John Williams

Born the child of a poor farmer in Missouri, William Stoner is urged by his parents to study new agriculture techniques at the state university. Digging instead into the texts of Milton and Shakespeare, Stoner falls under the spell of the unexpected pleasures of English literature, and decides to make it his life. Stoner is the story of that life. The sorrows of William Stoner are tempered, somehow, by the demands of the daily routine. His own ordinary...

In the 1870s, Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek "an original relation to nature," drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher's Crossing, a small Kansas town full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. One of these men regales Will with tales of the immense buffalo herds hidden away in the Colorado Rockies and convinces him to join an expedition to track them down. At the end of a grueling journey,...

Provides instructions for making and using a variety of machines, including levers, diggers, cranes, and pulleys.

Describes the physical characteristics, habits, life cycle, and habitats of the graceful migratory bird the swallow.

Explores the wheel through projects involving rollers, carts, wagons, and other devices using wheels to function.

Introduces the concepts of flight through a variety of projects and experiments.

"The history of a generation of artists, writers, activists, and dreamers who created a Bohemian utopia on the windblown shores of Cape Cod"--

The history of the railroad across America that united a nation.