Raised by her widowed rabbi father and a Christian nursemaid in Normandy, Shira is a free-spirited, inquisitive girl whose love of learning shocks the community. When Shira’s father is arrested by the local baron intent on enforcing the Catholic Church’s strictures against heresy, Shira fights for his release and encounters two men who will influence her life profoundly—an inspiring Catholic priest and Meir ben Baruch, a brilliant scholar. In Meir, Shira finds her soulmate.
Married to Meir in Paris, Shira blossoms as a wife and mother, savoring the intellectual and social challenges that come with being the wife of a prominent scholar. After witnessing the burning of every copy of the Talmud in Paris, Shira and her family seek refuge in Germany. Yet even there they experience bloody pogroms and intensifying anti-Semitism. With no safe place for Jews in Europe, they set out for Israel only to see Meir captured and imprisoned by Rudolph I of Hapsburg. As Shira weathers heartbreak and works to find a middle ground between two warring religions, she shows her children and grandchildren how to embrace the joys of life, both secular and religious.
A dying king makes his son his heir — on one condition: the vain Prince Raphael must marry a woman who is his equal in beauty, intelligence, and wealth. A search throughout the kingdom appears to be fruitless until the lovely Rosamund appears at the palace. She is intelligent and wealthy, as well as beautiful — certainly his equal, Raphael thinks. But what does the mysterious Rosamund think?
Biographies of twelve talented people introduce readers to the eight ways people can be smart and the realization that intelligence is ?not about how smart you are, but how you are smart.?
This catchall of curiosities in the animal world contains many amazing small items that Mrs. George has apparently been collecting for years. In categorical order, you will learn how some species travel (the hydra has a “sophisticated pogo stick”; dragonflies are jet-propelled by water ejected through their anus); how they court and mate (the turtle taps on the female’s shell before entering; the Gnaphoid male spider ties the female down); how they care for (or neglect) the young, build homes, eat (the worm, Convuluta, exists entirely on the algae inside him until he starves to death while the stickflea eats the feces of its parents); how they sense many things often without obvious apparatus; how they adapt to man, etc., etc. Unnatural natural history agreeably presented for its eyestopping eccentricity.(Kirkus Review)
