In central Texas in 1899, eleven-year-old Callie Vee Tate is instructed to be a lady by her mother, learns about love from the older three of her six brothers, and studies the natural world with her grandfather, the latter of which leads to an important discovery.

Leaving the den as the weather warms, Baby Bear discovers blue birds, red strawberries, orange butterflies, and other colorful things in nature.

Mouse and Minka experience the delights of nature on a windy autumn day.

Asks readers to think about ways in which the natural world has provided for them, by exploring all the different elements of a house and where each came from, once.

An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four,...

Hold on, Toby is the story of a little maple leaf bud on a very big tree. As he grows and matures, he encounters the wonder and forces of nature, and various critters and people of all sizes. Throughout his journey Toby is often told to hold on, although he has no idea what that means. Hold on, Toby presents an opportunity to experience the joy of each season and to glimpse an understanding of the cycle of life as expressed through the seasons of...

Excerpts from Michener's other novels are collected in this single volume in which he re-creates the planet Earth as it existed millions of years ago when dinosaurs flourished, describes the vast forces that created the geological wonders we know today, and explains how in the millennia-old struggle for survival, some species endured and evolved while others disappeared.

Mouse and Minka invite you to celebrate summer with a picnic in the park.

A Bear Named Bjorn takes us into the forest with Bjorn the bear and his friends. One day the animals have their eye exams and try on the humans' lost glasses. Another, they just sit, watching the leaves and playing cards on a tree stump. And on party night the animals borrow clothes hanging on the camping ground line--and return everything carefully in the morning, only a little bit used.

A man who was offered for adoption at birth because he was an illegitimate child searches for his mother in this novel on a Nebraska family. In the process, Nelse Carlson, 30, discovers he is the grandson of a powerful rancher.