In this hilarious, coming-of-age novel that's "Ready Player One for the middle grade crowd" (School Library Journal), twelve-year-old Bryan Biggins wakes up to find that his life has become a video game. Meet Bryan Biggins. Most of the time he's a freckle-faced boy, small for his age, who attends a school known for its unwritten uniform of North Face jackets and Hollister jeans. The rest of the time he is Kieran Nightstalker, the level-fifty dark-elf hero of his favorite video game, Sovereign of Darkness. Until one day Bryan wakes up to find out his life has become a video game. Sort of. Except instead of fighting dragons or blasting bad guys, he's still doing geometry and getting picked last for dodgeball. It's still middle school. Only now there's much more at stake. Stealing the Twinkie from underneath the noses of those dieting teachers isn't enough to earn him another life. And battling the creature that escaped from the science lab doesn't seem to cut it either. And who knew Romeo and Juliet would turn into a zombie bloodbath?! All the while he's losing hit points and gaining levels, and facing the truth that GAME OVER might flash before his eyes at any minute. It all seems to be building to something...something that has been haunting Bryan since way before his life turned into an X-Box nightmare, a challenge that only he can face. Will Bryan find a way to beat the game before it's too late?

The invention of flight craft heavier than air counts among humankind's defining achievements. In this book, aviation engineer and historian John D. Anderson, Jr., offers a concise and engaging account of the technical developments that anticipated the Wright brothers' successful first flight on December 17, 1903. While the accomplishments of the Wrights have become legendary, we do well to remember that they inherited a body of aerodynamics knowledge and flying machine technology. How much did they draw upon this legacy? Did it prove useful or lead to dead ends? Beginning with the earliest attempts at flight, Anderson explains how Leonardo da Vinci first began to grasp the concepts of lift and drag which would be essential to the invention of powered flight. He describes the many failed efforts of the so-called "tower jumpers," from Benedictine monk Oliver of Malmesbury in 1022 to the eighteenth-century Marquis de Bacqueville. He tells the fascinating story of aviation pioneers such as Sir George Cayley, who in a stroke of genius first proposed the modern design of a fixed-wing craft with a fuselage and horizontal and vertical tail surfaces in 1799, and William Samuel Henson, a lace-making engineer whose ambitious "aerial steam carriage" was patented in 1842 but never built. Anderson describes the groundbreaking nineteenth-century laboratory experiments in fluid dynamics, the building of the world's first wind tunnel in 1870, and the key contributions of various scientists and inventors in such areas as propulsion (propellers, not flapping wings) and wing design (curved, not flat). He also explains the crucial contributions to the science of aerodynamics by the German engineer Otto Lilienthal, later praised by the Wrights as their "most important" predecessor. In telling the dramatic story of the Wright brothers' many experiments at Kitty Hawk as they raced to become the first in flight, Anderson shows how the brothers succeeded where others failed by taking the best of early technology and building upon it using a carefully planned, step-by-step experimental approach. (They recognized, for example, that it was necessary to become a skilled glider pilot before attempting powered flight.) With vintage photographs and informative diagrams to enhance the text, Inventing Flight will interest anyone who has ever wondered what lies behind the miracle of flight. "I have long thought that need exists for a book, suitable for undergraduates, that would tell the connected prehistory of the airplane from Cayley to the Wrights. In light of the recognized excellence of his technical textbooks (with their stimulating historical vignettes), I can't think of a better person than Professor Anderson for the job. He has the rare combination of technical and historical knowledge that is essential for the necessary balance. Inventing Flight will be a welcome addition to undergraduate classrooms."--Walter G. Vincenti, Stanford University