Biographies

This classic, by Jean Fritz covers the era of exploration from 1421 to 1522. Like most Jean Fritz books, this one is charmingly illustrated with maps, portraits, and scenes of the period. Jean tells 10 tales of famous explorers and their exploits: Prince Henry the Navigator, Bartholomew Diaz, Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Pedro Cabral, John Cabot, Amerigo Vespucci, Ponce de Leon, Vasco de Balboa, and Ferdinand Magellan. This book makes an excellent addition to any study of the Renaissance.

Edward MacDowell and His Cabin in the Pines - a sensitive, appealing and lively biography of America's beloved composer which boys and girls (all others, too) will take to their hearts and treasure. His Quaker beginnings, his irrepressible interest in music, his youthful triumphs abroad, his visit to the master, Franz Liszt, who greeted him warmly and asked him back again to play at the festival in Zurich - his romance with his pupil, the lovely Marian Nevins, their marriage and return to America, the launching of the Peterboro, New Hampshire, colony, which bears his name - these are some of the delightful stories in the rich career of America's greatest composer, told gently, sensitively and with feeling, in a truly inspiring book.

Peter the Great, crowned tsar of Russia at the age of ten, believed that whatever he wanted he should have -- and the sooner the better. What he wanted most was to bring his beloved country into the modem world. He traveled to the West to learn European ways -- the first tsar ever to leave Russia -- disguised as a common soldier.

"In a simple, short biography of Columbus she has been extraordinarily successful in extracting the essence of the man." -- "The Horn Book." "Fritz's unconventional look at the great explorer who accidently discovered the New World reveals the navigator's obstinate as well as his visionary side." -- "School Library Journal"