Books with author Bill Fleischman

The man with the spats rolled up his sleeves and proceeded to pluck a polished red billiard ball out of thin air. Presto! It vanished. Abracadabra! It reappeared. It turned white. it blushed red again. VoiIá! Suddenly there were four billiard balls between this amazing man's fingers.I was stunned. All of this was happening right under my nose. And there was more. He flipped the deck into falling waterfalls of cards, spun them into fans, and thrust a sword through a shower of cards to impale the seven of diamonds -- selected a moment before.I was dazzled. The moment he finished his act and ushered us gawkers back onto the sidewalk, I knew what I wanted to be. Someone else could be president of the United States.I wanted to be a magician.

"There's been so much tomfool nonsense told about McBroom's wonderful one-acre farm?." It's a good thing Farmer Josh McBroom is back, setting matters straight in this pair of hilarious, homespun, illustrated chapter books, issued in an easy-to-read paperback format for the very first time!What better way to find out how it all began than by starting at the beginning-as McBroom, his wife, and their 11 redheaded children pack up their homestead and head West!

Josh McBroom, his wife Melissa, and their rather large brood of children seem to be facing catastrophe when a freak twister comes along and uproots all of the marvelous topsoil from their magical one-acre farm, but the wily and resourceful McBroom follows the twister (turned red because of all the ripe tomato plants it has ripped up, and leaving a ready tomato-flecked trail to follow) and tracks down his soil miles away. It looks like it will be impossible to cart it all back, as the struggling farmer doesn't have the money to hire all the trucks necessary, but on the way to and from the pile of topsoil the McBrooms come across a whole strange hassle of critters that have been deposited by the tornado, rare beasts that they reckon no one hither or yon has seen, and a plan is hatched to start up a zoo in the hole left by the farm, charge admission and get the topsoil back.

See him? That little tramp twitching a postage stamp of a mustache, politely lifting his bowler hat, and leaning on a bamboo cane with the confidence of a gentleman? A slapstick comedian, he blazed forth as the brightest movie star in the Hollywood heavens. Everyone knew Charlie—Charlie Chaplin. When he was five years old he was pulled onstage for the first time, and he didn't step off again for almost three-quarters of a century. Escaping the London slums of his tragic childhood, he took Hollywood like a conquistador with a Cockney accent. With his gift for pantomime in films that had not yet acquired vocal cords, he was soon rubbing elbows with royalty and dining on gold plates in his own Beverly Hills mansion. He was the most famous man on earth—and he was regarded as the funniest. Still is. . . . He comes to life in these pages. It's an astonishing rags-to-riches saga of an irrepressible kid whose childhood was dealt from the bottom of the deck. Abundantly illustrated.