Miracles on Maple Hill
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Old Yeller
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A story of a boy and his dog in the Texas hill country ranks high in the annals of boy and dogdom. Gipson, in earlier books, has evinced an evocative quality which recaptures for the reader the sounds, the smells, the sights of the region he knows and loves, recaptures too the emotional quality, the moods of his central figure. This was particularly true in Hound-Dog Man, which for some readers was marred by the vernacular. In Old Yeller the story is told as a boy might share his own experience of growing up -- the dialect is no more insistent-possibly less so- than in The Yearling. Travis is thirteen when his father goes off on the long cattle trail to Abilene, leaving him as man of the house. There were the hogs who ran wild and some of the most exciting parts of the story tell of the roping and branding of the young. There were the cattle that had to be gentled for milking. There was a constant battle against skunks and coons in the corn patch and the melons. There was a small brother, violent in protest against Travis as disciplinarian. And -- a fairly shadowy figure- there was his mother, taking her share and more, in the struggle for existence. But most important there was Old Yeller, a big ugly yellow cur, whom Travis hated at the start and grew to love and trust and depend on, up to the tragic and dramatic end. A moving segment of early frontier America.
The House of Sixty Fathers
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Alone in a sampan with his pig and three ducklings, a little Chinese boy is whirled down a raging river, back to the town from which he and his parents had escaped the invading Japanese, and spends long and frightening days regaining his family and new home.
Mr. Justice Holmes
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A biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., describing his early education at dame and latin schools and Harvard College, his years of military service during the Civil War, his study of law, his work on The Common Law and his years as lawyer and judge in Massachusetts and as justice of the Supreme Court.
The Corn Grows Ripe
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Tigre, a twelve-year-old Mayan boy living in a modern-day village in Yucatán, must learn to be a man when his father is injured.
Black fox of Lorne
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The story occurs in the tenth century, with two Viking twins shipwrecked on the Scottish coast. They seek to avenge the death of their father and encounter loyal clansmen at war, kindly shepherds, power-hungry lairds and staunch crofters.