How This Book Came To Be: Some years ago, the Abenaki of northwestern Vermont staged a demonstration against the practices of certain contractors who were building homes on sites the Abenaki had identified as ancient burial grounds of their people. About a month after that demonstration, I happened to travel near the area in question. Along the way, I noticed a small group of people standing around a big yellow loader on a building lot that had been ripped up to dig a cellar hole. The loader's scoop, filled with sand, had been lifted to table height and people stood around it, not the usual...

On any given school day in the United States of America, there are approximately 480,000 school buses on the road. They transport 26 million students. Not too many people know or care about these statistics. The school bus comes. It picks up the kids. It drops them at school. It picks them up after school and drops them at home. It disappears into the evening dusk, not to be seen again until the next morning, usually as reliably as the sunrise. But there is more to it than that... This is the story of one bus driver's first year, driving a bus named Phil, full of a feisty band of students...

The year is 1896. The European colonizing effort known as The Scramble For Africa is at its peak. Against the threat of invasion, Ethiopian Emperor Menelik II, King of Kings, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, issues a proclamation of war and rallies his troops to the defense of the Motherland.
In the far south of Ethiopia, in the small mountain town of Bekoji high on the Arusi Plateau, two brothers-Bedane and Chala Negassa-answer the Emperors call to battle. Bedane leads a squadron of the fierce and feared Oromo cavalry north to join the Emperor. Too young to join the army, Chala is...