The Forest My Friend

Choosing a lifetime career can be as simple as taking a field trip when you're ten.This is a field trip in a book. You'll spend the day in the forest with Kate.

Text and illustrations tell the story of a real dog named Jasper, who lived in Northern Maine. He interacted with many forest animals and befriended an injured whitetail doe who came to his yard to graze.

This book is filled with imaginary characters. I am happy and excited in sharing some of the unexpected actions of stationary and moving things of nature. Every place you look you find that you are surrounded by them. What if they could talk about their concerns or their wisdom? All things that have been placed on our earth have a purpose in our lives, no matter how large or how small. The stories in this book are meant to be amusing and inspiring for the children and the parents who read them. These stories also have an underlying message about the trials and triumphs of life. When we walk through a forest or a park, we seem to locate immediately the large things that stand out. I have always searched for the smallest insignificant part of everything I see in the forest as I feel that it is very important not to overlook as you are a witness to the beginning of life. Some inhabitants in the forest will become giants of the earth while others will remain small, but all are important to life on earth. Even though my name I have not mentioned throughout the stories of this book, I was there looking in and listening to the many conversations and now I am happy to share with the children what I saw and heard.

As Thomas and Pricilla practice their dance routine for the upcoming Village Talent Competition in the forest while the four large singing oak trees sing for them, they bump into Becky and Cap running around the forest playing soldiers. As the two parties get to know one another and become great friends Thomas is confronted with a big problem with only two weeks left to go till the talent competition. You see, Pricilla is Thomas’ imaginary friend and Cap, like Pricilla, is Becky’s imaginary friend too. Only children with imaginary friends can see other children’s imaginary friends and of course the oak trees and animal too. How will Thomas be able to compete in the competition with Pricilla when no one will be able to see her? What will he do, and will Becky and Cap be able to help?

The original edition of the book was published in Ukrainian. This is a story about a nine-year-old boy named Maxim. He grows up in a loving family surrounded by three generations of doting relatives, but he is lonely without friends of his age. One day he buys a weird teddy bear with a lion tail that winked at him in the shop and turns out to be a schoolboy from a parallel world, Ledvedik. He comes for a semester to study earthly life and chooses Maxim as his host. Maxim gets an amazing friend who feeds on electricity, can teleport and levitate, explains the mysteries of Time, Chaos and Entropy. The only downside, his visit must be kept secret even from Maxim´s dad, an alien contact specialist who, however, begins to guess the origin of the strange toy. Their adventures are well known to children in Ukraine and now we are excited to present them to you.

The 1968 US men's track and field team featured such legends as Tommie Smith, Bob Beamon, Al Oerter, and Dick Fosbury and they won 12 gold medals and set six world records at the Mexico City Games, one of the most dominant performances in Olympic history. The Black Power protest of Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the victory stand in Mexico City remains a most enduring images of the games. A 400-meter track carved out of the Eldorado National Forest above Lake Tahoe played a role in molding that juggernaut. To acclimate US athletes for the elevation of Mexico City, the training camp and final Olympic selection was held at Echo Summit near the California-Nevada border. On a track in which hundreds of trees were left on the infield to minimize environmental impact, four world records fell—more than have been set at any US meet since. But the Vietnam War was raging, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, and a group of athletes from San Jose State had been threatening to boycott the Mexico City Games to protest racial injustice. Informed by dozens of interviews and the deep knowledge of sports journalist and track enthusiast Bob Burns, this is the story of how in one of the most divisive years in American history, a California mountaintop provided an incomparable group of Americans shelter from the storm.