City Schools

Teach magic, they said. It’ll be fun, they said. Yeah, well, they’re dirty rotten liars. When I told Tennessee we needed to have more schools than just Edenburg, I thought they’d assign appropriate people to the task. Ya know, like actual adults. Not a 16-year-old who still has to finish high school herself.

Despite her innate ambition and summa cum laude smarts, Kate Pearson has turned into a major slacker. After being dumped by her handsome French "almost fiancé", she abandons her grad school plans and spends her days lolling on the couch, leaving her apartment only when a dog-walking gig demands it. Her friends don't know what to do other than pass tissues and hope for a comeback while her practical sister, Angela, pushes every remedy she can think of, from trapeze class to therapy to job interviews.

The US Army Ranger School class started in June 1989 as a class of 600. In the first week, 150 were in the hospital. Ultimately, only 20% of us made it. This dramatic story paints a vivid picture of the hardships of Ranger School, and how the "I will do anything to help my buddy" Army Ranger ethos is formed. It is a story of incredible tenacity, of wrenching emotional blows, and of triumph. Above all, it is a story of helping your mates.

Fans of New York Times best seller The Nanny Diaries will rejoice in this wickedly hilarious novel, which acclaimed author Katharine Weber says is "much funnier and darker". Optioned for a major motion picture starring Catherine Zeta-Jones, The Ivy Chronicles skewers the twisted priorities of America's well-heeled elite.

It’s him. Always has been. But the timing has never been right. And why would a guy like him— rich, drop-dead gorgeous, and kind—ever be interested in little old me? He owns a massive hotel chain. I’m living in my brother’s rinky-dink basement suite. I have bigger things to worry about than my teenage crush coming back to haunt me. But what if that crush also hands me the big break I need? How could I say no when the guy of my dreams also offers me my dream job? Heck yes I want to work for him this Christmas season. Cue holiday music, mistletoe, and nostalgia. If I hadn’t ...

Now here at last, is McCourt's long-awaited audiobook about how his thirty-year teaching career shaped his second act as a writer. Teacher Man is also an urgent tribute to teachers everywhere. In bold and spirited prose featuring his irreverent wit and heartbreaking honesty, McCourt records the trials, triumphs, and surprises he faces in public high schools around New York City.

Idlewild is a tiny, artsy Quaker high school in lower Manhattan. Students call their teachers by their first names, there are no grades, and every day begins with 20 minutes of contemplative silence in the Meetinghouse. It is during one of those meetings that an airplane hits the Twin Towers. For two Idlewild outcasts, 9/11 serves as the first day of an intense 18-month friendship. Fay is prickly, aloof, and obsessed with gay men; Nell is shy, sensitive, and obsessed with Fay. The two of them bond and spend all their waking hours giddily parsing their environment for homoerotic subtext.

In this classic 1948 memoir, now in its fourth edition, Caroline Pratt recounts, in a wry authorial voice much closer to Will Rogers than John Dewey, how she founded what is now the dynamic City and Country School in New York City; invented the maple "unit blocks” that have become a staple in classrooms and children’s homes around the globe; and came to play an important role in reimagining preschool and primary-school education in ways that resound in the tumultuously creative age before us.  

It had to be her. The one woman in this town who can help save my family’s ranch. We’re oil and water when we’re together. She’s a lawyer. I’m an old-fashioned cowboy. Why do I keep finding myself drawn back to her? Lawyer or not, she’s trouble in high heels, and our love affair might burn the ranch down before we can save it. Hell. Family is everything and our legacy is at stake. But for her? I’d give up everything I’ve been fighting for. The question is… Would she do the same?

He’s in it to win it. But when he brings in a troubled teen as a ringer, is the price of success too high? Vietnam vet Donny Doyle has a job no one wants: coaching Tsalagee High’s basement-dwelling football team. And despite the school’s decade-long record of failure, he promises to deliver the backwater Oklahoma town a state championship. But the only way to do it is to recruit a terrifying, mammoth kid straight out of juvenile detention. Battling his own PTSD, Coach Doyle struggles to tame his ticking time bomb of a player into a disciplined gridiron beast. And after a fast five-win...

Charlotte Holmes and Jamie Watson finally have a chance to start over. With all the freedom their precollege summer program provides and no one on their tail, the only mystery they need to solve, once and for all, is what they are to each other. But upon their arrival at Oxford, Charlotte is immediately drawn into a new case: a series of accidents befell the theater program at Oxford last year, culminating in a young woman going missing on the night of a major performance.

Now here at last, is McCourt's long-awaited audiobook about how his thirty-year teaching career shaped his second act as a writer. Teacher Man is also an urgent tribute to teachers everywhere. In bold and spirited prose featuring his irreverent wit and heartbreaking honesty, McCourt records the trials, triumphs, and surprises he faces in public high schools around New York City.

The last thing Ash expects when she lands in Clearwater, Florida is to be stalked by a troubled teenager. If that's not bad enough, she is caught in a shooting spree next to the nearby elementary school. The cops think it’s an attempt at mass killing, but Ash wonders if the only victim was specifically targeted by the killer. Will she manage to identify him and have him arrested before he comes after her?

In a fit of idealism, Ed Boland left a 20-year career as a non-profit executive to teach in a tough New York City public high school. But his hopes quickly collided headlong with the appalling reality of his students' lives and a hobbled education system unable to help them. Freddy runs a drug ring for his incarcerated brother; Nee-cole is homeschooled on the subway by her brilliant homeless mother; Byron's Ivy League dream is dashed because he is undocumented. In the end, Boland isn't hoisted on his students' shoulders and no one passes AP anything.

Prepare yourself to embark on an exciting journey into local politics with our new eBook, "The Office Quest." This practical guide invites readers to explore the nuances and strategies inherent in serving your local community through political roles. Our eBook begins by highlighting the pivotal role local politics play in shaping our daily lives, and the overall structure of local government, further emphasizing the profound impact of local political positions on our communities. It then guides you on introspecting your political goals, assessing your skills, and aligning your objectives ...

Chicago has long struggled with racial residential segregation, high rates of poverty, and deepening class stratification. Unequal City examines the ways in which Chicago's most vulnerable residents navigate their neighborhoods, life opportunities, and encounters with the law. In this pioneering analysis of the intersection of race, place, and opportunity, sociologist and criminal justice expert Carla Shedd illuminates how schools either reinforce or ameliorate the social inequalities that shape the worlds of these adolescents.

Told with equal parts raw honesty and unbridled compassion, All Day recounts a year in Liza Jessie Peterson's classroom at Island Academy, the high school for inmates detained at New York City's Rikers Island. A poet and an actress who had done occasional workshops at the correctional facility, Peterson was ill prepared for a full-time stint teaching in the GED program for the incarcerated youths.

In this powerful narrative non-fiction debut, the lives of these three characters provide listeners with a vivid and sobering portrait of education in twenty-first-century America. Hope Against Hope works in the same tradition as Random Family and There Are No Children Here to capture the challenges of growing up and learning in a troubled world.

In the uncharted depths of space, challenges await that will push them beyond their limits… After testing their new ship the Hermes, gifted to them by an advanced species from the distant planet Pandooma, charismatic teenage adventurer Samantha and her multi-talented young crew head back out into space, hungry for new discoveries. However, attacked by pirates determined to resume their reign of terror, the crew has to flee the planet they were exploring—leaving two of their number behind. When two more crew members disappear, the priority of those left on the Hermes has to be to save ...

How is it that, half a century after Brown v. Board of Education, educational opportunities remain so unequal for black and white students, not to mention poor and wealthy ones? In his important new book, Five Miles Away, a World Apart, James E. Ryan answers this question by tracing the fortunes of two schools in Richmond, Virginia - one in the city and the other in the suburbs. Ryan shows how court rulings in the 1970s, limiting the scope of desegregation, laid the groundwork for the sharp disparities between urban and suburban public schools that persist to this day.