Books published by publisher Firefly Books

"What, my dear Lady Disdain! Are you yet living?" These famous lines from Shakespeare's comedy Much Ado About Nothing delightfully show the verbal sparring between the reluctant lovers, Beatrice and Benedick who are happily brought together at the end by the schemes of their friends. And, no story is complete without at least one evil character, Don John, who unsuccessfully tries to tear apart the wedding plans of Hero and Claudio, the other lovers in this sparkling tale. Written in rhyming couplets, Much Ado About Nothing, the eighth book in this successful series, captures all the exciting elements of the original story, and is truly a delightful read for both adult and child. Lois Burdett has been a teacher at Hamlet Public School in Stratford, Ontario, for over twenty years and her expertise in bringing Shakespeare to life for children as young as seven is reflected in the children's clever insights and wonderful drawings which complement the play. Her success has resulted in an ever-increasing demand for workshops as far afield as Europe and Australia where she instructs educators on how they too can familiarize young children with Shakespeare. From the Foreword by Denzel Washington "[Lois Burdett's] delightfully entertaining text is complemented by her students' thoughtful interpretations and charming artwork which make Much Ado About Nothing come alive in a whole new way."

The I Want to Be... series gives young children a realistic insight into the working day of adults. Easy-to-read captions and color photographs of women and men from different cultures help children understand what's involved in each occupation. Young readers learn to respect the importance of doing a job well and appreciate the contributions these workers make to our life and the world around us. These books are perfect for reading alone or in group story times. They are certain to spark questions and encourage dialogue and prompt children to learn more about these occupations.

A richly illustrated book about the big machines kids love. Kids love big machines: watching real machines do real work, playing with toy machines, reading and talking about all kinds of machines. The bigger, the better! The Great Big Book of Mighty Machines is one big and mighty book about the massive moving machines that kids love: monster trucks, dump trucks, fire trucks, tractors, big bikes, cranes, trains and airplanes! One big bundle of mightiness. Vivid color photographs of machines at work jump off the page. Large, easy-to-read type describes the machines, their parts and what they are used for. Red arrows point out special features. Glossaries explain essential terms, and suggested activities, like quizzes, "what to draw" and "pick the picture," add to the fun.

An illustrated guide to observing, catching and releasing dragonflies. Dragonflies are as fascinating as they are beautiful. In this book readers will learn how to observe them in the wild and have them hover as close as their nose! Dragonflies and their close relatives, damselflies, have been around longer than dinosaurs and can be found on all continents except Antarctica. One dragonfly species makes the longest migration of any insect in the world. Dragonflies can be found in wetlands, forests, fields and even backyards. This illustrated guide to dragonflies and damselflies is packed with all the facts about what they are, what they eat, and what eats them. Their life cycle is explored, beginning from eggs that hatch into wingless nymphs that live underwater and breathe through gills. With the help of this detailed guide featuring close-up photographs, readers will learn tips and tricks for how to properly catch, hold and let a dragonfly go. An identification section allows the reader to quickly and easily identify the most popular species and illustrates how each is unique, from darners to clubtails, spiketails to cruisers, and emeralds to skimmers.

Perhaps the best-known of Shakespeare's tragedies, Hamlet has all the ingredients for a gripping story: revenge and power, familial love and betrayal, dramatic sword fights, dark spooky scenes. Once again Lois Burdett has woven her own brand of magic by transforming Shakespeare's complex verse into rhyming couplets. She has created a version of Hamlet especially for children, even as young as seven, and one that readers of all ages will enjoy. At the appropriately named Hamlet Elementary School in Stratford, Ontario, where Burdett has taught for over 20 years, her students have created wonderful drawings of Hamlet to illustrate Burdett's fluid rhymes. The students' interpretations are vivid evidence of Burdett's clever ability to bring Shakespeare's complex characters and intricate plots to life for young people.

Winner of American Library Association award: Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Adult Readers: 2010 An illustrated guide to skateboarding skills and techniques. Skateboarding is more than a sport; it is a passion and way of life driven by those who love to push the limits of gravity and inertia while bending the notions of social acceptability. The Skateboarding Field Manual addresses both the intricacies of the sport and the intangibles of its culture. Skateboard enthusiast and journalist Ryan Stutt provides outstanding advice, which ranges from how to stand on your board and how to fall without causing injuries to how to perform grinds, slides and flips. This comprehensive reference is simply the very best manual on the sport of skateboarding. There are 33 maneuvers and tricks for beginners to intermediates, all illustrated with over 350 custom color photographs by skateboarding photographer Harry Gils. Other features include: A 12-page primer on skate culture, including history, deck art, skateboarding in the media and the importance of homemade skate videos and photos. A beginner's guide to parts, safety equipment and skatepark etiquette. Instructions on the basic techniques of pushing, turning, dropping-in, ollies and nollies. Advice on flips, grinds and slides for rails, ramps and ledges, including the varial flip, the nose grind and the board slide. The Skateboarding Field Manual is the essential guide for anyone looking to master the art of skateboarding and to understand its unique culture.

A practical guide to identifying, understanding and hunting for fossils. The Firefly Guide to Fossils is a practical, pocket-sized and beautifully illustrated field guide. Its introduction explains how fossils form and the history of ancient life. Fossil classification and distribution are described, providing essential background information for students and collectors. Fossil hunting is described in detail with practical advice on everything from finding sites to displaying specimens. The main part of the book presents major groups of fossils, from trilobites to tree ferns in a wide international range, from the common and easy-to-find, to dinosaur bones that would crown any collection. The entries are illustrated with color images accompanied by clear descriptive text. A quick reference identification key organizes the 400 specimens by the major fossil classification, making it easier to find detailed information for each one.

An illustrated look at the weird and wonderful creatures that live in the very deepest parts of the sea. Humans have always wondered, with a mixture of fear and fascination, what lurks beneath the surface in the depths of the ocean. In this book, Erich Hoyt introduces 50 of the oddest creatures you will ever meet in the sea. From the carnivorous comb jelly to the lantern-carrying deep-sea dragonfish, from a vampire squid with giant eyes to dancing jellyfish, Hoyt explores these peculiar conditions and their equally peculiar environment. These creatures have adapted to lack of light and, using sound pulses (echolocation) or light-producing organs and pigment cells (emitting light via bioluminescence), they are able to communicate without giving their location away to predators. These stunning, captivating photographs weren't taken from the portholes of submarines. Photographers David Shale, Solvin Zanki and Jeff Rotman worked with oceanography institutes, museums and the BBC Natural History Unit, taking long cruises across the ocean to record and try to understand these little-studied residents of the deep sea. To capture the creatures for observation, a net was lowered far beneath the surface. As soon as the trawl was hauled aboard, the photographers would race to transfer the most unusual animals to fresh seawater aquariums in a chilled laboratory on board. These pages let readers gaze into strange, wild eyes and study faces with toothless or crooked smiles that witness the fruits of deep-sea evolution. Informative captions explain what the patterns of lights on their bodies are "saying" to others in their absolutely dark world. The wonder and extraordinary weirdness of what lives in the deep seas, so far away from us and yet so close, will become more familiar with this book.

New Jersey is rich in scenery and history. Its miles of beaches, charming seaside towns, lush parks and diverse communities make it a popular and vibrant tourist destination. Its wealth of attractions -- some familiar and others more surprising -- include: Appalachian National Scenic Trail The boardwalk at Atlantic City Beaches, lighthouses, barrier islands and bays Cape May's picturesque streets and homes Washington's headquarters in Morristown Classic diners New Jersey packs an astounding amount of history and beauty into its geographic area. This new book showcases the Garden State at its most scenic and interesting. The America the Beautiful series takes readers on a photographic tour of the country's most beautiful states and most vibrant cities. Top photographers contribute their best images of both well-known destinations and hidden gems. Clear and informative captions bring each scene to life. These handsomely designed books show the beauty of each destination and will be enjoyed by visitors and locals alike.

Who designs skyscrapers? How are they built? Why don't they fall down? From the Tower of Babel to the Great Pyramids to New York's Freedom Tower (to be completed in 2010), skyscrapers in one form or another have captured humankind's imagination. This book covers the world's most important skyscrapers, beginning with the earliest attempts to build to the sky, through the major design periods, and right up to post-September 11. The acetate overlays feature: The Chrysler Building: cutaway view of the crown The New York Skyline: 1876 and today The Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank: cutaway view of its structure The Petronas Tower, Kuala Lumpur: in 1996, the world's tallest building. The Uncovering series: Exposing science and technology in stunning color and detail. Jam-packed with exacting full-color illustrations, these titles focus on topics of particular interest to young readers. Informative text and descriptive captions and sidebars complement dozens of annotated drawings. Each book contains four acetate overlays, used in some cases to show changes over time, in others to show a cutaway interior.

"Human beings are an amazingly inventive species in creating technologies that have taken us far beyond planetary boundaries that constrain all other animals. Whether it's very powerful innovations like pesticides, antibiotics or combustion engines, we fail to consider the long-term ramifications of our enterprises in a world where everything is interconnected. Plastics are a classic example, created by chemists from complex molecules of life in fossil fuels, applied in so many useful ways but ignoring what happens when the products are discarded as waste on such a scale that we have a gargantuan problem. The story of plastic is a cautionary tale about every aspect of the way we are living in the Anthropocene." -- David Suzuki The shocking truth of plastic's impact on our planet -- and what we can do about it. The data is in and it's bad. We create and throw away too much plastic, and it is killing our planet. However, too many people have very little idea about just how far this problem reaches, and those who do know feel helpless with the enormity of the task at hand. To fill this void and provide some hope is Rachel Salt's simple and transformative book, The Plastic Problem. As a producer for the award-winning and wildly popular YouTube channel AsapSCIENCE, Salt is accustomed to taking big, complicated concepts and translating them into entertaining and easy-to-understand segments. She applies the same methodology to The Plastic Problem. The result is a critically important book that will change the lives of those who read it. Never before has the problem been presented in such an impactful way. Readers of any age will emerge from this book with a thorough understanding of the problem, its individual and global impacts, and -- most importantly -- hope for the future. In 18 bite-sized chapters, Salt walks readers through the invention and globalized creation of plastic, its impacts and uses in our day-today lives, and its importance to the larger global economy. She then examines the how and why of what makes plastic so harmful to our planet and, just in case there was any doubt, Salt reinforces this danger by providing chapters on the planet-choking results of our plastic habit -- including the fact that there is almost certainly, plastic floating inside each and every person in the world. Salt finishes this vital book with a message of hope. All is not lost. We can make changes -- both at home and on a global scale. Big changes are already happening. If you want to be an actor and help change the future, The Plastic Problem is the best place to start. "Plastic kills. Breaking our plastic addiction is a matter of survival for humans and it impacts every creature on Earth to the deepest part of the ocean. With clear, concise prose and illustrations, The Plastic Problem navigates a way through this plastic mess we've found ourselves in." -- Erich Hoyt, author of Encyclopedia of Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises, Orca: The Whale Called Killer and Creatures of the Deep; Research Fellow, Whale and Dolphin Conservation; Co-chair, IUCN Marine Mammal Protected Areas Task Force

An exciting visual journey around the world of foods and flavors. Food Atlas takes readers on a global discovery tour of the ingredients, dishes, and culinary curiosities that characterize the world's continents. The book features appealing illustrations and concise captions organized into 39 regional maps that focus on one country. The book opens with a world map showing the six continents and 50 countries. The featured countries are: North America -- Canada, United States, Mexico South America -- Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Chile Europe -- Great Britain (and Ireland), Norway, Sweden, Finland, Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Hungary, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece Asia -- Russia, Lebanon, Turkey, China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, South Korea, India Africa -- Morocco, Egypt, Angola, South Africa, Madagascar Oceania -- Australia, New Zealand, Fiji Islands. Each chapter opens with a continent map showing the countries, each with a selected food or ingredient of importance and introductory text. Every country map has a brief introduction outlining the most important features of the cuisine and culture of food, such as late night meals or traditional morning beverages. The most important foods grown or produced in that country are illustrated within its borders. Local and specialty dishes and beverages that make up the country's cuisine fill the rest of the page. Sometimes a food ingredient is shown in a specific place; e.g., the Khasi mandarin in India's Meghalaya region, which is where it and all other citrus fruits originated; or ostrich eggs in Southern Africa, where the bird lives in savannah and desert habitats. Oceans and seas show marine animals that add to the country's diet. The book closes with a world map that shows how explorers carried some of the world's most widely eaten foods from their land of origin to new lands, where they now fill grocery stores and markets around the world; e.g. rice and citrus came from China; coffee from Ethiopia; black pepper from Vietnam; and so on for all 23 world-traveling foods. Country by country around the globe, readers will discover the gastronomical wonders of the globe in all their delicious variety.