Cañon City Public Library

"No less than the internal combustion engine, the transistor, or the silicon chip, barbed wire is the quintessentially modern invention. Cheap and mass produced, it accomplished what no other product did before, or has since done so effectively: the control of space. Few technologies did more to usher in the hallmarks of the modern era: the harnessing of nature, brutal mass warfare, political conquest and repression, and genocide.". "With this work...

Sixth grader Lucy is brand-new to middle school, and when her older sister GiGi--the undisputed queen bee of eighth grade--humiliates her in the cafeteria, Lucy snaps and challenges her to a fenncing duel

Suspended unjustly from elite Middlefield Prep, Donte Ellison studies fencing with a former champion, hoping to put the racist fencing team captain in his place.

In 1655 sixteen-year-old Tania is the daughter of a retired musketeer, but she is afflicted with extreme vertigo and subject to frequent falls; when her father is murdered she finds that he has arranged for her to attend Madame de Treville's newly formed Académie des Mariées in Paris, which, it turns out, is less a school for would-be wives, than a fencing academy for girls--and so Tania begins her training to be a new kind of musketeer, and to...

How could an ordinary fence shape the development of a nation? Before the 1870s, much of the American West was an uninterrupted expanse of prairie and cowboys ran cattle on an open range without a fence in sight. Then the Homestead Act of 1862 passed and settlers poured into the west looking for land to tame and farm. This set up a conflict between the farmers who wanted to keep cattle off their crops and cattlemen that needed the land for their livestock....

Excited by a fencing demonstration he happens to see, fourth grader Mikey starts taking lessons in hopes that the sport will make him special like his brother and sisters.

"Fleeing from the Soviet secret police, Estonian fencer Endel Nelis returns to his homeland and finds work as a children's sports instructor. Quickly becoming a role model to his students, Nelis begins teaching them competitive fencing techniques despite the objections of school administrators. When the children are invited to a fencing tournament in Leningrad, Nelis must make a choice: put his safety first or risk everything to take the children...

"Tryouts are well underway at King's Row for a spot on the prestigious fancing team, and scrappy fencer Nicholas isn't sure he's going to make the grade in the face of surly upperclassmen, nearly impossible odds, and his seemingly instoppable roommate, the surly, sullen Seiji Katayama. It'll take more than sheer determination to overcome a challenge this big!"--Back cover.