YA and Elementary Books

Los Angeles was once known as the Smog Capital of the World. Today, the city has changed "air you can see" into "air you can breathe." While the fight to eliminate pollution in the city continues, modern smog is not the thick, oppressive, silver-blue haze that drove people to move out of Los Angeles altogether during the mid-twentieth century. Professor Arie Haagen-Smit became a key leader in the fight against smog after making a crucial discovery--what caused it. The last Stage 3 smog, considered the unhealthiest, struck in 1974, and in 2003, the city saw its last Stage 1 smog. 

The book uses an organizational development lens to describe how concerned people uncovered the root cause of Los Angeles' thick silver-blue smog--a serious problem for sixty years, from 1943 to 2003, and the changes they made to eliminate it, changes that to this day also affect the nation and much of the world.

Carl Oliver lived on a hillside overlooking the Panama Canal for nearly two years while researching this book. He rode ships through the canal, talked to canal pilots and, with the help of canal employees, found historic documents in both Panama and Washington, D.C. This book grew out of observation that Americans visiting the canal knew a little about what the canal is and who built it, but hardly anything about the whys and hows of its psychological, economic, and political environment. This book overviews the history of the Panama Canal, from its construction through the agreement turning the canal over to Panama.

 The men and women who made American aviation history have left behind vivid and exciting  -- and sometimes also hilariously funny -- accounts of their exploits. This collection of first-person narratives spans the years from Kitty Hawk to the moon landing. Orville Wright tells how he and his brother came to invent the airplane . . . Dean Smith flies the mail in 1920 . . . barnstormer Slats Rodgers builds his own plane (never having even seen one before) . . . Amelia Earhart, Jacqueline Cochran, Lindbergh, Byrd, and Chuck Yeager are here. Together the tales of these adventurous men and women comprise a lively history of American aviation.