"The Little Drummer Boy" joins the procession to Bethlehem to offer gifts to the Christ Child. Buddy McGee eagerly awaits a promised visit from his friend, so he can wish him "Merry Christmas, Space Case." "Sam and the Lucky Money" examines the dilemma of how one young boy spends his Chinese New Year's gift. On a crisp, cold, snowy, still winter's night, "The Tomten" of a humble farm homestead goes about on his secret rounds doing his caretaker duties...

In the second "Sapiens" volume, Yuval Noah Harari tells the story of how we took over the world; how an unlikely marriage between a god and a bureaucrat created the first empires; and how war, famine, disease, and inequality became a part of the human condition. The origins of modern farming are introduced through Elizabethan tragedy, the changing fortunes of domesticated plants and animals are tracked in the columns of the Daily Business News, and...

"This book is about one of the great zoological wonders of the world. No, it's not about the tears of the elephant, the smile of the dolphin, or the politics of the chimpanzee. It is about a scrawny, brainy ape with the habit of helping strangers, at times even risking life and limb to do so. It's about you and me, and how we treat everybody else. In short, it answers one of the biggest questions science has ever faced: Why do we give a damn about...

"Jungle tells a deep new history of the world, arguing that tropical rainforests played an outsize and overlooked role in our lives. Although we now recognize the crucial role tropical forests play in regulating planetary systems like the atmosphere, we still tend to think of them as a kind of "green hell," as inhospitable, prehistoric wildernesses, largely irrelevant to our lives. This has made it easier for private interests to exploit rainforest...

"Wesley McNair's story-like poems have long celebrated eccentrics and misfits, the hopeful and the lost, with a tenderness that transcends the everyday. This career-spanning collection brings together his very best poems from the past four decades alongside his newest poems. Since the publication of his first book in the early 1980s, Wesley McNair has earned a reputation as a poet of place, an intimate observer of the speech and character of New England....

The authoritative source on ASL is better than ever with more than 50 new phrases For more than 20 years, The American Sign Language Phrase Book has been the go-to guide for the hearing impaired and those who need to communicate with them-family, teachers, and friends. Now this classic by ASL leader Lou Fant has been updated by his wife Barbara Fant to include signs for today's lifestyle.