Into The Gauntlet, by Margaret Peterson Haddix, is the best and final book in the 39 Clues book series. It is an amazing book to read because it is surprising and suspenseful. It was so great, I couldn’t put the book down for all forty-three chapters! This book was an awesome ending to an amazing series, and I recommend the entire series to anyone who enjoys mystery and adventure. They are also making a new series about the Cahill family; I will definably read and tell about the new series. I hope that if you read any of these books that you will enjoy them as much as I did.

Camp Confidential
Natalie's Secret

Camp Confidential by Malissa Morgan is a wonderful amazing story that taught me to never judge a book by its cover. A girl named Natalie is going to camp Lakeview and is not very happy about that. This fun filled book will make you laugh and get surprised at times. I think kids will love it and some may even relate to what Natalie goes through, from not wanting to go to camp to meeting someone not so nice, and meeting a boy she really likes, and to having her secret exposed, and to get lost on a camping trip. In the end she ends up really liking camp. So remember to never judge anything before you try it.

Carly Crow loves to read. She is a 5th grade student at CL Smith School

Awakening the Wisdom and Compassion to Change Your World is the latest book by Robert Sachs. It is the sequel to Robert's groundbreaking interviews with some of the world's foremost Buddhist leaders in The Wisdom of The Buddhist Masters: Common and Uncommon Sense.

In the fall of 2006, Duncan Baird editor-in-chief, Michael Mann asked Robert if he could interview current world Buddhist masters asking pithy questions about today's challenges and what they saw in humanity's future on planet Earth. Such masters are usually approached to answer the more philosophical and existential questions of life. But, as a student of Tibetan Buddhism since 1974, Robert often heard them make "off the record" comments demonstrating their social, historical, and political astuteness. The Wisdom of The Buddhist Masters documents those interviews.

These interviews had a profound effect on Robert and led him to discuss with Michael at Duncan Baird an expanded and updated version of one of his most popular books, The Buddha at War: Peaceful Heart, Courageous Action in Troubled Times. Becoming Buddha not only lays out a step-by-step path to becoming a "conscious, engaged activist" or spiritual warrior, working in all spheres of human activity to create a possible and sustainable future, as outlined in The Buddha at War. In what he sees as a more inclusive book that will touch the hearts and inspire the minds of readers regardless of their religious, political, or philosophical persuasion, Robert adds the critical social and moral Buddhist principle of the Four Guests. Briefly, the Four Guests include divine or transcendent beings, elemental forces, our human family and the world of life we all share, and those in the greatest suffering we see in our world. In keeping with teachers of past and present, Robert asserts that in properly addressing these Four Guests, we can create a society that becomes more fulfilling and sustainable for us here and now.  It also casts an eye down the road and suggests that for us to have a conscious, engaged civilization for generations to come, we need to consider, appreciate, and pass on to future generations the wisdom and compassion to maintain healthy relationships to all of these Four Guests. To demonstrate his own commitment to this, there is an Appendix which illustrates the kind of provoking editorial writing Robert does to inspire social and political change.

Thus, Becoming Buddha will not only help to train each and every one of us to become "all that we can be" - awakened incarnations living conscious, engaged lives.  It also offers an encompassing vision of how we can build a conscious, sustainable civilization to inform, inspire, and serve generations to come.