Cancer researchers, Ireland's battlefields, and civil rights leaders help Gladwell demonstrate the hidden truths behind the weak and the powerful. Gladwell also heads into the classroom to examine common misconceptions about how we define advantages and disadvantages.

When seven-year-old Bean plays a mean trick on her sister, she finds unexpected support for her antics from Ivy, the new neighbor, who is less boring than Bean first suspected.

Living in rural Virginia, ten-year-old Jess and Leslie become special friends as they create a magical secret world that they call Terabithia. But when a tragic accident causes Leslie's death during a storm, Jess is forced to face life alone. "This Newbery Medal-winning novel by bestselling-author Katherine Paterson has been a modern classic about friendship and loss for forty years. Jess Aarons has been practicing all summer so he can be the fastest...

This novel continues the stories of five interrelated families who struggle with social, political, and economic turmoil in the mid-twentieth century, during which they witness the rise of Nazi Germany, the Spanish Civil War, and the horrors of World War II. It picks up right where the first book left off, and continues up to the explosions of the American and Soviet atomic bombs. Carla von Ulrich, born of German and English parents, finds her life...

A collection of stories tell of two sisters: one trades self-respect for a wealthy husband while the other finds in the pages of a book a kindred spirit who changes her life. The janitor at the local school has his faith tested in an encounter with an isolated man he has come to help; a grown daughter longs for mother love even as she comes to accept her mother's happiness in a foreign country; and the adult Lucy Barton returns to visit her siblings...

Ten-year-old Auggie Pullman, who was born with extreme facial abnormalities and was not expected to survive, goes from being home-schooled to entering fifth grade at a private middle school in Manhattan, which entails enduring the taunting and fear of his classmates as he struggles to be seen as just another student.

"A red oak tree and a crow help their human neighbors work out their differences"-- An old red oak tree tells how he and his crow friend, Bongo, help their human neighbors get along after a threat against an immigrant family is carved into the tree's trunk.

Four people in a car, hoping to make Chicago by morning. One man driving, eyes on the road. Another man next to him, telling stories that don't add up. A woman in the back, silent and worried. And next to her, a huge man with a broken nose, hitching a ride east to Virginia. An hour behind them, a man lies stabbed to death in an old pumping station. He was seen going in with two others, but he never came out. He has been executed, the knife work professional,...

Arriving in Tangier with her new husband only to encounter the estranged best friend she has not seen in more than a year, Alice allows her friend to introduce her to the rhythms and culture of Morocco, only to be quickly stifled by the woman's controlling nature.--

"Very short for her age, Julia grows into her sense of self while playing a munchkin in a summer regional theater production of The Wizard of Oz"--