Books with author Joan J Harris

Gold? Seriously? Brad and Kristen are on a family trip when they suddenly find themselves flung into the past.... again. This time, even their careful preparation and research can’t help them, and it’s only by sheer luck that they realize they’ve stumbled into a ‘golden’ opportunity—and the first discovery of gold in North America.When they learn that the land-owner, Reed—who doesn’t yet know about the gold—is considering selling his farm, Kristen and Brad do what they can to dissuade him from this plan. And they succeed.Problem solved, right?Wrong. That’s where the kidnapping comes in, and Kristen and Brad are separated, each accompanied by one of Reed’s children.As usual, adventure and danger are in the mix when the Everhearts are on one of their time-travel experiences.

The major fantasy debut from bestselling author Joanne Harris, now in paperback.Seven o'clock on a Monday morning, five hundred years after the end of the world, and goblins have been at the cellar again. Not that anyone would admit it was goblins. In Maddy Smith’s world, order rules. Chaos, old gods, faeries, magic—all of these were supposedly vanquished centuries ago. But Maddy knows that a small bit of magic has survived. The “ruinmark” she was born with on her palm proves it—and makes the other villagers fearful and suspicious that she is a witch.But the mysterious traveler One-Eye sees Maddy’s mark not as a defect, but a destiny. And Maddy will need every scrap that One-Eye can teach her about runes, cantrips, and glamours—every ounce of magic she can command—if she is to survive that destiny. * “Harris creates a glorious and complex world replete with rune-based magical spells, bickering gods, exciting adventures and difficult moral issues.”—Publishers Weekly, Starred

12- year old Cory Davidson loved the game of baseball. He loved to catch the ball. He loved to run the bases. He loved to hit the ball. But Cory begins to struggle and the pressures of life and his circumstances were not always leaning in his favor. His parents had divorced and him and his sister(Toya) had to move in with their Nana. He meets a friend, an old man name Mr. AL who began to teach Cory the lessons of life and baseball.Will Cory be able to get back to playing the game he loves at a higher level?Or will he fold like a pair of pants and put the game of baseball on the shelf forever.

Have you ever felt out of place? Like you are not important or special? Have you ever wondered why God made you the way you are? Well, so does Jed, the great, great whale. This story takes us on an underwater adventure with a whale named Jed, who is a very big whale! Jed grows bigger and bigger by the day and becomes twice the size of all the other whales in the sea. In fact, he becomes the biggest creature in the entire ocean! Jed is no monster, however; this big whale has an even bigger heart. Even after being picked on and mistreated, Jed never gives up and believes God made him special for a reason. Jed discovers God has an amazing mission for him and that he was made extra big for this special reason. As you embark on this journey with Jed, he wants you to remember that God never, ever makes a mistake. Just like Jed the whale, God loves you and has made you to do big things for Him.

Any devout baseball enthusiast will appreciate the creative metrics that Dr. Harris has applied to the careers of young black ballplayers whose big-league life (in the cases examined here) began a good six or eight years after Jackie Robinson’s debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers. The “study group” is mostly drawn from Post Cereal cards that Harris lovingly collected as a boy. Some of his collection’s most promising members had dropped off the map when he revisited the cards decades later, and he grew curious. Black players, especially, seemed abundant in this unhappy set of strange disappearances. The project started, therefore, in a thesis: as of about 1960, making it in the Major Leagues remained much harder for African-Americans than for Caucasians.Statistical review included not only a comparison of black and white batting averages, Earned Run Averages, and other standard metrics, but also an exploration of environmental conditions, such as how often players endured the disruption of being traded and how much time they spent in inactivity between starts. There are two sides to every story, of course, and Harris takes pains to underscore the presumptions and blind spots in his own arguments; but the tendency for black players to encounter more obstacles and fewer rewards often emerges rather powerfully.As Dr. Harris attempts to refine these findings with additional research into sportswriters’ accounts and other sources, he unveils a theory never succinctly proposed by any source: that the prejudices in question were not simply a conditioned reflex to skin color, but that the “anything goes” baseball of the Negro Leagues made coaches and managers of the Fifties’ systematized, highly controlled Major League game very suspicious and uncomfortable. Members of the Caucasian “brain trust” feared being shown up or drawn beyond the bounds of their expertise. This stylistic prejudice—which lay close to the heart of the game’s racial prejudice, Harris believes—appears nowhere more clearly than in the emphasis of the home run. Aaron, Mays, Robinson, Banks... they all rose to glory on an impressive wave of homering; but potential superstars like Pinson, Altman, Al Smith, and Floyd Robinson may have been ruinously infected by Home Run Fever.Such a conclusion, because it removes prejudice from the purely ideological corner of racism and chooses to view it as a complex puzzle—because, that is, it doesn’t confront us with a simplistic “good guy/bad guy” scenario—will disappoint many of today’s social critics who want to cast all racial questions in a “good vs. evil” mold. Dr. Harris stresses, however, that he is uninterested in being the “white scholar trying to advertise… moral enlightenment” in a grand feat of virtue-signaling. Referring to prejudices that beset his own son’s baseball experience—not racial, but nevertheless severe—he asserts instead, “I am a father who once felt the anguish of looking on helplessly as his son’s confidence was sabotaged—and who has re-aggravated that anguish in pondering the young lives of a few talented men now gone from this world.”The book thus ends up being a personal odyssey: an odd, even unique evolution for a work on sports history. But then, baseball is a unique game. It bonds fathers and sons, and it breaks down barriers that ordinarily separate our communities. If John Harris’s approach defies the expectations of sportswriting by confusing its subjects with our sons and our brothers, does it not also therein suggest the only possible solution to the problem of racial bigotry?

In 'Last Train to Dogtown', Neil K. is a bestselling author, feted and acclaimed wherever he goes. Until the evening his train maroons him in the middle of nowhere, and after wandering into a bar, he is confronted by a group of characters who are all strangely familiar...In 'The Little Mermaid', every Tuesday is reserved for Freak Day at the pool, when the disabled, the impaired and the elderly come to bathe without disturbing the able-bodied. Sad Flipper, so deformed and ungainly in her wheelchair, is as agile and graceful as a dolphin in the water. But will she be tempted to sacrifice her uniqueness for love?Part of the Storycuts series, these two short stories were previously published in the collection Jigs & Reels.