"There has been much attention given to the achievement gap between white and minority students, especially African American children. Through research and years of experience, the author breaks down the cultural influences on children's learning styles and provides a practical approach to helping black children thrive in the classroom. For black children, which Sullivan defines as those of African descent, there is a disconnect between learning preferences...

"A new look at the first few seconds after the Big Bang--and how research into these moments continues to revolutionize our understanding of our universe. Scientists in the past few decades have made crucial discoveries about how our cosmos evolved over the past 13.8 billion years. But there remains a critical gap in our knowledge: we still know very little about what happened in the first seconds after the Big Bang. At the Edge of Time focuses on...

"Avery Robinson decided to be a physician after helplessly watching her mother lose a battle with a terrible disease. Now at risk of developing the same illness, Avery guards her heart from love. She's driven to protect her loved ones as a workaholic doctor in the tiny mountain town of Riverbend Gap, North Carolina. Contractor Wes Garrett is hiking the Appalachian trail, in memory of the man who died saving his life, when an illness racks his body....

"Since the Great Recession, most Americans' standard of living has stagnated or declined. Economic inequality is at historic highs. But inequality's impact differs by race; African Americans' net wealth is just a tenth that of white Americans, and over recent decades, white families have accumulated wealth at three times the rate of black families. In our increasingly diverse nation, sociologist Thomas M. Shapiro argues, wealth disparities must be...

GENERATION WEALTH by Lauren Greenfield examines the influence of affluence over the last 25 years, illustrating the globalization of materialism, celebrity culture and social status. This timely, thought-provoking collection explores how “keeping up with the Joneses” has become Keeping Up with the Kardashians, magnifying the aspirational gap between what we want and what we can afford. The exhibit is not about the rich, but the pervasive desire...

"Rosmarie Waldrop says Gap Gardening 'spans forty years of exploring the language I breathe and move in and that continues to condition me even while I try to contribute to it. It tracks my turn from verse to prose poems, to focusing on the sentence and its boundaries, my increasing reliance on collage and source texts as a way of engaging with other voices, of being in dialogue.' Gap Gardening also traces Waldrop growing sense of writing as an exploration...

"In a brilliant but sobering work of journalism, Ellen Ruppel Shell takes a hard look at the forces that are reshaping the nature of work in America, overturning the often espoused mythology that retraining workers in software, engineering, and the sciences is the key to job security and career success, and achieving the middle-class dream in the future. In a wide-ranging narrative that takes us from a downsized marketing executive in Massachusetts,...

"Betsy Huckabee has big-city dreams, but nobody outside of tiny Pine Gap, Missouri, seems interested in the articles she writes for her uncle's newspaper. Her hopes for independence may be crushed, until the best idea she's ever had comes riding into town. Deputy Joel Puckett didn't want to leave Texas, but unfair circumstances have made moving to Pine Gap his only shot at keeping a badge. Worse, this small town has big problems, and masked marauders...

A leading Washington journalist argues that gay marriage is the best way to preserve and protect society's most essential institution Two people meet and fall in love. They get married, they become upstanding members of their community, they care for each other when one falls ill, they grow old together. What's wrong with this picture? Nothing, says Jonathan Rauch, and that's the point. If the two people are of the same sex, why should this chain...

"This book is about the presidency and the woman who - whoever she is! - will eventually hold the title Madame President and occupy the Oval Office. It's about the road that female candidates have traveled with the goal of getting there. It's a story about me - a woman who got to see, up close, more of them strive for the Oval Office at one time than ever before and who innately understood the invisible forces that, oftentimes, worked against them....