"Mom didn’t think it was funny when I took off my leg at school, put it in my locker, and then tied a rag around my stump with fake blood on it. After that, though, the kids at school pretty much knew if anyone was going to be cracking jokes about my leg, it was gonna be me."
So says thirteen-year-old Alastair Hudson in this darkly humorous comingof- age story about the relationship between Alastair—who calls himself Stump to draw shocked attention to his missing leg—and his father, who left the family after the accident that resulted in the amputation five years earlier. ...

First LifeThis is an illustrated and easy-to-read survey of the first life on Earth for young students, explaining how the functions that made life possible have developed over the years. Coverage includes the first tellurians, exoskeletons, invertebrates, vertebrates and much more.

Tom Swift & His Motor Boat

Besides entering some terrific races with his boat, Tom has a fantastic encounter with an aeronaut, in a reissue of an adventure first published more than eighty years ago.

The Secret of the Great Pyramid

Nine years ago, French architect Jean-Pierre Houdin became obsessed by the centuries-old mystery of how the Great Pyramid was built. For ten hours a day, he labored at his computer to create exquisitely detailed 3-D models of the interior of the Great Pyramid. After five years of effort, the images rotating on his computer screen provided evidence of an astonishing secret.

Beyond the Zonules of Zinn: A Fantastic Journey Through Your Brain

In his latest book, David Bainbridge combines an otherworldly journey through the central nervous system with an accessible and entertaining account of how the brain's anatomy has often misled anatomists about its function. Bainbridge uses the structure of the brain to set his book apart from the many volumes that focus on brain function. He shows that for hundreds of years, natural philosophers have been interested in the gray matter inside our skulls, but all they had to go on was its structure.