Books by Marc Aronson
Robert Kennedy (Up Close)
by Marc Aronson
Before his life was tragically cut short, Robert F. Kennedy was attorney general of the United States, a senator from New York, and a charismatic presidential candidate. But even more astonishing was Kennedy’s personal odyssey. Born into immense wealth and privilege, Kennedy came to embrace the cause of the poor and the disenfranchised, and to be seen by them as their ardent champion.
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For Boys Only: The Biggest, Baddest Book Ever
Hey, Boys!
Want to have some fun? Maybe learn how to land an airplane in an emergency? Or fight off an alligator? Escape from being tied up? How about taking a ride on one of America's scariest roller coasters? Learn how to make fake blood or turn a real bone into a pretzel. What if you could find out how to identify some of the world's most horrifying creatures? Or learn the secret of making a blockbuster movie? What about guessing the top 11 greatest moments in sports history? Find buried treasure? And once you've found the treasure, find out just how much it would cost you to buy one of the world's most expensive cars.
You'll find all this―and much more―over 250 pages of the biggest, baddest, and best information on just about everything. Plus we've placed a special, mind-bending, solve-the-code puzzle on random pages throughout the book that will lead you to a really cool solution! Now, that's fun!
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Sugar Changed the World: A Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, Freedom, and Science
by Marc Aronson, Marina Budhos
When this award-winning husband-and-wife team discovered that they each had sugar in their family history, they were inspired to trace the globe-spanning story of the sweet substance and to seek out the voices of those who led bitter sugar lives. The trail ran like a bright band from religious ceremonies in India to Europe’s Middle Ages, then on to Columbus, who brought the first cane cuttings to the Americas. Sugar was the substance that drove the bloody slave trade and caused the loss of countless lives but it also planted the seeds of revolution that led to freedom in the American colonies, Haiti, and France. With songs, oral histories, maps, and over 80 archival illustrations, here is the story of how one product allows us to see the grand currents of world history in new ways. Time line, source notes, bibliography, index.
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Sugar Changed the World: A Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, Freedom, and Science
by Marc Aronson, Marina Budhos
This globe-spanning history of sugar is "an epic story on a broad canvas that never loses sight of individual moments of human drama; a historical methodology infused with political, intellectual, cultural, and social strands; a complex sequence of cause and effect; an illuminating synthesis of primary and secondary sources; and a thoughtful marriage of words, picture, and design." (Horn Book starred review)
Here is the story of how one product allows us to see the grand currents of world history in new ways. Using songs, oral histories, maps, and over 80 archival illustrations, Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos put a human face on this vast pageant. Time line, source notes, bibliography, and index included.
The history of sugar runs like a bright band from religious ceremonies in India to Europe’s Middle Ages, then on to Columbus, who brought the first cane cuttings to the Americas. Sugar caused the loss of countless lives, but it also planted the seeds of revolution that led to freedom in the American colonies, Haiti, and France.
Cane, not cotton or tobacco, drove the bloody Atlantic slave trade and took the lives of countless Africans who toiled on vast sugar plantations under cruel overseers. And yet the very popularity of sugar gave abolitionists in England the one tool that could finally end the slave trade. Sugar moved, murdered, and freed millions; sugar changed the world.
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Bill Gates (Up Close)
by Marc Aronson
Bill Gates is many things: the richest person in the world; the ruthless businessman who co-founded Microsoft and led it to domination of the computer software industry; and now, the leading global philanthropist. When Gates was born in 1955, no one in the world owned a personal computer. A window had a pane of glass. A mouse was a rodent. As a teenager, Gates realized how computers were about to change the world, and made his fortune by riding that wave; modern teens look to him as their model of how technology can be turned into wealth. Marc Aronson’s biography is a probing portrait of a man whose name is a household word.
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Race: A History Beyond Black and White
by Marc Aronson
From historian Marc Aronson comes a thought-provoking, revelatory young adult nonfiction history of the origins of racism.
Race. You know it at a glance: he’s black; she’s white. They’re Asian; we’re Latino. Racism. I’m better; she’s worse. Those people do those kinds of things. We all know it’s wrong to make these judgments, but they come faster than thought. Why? Where did those feelings come from? Why are they so powerful? Why have millions been enslaved, murdered, denied their rights because of the color of their skin, the shape of their eyes?
This astounding book traces the history of racial prejudice in Western culture back to ancient Sumer and beyond. Greeks divided the world into civilized and barbarian, medieval men wrote about the traits of monstrous men until, finally, Enlightenment scientists scrap all those mythologies and come up with a new one: charts spelling out the traits of human races.
Throughout most of human history, slavery had nothing to do with race. In fact, the idea of race itself did not exist in the West before the 1600s. But once the idea was established and backed up by “scientific” theory, its influence grew with devastating consequences, from the appalling lynchings in the American South to the catastrophe known as the Holocaust in Europe.
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Master of Deceit: J. Edgar Hoover and America in the Age of Lies
by Marc Aronson
A fascinating and timely biography of J. Edgar Hoover from a Sibert Medalist.
"King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. . . . You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”
Dr. Martin Luther King received this demand in an anonymous letter in 1964. He believed that the letter was telling him to commit suicide. Who wrote this anonymous letter? The FBI. And the man behind it all was J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI's first director. In this unsparing exploration of one of the most powerful Americans of the twentieth century, accomplished historian Marc Aronson unmasks the man behind the Bureau- his tangled family history and personal relationships; his own need for secrecy, deceit, and control; and the broad trends in American society that shaped his world. Hoover may have given America the security it wanted, but the secrets he knew gave him — and the Bureau — all the power he wanted. Using photographs, cartoons, movie posters, and FBI transcripts, Master of Deceit gives readers the necessary evidence to make their own conclusions. Here is a book about the twentieth century that blazes with questions and insights about our choices in the twenty-first. Back matter includes an epilogue, an author’s note, source notes, a bibliography, and an index.
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Master of Deceit: J. Edgar Hoover and America in the Age of Lies
by Marc Aronson
A fascinating and timely biography of J. Edgar Hoover from a Sibert Medalist.
"King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. . . . You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”
Dr. Martin Luther King received this demand in an anonymous letter in 1964. He believed that the letter was telling him to commit suicide. Who wrote this anonymous letter? The FBI. And the man behind it all was J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI's first director. In this unsparing exploration of one of the most powerful Americans of the twentieth century, accomplished historian Marc Aronson unmasks the man behind the Bureau- his tangled family history and personal relationships; his own need for secrecy, deceit, and control; and the broad trends in American society that shaped his world. Hoover may have given America the security it wanted, but the secrets he knew gave him — and the Bureau — all the power he wanted. Using photographs, cartoons, movie posters, and FBI transcripts, Master of Deceit gives readers the necessary evidence to make their own conclusions. Here is a book about the twentieth century that blazes with questions and insights about our choices in the twenty-first. Back matter includes an epilogue, an author’s note, source notes, a bibliography, and an index.
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Skull in the Rock, The: How a Scientist, a Boy, and Google Earth Opened a New Window on Human Origins
by Marc Aronson
From the fossil hunter who discovered the Homo naledi fossils in September 2015, this book is an amazing account of Lee Berger’s 2008 hunt -- with the help of his curious 9-year-old son -- for a previously unknown species of ape-like creatures that may have been direct ancestors of modern humans. The discovery of two remarkably well preserved, two-million-year-old fossils of an adult female and young male, known as Australopiitecus sediba, has been hailed as one of the most important archaeological discoveries in history. The fossils reveal what may be one of humankind's oldest ancestors.
Berger believes the skeletons they found on the Malapa site in South Africa could be the "Rosetta stone that unlocks our understanding of the genus Homo" and may just redesign the human family tree.
Berger, an Eagle Scout and National Geographic Grantee, is the Reader in Human Evolution and the Public Understanding of Science in the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.
The focus of the book will be on the way in which we can apply new thinking to familiar material and come up with a breakthrough. Marc Aronson is particularly interested in framing these issues for young people and has had enormous success with this approach in his previous books: Ain't Nothing But a Man and If Stones Could Speak.
Berger's discovery in one of the most excavated and studied areas on Earth revealed a treasure trove of human fossils--and an entirely new human species--where people thought no more field work might ever be necessary. Technology and revelation combined, plus a good does of luck, to broaden by ten times the number of early human fossils known, rejuvenating this field of study and posing countless more questions to be answered in years and decades to come.
Releases simultaneously in Reinforced Library Binding: 978-1-4263-1053-9 , $27.90/$32.00 Can
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Griffin and the Dinosaur, The: How Adrienne Mayor Discovered a Fascinating Link Between Myth and Science
by Marc Aronson
Could Griffins have been real? When Adrienne Mayor carefully read the ancient Greek and Roman descriptions, this mythic hybrid of a lion and an eagle sounded like something people had actually seen. What could explain that evidence? After a decade of hunting through myths, poring over old maps, and tracing the discoveries of modern dinosaur hunters, she found the answer: awesome dinosaur fossils observed by ancient gold-hunters in the Gobi desert. Here is the story of one insightful, curious, and determined woman who solved the mystery of the Griffin, and invented a new science. Now she and others travel the world matching myths and fossils.
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$18.99
Rising Water: The Story of the Thai Cave Rescue
by Marc Aronson
The incredible true story of the twelve boys trapped with their coach in a flooded cave in Thailand and their inspiring rescue—as seen in Ron Howard's Thirteen Lives.
On June 23, 2018, twelve members of the Wild Boars soccer team and their coach were exploring the Tham Luang cave complex in northern Thailand when disaster struck. A rainy season downpour flooded the tunnels, trapping them as they took shelter on a shelf of the dark cave. Eight days of searching yielded no signs of life, but on July 2 they were discovered by two British divers. The boys and their coach were eventually rescued in an international operation that took three days. What could have been a terrible tragedy became an amazing story of survival.
Award-winning author Marc Aronson brings us the backstory behind how this astounding rescue took place. Rising Water highlights the creative thinking and technology that made a successful mission possible by examining the physical, environmental, and psychological factors surrounding the rescue. From the brave Thai Navy SEAL who lost his life while placing oxygen tanks along the passageways of the cave, to the British divers that ultimately swam the boys to safety, to the bravery of the boys and their coach, this is the breathtaking rescue that captivated the entire world.
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Four Streets and a Square: A History of Manhattan and the New York Idea
by Marc Aronson
From a Sibert Medalist comes the epic story of Manhattan—a magical, maddening island “for all” and a microcosm of America.
A veteran nonfiction storyteller dives deep into the four-hundred-year history of Manhattan to map the island’s unexpected intersections. Focusing on the evolution of four streets and a square (Wall Street, 42nd Street, West 4th Street, 125th Street, and Union Square) Marc Aronson explores how new ideas and forms of art evolved from social blending. Centuries of conflict—among original Americans and Europeans, slavers and the enslaved, rich and poor, immigrants and native-born—produced segregation, oppression, and violence, but also new ways of speaking, singing, and being American. From the Harlem Renaissance to Hammerstein, from gay pride in the Village to political clashes at Tammany Hall, this clear-eyed pageant of the island’s joys and struggles—enhanced with photos and drawings, multimedia links to music and film, and an extensive bibliography and source notes—is, above all, a love song to Manhattan’s triumphs.
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1968: Today’s Authors Explore a Year of Rebellion, Revolution, and Change
by Susan Campbell Bartoletti, Marc Aronson
“The book’s strength lies in the way different voices and different angles come together into an integrated whole. Fascinating and accomplished.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Welcome to 1968 — a revolution in a book. Essays, memoirs, and more by fourteen award-winning authors offer unique perspectives on one of the world’s most tumultuous years. As thousands of Vietnamese and Americans were killed in war, students across four continents took over colleges and city streets. Assassins murdered Dr. King and Robert F. Kennedy. Generations battled, and the world wobbled on the edge of a vast change that was exhilarating one day and terrifying the next. As we face our own moments of crisis and division, 1968 reminds us that we’ve clashed before and found a way forward — and that looking back can help map a way ahead.
With contributions by:
Jennifer Anthony
Marc Aronson
Susan Campbell Bartoletti
Loree Griffin Burns
Paul Fleischman
Omar Figueras
Laban Carrick Hill
Mark Kurlansky
Lenore Look
David Lubar
Kate MacMillan
Kekla Magoon
Jim Murphy
Elizabeth Partridge
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1968: Today's Authors Explore a Year of Rebellion, Revolution, and Change
by Susan Campbell Bartoletti, Marc Aronson
Welcome to 1968 — a revolution in a book. Essays, memoirs, and more by fourteen award-winning authors offer unique perspectives on one of the world’s most tumultuous years.
Nineteen sixty-eight was a pivotal year that grew more intense with each day. As thousands of Vietnamese and Americans were killed in war, students across four continents took over colleges and city streets. Assassins murdered Dr. King and Robert F. Kennedy. Demonstrators turned out in Prague and Chicago, and in Mexico City, young people and Olympic athletes protested. In those intense months, generations battled and the world wobbled on the edge of some vast change that was exhilarating one day and terrifying the next. To capture that extraordinary year, editors Marc Aronson and Susan Campbell Bartoletti created an anthology that showcases many genres of nonfiction. Some contributors use a broad canvas, others take a close look at a moment, and matched essays examine the same experience from different points of view. As we face our own moments of crisis and division, 1968 reminds us that we’ve clashed before and found a way forward — and that looking back can help map a way ahead.
With contributions by:
Jennifer Anthony
Marc Aronson
Susan Campbell Bartoletti
Loree Griffin Burns
Paul Fleischman
Omar Figueras
Laban Carrick Hill
Mark Kurlansky
Lenore Look
David Lubar
Kate MacMillan
Kekla Magoon
Jim Murphy
Elizabeth Partridge
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Trapped: How the World Rescued 33 Miners from 2,000 Feet Below the Chilean Desert
by Marc Aronson
The amazing story of the trapped Chilean miners and their incredible rescue that Publishers Weekly calls “a riveting, in-depth recounting of the events that held the world rapt.”
In early August 2010, the unthinkable happened when a mine collapsed in Copiapó, Chile, trapping thirty-three miners 2,000 feet below the surface. For sixty-nine days they lived on meager resources with increasingly poor air quality. When they were finally rescued, the world watched with rapt attention and rejoiced in the amazing spirit and determination of the miners. What could have been a terrible tragedy became an amazing story of survival.
In Trapped, Marc Aronson provides the backstory behind the rescue. By tracing the psychological, physical, and environmental factors surrounding the mission, Aronson highlights the amazing technology and helping hands that made it all possible. From the Argentinean soccer players that hoped to raise morale, to NASA volunteering their expertise to come up with a plan, there was no shortage of enterprising spirit when it came to saving lives. Readers will especially appreciate the eight pages of full-color photos, timeline, glossary, notes, and more.
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Taking Aim: Power and Pain, Teens and Guns
by Joyce Carol Oates, Chris Crutcher, Francesca Lia Block, Walter Dean Myers, Alex Flinn, Peter Johnson, Elizabeth Wein, Chris Lynch, Michael Cart, Ron Koertge, Eric Shanower, Marc Aronson, Will Weaver, Tim Wynne-Jones, Jenny Hubbard, Gregory Galloway, Edward Averett
Powerful, riveting, real. Sixteen celebrated authors bring us raw, insightful stories that explore guns and teens in a fiction collection that is thought provoking and emotionally gripping. For fans of Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock and Give a Boy a Gun, and with an array of YA talent like the late great Walter Dean Myers, the poetic Joyce Carol Oates, the prophetic Elizabeth Wein, and the gritty Chris Crutcher, these are evocative voices that each has a different perspective to give. Capturing the hurt and the healing, victims and perpetrators, these stories get to the heart of the matter.
From a boy whose low self-esteem is impacted when a gun comes into his possession to a student recalling a senseless tragedy that befell a favorite teacher, from a realistic look at hunting to a provocative look at a family that defies stereotypes, each emotional story stirs the debate to new levels. The juxtaposition of guns and their consequences offers moving tales, each a reminder of how crucial the question of guns in our society is, and the impact they have on all of us.
Other acclaimed contributors are Marc Aronson, Edward Averett, Francesca Lia Block, Alex Flinn, Gregory Galloway, Jenny Hubbard, Peter Johnson, Ron Koertge, Chris Lynch, Eric Shanower, Will Weaver, and Tim Wynne-Jones.
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Bite by Bite American History Through Feasts, Foods, and Side Dishes
by Marc Aronson, Frederick Douglass Opie, Paul Freedman, Amanda Palacios, Tatum Willis, David Zheng
Explore the fascinating history of America as told through the lens of food in this illustrated nonfiction middle grade book “sure to please history buffs and foodies alike” (BCCB, starred review) that lays out the diverse cultures that have combined to create the rich and delicious tapestry of the American country and cuisine.
As American as apple pie. It’s a familiar saying, yet gumbo and chop suey are also American! What we eat tells us who we are: where we’re from, how we move from place to place, and how we express our cultures and living traditions.
In twelve dishes that take readers from thousands of years ago through today, this book explores the diverse peoples and foodways that make up the United States. From First Salmon Feasts of the Umatilla and Cayuse tribes in the Pacific Northwest to fish fries celebrated by formerly enslaved African Americans, from “red sauce” Italian restaurants popular with young bohemians in the East to Cantonese restaurants enjoyed by rebellious young eaters in the West, this is the true story of the many Americas—laid out bite by bite.
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Reading the Bones Homo Naledi and the Mysteries of Human Evolution
High-stakes adventure meets cutting-edge anthropology in this true account of the groundbreaking discovery of Homo naledi, which shocked the world of evolutionary science and redefined what it means to be human, written for young readers by a Sibert Medalist and a nationally-recognized educator.
“Are you brave enough?” That’s what anthropologist Keneiloe Molopyane texted one of her graduate students, inviting her to join a dangerous underground search for a mysterious new human ancestor, Homo naledi. Would she dare to slide through the tight spaces and sheer drops of the Rising Star cave in South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind, to help unlock the secrets of a tiny chamber filled with literally hundreds of fossilized bones?
Join us as we follow the exciting explorations of Dr. Molopyane, along with six female excavators known as the Underground Astronauts, the dynamic, controversial leader Dr. Lee Berger, and others as they puzzle over the remains of this strange new species with much smaller brains than ours who may have buried their dead, made tools, used fire, and left markings on rocks. Guided by Sibert Medal–winner author Marc Aronson and teacher John S. Mead, whose sixth-grade science class followed many stages of the exploration as it happened, Reading the Bones: Homo naledi and the Mysteries of Human Evolution is real science in real time. Packed with drawings, maps, and a variety of resources, this is a thrilling introduction to scientific explorers on the front lines of the hunt for connections between humans and our primate relatives and ancestors.
Are you ready to join the quest?
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$20.99