Alyssa Catherine, also known as Aly Cat, is having a hard time in first grade. Can she get her friends to stop calling her names?

In Please Take Me Home, Clare Campbell takes us on a journey with the nation's rescue cats, from being treated as pests throughout history to being the pet of choice today. For a long time, stray cats in Britain were seen as a nuisance and hunted down as vermin. Having invited this wild, independent creature into our homes, humans did not extend their welcome for long. Over time, thousands of cats were subsequently abandoned and left to live on the margins of survival. There were, however, the kind few who sought to help. But these good spirited people were often scorned, even derided as 'mad'. A Princess of Wales was even told to stop helping lost cats in order to avoid a royal scandal; the story was kept a secret of state for years. It would take over a century for strays to become the beloved rescue cats of today, with some now gaining celebrity status, such as Downing Street's Larry or Street Cat Bob. Please Take Me Home is a fascinating and insightful history through the ages of the struggle for cats to exist in domesticity alongside mankind.

Welcome to the world of the Alley Cats, they are just trying to get a break for their band, but with opposition from the locals they are having a hard time. You can sing, dance and play your saxophone and piano like a master, but sometimes you still have to scratch your way to the top.

This book is about the practice of grade retention in elementary school, a particularly vexing problem in urban school systems, where upward of half the students may repeat a grade. On the Success of Failure addresses whether repeating a grade is helpful or harmful when children are not keeping up. It describes the school context of retention and evaluates its consequences by tracking the experiences of a large, representative sample of Baltimore school children from first grade through high school. In addition to evaluating the consequences of retention, the book describes the cohort s dispersion along many different educational pathways from first grade through middle school, the articulation of retention with other forms of educational tracking (like reading group placements in the early primary grades and course-level assignments in middle school), and repeaters academic and school adjustment problems before they were held back.

Since its founding in 1945, the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan (FCCJ) has been a haven for working journalists. From its origins at "No. 1 Shimbun Alley" in the ruins of Tokyo immediately after World War II, the club quickly took on a life of its own. At times it became like a miniature United Nations, meeting the needs of hundreds of foreign journalists from around the world, who used it as a working press center as well as a social oasis. Club members, who include several Pulitzer Prize winners, have personally witnessed and reported on some of the most momentous events of the last half century-the end of World War II and the occupation of Japan; the revolution in China; the Korean War; Vietnam and the student riots of the 1960s; the height of the Cold War; Japan's economic miracle and the subsequent collapse of the "bubble" economy; the death of Emperor Hirohito; and much more. Foreign Correspondents in Japan gives an intimate and colorful look at these journalists who covered Asia for the rest of the world during five decades of sweeping change, and provides first-person accounts of history as it was being written.

'A masterpiece' MARTIN AMIS 'The best book about homicide detectives by an American writer' NORMAN MAILER Based on a year on the killing streets of Baltimore, David Simon's true crime masterpiece reveals a city few will ever experience. Day in day out citizens are shot, stabbed, or bludgeoned to death. At the centre of this hurricane of crime is the city's homicide unit, a small brotherhood of men who fight for whatever justice is possible in a deadly world.

"The long and illustrious career of Edouard Vuillard spans the fin-de-siecle and the first four decades of the twentieth century, during which time the French painter, printmaker, and photographer created an extraordinary body of work. This is the first volume to explore Vuillard's rich and varied career in its totality, presenting nearly 350 works that demonstrate the full range of his subject matter and reveal both the public and private sides of this quintessentially Parisian artist." "In a series of illustrated essays and catalogue entries, the authors explore Vuillard's complex and diverse artistic development, beginning with his academic training in Paris in the late 1880s and the innovative Nabi paintings of the 1890s for which he is best known, including his provocative, disquieting middle-class interiors and his work associated with the avant-garde theatre. The authors also examine Vuillard's splendid but lesser known large-scale decorations, his luminous landscapes, and the elegant portraits from the last decades of his career. In addition to paintings, the volume includes a substantial selection of drawings and graphics, together with a large group of striking photographs by the artist, many of which are published here for the first time." "This illustrated catalogue accompanies the most comprehensive exhibition ever devoted to the work of Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940). The exhibition opens at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and travels to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Galeries nationales du Grand Palais in Paris, and the Royal Academy of Arts, London."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Continuing on from Kookaburra on the Deck, Time is the Brake follows Mouse as she grapples with the fact that her lover, Adrian, has deserted her for good. This time there is no turning back, even though she questions the validity of everything she has been told. The realisation that their literary epic is the only way they can be together propels her into full immersion with the script, both as a comfort and as a means to decipher their elusive destiny. As the pages grow daily beneath her tapping fingers she intuitively knows that events are not over.