"There is a great need for this book!" -Mary Allan, 2004 California Teacher of the Year Sometimes tests prove very little and somebody gets left behind even when they're thinking. Since standardized testing became a priority for schools, nine-year-old Jeffery Taylor's academic life has become pure torture. He suffers from a condition called test anxiety: when he takes a test, his stomach aches, his eyes hurt, he feels like his head is going to blow up, and, at times, he visibly trembles. Jeff's active imagination hasn't helped his success at school either-especially if he's drawing when he's supposed to be working on other subjects. But schoolwork is not his only problem. His classmate, Matt Huggins, is a real pest, and Jeff and his best friend, Terry, are growing apart. But Jeff is delighted when he meets a new friend who helps him to face his academic challenges. Testing is a tremendous issue in schools today. It can have a lasting effect on funding as schools balance the need to meet accountability standards with the desire to provide learning to students. But most importantly, it can result in test anxiety which has a lasting effect on children. In Nobody Left Behind, author Deanna Enos uses storytelling as an example of how to begin a dialogue between children, teachers, and parents concerning this important subject. Inside: Discussion Questions Activities for Art and Writing Test Taker Tips

Disability and Disaster adds disaster research to the expanding area of disability studies. The book includes writings by international scholars and first-hand narratives from individuals with disabilities affected by disasters around the globe. Hazards described in these narratives include earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, fires, and war.

The dramatic story of hundreds of senior citizens left in the path of a ferocious firestorm and what the quest for accountability reveals about the increasing risks to our most vulnerable population. “…a powerful work of investigative journalism about a particularly vulnerable segment of the population…. Alongside an engrossing account of the emergency as it unfolded in Sonoma County, Belden and Gullixson provide a definitive account of management’s woefully inadequate response at the two sister facilities. Their findings are a lesson to other care facilities —here’s what not to do.” —San Francisco Chronicle Just after midnight on October 9, 2017, as one of the nation’s deadliest and most destructive firestorms swept over California’s Wine Country, hundreds of elderly residents from two posh senior living facilities were caught in its path. The frailest were blind, in wheelchairs, or diagnosed with dementia, and their community quickly transformed from a palatial complex that pledged to care for them to one that threatened to entomb them. The rescue of the final 105 seniors left behind on an inflamed hillside depended not on employees, but strangers whose lives intersected in a riveting tale of terror and heroism. Headlines blamed caregivers for abandonment and neglect, but the truth proved far more complex—leading to a battle for accountability that stretched from the courtroom to the state legislature, and ultimately, to the ballot box. Inflamed: Abandonment, Heroism, and Outrage in Wine Country’s Deadliest Firestorm is the gripping and emotional narrative detailing what happened to these seniors, employees, and rescuers before, during, and after the Tubbs Fire decimated portions of Santa Rosa, including Oakmont Senior Living Villa Capri and part of Varenna at Fountaingrove. Anne Belden and Paul Gullixson are professional journalists and Sonoma County residents who spent three years recording each phase of the disaster in agonizing detail—from the botched evacuation and its excruciating aftermath to the investigations, lawsuits, and breakdowns that followed. They tell this harrowing story with a veracity and compassion only achieved by experienced reporters with local roots. Their narrative revisits the horrors of 2017 but also asks the reader to look to the future and consider how their community’s most vulnerable will fare as ten thousand Baby Boomers retire each day, the for-profit assisted living industry rapidly expands, and the climate becomes more volatile. If this travesty can happen at high-end senior living complexes, it can happen anywhere.

What is the soundtrack for a nuclear war? During the Cold War, over 500 songs were written about nuclear weapons, fear of the Soviet Union, civil defense, bomb shelters, McCarthyism, uranium mining, the space race, espionage, the Berlin Wall, and glasnost. This music uncovers aspects of these world-changing events that documentaries and history books cannot. In Atomic Tunes, Tim and Joanna Smolko explore everything from the serious to the comical, the morbid to the crude, showing the widespread concern among musicians coping with the effect of communism on American society and the threat of a nuclear conflict of global proportions. Atomic Tunes presents a musical history of the Cold War, analyzing the songs that capture the fear of those who lived under the shadow of Stalin, Sputnik, mushroom clouds, and missiles.

At the farthest reaches of the solar system, Ellen Ripley awakens on board the space station "Auriga". Her last memory is of her own fiery death. And yet she is somehow alive. Ripley discovers that her "resurrection" is a result of an incredible experiment which has altered both her and the creature she has been carrying. To combat the incalculable alien menace, she teams up with a renegade band of space smugglers.

Who thinks he has an answer to the Greater Persian Question? Who’s going to save a nation on the brink? What’s going down in the Libyan desert? Why all the motorcycles? What’s the deal with the iguanas? And, most of all... Who is John Dolt? A fortuitous encounter in the bathroom section. Menacing objects in the African sky. A secret and luxurious fortress in the Costa Rican jungle. A strike of all the really productive people. A private army on the streets. An honest man thrust into the seat of power.

The universe can be savage, but these heroes won’t go down without a fight. Six full-length novels by bestselling authors that explore the far reaches of the universe, the limits of the human mind, and the divide between man and machine. Aliens, AI, and post-apocalyptic adventure—you’ll find them all among the Savage Stars. Download this collection of series starters today! About the Books: Starship Waking by C. Gockel On an icy, barren world, a starship dreams of doom…Her nightmares will force an alien race to make contact with the most unlikely of heroes—6T9, a pleasure 'bot struggling to find purpose, and Volka, a lonely mutant on a repressive homeworld. The galaxy will be shaken to its core. The starship is waking. Exin Ex Machina by G. S. Jennsen When man and machine are one and the same, death is no longer an inevitability. Though Nika Tescarav has lived many lives, she no longer remembers them. But if whoever erased her past did so to silence her, they’ve failed. Enter a world of technological wonders, exotic alien life, captivating worlds—and a dark secret that will shatter it all. Star Nomad by Lindsay Buroker The Alliance has toppled the tyrannical empire. It should be a time for celebration, but not for fighter pilot Captain Alisa Marchenko. After barely surviving a crash in the final battle for freedom, she's stranded on a dustball of a planet, billions of miles from her young daughter. She has no money or resources, and there are no transports heading to Perun, her former home and the last imperial stronghold. The Legacy Human by Susan Kaye Quinn What would you give to live forever? Elijah wants to become an ascender, a human/machine hybrid, but it’s forbidden for legacy humans like him. When he’s sponsored for the creative Olympics, he could win everything, including ascendance… or lose it all playing the ascenders’ Games. Bypass Gemini by Joseph Lallo Lex was the next great hoversled pilot until a fixed race got him banned. Now a freelance delivery boy, life couldn’t get any worse. Then a mysterious suitcase got him mixed up with mobsters, a megacorp, and a mad scientist. Now he must solve the mystery or die trying. The Concordia Deception by J. J. Green After spending 184 years in suspended animation, scientist Cariad begins a new life in a remote space colony. On a planet rife with intrigue, betrayal, and alien threats, can she fight to preserve humanity’s future in the stars?