Leon And The Champion Chip

Leon's back. Having survived the sweatshop methods of Miss Hagmeyer, his needle-wielding fourth grade teacher at the Classical School, Leon braces himself for fifth grade. He arrives armed with a backpack full of pens and pencils, binders and notebooks . . . plus a rag doll that's the spitting image of Henry Lumpkin, the bully who has Leon in his sights. If the doll works the way it's supposed to, Leon (and his buddies P.W. and Lily-Matisse) won't have to worry about Lumpkin the Pumpkin! Better still, Leon has a fabulous new teacher, Mr. Sparks, who conducts science experiments using that most miraculous of research materials -- the potato chip. And a good thing, too. Mr. Sparks's lab work will come in handy when Leon is forced to take on Alphonse "The Chippopotamus" Cipollini at the annual Chipapalooza! Chip-Off. Once you've sunk your teeth into Leon and the Champion Chip, the hilarious sequel to Leon and the Spitting Image, you'll never eat potato chips the same way again!

Leon and the Champion Chip

Provides experiments associated with a bag of potato chips: bags, chips, lids, spuds, and tubes.

This book is about a hotel full of animals. And an evil ice maker. And glass eyeballs -- oh, and really old panty hose and Possibly Fake Hair. But mostly, it's about Leon Zeisel and his epic quest to survive fourth grade, despite his teacher, Miss Hagmeyer, and his archenemy, Lumpkin the Pumpkin, a human tank with a deadly dodgeball throw. Luckily, Leon has friends who will stand by him even if his magical plans for rescue and revenge involve ... SPIT!

This tale of an ambitious inventor in France as the Revolution looms is “brilliantly playful . . . full of lore and lewdness” (Chicago Tribune). “A portrait of a young mechanical genius in 18th-century France, delivered along with a gallimaufry of odd and intriguing facts and a rich, lusty picture of society in that time and place.” —Publishers Weekly In France, on the eve of the Revolution, a young man named Claude Page sets out to become the most ingenious and daring inventor of his time. Over the course of a career filled with violence and passion, Claude learns the arts of enameling and watchmaking from an irascible, defrocked abbé, then apprentices himself to a pornographic bookseller and applies his erotic erudition to the seduction of the wife of an impotent wigmaker. But it is Claude’s greatest device—a talking mechanical head—that both crowns his career and leads to an execution as tragic as that of Marie Antoinette, and far more bizarre. “Like a joint effort by Henry Fielding and John Barth” (Chicago Tribune), this “captivating novel” (San Francisco Chronicle) marked the debut of one of the finest literary artists of our time. “A Case of Curiosities . . . really is brilliant. Also witty, learned, ingenious, sly, and bawdy.” —Entertainment Weekly “What John Fowles did for the 19th century with The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Umberto Eco did for the 14th with The Name of the Rose . . . Kurzweil now does for the late 18th century.” —San Francisco Chronicle

Winner of the Edgar® Award for Best Fact Crime The true account of one boy’s lifelong search for his boarding-school bully. Equal parts childhood memoir and literary thriller, Whipping Boy chronicles prize-winning author Allen Kurzweil’s search for his twelve-year-old nemesis, a bully named Cesar Augustus. The obsessive inquiry, which spans some forty years, takes Kurzweil all over the world, from a Swiss boarding school (where he endures horrifying cruelty) to the slums of Manila, from the Park Avenue boardroom of the world’s largest law firm to a federal prison camp in Southern California. While hunting down his tormentor, Kurzweil encounters an improbable cast of characters that includes an elocution teacher with ill-fitting dentures, a gang of faux royal swindlers, a crime investigator “with paper in his blood,” and a onocled grand master of the Knights of Malta. Yet for all its global exoticism and comic exuberance, Kurzweil’s riveting account is, at its core, a heartfelt and suspenseful narrative about the “parallel lives” of a victim and his abuser. A scrupulously researched work of nonfiction that renders a childhood menace into an unlikely muse, Whipping Boy is much more than a tale of karmic retribution; it is a poignant meditation on loss, memory, and mourning, a surreal odyssey born out of suffering, nourished by rancor, tempered by wit, and resolved, unexpectedly, in a breathtaking act of personal courage. Whipping Boy features two 8-page black-and-white photo inserts and 83 images throughout.

Critically acclaimed for his international bestseller, "A Case of Curiosities," Kurzweil presents "The Grand Complication"--a modern-day tale of literary intrigue, deviant passions, and delicious secrets.

The infamous boxing match between Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield on June 28, 1997, was like none other in the sport's history, and this insightful account of the anticipation, the gruesome fight itself, and the ongoing aftermath of that one night reveals just how much of an impact it really made. The rivals met for a rematch that would never be finished, as Tyson earned a disqualification and infamy that followed in the third round by biting off a portion of Holyfield's ear. Through nearly 100 interviews, including with the famed fighters themselves, and extensive research of past interviews, books, and transcripts, this exploration of the sensational events surrounding the fight provides a behind-the-scenes, past and present look at the bout.