Books with author Katherine Brown

Down in the tropical blue sea lives a spectacular coral reef that is home to myriad fish and other creatures. Travel on a breathtaking journey over a reef crest, to a lagoon that sparkles at night, and on through mangrove roots with a baby coral searching for a home. Flashlight fish, feather duster worms, and sea squirts are just a few of the amazing animals you will encounter. A fact-filled text accompanies this luminous journey through the sea and introduces children to some of the dangers that threaten the coral reef ecosystem. Katherine Brown-Wing's illustrations invite you on a brilliant visual adventure you'll never forget.

From Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Boo, a landmark work of narrative nonfiction that tells the dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the twenty-first century's great, unequal cities. In this brilliantly written, fast-paced book, based on three years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human. Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees "a fortune beyond counting" in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption. With a little luck, her sensitive, beautiful daughter - Annawadi's "most-everything girl" - will soon become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest Annawadians, like Kalu, a fifteen-year-old scrap-metal thief, believe themselves inching closer to the good lives and good times they call "the full enjoy." But then Abdul the garbage sorter is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and a global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy turn brutal. As the tenderest individual hopes intersect with the greatest global truths, the true contours of a competitive age are revealed. And so, too, are the imaginations and courage of the people of Annawadi. With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects human beings to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century's hidden worlds, and into the lives of people impossible to forget

First published in 1955, Katherine Briggs' story about the hobgoblin whose charge it is to protect and influence the unloving Puritan family who come to live at Widford Manor after the Civil War is a classic of English children's writing. Hobberdy Dick's benign works in favour of the characters carry the story from sadness to delight; but it is his character as ancient guardian that holds the reader. For the true conclusion is that sanctioned by fairy lore: the offer of mortal cloth for Dick to wear which will bring him eternal release from servitude. All these strands are intertwined with wonderful ease. Katharine Briggs's absorption in 'the personnel of fairyland' confers a naturalness to the supernatural goings-on, while the precise attention she gives to its setting reinforces this. Much of her youth had been spent in Scotland, but in 1939 she had bought a house in Burford and her love of the Cotswolds, with their green roads, their barrows, and their standing stones bring accuracy and, above all, warmth to her portrayal of both landscape and people.

Annawadi is a slum at the edge of Mumbai Airport, in the shadow of shining new luxury hotels. Its residents are garbage recyclers, construction workers and economic migrants, all of them living in the hope that a small part of India's booming future will eventually be theirs. But when a crime rocks the slum community and global recession and terrorism shocks the city, tensions over religion, caste, sex, power, and economic envy begin to turn brutal. As Boo gets to know those who dwell at Mumbai's margins, she evokes an extraordinarily vivid and vigorous group of individuals flourishing against the odds amid the complications, corruptions and gross inequalities of the new India. About the Author Katherine Boo is an investigative journalist focusing on matters of poverty and opportunity. A staff writer at the New Yorker magazine since 2001, she was previously a writer and editor at the Washington Post. Among the honours her work has received are a MacArthur Foundation 'Genius' Grant, a National Magazine Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. She is married to Sunil Khilnani, political historian and director of the King's India Institute in London. This is her first book.

Humorous and full of action. A fantastic two book combo! Book 3 and 4 of School is Scary follow Bailey through Second and Third Grade adventures. Don't worry if you missed Book 1 or 2, jump right in with this quirky group of friends as they learn how to deal with a new student in Second Grade Stinks. Then, in Third Grade's Terrible Trip, take a bus ride with Bailey and friends on a bumpy adventure for their very first field trip ever.

Katherine Boo's first book "Beyond the Beautiful Forever" rises beyond journalism as it follows the life of a group of youngsters for a while in a slum called Annawadi near Mumbai's Sahar airport. The book has gathered great reviews already. Joseph Lelyveld called it the "best piece of journalism to come out of India in the last fifty years". Shashi Tharoor and Jonathan Shinin, the editor of Caravan, have very high praise for it. The lives of the children are blighted by the utter lack of prospects and their knowledge of it. That the stunted rag picker, Sunil, has a spurt of growth in the brief months when he turns into a thief, tells us of the kind of deprivation these children live in. They are in danger from corrupt policemen, their means of livelihood, and, some, even from their parents. These children are not free agents; they are prey. All this will not surprise an Indian reader. What surprises is that the view of life is entirely from the children's eyes. The book gets its power by entering their minds, where the awful circumstances of their lives almost appear ordinary. This unswerving viewpoint brings us to understand that they are not statistics, they are individuals, with individual motivations and failures. In doing this the book rises beyond journalism to reach towards the psychological understanding of a novel. Katherine Boo makes an appearance only in the last chapter where she writes about the methods that enabled her to enter the minds of children and teenagers who are not very expressive. This too is a fascinating insight, although to a different world: the motives and methods of a Pulitzer-winning journalist.