Author: Gary D. Schmidt
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547612133
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 308
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Book Description
In a desperate attempt for survival, a peaceful civilization on a faraway planet besieged by a dark lord sends its most precious gift across the cosmos into the lunchbox of Tommy Pepper, sixth grader, of Plymouth, Massachusetts.
Author: Poonam Mistry
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781849767811
Category : Children's stories
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
New into paperback! HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED HOW THE STARS CAME TO BE? The Fisherman's Daughter loved to dance in the sunlight, and bathe in the glow of the moon, but when the moon disappeared for a few nights each month, she worried about her father and how he would find his way home from the sea in the darkness of the night. One night the sun finds her sobbing and so he takes one of his rays and smashes it onto the ground, creating the stars and gives the girl the task of putting them into the dark night sky. This beautifully illustrated story gives us a new folk tale, and a new way to look up at the night sky.
Author: Todd Neff
Publisher: Earthview Media
ISBN: 0982958315
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 482
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Book Description
How did a company best known for its glass jars hit a comet 83 million miles away? The answer involves technical expertise, heroic dedication, an industrial giant’s push to modernize, Hitler’s V-2 rocket, speakers destined for a Hall & Oates summer concert tour, and the search for life’s origins. In “From Jars to the Stars: How Ball Came to Build a Comet-Hunting Machine,” award-winning science journalist Todd Neff presents an inside look at the backgrounds and motivations of the men and women who actually create the spacecraft on which the American space program rides. A timeless story of science, engineering, politics and business strategy intertwining to bring success in the brutal business of space, “From Jars to the Stars” is a lively account of one of mankind’s great modern achievements. It is a story about people, foremost those on the Deep Impact mission, which smashed a spacecraft into the comet Tempel 1. “From Jars to the Stars” explores the improbable beginnings of Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., which built the comet hunter, and the evolution of the American space agency that funded it. The book begins with the story of a group of University of Colorado students who built a “sun seeker” for the noses of sounding rockets studying the home star. The pathbreaking device sparked the creation and development of both Ball Aerospace and the University of Colorado’s formidable Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. “From Jars to the Stars” describes how Ed Ball, president of the Ball Brothers Company of Muncie, Indiana, ended up owning a space business in Boulder, Colorado, through a combination of strategic intent and serendipity. Neff explores the personalities and the technologies behind Ball’s pioneering spacecraft, the Orbiting Solar Observatory launched in 1962. The Ball orbiter prepares the ground for Deep Impact, showing readers how much—and how little—changed across four decades of American space exploration. Neff goes on to show how Ball Aerospace evolved into an organization capable of building seven Hubble Space Telescope instruments as well as the comet hunter at the center of the story. The author describes the development of the American space enterprise as it went from emphasizing big-budget “gigabuck” missions to “faster, better, cheaper” spacecraft of the sort Ball specialized in. Neff pays special mind to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the world leader in interplanetary space exploration and Ball’s partner on Deep Impact. It was often a rocky marriage. Throughout, Neff makes clear that robotic space missions are indeed manned: the people just happen to stay on the ground.
Author: Jerrie Oughton
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780395779385
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 36
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Book Description
A retelling of the Navaho legend that explains the patterns of the stars in the sky.
Author: Simon Van Booy
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781567927030
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 275
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Book Description
A family saga--told in a captivating narrative that leaps forwards and backwards in time--of one family's struggle to survive in the rural United States over 100 years. Carol was thirteen when her daddy lost her in a game of cards. One year later--pregnant and with nowhere to go--she is taken in by Bessie and Martha, who run a secret refuge for "lost women." Fifty years on in the same small Kentucky town, Carol's thirteen-year-old grandson rides his BMX and watches wrestling, mesmerized by 1980s excess, while his community fights to stay employed in factories and on farms. Simon Van Booy has woven the many struggles and small triumphs of three generations of a single Kentucky family into an intimate portrayal of American life that includes the Depression, war, faith, the hardship of women, racial prejudice, and rural disenfranchisement. Van Booy captures the distinctive voices of each generation, time and again revealing the sacred bonds of family and friendship in times of crisis. With stark, poetic clarity, Night Came with Many Stars is a captivating journey through one century that reveals an America rarely seen.
Author: Dava Sobel
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143111345
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Dava Sobel, the "inspiring" (People), little-known true story of women's landmark contributions to astronomy A New York Times Book Review Notable Book Named one of the best books of the year by NPR, The Economist, Smithsonian, Nature, and NPR's Science Friday Nominated for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award "A joy to read.” —The Wall Street Journal In the mid-nineteenth century, the Harvard College Observatory began employing women as calculators, or “human computers,” to interpret the observations their male counterparts made via telescope each night. At the outset this group included the wives, sisters, and daughters of the resident astronomers, but soon the female corps included graduates of the new women's colleges—Vassar, Wellesley, and Smith. As photography transformed the practice of astronomy, the ladies turned from computation to studying the stars captured nightly on glass photographic plates. The “glass universe” of half a million plates that Harvard amassed over the ensuing decades—through the generous support of Mrs. Anna Palmer Draper, the widow of a pioneer in stellar photography—enabled the women to make extraordinary discoveries that attracted worldwide acclaim. They helped discern what stars were made of, divided the stars into meaningful categories for further research, and found a way to measure distances across space by starlight. Their ranks included Williamina Fleming, a Scottish woman originally hired as a maid who went on to identify ten novae and more than three hundred variable stars; Annie Jump Cannon, who designed a stellar classification system that was adopted by astronomers the world over and is still in use; and Dr. Cecilia Helena Payne, who in 1956 became the first ever woman professor of astronomy at Harvard—and Harvard’s first female department chair. Elegantly written and enriched by excerpts from letters, diaries, and memoirs, The Glass Universe is the hidden history of the women whose contributions to the burgeoning field of astronomy forever changed our understanding of the stars and our place in the universe.
Author: Von Del Chamberlain
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
Author: Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811229394
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 152
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Book Description
An ethereal new collection that is “visceral with intellection” (David Lau) Winner of the Bollingen Prize Finalist for the National Book Award Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Finalist for the PEN Open Book Award Finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Prize A Treatise on Stars extends Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s intensely phenomenological poetics to the fiery bodies in a “field of heaven…outside spacetime.” Long, lyrical lines map a geography of interconnected, interdimensional intelligence that exists in all places and sentient beings. These are poems of deep listening and patient waiting, open to the cosmic loom, the channeling of daily experience and conversation, gestalt and angels, dolphins and a star-visitor beneath a tree. Family, too, becomes a type of constellation, a thought “a form of organized light.” All of our sense are activated by Berssenbrugge’s radiant lines, giving us a poetry of keen perception grounded in the physical world, where “days fill with splendor, and earth offers its pristine beauty to an expanding present.”
Author: Ilan Stavans
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781632063021
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 400
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Book Description
In this rich, eye-opening, and uplifting digital anthology, dozens of esteemed writers, poets, and artists from more than thirty countries send literary dispatches from life during the pandemic. Net proceeds benefit booksellers in need. As our world is transformed by the coronavirus pandemic, writers offer a powerful antidote to the fearful confines of isolation: a window onto lives and corners of the world beyond our own. In Mauritius, a journalist contends with denialism and mourns the last days of summer, lost to the lockdown. In Paris, a writer struggles to protect his young son from fear. In Chile, protesters who prevailed against tear gas and rubber bullets are now halted by a virus. In Queens, after thirteen-hour shifts in the ER, a doctor dons running shoes and makes the long jog home. And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again takes its title from the last line of Dante's Inferno, when the poet and his guide emerge from hell to once again behold the beauty of the heavens. In that spirit, the stories, essays, poems, and artwork in this collection--from beloved authors including Jhumpa Lahiri, Mario Vargas Llosa, Eavan Boland, Daniel Alarcón, Jon Lee Anderson, Claire Messud, Ariel Dorfman, and many more--detail the harrowing experiences of life in the pandemic, while pointing toward a less isolated future. Together, they comprise a profound global portrait of the defining moment of our time, and send a clarion call for solidarity across borders. Our literary culture depends on bookstores--and those irreplaceable sources of conversation and community, of inspiration and solace, have been decimated by the lockdown. Net proceeds from And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again will go to the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, which helps the passionate booksellers we readers depend upon.
Author: Alfred Bester
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
ISBN: 9780575094192
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
One of the very best must-read SF novels of all time.
