Introduce students to some of today's best nonfiction authors and their writing-and promote nonfiction reading to young learners Engaging biographical sketches of 65 current nonfiction authors (some of them award winners) are accompanied by selective, annotated bibliographies for further reading. In addition, author photos and an author message to students enhance the experience. Biographies outline the childhoods of the authors, how they became writers, and how they go about their work. A detailed subject index allows you to plan thematic units of study and to assist students in finding reading material that matches their interests. A diversity of current authors and subjects are represented in this useful work.

The problems of international communication and linguistic rights are recurring debates in the present-day age of globalization. But the debate truly began over a hundred years ago, when the increasingly interconnected world of the nineteenth century fostered a desire for the development of a global lingua franca. Many individuals and social movements competed to create an artificial language unencumbered by the political rivalries that accompanied English, German, and French. Organizations including the American Philosophical Society, the International Association of Academies, the International Peace Bureau, the Comintern, and the League of Nations intervened in the debate about the possibility of an artificial language, but of the numerous tongues created before World War II, only Esperanto survives today. Esperanto and Its Rivals sheds light on the factors that led almost all artificial languages to fail and helped English to prevail as the global tongue of the twenty-first century. Exploring the social and political contexts of the three most prominent artificial languages—Volapük, Esperanto, and Ido—Roberto Garvía examines the roles played by social movement leaders and inventors, the strategies different organizations used to lobby for each language, and other early decisions that shaped how those languages spread and evolved. Through the rise and fall of these artificial languages, Esperanto and Its Rivals reveals the intellectual dilemmas and political anxieties that troubled the globalizing world at the turn of the twentieth century.

This small thesaurus offers 120,000 synonyms and antonyms in a quick and easy-to-use thesaurus. Synonyms are arranged in order of their closeness in meaning to the entry word, with the closest one given first and printed in bold type to make it easier to find the sense you're looking for. Improve your vocabulary with our Word Links, a feature that provides extra vocabulary related to a selection of key entries.

The extraordinary memoir of an orphan who danced her way from war-torn Sierra Leone to ballet stardom, most recently appearing in Beyonce's Lemonade and as a principal in a major American dance company.

Michaela DePrince was known as girl Number 27 at the orphanage, where she was abandoned at a young age and tormented as a "devil child" for a skin condition that makes her skin appear spotted. But it was at the orphanage that Michaela would find a picture of a beautiful ballerina en pointe that would help change the course of her life.

At the age of four, Michaela was adopted by an American family, who encouraged her love of dancing and enrolled her in classes. She went on to study at the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School at the American Ballet Theatre and is now the youngest principal dancer with the Dance Theatre of Harlem. She has appeared in the ballet documentary First Position, as well as on Dancing with the Stars, Good Morning America, and Nightline.

In this engaging, moving, and unforgettable memoir, Michaela shares her dramatic journey from an orphan in West Africa to becoming one of ballet's most exciting rising stars.

Historical Dictionary of Spanish Cinema covers Spanish cinema, its treasures its constant attempts to break through internationally, reaching out towards universal themes and conventions, and the specific obstacles and opportunities that have shaped the careers of filmmakers and stars. This book contains a chronology, an introduction, an appendix and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 200 cross-referenced entries on titles, movements, filmmakers and performers, and genres (such as homosexuality, nuevo cine español or horror). This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Spanish cinema.

Daoism is the oldest indigenous philosophic-spiritual tradition of China and one of the most ancient of the world’s spiritual structures. The name “Daoism� comes from the term dao that is often used for a “way� or a “road� through the field or woods to one’s village. It is also used of the “way� to do something, such as the way a master craftsman carves a candlestick, makes a bell, or even butchers an ox. But dao is also used as a nominative in the history of Daoism. It is used for the energizing process that permeates and animates all of reality and moves it along simply as “the Dao.� However, both text and practice in this tradition insist that dao itself cannot be described in words. Dao is not God in the sense of Western philosophy or religion. Daoism has no supreme being, even if there is an extensive grammar about numinal self-conscious entities and powers for which the Chinese use the word “spirit� (shen). For example, the highest numinal powers of Daoism are variously called Taishang Laojun (the deified Laozi), the Celestial Worthy of Primordial Beginning (Yuanshi tianzun), the Jade Emperor (Yuhuang Shangdi) or the Perfected Warrior (Zhenwu). But these are expressions of dao in specific shen, they are not identical with the Dao, except in the most unique case when Laozi, the putative founder of Daoism and author of its major work, Daodejing, is said to be one with the Dao. Historical Dictionary of Daoism contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 400 cross-referenced entries on related to the Chinese belief and practice worldview known as Daoism including dozens of Daoist terms, names, and practices. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Daoism.

Chinese, one of the oldest active languages, evolved over 5,000 years. As such, it makes for a fascinating case study in the development of language. This cultural history of Chinese demonstrates that the language grew and responded to its music and visual expression in a manner very similar to contemporary English and other western languages. Within Chinese cultural history lie the answers to numerous questions that have haunted scholars for decades: How does language relate to worldview? What would happen to law after its language loses absolute binding power? How do music, visual, and theatrical images influence literature? By presenting Chinese not as a system of signs but as the history of a community, this study shows how language has expanded the scope of Chinese imagination and offers a glimpse into the future of younger languages throughout the world.

The Aboriginal Australians first arrived on the continent at least 60,000 years ago. Indigenous Australians occupied and adapted to a range of environmental conditions from tropical estuarine habitats, densely forested regions, open plains and arid desert country, to cold, mountainous and often wet and snowy high country. Cultures adapted according to the different conditions and adapted again to environmental changes brought about by rising sea levels at the end of the last ice age. Colonization of the island continent in 1788 brought not only introduced diseases to which Aborigines had no immunity, but also heralded the commencement of enduring conflict over land and other resources. At times this conflict was violent and recognized as war. Still today the issue of reconciliation between Aborigines and the settler population remains unresolved. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Australian Aborigines contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 300 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Australian Aborigines.

Located in the middle of the Balkans, North Macedonia reflects the turbulent history of the region. The country emerged from former Yugoslavia in the 1990s without violence but struggled to achieve international recognition due to a dispute with neighboring Greece over its name and symbols. The name issue was resolved only in 2008 with the signature of the Prespa Agreement reviving prospects for membership in NATO and the European Union (EU). Yet North Macedonia’s story goes centuries back, to the Middle Ages, the period of Ottoman Rule which lasted until 1912, and the various reincarnations of Yugoslavia. The historical dictionary traces the country’s past and present with a wealth of articles on issues, events, institutions, personalities shaping political, economic and cultural life. It looks at the majority Macedonian as well as other ethnic communities such as the Albanians, Turks and the Roma. There are also entries on North Macedonia’s relations with neighbors, in history and today, as well as with global powers. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of North Macedonia contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about North Macedonia.

kira-kira (kee ra kee ra): glittering; shining Glittering. That's how Katie Takeshima's sister, Lynn, makes everything seem. The sky is "kira-kira" because its color is deep but see-through at the same time. The sea is "kira-kira" for the same reason. And so are people's eyes. When Katie and her family move from a Japanese community in Iowa to the Deep South of Georgia, it's Lynn who explains to her why people stop on the street to stare. And it's Lynn who, with her special way of viewing the world, teaches Katie to look beyond tomorrow. But when Lynn becomes desperately ill, and the whole family begins to fall apart, it is up to Katie to find a way to remind them all that there is always something glittering -- "kira-kira" -- in the future.

The essential playwriting career guide, from the team behind acclaimed new writing theatre company Papatango. Writing a good play is only a small part of making it as a successful playwright; understanding the business side of building a career is just as crucial. Yet most advice for budding writers focuses only on the craft of playwriting, ignoring the practicalities of the industry – which makes it harder for those without connections or know-how to get their work on stage. Being a Playwright sets out, transparently and honestly, all the factors besides writing that playwrights need to know about to succeed. It includes advice on: How to get a script noticed; Which programming and commissioning opportunities to pursue; How to approach agents, companies and collaborators Drawing on Papatango's decade-long experience of discovering and launching successful new writers – who have gone on to win prizes such as BAFTA, OffWestEnd, Royal National Theatre Foundation and Alfred Fagon Awards – this straightforward and accessible book discusses the opportunities and pitfalls of life as a playwright. Whether you're an aspiring writer wondering how to break into the industry, or a working playwright looking to land bigger commissions, this is your insider road map to navigating the world of professional theatre.

The "Dictionary of Louisiana French (DLF)" provides the richest inventory of French vocabulary in Louisiana and reflects precisely the speech of the period from 1930 to the present. This dictionary describes the current usage of French-speaking peoples in the five broad regions of South Louisiana: the coastal marshes, the banks of the Mississippi River, the central area, the north, and the western prairie. Data were collected during interviews from at least five persons in each of twenty-four areas in these regions. In addition to the data collected from fieldwork, the dictionary contains material compiled from existing lexical inventories, from texts published after 1930, and from archival recordings.

The new authoritative resource, the "DLF" not only contains the largest number of words and expressions but also provides the most complete information available for each entry. Entries include the word in the conventional French spelling, the pronunciation (including attested variants), the part of speech classification, the English equivalent, and the word's use in common phrases. The "DLF" features a wealth of illustrative examples derived from fieldwork and textual sources and identification of the parish where the entry was collected or the source from which it was compiled. An English-to-Louisiana French index enables readers to find out how particular notions would be expressed in "la Louisiane."

Encouraging you to be an inventive thinker and writer, THE COMPOSITION OF EVERYDAY LIFE, Concise, connects the act of writing to your daily life. It helps you to uncover meaning, rethink the world around you and invent ideas. With 36 reading selections by both professional and student writers, this book is designed to help you develop focused and distinctive academic essays. It gives you great preparation for the reading and writing activities you'll encounter throughout your college experience and beyond.

By definition, a maverick is a “lone dissenter� who “takes an independent stand apart from his or her associates� or “a person pursuing rebellious, even potentially disruptive policies or ideas.� The word maverick has evolved in the English language from being the term for an unbranded stray calf to a label given to a nontraditional person to a more extreme “uncontrollable individualist, iconoclast, unstable nonconformist.� The word has grown into an adjective (“he made a maverick decision�) and become a verb (mavericking or mavericked). Of all the words that originated in the Old West and survive to the present day, author Lewis Fisher notes, maverick has been called the least understood and most corrupted. But where did the word come from? The word’s definition is still such a mystery that Merriam-Webster lists it in the top 10 percent of its most-looked-up words. All of the origin stories agree it had something to do with Samuel A. Maverick and his cattle, but from there things go amok rather quickly. Was Sam Maverick a cattle thief? A legendary nonconformist who broke the code of the West by refusing to brand his calves? A Texas rancher who believed branding cattle was cruelty to animals? A runaway from South Carolina who branded all the wild cattle he could find and ended up with more cattle than anyone else in Texas? Samuel A. Maverick was a notable landholder and public figure in his own time, but his latter-day fame is based on the legend that he was a cattle rancher. No amount of truth-telling about maverick seems to have slowed the tall tales surrounding the word’s origination. Maverick: The American Name That Became a Legend is a whodunit, a historical telling of the man who unwittingly inspired the term, the family it’s derived from, the cowboys who embraced it as an adjective meaning rakish and independent, the curious inquirers intrigued by its narrative, and the appropriators who have borrowed it for political fame. Texas historian (and secondhand Maverick by marriage) Lewis Fisher has combed through Maverick family papers along with cultural memorabilia and university collections to get at the heart of the truth behind the far-flung Maverick legends. Maverick follows the history of the word through the “Maverick gene� all the way to Hollywood and uncovers the mysteries that shadow one of our country’s iconic words. Taken as a whole, the book is a fascinating portrayal of how we form, use, and change our language in the course of everyday life, and of the Maverick family’s ongoing relationship to its own contributions, all seen through the lens of a story featuring cowboys, Texas Longhorns, rustlers, promoters, movie stars, athletes, novelists, lawyers, mayors, congressmen, and senators—to say nothing of named maverick brands ranging from Ford cars and air-to-ground missiles to computer operating systems, Vermont maple syrup, and Australian wines. Ironically, given its literal meaning as unbranded, maverick is a brand name that helped shape the history of the American West and represents the ideal of being true to oneself.

A flock of birds, even a skein of geese perhaps - but a clete of badgers or a grist of bees? The collective nouns of animals and birds have long inspired and intirgued us. Many have their roots in medieval times, in particular applied to those creatures hunted by man, and subject to the etiquette of their proper group names. Steve Palin has beautifully illustrated and given the background to about 50 different animals and birds with interesting collective nouns - and listed 420 of them in his glossary.

By far the largest and most up-to-date single-volume English-Chinese and Chinese-English dictionary available and endorsed by academics worldwide, the Oxford Chinese Dictionary has been designed both for English speakers learning Mandarin Chinese and Mandarin Chinese speakers learning English. It has been produced using the latest lexicographic methods and the unique dictionary resources of Oxford University Press in Oxford and Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press in Beijing, together with an international body of expert advisors. The Oxford Chinese Dictionary contains over 300,000 words and phrases and 370,000 translations, including the latest vocabulary from computing, business, the media, and the arts, and tens of thousands of example phrases illustrating key points of construction and usage. There are over 300 cultural notes giving essential information about many aspects of life and culture in the Chinese- and English-speaking worlds. The dictionary is based throughout on corpus research for both English and Chinese, providing up-to-date evidence on real language. The English is based on the Oxford English Corpus, and the Chinese draws on the LIVAC corpus from the City University of Hong Kong. Extensive supplementary material includes sample letters and emails, guides to telephoning and text messaging in both Chinese and English, chronologies of Chinese history and culture, and features on particularly difficult aspects of the Chinese language, such as kinship terms and measure words. There are also over 50 pages of lexical and usage notes which contain helpful extra information about Chinese and English. The organization and layout have been designed for maximum clarity and accessibility. All Chinese headwords and compounds are shown with Pinyin transcriptions, so that the learner of Chinese can pronounce each one correctly. Chinese headwords are given in Simplified Chinese characters, but Traditional Chinese character versions are also given in brackets after the headwords when they differ from the Simplified form. All the English headwords are also shown with phonetics, so that the learner of English can pronounce each one correctly. The Chinese-English section of the dictionary is organised alphabetically by Pinyin and there is also a radical index which allows you to look up a character without knowing its Pinyin form.

Writing Audio Drama explores the common aspects of sound narrative in different practice media, and critically investigates to an advanced standard how audiogenic techniques transfer between radio, theatre, and film and other media such as videogames and animation. It enables readers to understand the practical and theoretical concerns of sound narrative across different story-telling media and to choose the correct medium for their writing.

Yoruba, one of the national languages of Nigeria, is spoken by more than 30 million people worldwide. It is the most widely spoken language in Nigeria after English, and is also spoken in Benin and Togo. This unique, two-part resource provides travelers to Nigeria and other parts of West Africa with the tools they need for daily interaction. The bilingual dictionary has a concise vocabulary for everyday use, and the phrasebook allows instant communication on a variety of topics. Ideal for businesspeople, travelers, students, and aid workers, this guide includes: 4,000 dictionary entries; phonetics that are intuitive for English speakers Essential phrases on topics such as transportation, dining out, and business Concise grammar and pronunciation sections