No summer is complete without a good book in your hand. Here are some of the best books of this season and YOU WON’T WANT TO MISS A WORD!

Re-Making the American Dream

By David Vaught     www.authorhouse.com

Hardback | Paperback | E-book $23.99 | $12.99 | $4.99   

The U. S. Military Academy at West Point’s mission is “to educate, train, and inspire the corps of cadets (军训生)”. The challenge by cadets to its requirement arose from the values of the American Dream and also re-made them through the resulting events.

The History of College Nicknames, Mascots and School Colors

By Gary Hudson     www.xlibris.com

Hardback | Paperback | E-book $29.99 | $19.99 | $3.99

College nicknames are fun. They are filled with history and if you ask 10 people how the nickname came about, you are more than likely to get several different answers. The History of College Nicknames, Mascots and School Colors explains the history behind them.

WWII+V

By Johan Zwaan     www.xlibris.com

Hardback | Paperback | E-book $29.99 | $18.99 | $6.99

1,500 troops. 7,000 ships. 4,000 American and British people died. Johan Zwaan narrates his memories of war as a kid 75 years after witnessing the Normandy invasion. The book has been translated into different languages and is a prize-winner.

Have Knife, Will Travel

By Hugh Cameron     www.authorhouse.com

Hardback | Paperback | E-book $19.99 | $12.99 | $3.99   

A story of the development of artificial joint replacement, and how a band of surgeons known as Traveling Road Show crossed the world teaching this new technology to thousands of other surgeons.

Françoise Malby-Anthony, a city girl, a Parisian through and through, could tell the quickest way to the Eiffel Tower but knew nothing about animals. Yet somewhere deep inside, she always felt she would end up in a foreign country.

It was her husband Lawrence Anthony, a South African, who brought out the wanderlust in her. They met in London in 1987, and a year later they moved to South Africa, where they were drawn by nature and eventually bought Thula Thula — a game reserve of river and 1,500 hectares of rolling hills. They were soon working to save an abundance of wild animals, especially elephants and rhinos, from the poachers and hunters who roamed for fun and profit. They also employed some locals, and taught them about office work, dealing with guests and cooking French dishes.

Last March, however, Lawrence died of a sudden heart attack. And there Francoise was, alone, burying her husband, and didn’t know where to begin.

She soon faced her first baptism (洗礼) by fire. A few days later, she received a call. Thabo, a three-year-old male rhino, had taken a bullet. It was the poachers. How could the poachers break into the fence in broad daylight? At that point, a rumor suggested it was an inside job. Maybe someone was trying to frighten her into leaving?

Lawrence was gone. A rhino in trouble and security men she couldn’t rely on. Since booking after booking had been canceled due to Lawrence’s passing away, Françoise finally had an empty bank account. But how could she leave the dream that Lawrence and she had fought so hard for?

Françoise slowly found her feet. Eventually Thabo recovered from the trauma. She set up meetings with the staff to go over reserve and animal issues and to agree on priorities. She even launched her own rhino fund. The desperate days have helped redefine the purpose of life without Lawrence, and she understands that the mission of protecting Thula Thula’s wildlife has become hers, and hers alone.

“It is necessary for us to go to places that still look like the ocean as it was 500 years ago,” says Enric Sala, former professor at Scripps Institute of Oceanography. However, in most parts of the world, marine conservation is stymied by opposition from fishing, oil, and mining interests. A mere 7 percent of the world’s ocean has protection—mostly weak rules, and only 2.5 percent is highly protected. Outside of these zones, the ocean’s story is a continuing failure.

A few remaining parts of the ocean are the last wild places of the sea—the marine equivalent of the remotest old-growth forest in the Amazon—still unaffected by overfishing, pollution and climate change. Enric is working with the National Geographic Society and together launched the Pristine Seas project in 2008. Over the past 14 years, Pristine Seas has helped create 28 marine reserves, making up two-thirds of the world’s fully protected marine areas—covering more than two million square miles in all.

Now Sala and his team have set an even more ambitious goal: to see more than a third of the world’s ocean conserved for the purpose not just of sustaining biodiversity but also of replenishing(补充)fish stocks and storing carbon.

Pristine Seas worked with native Palauans(帕劳人)to give an ancient conservation tradition a modern change. For centuries, Palauans have used what they all “buls”, a Palauan word which means closure, to preserve and rebuild their reef fish stocks. Over the years they have created 35 reserves to protect marine life around their islands, some of which ban fishing permanently.

Sala and his team calculate that a 14-fold expansion of the fully protected part of the ocean, from 2.5 percent to 35 percent, would provide 64 percent of the biodiversity benefits while increasing the global fish catch by almost 10 million metric tons. Even that may sound impossible, but the alternative is awful. For now, we still get to choose.

Even if you’re not familiar with Big Hero 6, a comic series and Disney movie, the robot Baymax might look familiar. A six-foot-two-inch tall, round, white, inflatable(可充气的)robot nurse, tasked with healthcare duties, Baymax calmly cares for his patients, supports a middle-school student and even helps a cat. A great pal indeed!

While soft robots already exist, forming one that we would have in our homes, like Baymax, is another story. “There’re all kinds of things that need to come together,” says Alex Alspach, a roboticist at Toyota Research Institute, who also helped develop the movie version of Baymax. Building Baymax’s software—the smart, humanlike mind which gives personalized responses is complex. By comparison, constructing the body will probably be simpler, Alspach suspects. Still, even that will come with challenges.

In the movie, whenever there is a hole, Baymax covers himself with tape or a Band-Aid. He can also inflate’ and deflate himself when he needs to, but it takes a long time. But the movie does not show the complex hardware that would be required to do this. An air compressor(压缩机)would be too heavy to carry. And while roboticists are coming up with chemicals that could inflate soft robots quickly, it’s too early to use these techniques.

For soft robots, staying soft and lightweight would keep their parts from getting damaged, but when making a life-sized robot, that will be difficult, since so many moving parts—such as motors, a battery pack, sensors and’ the air Compressor—will pack on weight.

Heat is another hard nut to crack. This heat will come from the motors and other electronics. Anything covering the frame of a robot will trap heat. For a life-sized robot, more motors and more heat could cause it to overheat and shut down or even catch on fire in some cases.

Will we see Baymax soon? “There will be a lot of dumb robots before you get to something as smart as Baymax,” says Alspach. But most experts agree that big steps toward making Baymax will come soon. “I think kids will get to see that in their lifetime,” Alspach says, “I’m hoping I get to see it in my lifetime. I don’t think we’re that far.”