by the National Center for Constitut

    The author maintains that the last two decades have seen the emergence of a mass alternative nation, populated by struggling screen writers, oddball thrift stores, indie rockers and thousands of coffee houses.

    It transcends the years, the standings, and all other distractions. And thanks to the countless remarkable football games between Michigan and Ohio State--and hundreds of thousands of devoted alumni and followers--the rivalry is now an enormous cultural event.

    Under the singular and brilliant lens that Ulrich brings to this study, ordinary household goods--Indian baskets, spinning wheels, a chimneypiece, a cupboard, a niddy-noddy, bed coverings, silk embroidery, a pocketbook, a linen tablecloth, a coverlet and a rose blanket, and an unfinished stocking--provide the key to a transformed understanding of cultural encounter, frontier war, Revolutionary politics, international commerce, and early industrialization in America. We discover how ideas about cloth and clothing affected relations between English settlers and their Algonkian neighbors. We see how an English production system based on a clear division of labor—men doing the weaving and women the spinning--broke down in the colonial setting, becoming first marginalized, then feminized, then politicized, and how the new system both prepared the way for and was sustained by machine-powered spinning.Pulling these divergent threads together into a rich and revealing tapestry of --the age of homespun,--Ulrich demonstrates how ordinary objects reveal larger economic and social structures, and, in particular, how early Americans and their descendants made, used, sold, and saved textiles in order to assert identities, shape relationships, and create history.

    Author Daniel Pool provides countless intriguing details (did you know that the "plums" in Christmas plum pudding were actually raisins?) on the Church of England, sex, Parliament, dinner parties, country house visiting, and a host of other aspects of nineteenth-century English life—both "upstairs" and "downstairs."An illuminating glossary gives at a glance the meaning and significance of terms ranging from "ague" to "wainscoting," the specifics of the currency system, and a lively host of other details and curiosities of the day.

    These are the stories of life inside the courtroom. They are sometimes funny, often moving and ultimately life-changing. How can you defend a child-abuser you suspect to be guilty? What do you say to someone sentenced to ten years who you believe to be innocent? What is the law and why do we need it? And why do they wear wigs? From the criminals to the lawyers, the victims, witnesses and officers of the law, here is the best and worst of humanity, all struggling within a broken system which would never be off the front pages if the public knew what it was really like. This is a first-hand account of the human cost of the criminal justice system, and a guide to how we got into this mess, The Secret Barrister shows you what it’s really like and why it really matters.

    Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn examine the controversy and criticism over how our nation's history should be taught, culminating in the debate about National History Standards. The book chronicles a media war spearheaded by conservatives from National Endowment for the Humanities veteran Lynne Cheney to Rush Limbaugh, posing questions with regard to history as it relates to national identity. What, the authors ask, is our objective in teaching history to children? Is the role of schools, textbooks, and museums to instill patriotism? Do we revise and reinterpret the past to tell stories that reflect present-day values? If so, who should articulate these values? Wonderfully clear, timely in its intentions, History on Trial provides a thoughtful account of the ways in which Americans have, since the beginning of the Republic, perceived and argued about our past.

    But awakened one morning by the crackle of musket fire, Horwitz starts filing front-line dispatches again this time from a war close to home, and to his own heart.Propelled by his boyhood passion for the Civil War, Horwitz embarks on a search for places and people still held in thrall by America's greatest conflict. The result is an adventure into the soul of the unvanquished South, where the ghosts of the Lost Cause are resurrected through ritual and remembrance.In Virginia, Horwitz joins a band of 'hardcore' reenactors who crash-diet to achieve the hollow-eyed look of starved Confederates; in Kentucky, he witnesses Klan rallies and calls for race war sparked by the killing of a white man who brandishes a rebel flag; at Andersonville, he finds that the prison's commander, executed as a war criminal, is now exalted as a martyr and hero; and in the book's climax, Horwitz takes a marathon trek from Antietam to Gettysburg to Appomattox in the company of Robert Lee Hodge, an eccentric pilgrim who dubs their odyssey the 'Civil Wargasm.'Written with Horwitz's signature blend of humor, history, and hard-nosed journalism, Confederates in the Attic brings alive old battlefields and new ones 'classrooms, courts, country bars' where the past and the present collide, often in explosive ways. Poignant and picaresque, haunting and hilarious, it speaks to anyone who has ever felt drawn to the mythic South and to the dark romance of the Civil War.

    In THE IRISH AMERICANS, he caps his decades of writing and teaching with this magisterial history of the Irish experience in the United States. Although more than 30 million Americans claim Irish ancestry, no other general account of Irish American history has been published since the 1960s. Dolan draws on his own original research and much other recent scholarship to weave an insightful, colorful narrative. He follows the Irish from their first arrival in the American colonies through the bleak days of the potato famine that brought millions of starving immigrants; the trials of ethnic prejudice and "No Irish Need Apply;" the rise of Irish political power and the heyday of Tammany politics; to the election of John F. Kennedy as president, a moment of triumph when an Irish American ascended to the highest office in the land.Dolan evokes the ghastly ships crowded with men and women fleeing the potato blight; the vibrant life of Catholic parishes in cities like New York and Chicago; the world of machine politics, where ward bosses often held court in the local saloon. Rich in colorful detail, balanced in judgment, and the most comprehensive work of its kind yet published, THE AMERICAN IRISH is a lasting achievement by a master historian that will become a must-have volume for any American with an interest in the Irish-American heritage.

    Lowry covers stances, body movement, striking, combination techniques and techniques with a partner.