This is a guide to rails, a relatively homogeneous family of birds spread throughout the world. Barry Taylor and Ber van Perlo have described and illustrated 145 species of rails, including two that are newly described, and also ten that are recently extinct and two that are almost certainly extinct. The book, based on up-to-date references and on new observations, is the first to give comprehensive information on field identification (including voice), covering all species and races for which details are known. It is also the first to provide descriptions of the immature and juvenile plumages of many species. The authors provide a detailed summary of current knowledge of all aspects of rail biology and their often complex behaviour, social structure, and family life. They explain how such apparently poorly flying birds can undertake intercontinental migrations and are such widespread and successful colonists of remote oceanic islands. They also discuss the remarkable ease and speed with which species on such islands have evolved into flightless forms in the absence of predators, a fact that has led to the rapid extinction of numerous island taxa following the arrival of man. Rail habitats are fast disappearing, say the authors, and many rails become endangered before enough is known about them to plan effective conservation measures. The book provides information on distribution, status, habitat requirements, and current threats, and it gives conservation priorities for threatened species.

Contains reliable information on agricultural production, supplies, consumption, facilities, costs, and returns. Its tables of annual data covering a wide variety of facts in forms suited to most common use.

The mission of the Urban and Regional Policy and Its Effects series is to inform policymakers, practitioners, and scholars about the effectiveness of select policy approaches, reforms, and experiments in addressing the key social and economic problems facing today's cities, suburbs, and metropolitan areas. Volume four of the series introduces and examines thoroughly the concept of regional resilience, explaining how resilience can be promoted—or impeded—by regional characteristics and public policies. The authors illuminate how the walls that now segment metropolitan regions across political jurisdictions and across institutions—and the gaps that separate federal laws from regional realities—have to be bridged in order for regions to cultivate resilience. Contributors: Patricia Atkins, George Washington University; Pamela Blumenthal, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development; Sarah Ficenec, George Washington University; Alec Friedhoff, Brookings Institution; Kathryn Foster, University at Buffalo, SUNY; Juliet Gainsborough, Bentley University; Edward Hill, Cleveland State University; Kate Lowe, Cornell University; John Mollenkopf, Graduate Center, City University of New York; Mai Nguyen, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Manuel Pastor, University of Southern California; Rolf Pendall, Urban Institute; Nancy Pindus, Urban Institute; Sarah Reckhow, Michigan State University; Travis St. Clair, George Washington University; Todd Swanstrom, University of Missouri, St. Louis; Margaret Weir, University of California, Berkeley; Howard Wial, Brookings Institution; Harold Wolman, George Washington University

A troubled detective falls in love with the daughter-in-law of a rich client.

In this historically accurate Western epic from debut author Rod Thompson, a young farm boy comes of age in a frontier crucible of death, vengeance, and beauty. When four hoodlums brutally murder a farming family in the Dakota Territory, they leave a fourteen-year-old boy for dead in the field…That’s a big mistake. After bearing witness to the savage acts that destroyed his world, young Cormac Lynch knows only one way to make things right. Coming upon the men, he takes aim and takes his revenge—rescuing the beautiful Irish redhead Lainey Nayle in the process. With a deadly reputation, Cormac grows up to back down from no man…and only one woman. He and Lainey face the danger and anguish of the frontier with grit and humor. But when Lainey’s life is endangered again, Cormac must once again make good on his reputation…

"Incredibly well-researched, thoroughly enjoyable, and singularly original."--SHELLEY SHEPARD GRAY, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author "A beautiful story of love, loss, and the bonds that connect a family to its faith."--SUZANNE WOODS FISHER, bestselling author of A Season on the Wind Ivy Zimmerman is successfully navigating her life as a young Mennonite woman, one generation removed from her parents' Old Order Amish upbringing. But when her parents are killed in a tragic accident, Ivy's way of life is upended. As she deals with her grief, her younger sisters' needs, the relationship with her boyfriend, and her Dawdi and Mammi's strict rules, Ivy finds solace in both an upcoming trip to Germany for an international Mennonite youth gathering and in her great-great-aunt's story about Clare Simons, another young woman who visited Germany in the late 1930s. As Ivy grows suspicious that her parents' deaths weren't, in fact, an accident, she gains courage from what she learns of Clare's time in pre-World War II Germany. With the encouragement and inspiration of the women who have gone before her, Ivy seeks justice for her parents, her sisters, and herself.

Stories, vignettes, short books, essays, poems, and a few illustrated lessons for young people Nathan Strong has had extremely diverse experiences in his seventy years - farmer, carpenter, painter, pilot, college administrator, minister, white-water canoeist, traveler (48 states, Canada and a foreign country), teacher, dulcimer maker and recording artist, political campaign manager, entrepreneur, missionary, baseball coach, writer, husband and father of three - fertile ground for his vivid imagination. The question often arises about how a minister can have such a wide range of interests and such an uninhibited imagination. There are many precedents, from Milton and C.S. Lewis to Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, who was a mathematician, photographer, inventor and Anglican deacon. In fact, the case may be made that a minister without imagination makes for a boring preacher, which this minister definitely is not. With humor and poignancy, something for everyone and for every interest, the reader will delight to wander through the meanderings of this unusual writer.