Böcker utgivna av Houghton Mifflin

The Common Man, Maurice Manning's fourth collection, is a series of ballad-like narratives, set down in loose, unrhymed iambic tetrameter, that honors the strange beauty of the Kentucky mountain country he knew as a child, as well as the idiosyncratic adventures and personalities of the oldtimers who were his neighbors, friends, and family. Playing off the book's title, Manning demonstrates that no one is common or simple. Instead, he creates a detailed, complex, and poignant portrait?by turns serious and hilarious, philosophical and speculative, but ultimately tragic?of a fast-disappearing aspect of American culture. The Common Man's accessibility and its enthusiastic and sincere charms make it the perfect antidote to the glib ironies that characterize much contemporary American verse. It will also help to strengthen Manning's reputation as one of his generation's most important and original voices.

"An extraordinary exploration and meditation . . . [Bass] transports us along on this wonder-filled tour, full of hardness and hope, into an otherworldly place that mirrors our own." --National Geographic TravelerBlack rhinos are not actually black. They are, however, giant animals with tiny eyes, feet the diameter of laundry baskets, and horns that are prized for both their aesthetic and medicinal qualities. Until recently, these creatures were perched on the edge of extinction, their numbers dwindling as they succumbed to poachers and the ravages of civil war. Now their numbers are rising, thanks to a groundbreaking new conservation method from the Save the Rhino Trust: make sure that rhinos are worth more alive than dead.Rick Bass, who has long worn the uneasy mantle of both activist and hunter, traveled to Namibia to find black rhinos. The tale of his journey provides a deeper understanding of these amazing animals and of just what needs to be done to protect them."Bass provides a singularly thoughtful portrait of a unique animal, and a meditation on mankind's relationship to both it and the natural world as a whole." --Minneapolis Star Tribune

?The place to go if you're really interested in this version of the quest for creating Artificial Intelligence (AI).??Seattle Times For centuries, people have dreamed of creating a machine that thinks like a human. Scientists have made progress: computers can now beat chess grandmasters and help prevent terrorist attacks. Yet we still await a machine that exhibits the rich complexity of human thought?one that doesn't just crunch numbers, or take us to a relevant Web page, but understands us and gives us what we need. With the creation of Watson, IBM's Jeopardy! playing computer, we are one step closer to that goal. But how did we get here? In Final Jeopardy, Stephen Baker traces the arc of Watson's ?life,? from its birth in the IBM labs to its big night on the podium. We meet Hollywood moguls and Jeopardy! masters, genius computer programmers and ambitious scientists, including Watson's eccentric creator, David Ferrucci. We see how a new generation of Watsons could transform medicine, the law, marketing, even science itself, as machines process huge amounts of data at lightning speed, answer our questions, and possibly come up with new hypotheses. As fast and fun as the game itself, Final Jeopardy shows how smart machines will fit into our world?and how they'll disrupt it. ?Like Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine, Baker's book finds us at the dawn of a singularity. It's an excellent case study, and does good double duty as a Philip K. Dick scenario, too.??Kirkus Reviews ?Baker's narrative is both charming and terrifying . . . an entertaining romp through the field of artificial intelligence?and a sobering glimpse of things to come.??Publishers Weekly, starred review

Sarah promised Marjorie when they were five years old that they would be best friends forever. But that was before seventh grade, when everything changed everything except Marjorie. While Sarah wants to meet new people and try new things, Marjorie still likes doing the same things they always did. It seems the more time the two girls spend together, the more time Sarah wants to spend apart. How did a promise that was so easy to make become so hard to keep?With beautifully drawn characters and vivid details, this incisive novel portrays middle school in all its complexity both the promise of what is to come and the pain of what must be left behind."

Big Audrey is a girl . . . with cat's whiskers . . . and sort of cat's eyes. But, is there an other cat-whiskered, sort of cat-eyed girl?Big Audrey waves goodbye to her friends Iggy and Neddie, Seamus, and Crazy Wig, in Los Angeles and hitches a ride with bongo-playing-while-driving Marlon Brando across the country to Poughkeepsie, New York, city of mystery. She finds she has questions needing answers-and a bit of inter-plane-of-existence traveling to do.Big Audrey and her telepathic friend Molly zigzag off on an incredibly strange and kooky adventure, and solve the mystery of the cat-whiskered doppelganger.

Three guys from the Briar Academy fencing team went up to the cliff that night for a hazing ritual but only two came back alive. Now Luke s best friend, Hayden, is in jail and the pressure is on Luke to report what he saw. But what did he see? An accident or a murder? Luke has always followed Hayden s lead, but this is one decision he ll be forced to make on his own. And to do it, he must face the truth about his friendship with Hayden and his own painful past.

Claire Louise Corbett and her Confederate family flee their home as Union soldiers shell their town of Vicksburg, Mississippi. They venture out from the safety of a cave only three times a day, when the Union army takes their meals at eight in the morning, noon, and eight at night. Although many of the townspeople suffer from a lack of food, the Corbetts receive extra rations from Claire Louise's brother, Landon, a doctor with the Union army. When Claire Louise discovers her brother tending to a Confederate soldier who is responsible for Robert E. Lee's "lost order" (causing the South to lose the Battle of Antietam), she is forced to make a difficult choice between family and friends.Award-winning historical novelist Ann Rinaldi paints a story of family, courage, and secrets during the forty-seven-day siege of Vicksburg, a battle that has sometimes been ignored in history because it ended the same day as the Battle of Gettysburg.

Meredith Willis is suspicious of Adrien, the new guy next door. When she dares to sneak a look into the windows of his house, she sees something in the cellar that makes her believe that Adrien might be more than just a creep?he may be an actual monster.But her sister, Heather, doesn't share Meredith's repulsion. Heather believes Adrien is the only guy who really understands her. In fact, she may be falling in love with him. When Adrien and Heather are cast as the leads in the school production of Romeo and Juliet, to Heather, it feels like fate. To Meredith, it feels like a bad omen. But if she tries to tear the couple apart, she could end up in the last place she'd ever want to be: the cellar. Can Meredith convince her sister that she's dating the living dead before it's too late for both of them?

Recklessness and rigor, in equal measure, mark the stirring poetics of Andrew Hudgins in this fine new book. Hudgins can wrestle a rhyme scheme into submission with one hand tied behind his back and can penetrate the black heart of history with a single, subtly rendered detail. He laughs with Democritus and weeps with Heraclitus and, line by distillate line, contrives a tonic antidote to the acetone / of American inattention. Linda Gregerson

On a summer vacation to Mexico, popularity-obsessed Kat ends up on a teen adventure tour where she meets Nando, a young Mayan guide (who happens to be quite a cutie). As they travel to different Mayan ruins each day, Nando tells Kat his original legend of Muluc, a girl who lived in the time of the ancient Maya. The dangerous, dramatic world in which Muluc lived is as full of rivalry, betrayal, and sacrifice as Kat s world at middle school. And as she makes new friends and discovers treasures in Mexico, Kat begins to question her values and those of her friends back at home."

ShadowStrike poisoned the water of Trinity Falls two months ago. Now the Trinity Four, the teens most affected by the poison, have been isolated in a remote mansion, under twenty-four-hour medical care while scientists on four continents rush to discover a cure. Meanwhile, U.S. operatives scour the world for the bioterrorists responsible for this heinous crime, as two teen virtual spies, also infected, hunt for the criminals on the Internet. The danger remains real?for ShadowStrike has every reason to pursue the Trinity Four, and their evil plan will unleash a new designer virus that's even deadlier than the first.

This collection of highly original narrative poems is written in the voice of frontiersman Daniel Boone and captures all the beauty and struggle of nascent America. We follow the progression of Daniel Boone's life, a life led in war and in the wilderness, and see the birth of a new nation. We track the bountiful animals and the great, undisturbed rivers. We stand beside Boone as he buries his brother, then his wife, and finds comfort in his friendship with a slave named Derry. Praised for his originality, Maurice Manning is an exciting new voice in American poetry.The darkest place I've ever beendid not require a name. It seemedto be a gathering place for the lintof the world. The bottom of a hollowbeneath two ridges, sunk like a stone.The water was surely old, the dregsof some ancient sea, but purifiedby time, like a man made better by his years, his old hurts absorbed intohis soul, his losses like a springin his breast. -from "Born Again"

A sparkling debut collection from a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet that makes an ecstatic argument for livingContaining joy and suffering side by side, Ramshackle Ode offers elegies and odes as necessary partners to bring out the greatest power in each. By turns celebratory, meditative, tender, and rebellious, these poems reimagine the divisions and intersections of life and death, the human and the natural world, the brutal and the beautiful. Time and again, they choose hope.From an award-winning young poet in the tradition of Marie Howe, Walt Whitman, Gerald Stern, and contemporary American bard Maurice Manning, Ramshackle Ode presents a new voice singing toward transcendence, offering the sense that, though this world is fragile, human existence is a wonderfully stubborn miracle of chance.