Books published by publisher Paw Prints 2011-05-24

One day in 1882, Thomas Edison flipped a switch that lit up lower Manhattan with incandescent light and changed the way people live ever after. The electric light bulb was only one of thousands of Edison’s inventions, which include the phonograph and the kinetoscope, an early precursor to the movie camera. As a boy, observing a robin catch a worm and then take flight, he fed a playmate a mixture of worms and water to see if she could fly! Here’s an accessible, appealing biography with 100 black-and-white illustrations.

In the winter of 1918, at the height of WWI, history’s most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in twenty-four weeks than AIDS has killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision of science and epidemic disease. Magisterial in its breadth of perspective and depth of research, John M. Barry weaves together multiple narratives, with characters ranging from William Welch (founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School) to John D. Rockefeller and Woodrow Wilson. Ultimately a tale of triumph amid tragedy, this crisis provides a precise and sobering model for our world as we confront AIDS, bioterrorism, and other, as yet unknown, diseases.

Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle has a trick up her sleeveMrs. Piggle-Wiggle loves everyone, and everyone loves her right back. The children love her because she is lots of fun. Their parents love her because she can cure children of absolutely any bad habit. The treatment are unusual, but they work! Who better than a pig, for instance, to teach a piggy little boy table manners? And what better way to cure the rainy-day "waddle-I-do's" than hunt for a pirate treasure in Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's upside-down house?