All Around You

When it's not windy, it can be easy to forget about air. But air is everywhere–it fills your house, your car, and even your empty milk glass. In fact, a regular room holds about 75 pounds of it! This Level 1 book, reillustrated with John O'Brien's clever, eye–catching illustrations, tells you how to discover the air that's all around you.

The Beautiful Music All Around Us presents the extraordinarily rich backstories of thirteen performances captured on Library of Congress field recordings between 1934 and 1942 in locations reaching from Southern Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta and the Great Plains. Including the children's play song "Shortenin' Bread," the fiddle tune "Bonaparte's Retreat," the blues "Another Man Done Gone," and the spiritual "Ain't No Grave Can Hold My Body Down," these performances were recorded in kitchens and churches, on porches and in prisons, in hotel rooms and school auditoriums. Documented during the golden age of the Library of Congress recordings, they capture not only the words and tunes of traditional songs but also the sounds of life in which the performances were embedded: children laugh, neighbors comment, trucks pass by. Musician and researcher Stephen Wade sought out the performers on these recordings, their families, fellow musicians, and others who remembered them. He reconstructs the sights and sounds of the recording sessions themselves and how the music worked in all their lives. Some of these performers developed musical reputations beyond these field recordings, but for many, these tracks represent their only appearances on record: prisoners at the Arkansas State Penitentiary jumping on "the Library's recording machine" in a rendering of "Rock Island Line"; Ora Dell Graham being called away from the schoolyard to sing the jump-rope rhyme "Pullin' the Skiff"; Luther Strong shaking off a hungover night in jail and borrowing a fiddle to rip into "Glory in the Meetinghouse." Alongside loving and expert profiles of these performers and their locales and communities, Wade also untangles the histories of these iconic songs and tunes, tracing them through slave songs and spirituals, British and homegrown ballads, fiddle contests, gospel quartets, and labor laments. By exploring how these singers and instrumentalists exerted their own creativity on inherited forms, "amplifying tradition's gifts," Wade shows how a single artist can make a difference within a democracy. Reflecting decades of research and detective work, the profiles and abundant photos in The Beautiful Music All Around Us bring to life largely unheralded individuals--domestics, farm laborers, state prisoners, schoolchildren, cowboys, housewives and mothers, loggers and miners--whose music has become part of the wider American musical soundscape. The hardcover edition also includes an accompanying CD that presents these thirteen performances, songs and sounds of America in the 1930s and '40s.

The debut picture book from the creator of the viral sensation Kid President is a moving take on how we can create bigger and bigger circles of community and connections as we grow—now a New York Times bestseller! In the circles all around us, everywhere that we all go, there's a difference we can make and a love we can all show. This is the story of a circle. When we're first born, our circle is very small, but as we grow and build relationships, our circle keeps getting bigger and bigger to include family, friends, neighbors, community, and beyond. Brad Montague originally created Circles as an Instagram video adorably narrated by his kids, and now this picture book adaptation is the perfect way to start a conversation about how to expand our worlds with kindness and inclusivity—even if it seems scary or uncomfortable. This book makes an ideal new-baby, first-day-of-school, or graduation gift, or any milestone that celebrates someone's world getting bigger.

Technology is more than computer tablets and smart phones. As they sing along, students will learn that technology is anything that solves a problem. Text is paired with music and fun illustrations. This hardcover book comes with CD and online music access

This “super useful book” includes step-by-step instructions for using each of the 150 patterns four different ways (Knitty). In the Up, Down, All-Around Stitch Dictionary, designer Wendy Bernard presents an innovative reference guide for knitters of all skill levels. This hefty collection, ranging from lace and cables to colorwork and fancy edgings, is loaded with beautifully photographed swatches of each pattern, plus charted and text instructions. Bernard also demonstrates how to work each of the 150 popular stitch patterns four different ways: top down, bottom up, back and forth, and in the round. And to showcase the stitch patterns in action, she includes instructions for eight garments as well as her famous formulas for knitting garments without a pattern.

Accompanying 'Look for Me All Around You', one of the three sections of Sharjah Biennial 14, this book charts a non-chronological time-space (dis- )continuum between the Americas and the Emirates, building unexpected trans-oceanic and multi-diasporic bridges for a global history. This volume provides interpretative, discursive, poetic, political, and theoretical tools to compare and contrast modes of migration, production, extraction, and exploitation through a series of 30 newly commissioned context- specific works and critical texts. Look for Me All Around You also operates as an artists' book generative of readings on performance.