A rare glimpse of life in the Lao People's Democratic Republic as it recovers its past and prepares to face its future. In 1991 Lao and Australian archaeologists journeyed up the Mekong to a remote village in north-eastern Laos. At Ban Xan Hai, "the village of the jar makers", they excavate the site of pottery kilns used for the mass production of ceramics more than 600 years ago. Since the revolution in 1975, Laos has had little contact with the...

An old man is found wandering in the Arizona desert, apparently demented, talking in rhymes. In his pocket is a diagram of a 14th century monastery in France that is being excavated by a team of archaeologists from Yale University. The head of the team disappears suddenly and three of the team members decide they will track him down. They are Kate Erickson, athletic, passionate about mediaeval architecture and rock climbing; dreamy Chris Hughes; and...

"In this scary, funny, and slyly political short story collection, Kate McIntyre conjures a fever dream of contemporary Kansas. Boundaries between fantasy and reality blur, and grotesque acts birth strange progeny. A mother must choose between her children and her personal safety when her husband steadily excavates a moat around their country home, his very own little border wall. A Kansas politician grapples with international notoriety after an...

A little girl chef dons her apron, singing and dancing around the kitchen as she shows us what to do. Argueta's gift in seeing beauty, magic and fun in everything around him makes this book a treasure -- avocados are like green precious stones, salt falls like rain, cilantro looks like a little tree and the spoon that scoops the avocado from its skin is like an excavating tractor. As in the previous cooking poems, "Guacamole" conveys the fun and pleasure...

"Two lovers crest the wave of the golden age of Athens: Pericles, statesman and general, and Aspasia, his courtesan, a philosopher's daughter and a brilliant woman in her own right. In a world of hierarchies, he is at the top when she arrives as little more than flotsam cast up on Athenian shores. Their love transcends social sanctions, enduring and deepening despite the grave threat it presents to Pericles' reputation as a leader of the Athenian...

"Mothers aren't supposed to be angry. Still, Minna Dubin was an angry mom: exhausted by hard, thankless full-time parenting work and feeling her career slip away from her, she would find herself screaming at her child or exploding in anger at her husband. Despite the pressure she felt to suffer in silence, Minna chose to talk publicly about her experiences, kicking off an international conversation about a rage that, it turns out, nearly every mother...

Diggers are so exciting! Children can learn all about how they work.

"Welcome to one of the great unsung currents of American pop music: the forgotten musical mash-up of Latin and Jewish, bagels and bongos, Spanish and Yiddish, manteca and schmaltz, that's been a bubbling undercurrent of American pop music since the early 1900s. It's a story full of Jewish mambo dancers, Jewish salsa greats, beloved sidemen, and record label chiefs on the one hand, and Latino bandleaders, singers, composers, and entrepreneurs on the...

In this companion to Where Do Diggers Sleep at Night, little ones can join all of the vehicles as they dress up on Halloween for a night of trick-or-treating.

Surprises are in store as Stink excavates his backyard in search of a relic from an extinct beast -- and Judy lends him a little sleight of hand. Mega-chomp! Stink wants to make the find of the century. He's on a dig, dig, digging quest in his backyard to find a tooth from a saber-toothed cat, otherwise known as a Smilodon. Why not? Two kids in Michigan found a mastodon bone in a backyard stream, and a girl in Great Britain found a pterosaur bone....