Jungle Tangle

Another mad-cap adventure from the author of Dead Hairy. Welcome to the Amazon, where heads shrink and villains slink! Media-savvy author with connections in the children's book world Established fan-base from Dead Hairy Author available for innovative in-store events Following a hair-raising adventure last summer, Abbie Hartley can't wait to join her friend Perdita on the trip of a lifetime. Their destination? The Amazon jungle. Their mission? To find the lost wife of their friend Fernando. There's only one problem. Fernando and his wife are shrunken heads ... and the Amazon jungle is huge. Oh, and another one. Squashy Grandma insists on coming, with her shopping bag on wheels and her pet wig. Oh, and just one more. Abbie's arch-enemy Dr Hubris Klench, burger-on-legs and villain extraordinaire, is lurking in the undergrowth with some very wicked tricks up his very wide sleeve.

With its roots in Rudyard Kipling's fantastical Jungle Book world, with a nod to the 'discovered wizard' world of prodigy magicians, and a knowing smile at traditions of shape-shifting animal stories, this mashup of youthful exuberance, strong female characters, and life in Kipling's Punjabi forests presents a new Maoglee and a new jungle world. Here is a boy who loses not one, but two families to the dark shifter wizard Shir Khan, yet finds a third in the shapeshifting couple of Bahlu the black bear and Bugira the black panther. They raise him in the tradition of Jungle Law, all the while the three of them knowing he must face the tiger-wizard before he grows into manhood. Maoglee is tough, fierce, and sometimes foolish, but he learns well from his adoptive parents and in the end, he does not shy from his fate, but embraces it calculatingly.

Written with a movie in mind, Aurona is stunningly visual, rich with detailed illustrations and a quickly developing, suspenseful storyline. A technological feast for ages 12 and up, it feeds the universal human quest for the New and Different. Our present space telescopes beg these questions: Is there another planet out there in far better shape than the Earth? Can the atmosphere be in pristine condition with a carefully managed, yet untouched wilderness? Aurona, far more technologically advanced the Earth, offers the possibility that this might actually be possible. A paradise? Utopia? The story unfolds… While exploring the jungle in the caldera of an extinct volcano, a boy and his grandfather discover the entrance to an alien outpost. A tripwire triggers a huge block of stone to roll back into a wall, revealing a spiral staircase that leads down into an underground vault. As they enter, they’re shocked to find an enormous dome lined with heavily embossed sheets of gold. More importantly, a star map is imbedded into a stunning, blue glass floor, its infrared tracery pointing the way to another world. Unfortunately, the chamber’s fusion reactor has reawakened after thousands of years and the room is about to self-destruct. In a burst of speed, they gather all the gold they can carry, shove it into their knapsacks and dive out of the entrance just as the great vault implodes. Years pass. Out of college, the teenager gets some unexpected news: his extravagantly wealthy grandfather has died, and the TV and Internet coverage reveals there’ll be an elaborate funeral for him in the Capitol Rotunda. Through a daringly clever ruse, the boy receives a secret package: three holographic discs and the keys to a starship. After an urgent message instructs him to assemble a crew, Aurona’s action-packed, stumbling voyage ensues. Reaching the planet, they find it completely surrounded by an electrically charged, golden shield. It takes some clever, innovative trickery with tiny surveillance robotoids to get them through, and a whole, different ecosystem surrounds them: they see that gold is everywhere, even permeating the atmosphere. Gargantuan trees can draw gold out of the ground, there are huge night-stalking insects with bioluminescent searchlights, saber toothed beasts can throw mind-stuns to paralyze their prey, and there are odd, fragile, gas-bag creatures floating around. Unfortunately, things have grown complicated: an alien stowaway has been hidden aboard in a sleep pod. It hadn’t been plugged into the ship’s mainframe and the timing for its opening sequence is way off. After two suspenseful months of waiting, the crazed alien awakens in a rage, summoning more of his plasmorphic kind. They steal the starship and hold many of the crew as hostages, forcing them to dig all the gold the ship can carry. The alien boasts to return one day with a vast army to attack and plunder Aurona. The boy, now maturing into a resourceful young leader, has other plans...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • At once an incredible adventure narrative and a penetrating biographical portrait—the bestselling author of River of the Gods brings us the true story of Theodore Roosevelt’s harrowing exploration of one of the most dangerous rivers on earth. “A rich, dramatic tale that ranges from the personal to the literally earth-shaking.” —The New York Times The River of Doubt—it is a black, uncharted tributary of the Amazon that snakes through one of the most treacherous jungles in the world. Indians armed with poison-tipped arrows haunt its shadows; piranhas glide through its waters; boulder-strewn rapids turn the river into a roiling cauldron. After his humiliating election defeat in 1912, Roosevelt set his sights on the most punishing physical challenge he could find, the first descent of an unmapped, rapids-choked tributary of the Amazon. Together with his son Kermit and Brazil’s most famous explorer, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Roosevelt accomplished a feat so great that many at the time refused to believe it. In the process, he changed the map of the western hemisphere forever. Along the way, Roosevelt and his men faced an unbelievable series of hardships, losing their canoes and supplies to punishing whitewater rapids, and enduring starvation, Indian attack, disease, drowning, and a murder within their own ranks. Three men died, and Roosevelt was brought to the brink of suicide. The River of Doubt brings alive these extraordinary events in a powerful nonfiction narrative thriller that happens to feature one of the most famous Americans who ever lived. From the soaring beauty of the Amazon rain forest to the darkest night of Theodore Roosevelt’s life, here is Candice Millard’s dazzling debut. Look for Candice Millard’s latest book, River of the Gods.

On April 9, 1942, thousands of U.S. soldiers surrendered as the Philippines island of Luzon fell to the Japanese. But a few hundred Americans placed their faith in their own hands and headed for the jungles. One of them was twenty-three-year-old Clay Conner Jr., who had never even camped before . . . The obstacles to Conner’s survival were as numerous as the enemy soldiers who ultimately put a price on his head: among them malaria, heat, jungle rot, snakes, and mosquitoes. Beyond that, the human threats of betrayal, capture, torture, and death. And, finally, he had to overcome self-doubt, struggle with the despair of burying comrades, deal with friction among his fellow American soldiers, and find a way to survive. But if conflict reveals character, Conner showed himself to be a man apart. Inspired by an unlikely alliance with a tribe of arrow-shooting pygmies, by the words in a dog-eared New Testament, and by a tattered American flag that he vowed to someday triumphantly fly at battalion headquarters, Conner emerged victorious from the jungle—after almost three years. Resolve is the story of an unlikely hero who never surrendered to the enemy—and of a soldier who never gave up hope.

In this, his major book of poems, poet David Kresh has explored a dangerous world. Using language that is never as simple as it seems, he has mapped the coordinates of a reality that seems to lie slightly beyond our own; at once both magical and familiar, and filled with unexpected moments of stark, heartbreaking beauty. David Kresh served as a reference librarian at the Library of Congress for nearly 40 years. He died in 2006. PRAISE FOR Turn Off or Use Opener ."a poet with original vision and technical sophistication, whose poems brim with surprise and pleasure." Daniel Hoffman Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress 1973-1974 "Kresh.played with language until it was fresh and new, innocent of pretension, and unafraid of retribution. the mundane became the magnificent." Grace Cavalieri Author of What I Would Do For Love

In recent years, the use of molecular data to build phylogenetic trees and sophisticated computer-aided techniques to analyze them have led to a revolution in the study of cospeciation. Tangled Trees provides an up-to-date review and synthesis of current knowledge about phylogeny, cospeciation, and coevolution. The opening chapters present various methodological and theoretical approaches, ranging from the well-known parsimony approach to "jungles" and Bayesian statistical models. Then a series of empirical chapters discusses detailed studies of cospeciation involving vertebrate hosts and their parasites, including nematodes, viruses, and lice. Tangled Trees will be welcomed by researchers in a wide variety of fields, from parasitology and ecology to systematics and evolutionary biology. Contributors: Sarah Al-Tamimi, Michael A. Charleston, Dale H. Clayton, James W. Demastes, Russell D. Gray, Mark S. Hafner, John P. Huelsenbeck, J.-P. Hugot, Kevin P. Johnson, Peter Kabat, Bret Larget, Joanne Martin, Yannis Michalakis, Roderic D. M. Page, Ricardo L. Palma, Adrian M. Paterson, Susan L. Perkins, Andy Purvis, Bruce Rannala, David L. Reed, Fredrik Ronquist, Theresa A. Spradling, Jason Taylor, Michael Tristem